by Naomi Novik
She marched past me, twitching her skirts to one side so they wouldn’t even brush up against mine, as if she didn’t care to be contaminated. The bar lifted itself at a flick of her hand. She swept out, and the heavy iron door clanged shut behind her, scraping on the stone like an axe-blade coming down.
Marek turned on me, his temper still unspent. “And you! You’re meant to be the foremost witness, and you’re wandering the castle looking like a kitchen slut. Do you think anyone is going to believe a word out of your mouth? Three days since I got you on the list—”
“You got me!” I said indignantly, wobbling up to my feet with the support of Kasia’s arm.
“—and all you’ve done is persuade the entire court you’re a useless bumpkin! Now this? Where is Solya? He was supposed to be showing you how to go on.”
“I don’t want to go on,” I said. “I don’t care what any of these people think of me. What they think doesn’t matter!”
“Of course it matters!” He seized me by the arm and dragged me out of Kasia’s hands. I stumbled with him, trying to gather together a spell to knock him away, but he pulled me to the window-sill and pointed down to the castle courtyard. I paused and looked down, puzzled. There didn’t seem to be anything alarming happening. The red-sashed ambassador was just going into the building with Crown Prince Sigmund.
“That man with my brother is an envoy from Mondria,” Marek said, low and savage. “Their prince consort died last winter: the princess will be out of mourning in six months. Now do you understand?”
“No,” I said, baffled.
“She wants to be queen of Polnya!” Marek shouted.
“But the queen’s not dead,” Kasia said, and then we understood.
I stared at Marek, cold, horrified. “But the king—” I blurted. “He loved—” I stopped.
“He’s putting the trial off to buy time, do you understand?” Marek said. “Once memories of the rescue have faded, he’ll get the nobility to look the other way, and then he can put her quietly to death. Now are you going to help me, or do you want to keep blundering around the castle until the snow flies and they burn her—and your beloved friend here—once it’s too cold for anyone to come out and watch?”
I curled my fingers tight around Kasia’s stiff hand, as if I could protect her that way. It felt too cruel and hollow to imagine: that we could have won Queen Hanna free, brought her out of the Wood, all so the king could cut off her head and marry someone else. Just to add a principality to the map of Polnya, another jewel to his crown. “But he loved her,” I said again, a protest I couldn’t help making—stupidly I suppose. Yet that story, the story of the lost beloved queen, made more sense to me than the one Marek was telling me.
“And you think that would make him forgive being made a fool?” Marek said. “His beautiful wife, who ran away from him with a Rosyan boy who sang her charming songs in the garden. That’s what they said of her, until I was old enough to kill men for saying it. They told me not to even mention her name to him, when I was a boy.”
He was staring down at Queen Hanna in her chair, where she sat blank as waiting paper. In his face, I could see him as he’d been, a child hiding in his mother’s deserted garden to escape that same crowd of poisonous courtiers—all of them smirking and whispering about her, shaking their heads and pretending at sorrow while they gossiped that they’d known it all along.
“And you think we can save her and Kasia by dancing to their music?” I said.
He lifted his gaze from the queen and looked at me. For the first time ever, I think he really listened to me. His chest rose and fell, three times. “No,” he said finally, agreeing. “They’re all just vultures, and he’s the lion. They’ll shake their heads and agree it’s a shame, and pick at the bones he throws them. Can you force my father to pardon her?” he demanded, as easily as if he wasn’t asking me to ensorcell the king, and take someone’s will away from them, as dreadful as the Wood.
“No!” I said, appalled. I looked at Kasia. She stood with a hand resting on the back of the queen’s chair, straight and golden and steady, and she shook her head to me. She wouldn’t ask that of me. She wouldn’t even ask me to run away with her, to abandon our people to the Wood—even if it meant the king would murder her, just so he could kill the queen, too. I swallowed. “No,” I said again. “I won’t do that.”
