Uprooted(39)
Author: Naomi Novik

The Dragon conjured a narrow wooden stand and set the Summoning upon it. He looked at me. “Are you ready?” he asked me, in stiff and formal tones. He had dressed in fine garments of silk and leather and velvet in endless layers, and he wore gloves; as though armoring himself against anything like what had happened the last time we’d cast a working together. It seemed to me as long ago as a century and as distant as the moon. I was untidy in homespun, my hair pulled into a haphazard knot just to keep it out of my eyes. I reached down and opened the cover, and began to read aloud.

The spell caught me up again almost at once, and by now I knew enough of magic to feel it drawing on my strength. But the Summoning didn’t insist on tearing away chunks of me: I tried to feed it as I did most of my spells, with a steady measured stream of magic instead of a torrent, and it permitted me to do so. The words no longer felt so impenetrable. I still couldn’t follow the story, or remember one sentence to the next, but I began to have the feeling that I wasn’t meant to. If I could have remembered, at least some of the words would have been wrong: like hearing again a half-remembered favorite tale from childhood and finding it unsatisfying, or at least not as I’d remembered it. And that was how the Summoning made itself perfect, by living in that golden place of vague and loving memory. I let it flow through me, and when I finished the page I stopped, and let the Dragon take it up: he’d insisted grimly he would read two to my one, when I wouldn’t be dissuaded from trying.

His voice sounded the words a little differently than I had, with crisper edges and less of a running rhythm, and it didn’t feel quite right to me at first. The working continued to build without any difficulty as far as I could tell, and by the end of his two pages, his own reading did sound well to me after all—as though I were hearing a gifted storyteller tell a different version of a tale than the one I loved, and he had overcome my instinctive annoyance at hearing it told differently. But when I had to begin again myself, I struggled to pick up the thread of it, and it was a greater effort than the first page had been. We were trying to tell the story together, but pulling in different ways. I realized in dismay even as I read that it wasn’t going to be enough that he was my teacher: those three witches he’d seen cast the spell must have been more like one another, in their magic and their working, than he and I were.

I kept reading, pushing onward, and I managed to reach the end of the page. When I had finished it, the story was flowing smoothly for me again—but only because it had become my story again, and when the Dragon began to read this time, the jarring was even worse. I swallowed against my dry parched mouth and looked up from the podium—and Kasia was looking at me from the wall where she was chained, smiling with a hideous light in her face,with delight. She could tell as easily as I could that it wasn’t good enough—that we couldn’t complete the working. I looked at the Dragon reading grimly on, intently focused on the page, his brows drawn hard together. He had warned me he would halt the working before we went too deep if he thought we couldn’t succeed; he would try and collapse the spell as safely as he could, and control the damage it would do. He had only agreed to try when I had agreed to accept his judgment, and to stop my part of the working and keep out of his way if he felt it necessary to do so.

But the working was already strong, full of power. We’d both had to exert ourselves just to keep going. There might already be no safe way. I looked at Kasia’s face, and remembered the feeling I’d had, that the presence in the Wood, whatever it was, was in her; that it was the same presence. If the Wood was here in Kasia—if it knew what we were doing, and knew that the Dragon had been injured, some great part of his strength drained—it would strike again, right away. It would come again for Dvernik, or maybe just Zatochek, settling for a smaller gain. In my desperation to save Kasia, in his pity for my grief, we had just handed the Wood a gift.

I groped for something to do, anything, and then I swallowed my own hesitation and reached out with a shaking hand to cover his where he held the page down. His eyes darted towards me, and I took a breath and began to read along.

He didn’t stop, although he glared at me ferociously—What do you think you’re doing?—but after a moment he understood and caught the idea of what I was trying to do. Our voices sounded terrible at first when we tried to bring them together, off-key and grating against each other: the working wobbled like a child’s tower made of pebbles. But then I stopped trying to read like him and simply read with him instead, letting instinct guide me: I found myself letting him read the words off the page, and with my own voice almost making a song of them, choosing a single word or line to chant over again twice or three times, sometimes humming instead of words, my foot tapping to give a beat.

He resisted at first, holding for a moment to the clean precision of his own working, but my own magic was offering his an invitation, and little by little he began to read—not any less sharply, but to the beat I gave. He was leaving room for my improvisations, giving them air. We turned the page together and kept on without a pause, and halfway down the page a line flowed out of us that was music, his voice crisply carrying the words while I sang them along, high and low, and abruptly, shockingly, it was easy.

No—not easy; that wasn’t even an adequate word. His hand had closed on mine, tightly; our fingers were interlaced, and our magic also. The spell came singing out of us, effortless as water running downhill. It would have been harder to stop than to keep going.

And I understood now why he hadn’t been able to find the right words, why he hadn’t been able to tell me whether the spell would help Kasia or not. The Summoning didn’t bring forth any beast or object, or conjure up some surge of power; there was no fire or lightning. The only thing it did at all was fill the room with a clear cool light, not even bright enough to be blinding. But in that light everything began to look, to be different. The stone of the walls grew translucent, white veins moving like rivers, and when I gazed at them, they told me a story: a strange deep endless story unlike anything human, so much slower and farther away that it felt almost like being stone again myself. The blue fire that danced in its stone cup was in an endless dream, a song circling on itself; I looked into its flickering and saw the temple where that fire had come from, a long way from here and long since fallen into ruin. But nevertheless I knew suddenly where that temple stood, and how I could cast that very spell and make a flame that would live on after me. The carved walls of the tomb were coming alive, the inscriptions shining. If I looked at them long enough, I would be able to read them, I was sure.