Uprooted(76)
Author: Naomi Novik

“What are you looking for?”

I nearly pitched off the ladder onto Father Ballo’s head, just barely catching the side rail in time and barking my ankle painfully on a joint. There was a section of one of the bookshelves standing open halfway down the room, the door to some hidden nook; he’d come out of there. He was carrying four thick volumes in his arms, which I supposed he meant to put back on the shelves, and staring up at me doubtfully from the floor.

I was still twitching inwardly with surprise, and I spoke without thinking. “I’m looking for Sarkan,” I said.

Ballo looked blankly at the shelves I’d been pawing over: did I think I was going to find the Dragon pressed between the pages of a book? But as if I’d told myself at the same time as him, I realized that was exactly what I was after. I wanted Sarkan. I wanted him to look up from among his heaped books and snap at me at the disorder I’d created. I wanted to know what he was doing, if the Wood had struck back. I wanted him to tell me how I could persuade the king to let Kasia go.

“I want to speak to him,” I said. “I want to see him.” I already knew there wasn’t a spell in Jaga’s book, and Sarkan had never shown me such a spell himself. “Father, what spell would you use, if you wanted to talk to someone in another part of the kingdom?”—but Ballo was already shaking his head at me.

“Far-speaking is a thing of fairy-tales, however convenient bards find the notion,” he said, in lecturing tones. “In Venezia they have discovered the art of laying a spell of communion within a pair of mirrors made together from the same pool of quicksilver. The king has such a mirror, with the mate carried by the chief of the army at the front. But even these can speak only with one another. The king’s grandfather purchased them in exchange for five bottles of fire-heart,” he added, making me squeak involuntarily at the price: you might as well buy a kingdom. “Magic may extend the senses, extend sight and hearing; it may amplify the voice, or conceal it into a nut to emerge later. It cannot fling your visage across half a kingdom in an instant, or carry someone’s voice back to you.”

I listened to him dissatisfied, although it made unfortunate sense: why would Sarkan ever send a messenger, or write a letter, if he could simply cast a spell? It was sensible enough, the same way he could only use his transporting spell to go around the valley, his own territory, and not leap straight to the capital and back.

“Are there any other spellbooks like Jaga’s here, that I might look in?” I asked, even though I knew Ballo didn’t have any use for her.

“My child, this library is the heart of the scholarship of magic in Polnya,” he said. “Books are not flung onto these shelves by the whim of some collector, or through the chicanery of a bookseller; they are not here because they are valuable, or painted in gold to please some noble’s eye. Every volume added has been carefully reviewed by at least two wizards in the service of the crown; their virtues have been confirmed and at least three correct workings attested, and even then they must be of real power to merit a place here. I myself have spent nearly my entire life of service pruning out the lesser works, the curiosities and the amusements of earlier days; you will certainly not find anything like that here.”

I stared down at him: his entire life! And he would surely have pounced instantly on anything that I could use. I took the sides of the ladder and slid myself to the foot, to his pinched disapproving look: I suppose he would have stared to see anyone climb a tree, too. “Did you burn them?” I said, hopelessly.

He recoiled as if I’d suggested burning him. “A book need not be magical to be of value,” he said. “Indeed, I would have liked to move them to the University’s collection for more thorough study, but Alosha insisted on their being kept here, under lock—which I cannot deny is a sensible precaution, as such books can attract the worst sort of elements of lower society; occasionally enough of the gift crops up to make a street apothecary dangerous, if they get the wrong book in their hands. However, I do believe the University archivists, who are men of excellent training, might with the proper instruction and a rigorous scheme of oversight have been entrusted with the safekeeping of lesser—”

“Where are they?” I interrupted.

The tiny room he showed me to was crammed full of old, ragged-edged books with not even an arrow-slit window for air. I had to leave the door cracked open. I was happier rummaging through these messy heaps, where I didn’t have to worry about putting them back in any order, but most of the books were just as useless to me as the ones on the shelves. I pushed aside any number of dry histories of magic, and others that were tomes of elaborate small cantrips—at least half of which would have taken twice as long and made five times the mess of doing whatever they wanted to do by hand—and others that seemed perfectly reasonable formal spellbooks to me, but evidently hadn’t met Father Ballo’s more rigorous standards.

There were stranger things in the piles. One very peculiar volume looked just like a spellbook, full of mysterious words and pictures, diagrams like those in many of the Dragon’s books, and writing that made no sense. After I lost ten solid minutes to puzzling over the thing, I realized slowly that it was mad. I mean, a madman had written it, pretending he was a wizard, wanting to be one: it wasn’t real spells at all, just made-up ones. There was something hopelessly sad about it. I pushed that one away into a dark corner.

Then finally my hand fell on one small thin black book. On the outside it looked like my mother’s recipe-book for dishes to serve on holidays, and it felt warm and friendly to me at once. The paper was cheap, yellowing and crumbly, but it was full of small, comfortable spells, sketched out in a neat hand. I looked through the pages, smiling down at it involuntarily, and then I looked at the inside of the front cover. In that same neat hand was written, Maria Olshankina, 1267.

I sat looking down at it, surprised and not surprised at the same time. This witch had lived in my valley more than three hundred years ago. Not long after the valley had been settled: the big cornerstone on Olshanka’s stone church, the oldest building in the valley, was engraved with the year 1214. Where had Jaga been born? I wondered, suddenly. She had been Rosyan. Had she lived in the valley on the other side of the Wood, before Polnya settled it from the other direction?

I knew it wasn’t going to help me. It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can’t change what’s wrong. There were folk-witches who cured some kinds of sickness and dealt with crop-blight, in most big towns; I think Maria had been one of them. For a moment I saw her, a big, cheerful woman with a red apron sweeping out her front yard, children and chickens underfoot, going inside to brew up some cough-potion for an anxious young father with a sick baby at home, pouring it into his cup with a lecture on running across town without a hat on. There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life. I sighed and put the book into my pocket anyway. I didn’t want to leave it here thrown away and forgotten.