“Then what will you do?” Marek snarled, angry again, and stalked from the room without waiting for me to answer. It was just as well. I didn’t know what to say.
Chapter 20
The guards on the Charovnikov did recognize me, despite my clothes. They opened the heavy wooden doors for me and swung them closed again. I stood with my back pressed up to them, the gilt and turning angels overhead and the endless walls of books looming all the way down one wall and back along the next, dipping into alcoves and back out again. There were a handful of other people working at the tables here and there, young men and women in robes with their heads bent over alembics or books. They didn’t pay attention to me; they were all busy themselves.
The Charovnikov wasn’t welcoming to me, colder than the Dragon’s library and too impersonal, but at least it was a place I understood. I still didn’t know how I was going to save Kasia, but I knew I had more chance of finding a way to do it here than I did in a ballroom.
I took hold of the nearest ladder and dragged it squeaking all the way to the very front of the very first shelf, then I tucked up my skirts, climbed up to the top, and began to rummage. It was a familiar kind of searching. I didn’t go gleaning in the forest to find something in particular; I went to find whatever there was to find, and to let ideas come to me: if I found a heap of mushrooms, we’d have mushroom soup the next day, and if I found flat stones the hole in the road near our house would get mended. I thought surely there had to be at least a few books here that would speak out to me like Jaga’s book; maybe they even had another one of hers somewhere hidden away among all these fancy gold-stamped volumes.
I worked as quickly as I could. I looked at the dustiest books, the ones least-used. I ran my hands over all of them, read the titles off their spines. But it was slow going no matter what, and full of frustration. After I had gone through twelve wide bookcases, ceiling-to-floor, thirty shelves on each, I began to wonder if I would find anything here, after all: there was a dry stiff feeling to all the books beneath my hands, and nothing that invited me to keep looking.
It had grown late while I worked. The handful of other students were gone, and the magical lights had dimmed down to the faint glow of hot ash all along the library, as though they had gone to sleep. Only the one on my shelf still shone firefly-bright, and my back and ankles were complaining. I was twisted up on the ladder, my foot hooked around a rail, so I could reach out and grab the farthest books. I’d barely made it a quarter of the way down one side of the room, and that was going as quick and slipshod as I could, not a tenth of the books looked at properly; Sarkan would have muttered something uncomplimentary.
“What are you looking for?”
I nearly pitched off the ladder onto Father Ballo’s head, just barely catching the side rail in time and barking my ankle painfully on a joint. There was a section of one of the bookshelves standing open halfway down the room, the door to some hidden nook; he’d come out of there. He was carrying four thick volumes in his arms, which I supposed he meant to put back on the shelves, and staring up at me doubtfully from the floor.
I was still twitching inwardly with surprise, and I spoke without thinking. “I’m looking for Sarkan,” I said.
Ballo looked blankly at the shelves I’d been pawing over: did I think I was going to find the Dragon pressed between the pages of a book? But as if I’d told myself at the same time as him, I realized that was exactly what I was after. I wanted Sarkan. I wanted him to look up from among his heaped books and snap at me at the disorder I’d created. I wanted to know what he was doing, if the Wood had struck back. I wanted him to tell me how I
could persuade the king to let Kasia go.
“I want to speak to him,” I said. “I want to see him.” I already knew there wasn’t a spell in Jaga’s book, and Sarkan had never shown me such a spell himself. “Father, what spell would you use, if you wanted to talk to someone in another part of the kingdom?”—but Ballo was already shaking his head at me.
“Far-speaking is a thing of fairy-tales, however convenient bards find the notion,” he said, in lecturing tones. “In Venezia they have discovered the art of laying a spell of communion within a pair of mirrors made together from the same pool of quicksilver. The king has such a mirror, with the mate carried by the chief of the army at the front. But even these can speak only with one another. The king’s grandfather purchased them in exchange for five bottles of fire-heart,” he added, making me squeak involuntarily at the price: you might as well buy a kingdom. “Magic may extend the senses, extend sight and hearing; it may amplify the voice, or conceal it into a nut to emerge later. It cannot fling your visage across half a kingdom in an instant, or carry someone’s voice back to you.”
