Uprooted(26)
Author: Naomi Novik

“Then,” I ventured, “I did well to go?”

His expression was as sour as milk left out in midsummer. “If anyone could say so when you’ve poured out fifty years’ worth of my most valuable potions in less than a day. Did it never occur to you that if they could be so easily spent, I would give half a dozen flasks to every village headman, and save myself the trouble of ever setting foot in the valley?”

“They can’t be worth more than people’s lives,” I fired back.

“A life before you in the moment isn’t worth a hundred elsewhere, three months from now,” he said. “Listen, you simpleton, I have one bottle of fire-heart in the refining now: I began it six years ago, when the king could afford to give me the gold for it, and it will be finished in another four. If we spend all my supply before then, do you suppose Rosya will generously refrain from firing our fields, knowing that we’ll have starved and sued for peace before we can return the favor? And there are likewise costs for every other vial you spent. All the more because Rosya has three master-wizards who can brew potions, to our two.”

“But we’re not at war!” I protested.

“We will be in the spring,” he said, “if they hear a song of fire-heart and stone-skin and profligacy, and think they might have gained a real advantage.” He paused, and then he added heavily, “Or if they hear a song of a healer strong enough to purge corruption, and think that soon the balance will tip in our favor, instead, when you are trained.”

I swallowed and looked down at my bowl of soup. It was unreal when he spoke of Rosya declaring war because of me, because of things I’d done or what they would imagine I might do. But I remembered again the terror I’d felt on seeing the beacons lit with him gone, knowing just how little I could do to help those I loved. I still wasn’t at all sorry to have taken the potions, but I couldn’t pretend anymore that it mattered nothing whether I ever learned a single spell.

“Do you think I could help Jerzy, once I’ve been trained?” I asked him.

“Help a man already fully corrupted?” The Dragon scowled at me. But then he said, a grudging admission, “You shouldn’t have been able to help me.”

I picked up my bowl and drank the rest of the soup down, and then I put it aside and looked at him across the scarred and pitted kitchen table. “All right,” I said, grimly. “Let’s get on with it.”

Unfortunately, the willingness to learn magic wasn’t the same thing as being any good at it. Groshno’s minor charms stymied me thoroughly, and the conjurations of Metrodora remained resolutely unconjured. After another three days of letting the Dragon set me at healing spells, all of which felt as awkward and wrong as ever, I marched down to the library the next morning with the little worn journal in my hand and put it down on the table before him as he scowled. “Why won’t you teach me from this?” I demanded.

“Because it’s unteachable,” he snapped. “I’ve barely managed to codify the simplest cantrips into any usable form, and none of the higher workings. Whatever her notoriety, in practice it’s worth almost nothing.”

“What do you mean, notoriety?” I said, and then I looked down at the book. “Who wrote this?”

He scowled at me. “Jaga,” he said, and for a moment I stood cold and still. Old Jaga had died a long time ago, but there weren’t very many songs about her, and bards mostly sang them warily, only in summer, at midday. She had been dead and buried five hundred years, but that hadn’t stopped her turning up in Rosya only forty years ago, at the baptism of the newborn prince. She’d turned six guards who tried to stop her into toads, put two other wizards to sleep, then she’d gone over to the baby and peered frowning down at him. Then she’d straightened up and announced in irritation, “I’ve fallen out of time,” before vanishing in a great cloud of smoke.

So being dead wasn’t a bar to her sudden return to claim her spellbook back, but the Dragon only grew even more annoyed at my expression. “Stop looking like a solemn six-year-old. Contrary to popular imagination, she is dead, and whatever time-wandering she may have done beforehand, I assure you she would have had a larger purpose than to run around eavesdropping on gossip about herself. As for that book, I spent an inordinate amount of money and trouble to get it, and congratulated myself on the acquisition until I realized how infuriatingly incomplete it was. She plainly used it only to jog her memory: it has no details of real spellwork.”

“The four I’ve tried have all worked perfectly well,” I said, and he stared at me.

He didn’t believe me until he’d made me throw half a dozen of Jaga’s spells. They were all alike: a few words, a few gestures, a few bits of herbs and things. No particular piece mattered; there was no strict order to the incantations. I did see why he called her spells unteachable, because I couldn’t even remember what I did when I cast them, much less explain why I did any one step, but for me they were an inexpressible relief after all the stiff, overcomplicated spells he’d set me. My first description held true: I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There’s an easy way through the brambles on the left. She didn’t care how I got to the blueberries: she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet.

He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him. He finally resorted to standing over me while I cast the final spell, noting down every small thing I did, even the sneeze from breathing in too deep over the cinnamon, and when I was finished he tried it again himself. It was very strange watching him, like a delayed and flattering mirror: he did everything exactly the way I had done, but more gracefully, with perfect precision, enunciating every syllable I had slurred, but he wasn’t halfway through before I could tell it wasn’t working. I twitched to interrupt him. He shot me a furious look, so I gave up and let him finish working himself into a thicket, as I thought of it, and when he was done and nothing whatsoever had happened, I said, “You shouldn’t have said miko there.”

“You did!” he snapped.

I shrugged helplessly: I didn’t doubt that I had, though to be perfectly honest I didn’t remember. But it hadn’t been an important thing to remember. “It was all right when I did it,” I said, “but when you did it, it was wrong. As though—you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it—”