Page 22 of Uprooted 1
But I had savedhim,when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too.And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another.I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked.“Not yet,” I whispered.“Not yet.”
—
If I had been an indifferent student before, now I was dreadful in a wholly different way.I turned ahead in books and took ones he didn’t give me down from the shelves if he didn’t catch me.I looked into anything and everything I could find.I would work spells out halfway, discard them, and go onward; I would throw myself into workings without being sure I had the strength.I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out ofmy way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.
At least every few days I would find something with enough faint promise that I would convince myself it was worth trying.The Dragon took me down to Kasia to try whenever I asked, which was far more often than I managed to find anything really worth trying.He let me tear apart his library, and said nothing when I spilled oils and powders across his table.He didn’t press me to let Kasia go.I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.
She—the thing inside her—didn’t try to pretend anymore.She watched me with bird-bright eyes, and smiled occasionally when my workings did nothing: a horrible smile.“Nieshka, Agnieszka,” she sang softly, over and over, sometimes, if I was trying an incantation, so I had to stumble on through it while listening to her.I would come out feeling bruised and sick to my bones, and climb the stairs again slowly, with tears dripping from my face.
Spring was rolling over the valley by then.If I looked from my window, which I did now only rarely, every day I could watch the Spindle running riotous white with melted ice, and a band of open grass widening from the lowlands, chasing the snow up into the mountains on either side.Rain swept over the valley in silver curtains.Inside the tower I was parched as barren ground.I had looked at every page of Jaga’s book, and the handful of other tomes that suited my wandering magic, and any other books the Dragon could suggest.There were spells of healing, spells of cleansing, spells of renewal and life.I had tried anything with any promise at all.
They held the Spring Festival in the valley before the planting began, the great bonfire in Olshanka a tall heap of seasoned wood so large I could see it plainly from the tower.I was alone in the library when I heard a faint snatch of the music drifting on the wind, and looked out to see the celebration.It seemed to me that the entire valley had burst into life, early shoots prodding their way out of all the fields, the forests bursting into pale and misty green aroundevery village.And far down those cold stone stairs, Kasia was in her tomb.I turned away and folded my arms on the table and put my head down on them and sobbed.
When I lifted my head again, blotchy and tearstained, he was there, sitting near me, looking out of the window, his face bleak.His hands were folded in his lap, the fingers laced, as though he had held himself back from reaching out to touch me.He had laid a handkerchief on the table before me.I took it up and wiped my face and blew my nose.
“I tried, once,” he said abruptly.“When I was a young man.I lived in the capital, then.There was a woman—” His mouth twisted slightly, self-mocking.“The foremost beauty of the court, naturally.I suppose there’s no harm anymore in saying her name now she’s forty years in the grave: Countess Ludmila.”
I nearly gaped at him, not sure what confused me the most.He was the Dragon: he had always been in the tower and always would be, a permanent fixture, like the mountains in the west.The idea that he had ever lived somewhere else, that he had ever been a young man, seemed perfectly wrong; and yet at the same time, I stumbled just as much over the idea that he’d loved a woman forty years dead.His face was familiar to me now, but I looked at him startled all over again.There were those lines at the corners of his eye and mouth, if I looked for them, but that was all that betrayed his years.In everything else, he was a young man: the still-hard edges of his profile, his dark hair untouched with silver, his pale smooth unweathered cheek, his long and graceful hands.I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind—he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely noblewoman—and there my imagination stumbled.He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.
“She—became corrupted?”I asked, helplessly.
“Oh, no,” he said.“Not her.Her husband.”He paused, and I wondered if he would say anything more.He had never spoken of himself to me at all, and he’d said nothing of the court but todisparage it.After a moment he went on, however, and I listened, fascinated.
“The count had gone to Rosya to negotiate a treaty, across the mountain pass.He came back with unacceptable terms and a thread of corruption.Ludmila had a wise-woman at her house, her nursemaid, who knew enough to warn her: they locked him up in the cellar and barred the door with salt, and told everyone he was ill.