I listened to him dissatisfied, although it made unfortunate sense: why would Sarkan ever send a messenger, or write a letter, if he could simply cast a spell? It was sensible enough, the same way he could only use his transporting spell to go around the valley, his own territory, and not leap straight to the capital and back.
“Are there any other spellbooks like Jaga’s here, that I might look in?” I asked, even though I knew Ballo didn’t have any use for her.
“My child, this library is the heart of the scholarship of magic in Polnya,” he said. “Books are not flung onto these shelves by the whim of some collector, or through the chicanery of a bookseller; they are not here because they are valuable, or painted in gold to please some noble’s eye. Every volume added has been carefully reviewed by at least two wizards in the service of the crown; their virtues have been confirmed and at least three correct workings attested, and even then they must be of real power to merit a place here. I myself have spent nearly my entire life of service pruning out the lesser works, the curiosities and the amusements of earlier days; you will certainly not find anything like that here.”
I stared down at him: his entire life! And he would surely have pounced instantly on anything that I could use. I took the sides of the ladder and slid myself to the foot, to his pinched disapproving look: I suppose he would have stared to see anyone climb a tree, too. “Did you burn them?” I said, hopelessly.
He recoiled as if I’d suggested burning him. “A book need not be magical to be of value,” he said. “Indeed, I would have liked to move them to the University’s collection for more thorough study, but Alosha insisted on their being kept here, under lock—which I cannot deny is a sensible precaution, as such books can attract the worst sort of elements of lower society; occasionally enough of the gift crops up to make a street apothecary dangerous, if they get the wrong book in their hands. However, I do believe the University archivists, who are men of excellent training, might with the proper instruction and a rigorous scheme of oversight have been entrusted with the safekeeping of lesser—”
“Where are they?” I interrupted.
The tiny room he showed me to was crammed full of old, ragged-edged books with not even an arrow-slit window for air. I had to leave the door cracked open. I was happier rummaging through these messy heaps, where I didn’t have to worry about putting them back in any order, but most of the books were just as useless to me as the ones on the shelves. I pushed aside any number of dry histories of magic, and others that were tomes of elaborate small cantrips—at least half of which would have taken twice as long and made five times the mess of doing whatever they wanted to do by hand—and others that seemed perfectly reasonable formal spellbooks to me, but evidently hadn’t met Father Ballo’s more rigorous standards.
There were stranger things in the piles. One very peculiar volume looked just like a spellbook, full of mysterious words and pictures, diagrams like those in many of the Dragon’s books, and writing that made no sense. After I lost ten solid minutes to puzzling over the thing, I realized slowly that it was mad. I mean, a madman had written it, pretending he was a wizard, wanting to be one: it wasn’t real spells at all, just made-up ones. There was something hopelessly sad about it. I pushed that one away into a dark corner.
Then finally my hand fell on one small thin black book. On the outside it looked like my mother’s recipe-book for dishes to serve on holidays, and it felt warm and friendly to me at once. The paper was cheap, yellowing and crumbly, but it was full of small, comfortable spells, sketched out in a neat hand. I looked through the pages, smiling down at it involuntarily, and then I looked at the inside of the front cover. In that same neat hand was written, Maria Olshankina, 1267.
I sat looking down at it, surprised and not surprised at the same time. This witch had lived in my valley more than three hundred years ago. Not long after the valley had been settled: the big cornerstone on Olshanka’s stone church, the oldest building in the valley, was engraved with the year 1214. Where had Jaga been born? I wondered, suddenly. She had been Rosyan. Had she lived in the valley on the other side of the Wood, before Polnya settled it from the other direction?
