by Naomi Novik
The door swung open. “I understand your caution, Alosha,” Ballo was saying peevishly, “but I hardly see what harm can come from—”
“Stop!” I shouted, and he and Alosha halted in the narrow doorway and stared at me. I suppose I looked bizarre, standing there like a lion-tamer with a particularly vicious beast, and only a single book lying quietly on the floor in front of me.
Ballo stared at me, astonished, and then peered down at the book. “What on earth—”
But Alosha was already moving: she pushed him gently to one side and drew a long dagger off her belt. She crouched down and stretched her arm to its full length and prodded the book with just the tip. The blade lit silver all along its edge, and where it touched the book, the light glowed through a greenish cloud of corruption. She drew the dagger back. “How did you find that?”
“It was just here in the heap,” I said. “It tried to catch me. It felt like—like the Wood.”
“But how could—” Ballo started, but Alosha vanished out of the doorway. A moment later she reappeared, wearing a heavy metal gauntlet. She picked up the book between two fingers and jerked her head. We followed her out into the main part of the library, the lights coming up over our heads where we walked, and she shoved a heap of books off one of the large stone tables and laid the book down upon it. “How did this particular piece of nastiness escape you?” she demanded of Ballo, who was peering down at it over her shoulder, alarmed and frowning.
“I don’t believe I even looked into it,” Ballo said, with a faintly defensive note. “There was no need: I could see at a glance it wasn’t a serious text of magic, and quite plainly had no place in our library. I recall I had rather strong words with poor Georg about it, in fact: he tried to insist on keeping it on the shelves even though there was not the least sign of enchantment about it.”
“Georg?” Alosha said grimly. “Was this just before he disappeared?” Ballo paused and nodded.
“If I’d kept going,” I said, “would it have—made one of those things?”
“Made you into one, I imagine,” Alosha said, horrifyingly. “We had an apprentice go missing five years ago, the same day a hydra crawled up out of the palace sewers and attacked the castle: we thought it had eaten him. We had better take poor Georg’s head off the wall in the parade-room.”
“But how did it get here in the first place?” I asked, looking down at the book, the dappled leaves of pale and dark green, the two-headed serpent winking at us with its red eyes.
“Oh—” Ballo hesitated, and then he went down the hall to a shelf full of ledgers, each of them nearly half his own height: he muttered some small dusty spell over them as he drew his fingers along, and one page gleamed out far down the shelf. He lifted out the heavy book with a grunt and brought it to the table, supporting it from beneath with absent practice as he opened to the one illuminated page, with one row shining out upon it. “Bestiary, well-ornamented, of unknown origin,” he read. “A gift from the court of … of Rosya.” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the date, his ink-stained index finger resting upon it. “Twenty years ago, and one of half a dozen volumes gifted at the same time,” he said, finally. “Prince Vasily and his embassy must have brought it with them.”
The malevolent carved book sat in the middle of the table. We stood in silence around it. Twenty years ago, Prince Vasily of Rosya had ridden into Kralia, and three weeks later he had ridden out again in the dead of night with Queen Hanna beside him, fleeing towards Rosya. They had gone too close to the edge of the Wood, trying to evade pursuit. That was the story. But perhaps they’d been caught long before then. Maybe some poor scribe or book-binder had wandered too close to the Wood, and under the boughs pounded fallen leaves into paper, brewed ink out of oak galls and water, and wrote corruption into every word, to make a trap that could creep even into the castle of the king.
“Can we burn it here?” I said.
“What?” Ballo said, jerking up in protest as though he were on a string. I think he recoiled instinctively from burning any book at all, which I thought was all very well, but not when it came to this one.
“Ballo,” Alosha said, and from her expression she felt just as I did.
“I will attempt a purification, to make it safe to examine,” Ballo said. “If that should fail, then we will of course have to consider cruder methods for disposal.”
“This isn’t something to keep, purified or not,” she said grimly. “We should take it to the forge. I’ll build a white fire, and we’ll close it in until it’s ash.”
“We cannot burn it at once, no matter what,” Ballo said. “It is evidence in the queen’s case, and the king must know of it.”
Evidence, I realized too late, of corruption: if the queen had touched this book, if it had led her to the Wood, she had been corrupted even before she was drawn under the boughs. If this were presented at the trial—I looked at Alosha and Ballo in dismay. They hadn’t come here to help me. They’d come to stop me finding anything useful.
Alosha sighed back at me. “I’m not your enemy, though you want to think me so.”
“You want them put to death!” I said. “The queen, and Kasia—”
“What I want,” Alosha said, “is to keep the kingdom safe. You and Marek: all you worry about is your own sorrows. You’re too young to be as strong as you are, that’s the trouble of it; you haven’t let go of people. When you’ve seen a century of your own go by, you’ll have more sense.”
I’d been about to protest at her accusation, but that silenced me: I stared at her in horror. Maybe it was silly of me, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment that I was going to live like Sarkan, like her, a hundred years, two hundred—when did witches even die? I wouldn’t grow old; I’d just keep going, always the same, while everyone around me withered and fell away, like the outer stalks of some climbing vine going up and up away from them.
