Uprooted (17 page)

He’d seized me the instant I came into the tower: he hadn’t let a moment pass. “There must be a way,” I said. “There has to be a way. They’d only just taken her—she couldn’t have been in the tree for long.”

“What?” he said sharply, and listened with his brows drawing as I spilled out the horror of the clearing, of the tree. I tried to tell him about the dreadful weight of the Wood, watching me; the feeling of being hunted. I stumbled over it all: words didn’t seem enough. But his face grew more dark, until at last I finished with that last staggering rush out into the clean snow.

“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing. No one has gone into the Wood as deep as you and come out whole: not since—” He halted, and I somehow knew without his saying her name that it was Jaga: that Jaga had walked in the Wood, and come out again. He saw my realization, and glared at me. “And at the time,” he said, icily, “she was a hundred years old, and so steeped in magic that black toadstools would spring up where she walked. And even she wasn’t stupid enough to start a great working in the middle of the place, although I will grant that in this case, it’s the only thing that saved you.” He shook his head. “I should have chained you to the wall as soon as that peasant woman came here to weep on your shoulder, I suppose.”

“Wensa,” I said, my dull, exhausted mind latching on to one thing. “I have to go tell Wensa.” I looked towards the hallway, but he cut in.

“Tell her
what
?” he said.

“That Kasia’s alive,” I said. “That she’s out of the Wood—”

“And that she will surely have to die?” he said, brutally.

Instinctively I backed towards Kasia, putting myself between them, holding my hands up—futile, if he had meant to overcome me, but he shook his head. “Stop mantling at me like a rooster,” he said, more weary than irritated: the tone made my chest clench in dismay. “The last thing we need is any further demonstrations that you’ll go to fool’s lengths for her sake. You can keep her alive as long as we can keep her restrained. But you’ll find it a mercy by the end.”

I did tell Wensa, when she woke a little later that morning. She clutched my hands, wild-eyed. “Let me see her,” she demanded, but that much, the Dragon had flatly forbidden.

“No,” he said. “You can torment yourself if you want to; that’s as far as I’ll go. Make that woman no false promises, and don’t let her come anywhere near. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll tell her the girl is dead, and let her get on with her life.”

But I steeled myself and told her the truth. Better, I thought, to know that Kasia was out of the Wood, that there was an end to her torment, even if there wasn’t a cure. I wasn’t sure if I was right. Wensa wailed and wept and begged me; if I could have, I would have disobeyed and taken her. But the Dragon didn’t trust me with Kasia: he had already taken her away and put her in a cell somewhere, deep beneath the tower. He’d told me he wouldn’t show me the way down until I’d learned a spell of protection, something to guard myself from the Wood’s corruption.

I had to tell Wensa that I couldn’t; I had to swear it to her on my heart, over and over, before she would believe me. “I don’t know where he’s put her,” I cried out finally. “I
don’t
!”

She stopped begging and stared at me, panting, her hands gripping my arms. Then she said, “Wicked, jealous—you always hated her, always. You wanted her to be taken! You and Galinda, you knew he’d take her, you knew and you were glad, and now you hate her because he took you instead—”

She was shaking me, in jerks, and for a moment I couldn’t stop her. It was too horrible, hearing her say these things to me, like poison spilling out where I’d looked for clean water. I was so desperately tired, ill from the purging and all my strength spent in bringing Kasia out. I wrenched myself loose at last and ran from the room, unable to bear it, and stood in the hallway leaning against the wall crying messily, too spent even to wipe my face. Wensa crept out after me in a moment, weeping herself. “Forgive me,” she said. “Nieshka, forgive me. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.”

I knew she hadn’t meant it, but it was also true, a little, in twisted ways. It dredged up my own secret guilt, my cry:
Why didn’t you take Kasia instead?
We
had
been glad all those years, my mother and I, to think I wouldn’t be taken, and I
had
been miserable afterwards, even if I’d never hated Kasia for it.

I wasn’t sorry when the Dragon sent Wensa home. I didn’t even argue very much when he refused to try and teach me the spell of protection that very day. “Try not to be more of a fool than you can help,” he snapped. “You need rest, and if you don’t, I certainly do before facing the undoubtedly torturous process of drumming the necessary protections into your head. There’s no need for haste. Nothing is going to change.”

“But if Kasia’s infested, as I was,” I started, and stopped: he was shaking his head.

“A few shadows slipped between your teeth; purging you at once kept them from getting a hold on you,” he said. “This isn’t anything like that, nor even some thirdhand infestation, like that luckless cow-herder you turned to stone for no good reason. Do you understand that the tree you saw is one of the heart-trees of the Wood? Where they take root, its borders spread, the walkers are fed on their fruit. She was as deep in the Wood’s power as any person can be. Go to sleep. A few hours won’t make a difference to her, and it may keep you from committing some new folly.”

I
was
too tired, and I knew it, reluctantly, though I felt argument coiling in my belly. I put it away for later. But if I’d listened to him and his caution in the first place, Kasia would still be there inside the heart-tree, being devoured and rotted away; if I’d swallowed everything he told me of magic, I’d still have been chanting cantrips to my exhaustion. He had told me himself no one had ever been brought out of a heart-tree, no one had ever come out of the Wood—but Jaga had done it, and now I had, too. He could be mistaken; he was mistaken about Kasia. He
was
.

I was up before first light. In Jaga’s book I found a spell
for smelling out rot;
a simple chant,
Aish aish aishimad,
and I worked it down in the kitchens, picking out a place where mold grew on the back of a barrel, a spot of rotting mortar in the walls, bruised apples and one spoiled cabbage that had rolled away under a shelf of wine-bottles. When sunlight finally brightened the stairway, I went up to the library and started banging books off the shelves loudly until he appeared, tired-eyed and irritable. He didn’t chide me; he only looked a brief frown, and then turned away without saying a word. I would have preferred it if he’d shouted.