I knew it wasn’t going to help me. It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can’t change what’s wrong. There were folk-witches who cured some kinds of sickness and dealt with crop-blight, in most big towns; I think Maria had been one of them. For a moment I saw her, a big, cheerful woman with a red apron sweeping out her front yard, children and chickens underfoot, going inside to brew up some cough-potion for an anxious young father with a sick baby at home, pouring it into his cup with a lecture on running across town without a hat on. There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life. I sighed and put the book into my pocket anyway. I didn’t want to leave it here thrown away and forgotten.
I found two more like that, among the thousands of tumbled books, and paged through them; they had a few useful spells between them, a little good advice. They didn’t have places written in them, but somehow I knew they, too, had come from my valley. One had been written by a farmer who’d found a working that could call clouds together so they’d bring rain. On that page he had sketched a field beneath clouds, and in the distance a familiar toothy line of grey mountains.
There was a note of warning at the bottom of that spell: Be careful when it’s already grey: if you call too many, thunder comes too. I touched the short simple word with my fingers, kalmoz, and I knew I could call thunder, lightning forking down from the sky. I shivered and put that book aside. I could imagine how Solya would like to help me with that kind of spell.
None of them had what I needed. I cleared a space around me on the floor and kept on going, bent over reading one book while my free hand groped through the piles for the next. Without looking, my fingers caught on a scalloped edge of raised leather, and I jerked back my hand and sat up, shaking it out uneasily.
Once out gleaning in winter, still young, not quite twelve, I’d found a strange big white sac on a tree, between the roots, buried beneath wet dead leaves. I’d poked it with a stick a few times, and then I ran to where my father was working and brought him back to show him. He’d cut down the nearest trees for a fire-break, and then burned the sac and the tree with it. In the ashes we’d poked through with a stick and found a curled skeleton of some misshapen growing thing, not any beast we recognized. “You keep away from this clearing, Nieshka, you hear me?” my father had said.
“It’s all right now.” I’d told him that, I suddenly remembered. I’d known, somehow.
“All the same,” he’d said, and we’d never spoken of it again. We’d never even told my mother. We hadn’t wanted to think about what it meant, that I could find evil magic hiding in the trees.
The memory
came back to me vividly now: the faint damp smell of the rotting leaves, my breath cold and white in the air, a glaze of frost along the edges of the branches and the raised bark, the heavy silence of the forest. I’d gone out looking for something else; I’d drifted into the clearing that morning with a thread of unease pulling me along. I felt the same way now. But I was in the Charovnikov, in the heart of the king’s palace. How could the Wood be here?
I wiped my fingers on my skirts, braced myself, and drew the book out. The cover was painted and sculpted elaborately by hand, a raised amphisbaena of leather with every serpent-scale painted in a shimmering blue, the eyes red jewels, surrounded by a forest of green leaves with the word Bestiare hanging above it in golden letters joined to the branches like fruits.
I turned the pages with a finger and a thumb, holding them by the lower corner only. It was a bestiary, a strange one full of monsters and chimaeras. Not all of them were even real. I turned a few more pages slowly, only glancing at the words and pictures, and with an odd, creeping sensation began to realize that while I read, the monsters felt real, I believed in them, and if I went on believing in them long enough—abruptly I shut the book hard and put it down on the floor and stood up away from it. The hot stifling room had gone even more stifling, a thickness like the worst days of summer, the air hot and moist under a smothering weight of still leaves that stopped the wind from ever getting through.
I scrubbed my hands on my skirts, trying to get rid of the oily feeling of the pages against my hands, and watched the book suspiciously. I had the feeling if I took my eyes away, it would turn itself into some kind of twisted thing and come leaping for my face, hissing and clawing. Instinctively I reached for a spell of fire, to burn it, but even as I opened my mouth, I stopped, realizing how stupid that would be: I was standing in a room full of old dry books, the air so desiccated it tasted of dust when I breathed, and outside was an enormous library. But I was sure it wasn’t safe to leave the book there, not even for a moment, and I couldn’t imagine touching it again—