“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?” Maybe there was some way, I wondered wildly, to give away some of that life: maybe I could give some to my family, to Kasia—if they would take it; who would want anything like that, at the price of falling out of the world, taking yourself out of life.
“My dear child, you are growing very distressed,” Ballo said feebly, making a gesture at calming me. I stared at him and the faint fine lines at the corner of his eyes, all his days spent with dusty books, loving nothing else; him and Alosha, who spoke as easily of putting people in the fire as she did books. I remembered Sarkan in his tower, plucking girls out of the valley, and his coldness when I’d first come, as though he couldn’t remember how to think and feel like an ordinary person.
“A nation is people as well,” Alosha said. “More people than just the few you love best yourself. And the Wood threatens them all.”
“I’ve lived seven miles from the Wood all my days,” I said. “I don’t need to be told what it is. If I didn’t care about stopping the Wood, I’d have taken Kasia and run away by now, instead of leaving her to all of you to push her like a pawn from here to there, as if she doesn’t even matter!”
Ballo made startled murmuring noises, but Alosha only frowned at me. “And yet you can speak of letting the corrupted live, as if you didn’t know better,” she said. “The Wood is not just some enclave of evil, lying in wait to catch people who are foolish enough to wander inside, and if you can get someone out of it there’s an end to the harm. We aren’t the first nation to face its power.”
“You mean the people of the tower,” I said slowly, thinking of the buried king.
“You’ve seen the tomb, have you?” Alosha said. “And the magic that made it, magic that’s lost to us now? That should have been enough warning to make you more cautious. Those people weren’t weak or unprepared. But the Wood brought their tower down, wolves and walkers hunted them, and trees choked all the val
ley. One or two of their weaker sorcerers fled to the north and took a few books and stories with them. The rest of them?” She waved a hand towards the book. “Twisted into nightmares, beasts to hunt their own kind. That’s all the Wood left of that people. There’s something worse than monsters in that place: something that makes monsters.”
“I know it better than you!” I said. My hands still itched, and the book sat there on the table, malevolent. I couldn’t stop thinking about that heavy, monstrous presence looking out of Kasia’s face, of Jerzy’s, the feeling of being hunted beneath the boughs.
“Do you?” Alosha said. “Tell me, if I said to uproot every person living in your valley, to move them elsewhere in the kingdom and abandon it all to the Wood, save them and let it all go; would you come away?” I stared at her. “Why haven’t you already left, for that matter?” she added. “Why do you keep living there, in that shadow? There are places in Polnya that aren’t haunted by evil.”
I fumbled for an answer I didn’t know how to give. The idea was simply foreign. Kasia had imagined leaving, because she’d had to; I never had. I loved Dvernik, the deep soft woods around my house, the long bright running of the Spindle beneath the sun. I loved the cup of the mountains around us, a sheltering wall. There was a peace deep in our village, in our valley; it wasn’t just the Dragon’s light hand on the reins. It was home.
“A home where some misshapen thing might come out of the forest at night and steal away your children,” Alosha said. “Even before the Wood roused fully again, that valley was infested with corruption; there are old tales from the Yellow Marshes that speak of seeing walkers on the other side of the mountain passes, from before we ever pushed our way over the mountains and started to cut down the trees. But men still sought out that valley, and stayed there, and tried to live in it.”
“Do you think we’re all corrupted?” I said in horror: maybe she would rather burn all the valley, and all of us inside it, if given her way.
“Not corrupted,” she said. “Lured. Tell me, where does the river go?”
“The Spindle?”
“Yes,” she said. “Rivers flow to the sea, to lakes or marshland, not to forests. Where does that one go? It’s fed every year by the snows of a thousand mountains. It doesn’t simply sink into the earth. Think,” she added, with a bite, “instead of going on blindly wanting. There is some power deep in your valley, some strangeness beyond mortal magic that draws men in, plants roots in them—and not only men. Whatever thing it is that lives in the Wood, that puts out corruption, it’s come to live there and drink from that power like a cup. It killed the people of the tower, and then it slumbered for a thousand years because no one was fool enough to bother it. Then along we come, with our armies and our axes and our magic, and think that this time we can win.”
She shook her head. “Bad enough we went there at all,” she said. “Worse to keep pressing on, cutting down trees, until we woke the Wood again. Now who knows where it will end? I was glad when Sarkan went to hold it back, but now he’s behaving like a fool.”
“Sarkan’s not a fool,” I snapped out, “and neither am I.” I was angry and more than that, afraid; what she was saying rang too true. I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I’d missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots—yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go. I thought of Maria Olshankina, of Jaga, my sisters in the strange magic that no one else seemed to understand, and I knew, suddenly, why the Dragon took a girl from the valley. I knew why he took one, and why she left after ten years.
