Uprooted(44)
Author: Naomi Novik

“First, however,” he added, “we must codify the principles of the spell, and you need to practice each separate component. I believe it falls into the category of fifth-order workings, wherein the Summoning provides the frame, the corruption itself provides the channel, and the purging spell provides the impulse—do you remember absolutely nothing I’ve taught you?” he demanded, seeing me bite my lip.

It was true I hadn’t bothered to remember much of his insisted-on lessons about the orders of spells, which were mostly for explaining why certain spells were more difficult than others. As far as I could see, it all came down to the obvious: if you put together two workings to make a new spell, usually it would be harder than either one of those alone; but beyond that, I didn’t find the rules very useful. If you put together three workings, it would be harder than any one of them alone, but at least when I tried it, that didn’t mean it would be harder than either two: it all depended on what you were trying to do, and in what order. And his rules didn’t have anything to do with had happened down there in the chamber.

I didn’t want to speak of it, and I knew he didn’t, either. But I thought of Kasia, struggling towards me while the Wood tore at her; and of Zatochek, on the edge of the Wood, one attack away from being swallowed. I said, “None of that matters, and you know it.”

His hand tightened on the papers, crumpling pages, and for a moment I thought he would start to shout at me. But he stared down at them and didn’t say a word. After a moment, I went for my spellbook and dug out the illusion spell we’d cast together, in winter, all those long months ago. Before Kasia.

I pushed away the heap of papers enough to clear some room before us, and set the book down in front of me. After a moment, without a word, he went and took another volume off the shelf: a narrow black book, whose cover glimmered faintly where he touched it. He opened it to a spell covering two pages, written in crisp letters, with a diagram of a single flower and every part of it attached to a syllable of the spell somehow. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.” And he held his hand out to me across the table.

It was harder to take it this time, to make that deliberate choice, without the useful distraction of desperation. I couldn’t help but think about the strength of his clasp, the long graceful lines of his fingers closed around my hand, the warm callused tips brushing my wrist. I could feel his pulse beating against my own fingers, and the heat of his skin. I stared down at my book and tried to make sense of the letters, my cheeks hot, while he began to cast his own spell, his voice clipped. His illusion started taking shape, another single perfectly articulated flower, fragrant and beautiful and thoroughly opaque, and the stem nearly covered in thorns.

I began in a whisper. I was trying desperately not to think, not to feel his magic against my skin. Nothing whatsoever happened. He didn’t say anything to me: his eyes were fixed determinedly on a point above my head. I stopped and gave myself a private shake. Then I shut my eyes and felt out the shape of his magic: as full of thorns as his illusion, prickly and guarded. I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it. I heard him draw a sharp breath, and the sharp edifice of his spell began grudgingly to let mine in. The rose between us put out long roots all over the table, and new branches began to grow.

It wasn’t the jungle of the first time we’d cast the spell: he was holding back his magic, and so was I, both of us letting only a thin stream of power feed the working. But the rosebush took on a different kind of solidity. I couldn’t tell it was an illusion anymore, the long ropy roots twisting together, putting fingers into the cracks of the table, winding around the legs. The blossoms weren’t just the picture of a rose, they were real roses in a forest, half of them not open yet, the other half blown, petals scattering and browning at the edges. The thick fragrance filled the air, too sweet, and as we held it, a bee came hovering in through the window and crept into one of the flowers, prodding it determinedly. When it couldn’t get any nectar out, it tried another, and another, small legs scrabbling at the petals, which gave way exactly as if they could bear the weight of a bee.

“You won’t get anything here,” I told the hovering bee, and blew at it, but it only tried again.

The Dragon had stopped staring over my head, any awkwardness falling before his passion for magic: he was studying our twined spells with the same fierce intent look he bent on his most complicated workings, the light of the spell bright in his face and his eyes; he was hungry to understand. “Can you hold it alone?” he demanded.

“I think so,” I said, and he slowly eased his hand from mine, leaving me to keep up the wild sprawling rosebush. Without the rigid frame of his casting, it half-wanted to collapse like a vine with its trellis gone, but I found I could keep hold of his magic: just a corner of it, enough to be a skeleton, and feeding the spell more of my own magic to make up for its weakness.

He reached down and turned a few pages of his book until he came to another spell, this to make an insect illusion, as diagrammed as the flower one had been. He spoke quickly, the spells rolling off his tongue, and made half a dozen bees and set them loose on the rosebush, which only confused our first bee-visitor further. As he made each one, he—gave them to me, with a kind of small push; I managed to catch them and hook them into the rosebush working. Then he said, “What I intend to do now is attach the watching spell to them. The one the sentinels carry,” he added.

I nodded even while I concentrated on holding the spell: what could more easily pass unnoticed in the Wood than a simple bee? He turned to the far-back pages of the book, to a sheaf of spells written in his own hand. As he began the working, though, the weight of the spell came heavily down on the bee illusions, and on me. I held them, struggling, feeling my magic draining too quickly to replenish, until I managed to make a wordless noise of distress, and he looked up from the working and reached towards me.

I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them. The rosebush began growing again, roots crawling off the table and vines climbing out the window. The bees became a humming swarm amid the flowers, each of them with oddly glittering eyes, wandering away. If I had caught one in my hands and looked closely, I would have seen in those eyes the reflection of all the roses it had touched. But I had no room in my head for bees, or roses, or spying; no room for anything but magic, the raw torrent of it and his hand my only rock, except he was being tumbled right along with me.