Uprooted(24)
Author: Naomi Novik

It was a journal written in a tiny crabbed hand, almost impossible to read at first and full of abbreviations. The sheets were notes in the Dragon’s hand, one or more of them inserted between almost every leaf, where he had written out different ways to cast each spell, with explanations of what he was doing: that at least seemed more promising, as if his voice might speak to me from the paper.

There were a dozen spells for healing and for cleansing wounds—of sickness and gangrene, not of enchanted corruption, but at least worth the trying. I read over one spell, which advised lancing the poisoned wound, packing it with rosemary and lemon-peel, and doing something which the writer called putting breath on it. The Dragon had written four crammed-close pages on the subject and drawn up lines in which he noted down nearly five dozen variations: this much rosemary, dry or fresh; that much lemon, with pith on or without; a steel knife, an iron one, this incantation and another.

He hadn’t written down which of the attempts had worked better and which worse, but if he had gone to so much effort, it had to be good for something. All I needed right now was to do him enough good to let him speak even a handful of words to me, give me some direction. I flew down to the kitchens and found a great bundle of hanging rosemary and a lemon. I took a clean paring knife and some fresh linens and hot water in a pot.

Then I hesitated: my eye had fallen on the great cleaver, lying on its chopping stone. If I couldn’t do anything else, if I couldn’t give him the strength to speak—I didn’t know if I could do it, if I could cut off his arm. But I saw Jerzy on his bed, cackling and monstrous, far away from the quiet, sad man who had always nodded to me in the lane; I saw Krystyna’s hollowed-out face. I swallowed and picked up the cleaver.

I honed both the knives, resolutely thinking of nothing, and then I carried my things upstairs. The window and door stood open, but even so the terrible stink of corruption had begun to gather in my small room. It turned my stomach with dread as much as physically. I didn’t think I could bear to see the Dragon corrupted, all his crisp edges rotted away, his sharp tongue reduced to howling and snarls. His breath was coming shorter, and his eyes were half-closed. His face was terribly pale. I lay the linens under his arm and tied them on with some twine. I peeled off wide strips of the lemon’s skin, tore rosemary leaves off the stems, crushing them all and throwing them into the hot water so that the sweet strong smell rose up and drove out the stink. Then I bit my lip, and, steeling myself, slashed open the swollen wound with the paring knife. Green tarry bile spurted out of it. I poured cup after cup of the hot water over the wound until it was clean. I caught fistfuls of the steeped herbs and lemon and packed them down tight.

The Dragon’s notes said nothing of what it meant to put breath on the wound, so I bent down and breathed out the incantations over it, trying one and then another, my voice breaking. They all felt wrong in my mouth, awkward and hard-edged, and nothing was happening. Wretched, I looked back at the crabbed original writing again: there was a line that said Kai and tihas, sung as seems good, will have especial virtue. The Dragon’s incantations all had variants of those syllables, but strung round with others, built up into long elaborate phrases that tangled on my tongue. Instead I bent down and sang Tihas, tihas, kai tihas, kai tihas, over and over, and found myself falling into the sound of the birthday song about living a hundred years.

That sounds absurd, but the rhythm of it was easy and familiar, comforting. I stopped having to think about the words: they filled my mouth and spilled over like water out of a cup. I forgot to remember Jerzy’s mad laughter, and the green vile cloud that had drowned the light inside him. There was only the easy movement of the song, the memory of faces gathered around a table laughing. And then finally the magic flowed, but not the same way as when the Dragon’s spell-lessons dragged it in a rush out of me. Instead it seemed to me the sound of the chanting became a stream made to carry magic along, and I was standing by the water’s edge with a pitcher that never ran dry, pouring a thin silver line into the rushing current.

Under my hands, the sweet fragrance of rosemary and lemon was rising strong, overpowering the stench of corruption. More and more of the bile began to flow from the wound, until I would have worried except that the Dragon’s arm kept looking better: the dreadful greenish cast was fading, the darkened and swollen veins shrinking back.

I was running out of breath; but besides that, I felt somehow that I was finished, that my work was done. I brought my chanting to a simple close, going up and down a note: I had only really been humming anyway by the end. The shining glow where he held his arm at the elbow was growing stronger now, brighter, and abruptly thin lines of light shot away from his grip, running down his veins and spreading out through them like branches. The rot was disappearing: the flesh looked healthy, his skin restored—to his usual unhealthy sunless pallor, but nevertheless his own.

I watched it holding my breath, hardly daring to hope, and then his whole body shifted. He drew one longer, deeper breath, blinking at the ceiling with eyes that were aware again, and his fingers one after another let go their iron grip around his elbow. I could have sobbed with relief: incredulous and hopeful, I looked up at his face, a smile working its way onto my mouth, and found him staring at me with an expression of astonished outrage.

He struggled up from the pillows. He stripped his arm clean of the rosemary and lemon packing and held it in his fist with a look of incredulity, then leaned over and seized the tiny journal from the coverlet over his legs: I had put it there so I could look at it while I worked. He stared at the spell, turned the book to see the spine as if he didn’t quite believe his own eyes, and then he spluttered at me, “You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?”

I sat back on my heels in some indignation: this, when I had just saved not only his life, but everything he might be, and all the kingdom from whatever the Wood might have made from him. “What ought I have done?” I demanded. “And how was I to know to do it? Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”

For some reason, this only made him nearly incoherent with fury, and he levered himself up from my cot, threw the book across the room, all the notes flying everywhere, and flung himself out into the hallway without another word. “You might thank me!” I shouted after him, outraged myself, and his footsteps had vanished before I recalled that he had been wounded at all in saving my life—that he had surely pressed himself to terrible lengths to come to my aid at all.