But he took a small gold key and unlocked a closed cabinet of black wood on the far side of the room. I peered into it: it was full of thin flat sheets of glass in a rack, pieces of parchment pressed between them. He took one and brought it out. “I’ve preserved it mostly as a curiosity,” he said, “but that seems to suit you best.”

He laid it on the table still in its glass: a single page in sprawling messy script, many of the letters oddly shaped, with rough illustrations of a branch of pine needles, the smoke going into the nostrils of a face. There were a dozen different variations listed:
suoltal videl, suoljata akorata, videlaren, akordel, estepum,
more besides. “Which one do I use?” I asked him.

“What?” he said, and prickled up indignantly when I told him they were separate incantations, not all one long chant, in the way that meant he hadn’t realized it before. “I haven’t the least idea,” he said shortly. “Choose one and try.”

I couldn’t help but be secretly, passionately glad: another proof that his knowledge had limits. I went to the laboratory for pine needles and made a small smudgy bonfire of them in a glass bowl on the library table, then bent my head eagerly over the parchment and tried. “
Suoltal,
” I said, feeling the shape of it in my mouth—but there was something wrong, a kind of sideways sliding to it.

“
Valloditazh aloito, kes vallofozh,
” he said, a hard bitter sound that curled into me like fishhooks, and then he made a quick jerk of one finger, and my hands rose up from the table and clapped themselves together three times. It wasn’t like having no control, the involuntary lurch of coming out of a dream of falling. I could feel the deliberation behind the movement, the puppet-strings digging into my skin. Someone had moved my arms, and it hadn’t been me. I nearly reached for some spell to strike at him, and then he crooked his finger again and the fishhook came loose and the line slithered back out of me.

I was up on my feet, halfway across the room from him, panting, before I could stop myself. I glared, but he didn’t offer me an apology. “When the Wood does it,” he said, “you won’t feel the hook. Try again.”

It took me an hour to work out an incantation. None of the ones came out right, not the way they were on paper. I had to try them all on my tongue, rolling them this way and that, before I finally realized that some of the letters weren’t meant to sound the same way I thought they did. I tried changing them until I stumbled over a syllable that felt right in my mouth; then another, and another, until I had put it together. He made me practice it over and over for hours more. I breathed in pine smoke and breathed out the words, and then he prodded at my mind with one unpleasant twisting of a spell and another.

He finally let me stop for a rest at noon. I crumpled into a chair, hedgehog-prickled and exhausted; the barriers had held, but I felt very much as though I’d been jabbed repeatedly with sharp sticks. I looked down at the old vellum, so carefully sealed away, with the strange-shaped letters; I wondered how old it was.

“Very old,” he said. “Older than Polnya: it might even be older than the Wood.”

I stared at him; it hadn’t occurred to me even to think, before then, that the Wood hadn’t always been here, always been what it was.

He shrugged. “For all we know, it has. It’s certainly older than Polnya and Rosya: it was here before this valley was ever settled by either of us.” He tapped the parchment in the glass. “These were the first people who lived in this part of the world, so far as we know, some thousand years ago. Their sorcerer-kings brought the tongue of magic west with them, from the barren lands on the far side of Rosya, when they first settled this valley. And then the Wood rolled over them, brought their fortresses low and laid their fields waste. There’s little left of their work now.”

“But,” I said, “if the Wood wasn’t here when they first settled the valley, where did it come from?”

The Dragon shrugged. “If you go to the capital, you’ll find any number of troubadours who will be happy to sing you the rising of the Wood. It’s a popular subject among them, at least when they have an audience that knows less about it than they do: it offers them enormous scope for creativity. I suppose there’s a chance one of them has hit on the true story. Light the fire and let’s begin again.”

It wasn’t until late that evening, as the light was failing, that he was satisfied with my work. He tried to send me to bed, but I wouldn’t have it. Wensa’s words still grated and scraped in the back of my head, and it occurred to me that perhaps he’d wanted me exhausted so he could put me off for another day. I wanted to see Kasia with my own eyes; I wanted to know what I was facing, this corruption I had to find a way to fight. “No,” I said. “No. You said I could see her when I could protect myself.”

He threw up his hands. “All right,” he said. “Follow me.”

He led me to the bottom of the stairs, and into the cellars past the kitchen. I remembered searching all those walls in desperation, when I’d thought he was draining my life; I had run my hands over every wall, poked my fingers into every crack, and tugged on every worn brick, trying to find a way out. But he led me to a smooth-polished part of the wall, a single entire slab of pale white stone unbroken by any mortar. He touched it lightly with the fingers of one hand and crooked them up like a spider; I felt the faint thrill of his magic working. The whole slab swung back into the wall, revealing a stairwell of the same pale stone, shining dimly, that bent steeply downwards.

I followed him down the passage. It was different from the rest of the tower: older and more strange. The steps were hard-edged on either side but worn in the middle to softness, and letters had been carved in a line running along the base of both walls, a script neither ours nor Rosyan: very much like the shape of the letters on the parchment with the protection spell. We seemed to go down for a long time, and I was increasingly aware of the weight of stone around us, of silence. It felt like a tomb.

“It
is
a tomb,” he said. We had reached the bottom of the stairs, coming into a small round room. The very air seemed thicker. The writing came off one wall of the stairwell, continued all around it in an unbroken line that circled to the opposite side, went up the wall in a tall curve that drew an arch, and then came back and went up the other side of stairs. There was a small patch of lighter stone inside the arch, towards the bottom—as though the rest of the wall had been built, and then had been closed up afterwards. It looked perhaps the size for a man to crawl through.