He stirred. “Who?” he said, surfacing from his reverie. “Oh, Ludmila?” He paused. “After I came back to the court for the last time,” he said finally, “I told her there was nothing to be done for her husband. I brought two other wizards from the court to attest his corruption was incurable—they were quite appalled that I’d allowed him to live so long in the first place—and I let one of them put him to death.” He shrugged. “They tried to make hay of it, as it happens—there’s more than a little envy among enchanters. They suggested to the king that I ought to be sent here for punishment, for having concealed the corruption. They meant the king to refuse that punishment, but settle on something else, some small or petty wrist-slapping, I suppose. It rather deflated them when I announced I was going, no matter what anyone else thought of it.
“And Ludmila—I didn’t see her again. She tried to claw my eyes out when I told her we had to put him to death, and her remarks at the time rather quickly disillusioned me as to the real nature of her feelings for me,” he added, dryly. “But she inherited the estate and remarried a few years later to a lesser duke; she bore him three sons and a daughter, and lived to the age of seventy-six as a leading matron of the court. I believe the bards at court made me the villain of the piece, and her the noble faithful wife, trying to save her husband at any cost. Not even false, I suppose.”
That was when I realized that I already knew the story. I had heard it sung. Ludmila and the Enchanter, only in the song, the brave countess disguised herself as an old peasant woman and cooked and cleaned for the wizard who had stolen her husband’s heart, until she found it in his house locked inside a box, and she stole it back and saved him. My eyes prickled with hot tears. No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.
“Are you ready to let her go?” the Dragon said.
I wasn’t, but I was. I was so tired. I couldn’t bear to keep going down those stairs, down to the thing wearing Kasia’s face. I hadn’t saved her at all. She was still in the Wood, still swallowed up. But fulmia still shuddered in my belly deep down, waiting, and if I said yes to him—if I stayed here and buried my head in my arms and let him go away, and come back and tell me it was done—I thought it might come roaring out of me again, and bring the tower down around us.
I looked at the shelves, all around them, desperately: the endless books with their spines and covers like citadel walls. What if one of them still held the secret, the trick that would set her free? I stood and went and put my hands on them, gold-stamped letters meaningless beneath my blind fingers. Luthe’s Summoning caught me again, that beautiful leather tome that I’d borrowed so long ago, and enraged the Dragon by taking, before I’d ever known anything of magic, before I’d known how much and how little I could do. I put my hands on it, and then I said abruptly, “What does it summon? A demon?”
“No, don’t be absurd,” the Dragon said, impatiently. “Calling spirits is nothing but charlatanry. It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal. The Summoning does nothing so trivial. It summons—” He paused, and I was surprised to see him struggling for words. “Truth,” he said finally, with half a shrug, as though that was inadequate and wrong, but as close as he could come. I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie.
“But why were you so angry that I had started reading it, then?” I demanded.
He glared at me. “Does that seem to you a trivial working? I thought you’d been set on to an impossible task by some other enchanter at court—with the intention, on their part, of blasting the roof off the tower when you’d spent all your strength and your working fell in on itself, and thereby making me look an incompetent fool not to be trusted with an apprentice.”
“But that would have killed me,” I said. “You thought someone from court would—?”
“Spend the life of a peasant with half an ounce of magic to score a victory over me—perhaps to see me ordered back to court, humiliated?” the Dragon said. “Of course. Most courtiers set peasants one degree above cows, and somewhat below their favorite horses. They’re perfectly delighted to spend a thousand of you in a skirmish with Rosya for some minor advantage on the border; they’d hardly blink at this.” He waved the viciousness of it aside. “In any case, I certainly didn’t expect you to succeed.”
I stared at the book on the shelf under my hands. I remembered reading it, that sense of sure satisfaction, and abruptly I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to him, clutching it to my body. He eyed me warily. “Could it help Kasia?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth to deny it, I could tell; but then he hesitated. He looked at the book, frowning and silent. Finally he said, “I doubt it. But the Summoning is—a strange work.”
“It can’t hurt anything,” I said, but that won me an irritated look.
“Certainly it can hurt,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to what I just said? The entire book must be invoked in a single sitting to make the spell, and if you haven’t the strength to do it, the whole edifice of the spell will collapse, disastrously, when you exhaust yourself. I’ve seen it cast only once, by three witches together, each having taught the next younger, passing the book from one to another to read. It almost killed them, and they were by no means weak.”
I looked down at the book, heavy and golden in my hands. I didn’t doubt him. I remembered how I’d liked the taste of it on my tongue, the way it had pulled at me. I drew a deep breath and said, “Will you cast it with me?”
Chapter 10
We chained her first. The Dragon carried down heavy iron manacles and with an incantation thrust one end of them deep into the stone walls of the chamber while Kasia—the thing inside Kasia—stood back and watched us, unblinking. I held a ring of fire around her, and when he was done, I herded her over, and with another spell he forced her arms into the manacles. She resisted, more to have the pleasure of putting us to the trouble than out of any worry, I thought—her expression remained that same inhuman blankness all along, and her eyes never left my face. She was thinner than she had been. The thing ate only sparingly. Enough to keep Kasia alive, not enough to keep me from watching her wear away, her body growing gaunt and her face hollow-cheeked.
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.