Uprooted(36)
Author: Naomi Novik

He fell silent. I remained sunk in on myself, curled up around my knees on the floor. I couldn’t stop shivering. Finally he said, heavily, “Are you ready to let me end this? Most likely there’s nothing left of her to rescue.”

I wanted to say yes. I wanted that thing gone, destroyed—the thing that wore Kasia’s face, that used not only her hands but everything in her heart, in her mind, to destroy those she loved. I almost didn’t care if Kasia was in there. If she was, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than to be trapped in her own body, that thing dangling her like a monstrous puppet. And I couldn’t persuade myself to doubt the Dragon anymore when he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.

But I had saved him, 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 of my 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 around every 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 to disparage 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.”