“No one in the capital thought anything of a beautiful young wife making a scandal of herself while her older husband ailed out of sight; least of all myself, when she made me the object of her pursuit.I was still young and foolish enough at the time to believe myself and my magic likely to elicit admiration instead of alarm, and she was clever and determined enough to take advantage of my vanity.She had me thoroughly on a string before she asked me to save him.
“She had a particularly deft understanding of human nature,” he added, dryly.“She told me that she couldn’t leave him in such a state.She professed herself willing to give up her place at court, her title, her reputation, but so long as he was corrupted, honor demanded she remain chained to his side; only by saving him could I free her to run away with me.She tempted my selfishness and my pride at once: I assure you I thought of myself as a noble hero, promising to save my lover’s husband.And then—she let me see him.”
He fell silent.I hardly breathed, sitting like a mouse under an owl’s tree so he would go on talking.His gaze was turned inward, bleak, and I felt a kind of recognition: I thought of Jerzy laughing dreadfully at me out of his sickbed, of Kasia below with the terrible brightness in her eyes, and knew that same look lived in my own face.
“I spent half a year trying,” he said finally.“I was already accounted the most powerful wizard of Polnya by then; I was certain there was nothing I couldn’t do.I ransacked the king’s library andthe University, and brewed a score of remedies.”He waved towards the table, where Jaga’s book lay shut.“That was when I bought that book, among other less wise attempts.Nothing served.”
His mouth twisted again.“Then I came here.”He indicated the tower with one finger, circling.“There was another witch here guarding the Wood then, the Raven.I thought she might have an answer.She was growing old at last, and most of the wizards at court avoided her carefully; none of them wanted to be sent to replace her when she finally died.I wasn’t afraid of that: I was too strong to be sent away from court.”
“But—” I said, startled into speaking, and bit my lip; he looked at me for the first time, one of those sarcastic eyebrows raised.“But youweresent here, in the end?”I said uncertainly.
“No,” he said.“I chose to stay.The king at the time wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about my decision: he preferred to keep me under his eye, and his successors have often pressed me to return.But she—persuaded me.”He looked away from me again, out the window and over the valley towards the Wood.“Have you ever heard of a town called Porosna?”
It sounded only vaguely familiar.“The baker in Dvernik,” I said.“Her grandmother was from Porosna.She made a kind of bun—”
“Yes, yes,” he said, impatient.“And do you have any idea where it is?”
I groped helplessly: I barely knew the name.“Is it in the Yellow Marshes?”I offered.
“No,” he said.“It was five miles down the road from Zatochek.”
Zatochek was not two miles from the barren strip that surrounded the Wood.It was the last town in the valley, the last bastion before the Wood; so it had been all my life.“The Wood—took it?”I whispered.
“Yes,” the Dragon said.He rose and went for the great ledger I had seen him write in, the day that Wensa had come to tell us about Kasia being taken, and he brought it to the table and opened it.Each of the great pages was divided into neat lines, rows andcolumns, careful entries like an account-book: but in each row stood the name of a town, names of people, and numbers: this many corrupted, this many taken; this many cured, this many slain.The pages were thick with entries.I reached out and turned the pages back, the parchment unyellowed, the ink still dark: there was a faint clinging magic of preservation on them.The years grew thinner and the numbers smaller as I went back.There had been more incidents lately, and larger ones.
“It swallowed Porosna the night the Raven died,” the Dragon said.He reached out and turned a thick sheaf of pages to where someone else, less orderly, had been keeping the records: each incident was merely written out like a story, the writing larger and the lines a little shaky.
Today a rider from Porosna: they have a fever there with seven sick.He did not stop in any towns.He was sickening, too.A woodbane infusion eased his fever, and Agata’s Seventh Incantation was effective at purifying the root of the sickness.Sevenweight of silver worth of saffron consumed in the incantation, and fifteen for the woodbane.
It was the last entry in that hand.
“I was on my way back to the court by then,” the Dragon said.“The Raven had told me the Wood was growing—she asked me to stay.I refused, indignantly; I thought it beneath me.She told me there was nothing to be done for the count, and I resented it; I told her grandly I would find a way.That whatever the Wood’s magic had done, I could undo.I told myself she was an old weak fool; that the Wood was encroaching because of her weakness.”