We were of the valley. Born in the valley, of families planted too deep to leave even when they knew their daughter might be taken; raised in the valley, drinking of whatever power also fed the Wood. I remembered the painting, suddenly, that strange painting in my room, showing the line of the Spindle and all its little tributaries in silver, and the odd pull of it that had made me cover it up, instinctively. We were a channel. He used us to reach into the valley’s power, and kept each girl in his tower until her roots had withered and the channel closed. And then—she didn’t feel the tie to the valley anymore. She could leave, and so she did, getting away from the Wood like any sensible ordinary person would.
I wanted to speak to Sarkan now more than ever, to shout at him; I wanted him in front of me so I could shake him by his thin shoulders. I shouted at Alosha instead. “Maybe we shouldn’t have gone in,” I said, “but it’s too late for that now. The Wood isn’t going to let us go, even if we could. It doesn’t want to drive us away, it wants to devour us. It wants to devour everything, so no one ever comes back again. We need to stop it, not run away.”
“The Wood isn’t to be defeated by wanting it so,” she said.
“That’s no reason not to try when we have the chance!” I said. “We’ve destroyed three heart-trees already, with the Summoning and the purging spell, and we can destroy more. If only the king would give us enough soldiers, Sarkan and I could start burning the whole thing back—”
“Whatever are you speaking of, child?” Ballo said, bewildered, breaking in. “Do you mean Luthe’s Summoning? No one has cast that spell in fifty years—”
“All right,” Alosha said, contemplating me from under her dark brows. “Tell me exactly how you’ve been destroying these trees, and from the beginning: we shouldn’t have relied on Solya to tell it to us properly.”
I haltingly told them about the first time we’d cast the Summoning, about the long stretch of that brilliant light reaching down to Kasia, the Wood lashing at her and trying to hold her back; about those final dreadful moments with Kasia’s fingers around my throat unlocking one by one, knowing I would have to kill her to save her. I told them about Jerzy, too; and the strange inner Wood the Summoning had shown us, where the two of them had wandered lost.
Ballo looked distressed through my whole recitation, wavering between resistance and unwilling belief, occasionally saying faintly, “But I have never heard … ,” and “The Summoning has never been reported to … ,” only to trail off again when Alosha made impatient silencing gestures.
“Well,” she said, when I was done, “I’ll grant that you and Sarkan have done something, anyway. You’re not entirely fools.” She was still holding the dagger in her hand, and she tapped the tip of the blade against the stone edge of the table, tap, tap, tap, a ringing noise like a small bell. “That doesn’t mean the queen was worth saving. After twenty years wandering in this shadow-place you’ve seen, what did any of you expect to be left of her?”
“We didn’t,” I said. “Sarkan didn’t. But I had to—”
“Because Marek said he’d put your friend to death otherwise,” Alosha finished for me. “Damn him anyway.”
I didn’t feel I owed Marek anything, but I said honestly, “If it were my mother—I’d try anything, too.”
“Then you’d be behaving like a child instead of a prince,” Alosha said. “Him and Solya.” She turned to Ballo. “We should have known better, when they offered to go after the girl Sarkan had brought out.” She looked back at me grimly. “I was too busy worrying that the Wood had finally got its claws into Sarkan. All I wanted was to have her put to death quickly, and Sarkan dragged back here for the rest of us to look over. And I’m still not certain that wouldn’t be for the best, after all.”
“Kasia’s not corrupted!” I said. “And neither is the queen.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t still be turned to serve the Wood.”
“You can’t put them to death just because something dreadful might happen that won’t even be their fault,” I said.
Ballo said, “I cannot disagree with her, Alosha. When the relics have already proven they are pure—”
“Of course we can, if it’ll save the kingdom from being overrun by the Wood,” Alosha said, brutally, overriding us both. “But that doesn’t mean I long to do it; and still less,” she added to me, “to provoke you into some
stupidity. I’m starting to understand why Sarkan indulged you as far as he has.”
She tapped the blade on the table again before she spoke on, with sudden decision. “Gidna,” she said.
I blinked at her. I knew about Gidna, of course, in a vague distant way; it was the great port city on the ocean, far to the north, that brought in whale oil and green woolen cloth; the crown prince’s wife had come from there.
“That’s far enough from the Wood, and the ocean is inimical to corruption,” Alosha said. “If the king sends them both there—that might do. The count has a witch, the White Lark. Lock them up under her eyes, and in ten years’ time—or if we do manage to burn down the whole rotten Wood—then I’ll stop worrying so much.”
Ballo was already nodding. But—ten years! I wanted to shout, to refuse. It was as though Kasia would be taken all over again. Only someone a century old could so easily throw ten years away. But I hesitated. Alosha wasn’t a fool, either, and I could see she wasn’t wrong to be wary. I looked at the corrupt bestiary lying on the table. The Wood had set us one trap after another, over and over. It had set a chimaera on the Yellow Marshes and white wolves on Dvernik, trying to catch the Dragon. It had taken Kasia, to lure me in. And when I’d found a way to break her out, the Wood had still tried to use Kasia to corrupt the Dragon and me both, and when that hadn’t worked, it had let her live, to lure us into its hands again. We’d fought our way out of that trap, but what if there was another one, some way the Wood could turn our victory into defeat all over again?