“Hired servants were inadequate,” he said, irritable and evasive; he didn’t say why. He made an impatient gesture, not looking at me; if he had seen my face, perhaps he would have stopped. “I don’t take puling girls who want only to marry a village lover, or ones who cringe from me—”
I stood straight up, the chair clattering back over the floor away from me. Slow and late and bubbling, a ferocious anger had risen in me, like a flood. “So you take the ones like Kasia,” I burst out, “the ones brave enough to bear it, who won’t hurt their families worse by weeping, and you suppose that makes it right? You don’t rape them, you only close them up for ten years, and complain that we think you worse than you are?”
He stared up at me, and I stared back, panting. I hadn’t even known those words were in me to be spoken; I hadn’t known they were in me to be felt. I would never have thought of speaking so to my lord, the Dragon: I had hated him, but I wouldn’t have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn’t a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.
But he had stepped down from that plane; he had given me real kindness. He’d let his magic mingle with my own again, that strange breathtaking intimacy, all to save Kasia with me. I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human.
“It’s not right,” I said loudly. “It’s not right!”
He stood up and for a moment we faced each other across the table, both of us furious, both of us, I think, equally shocked; then he turned and walked away from me, bright angry streaks of red color in his cheeks, his hand gripping hard on the window-sill as he stared out of the tower. I flung myself out of the room and ran upstairs.
For the rest of the day, I stayed by Kasia’s bedside while she slept, perched on the bed with her thin hand in mine. She was still warm and alive, but he hadn’t misspoken. Her skin was soft, but beneath it her flesh was unyielding: not like stone but like a smooth-polished piece of amber, hard but flowing, with the edges rounded away. Her hair shone in the deep golden cast of the candle-glow, curling into whorls like the knots of a tree. She might have been a carved statue. I had told myself she wasn’t so altered, but I knew I was wrong. My eyes were too loving: I looked and only saw Kasia. Someone who didn’t know her would see a strangeness in her at once. She had always been beautiful; now she was unearthly so, preserved and shining.
She woke and looked at me. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Are you hungry?”
I didn’t know what to do for her. I wondered if the Dragon would let her stay here: we could share my room, upstairs. Perhaps he would be glad of a servant who could never leave, since he disliked training a new one. It was a bitter thought, but I couldn’t think of anything else. If a stranger had come into our village looking like her, we’d have thought them corrupted for sure, some new kind of monstrosity put forth by the Wood.
The next morning, I made up my mind to ask him to let her stay, despite everything. I went back to the library. He was at the window with one of his wisp-creatures floating in his hands. I stopped. Its gently undulating surface held a reflection, like a still pool of water, and when I edged around beside him I could see that it reflected not the room but trees, endless deep and dark, moving. The reflection changed gradually as we watched: showing where the wisp had been, I guessed. I held my breath as a shadow moved over the surface: a thing like a walker moving by, but smaller, and instead of the stick-like legs, it had broad silvery grey limbs, veined like leaves. It stopped and turned a strange faceless head towards the wisp. In its forelegs it held a ragged bundle of green torn-up seedlings and plants, roots trailing: for all the world like a gardener who had been weeding. It turned its head from side to side, and then continued onward into the trees, vanishing.
“Nothing,” the Dragon said. “No gathering of strength, no preparations—” He shook his head. “Move back,” he said over his shoulder to me. He prodded the floating wisp back outside the window, then picked up what I had imagined to be a wizard’s staff from the wall, lit the end in the fireplace, and thrust it out directly into the middle of the wisp. The whole floating shimmer of it caught fire in one startling blue burst, burned up, and was gone; a faint sweet smell came through the window: like corruption.
“They can’t see them?” I asked, fascinated.
“Very occasionally one doesn’t come back: I imagine they catch them sometimes,” the Dragon said. “But if they touch it, the sentinel only bursts.” He spoke abstractly; frowning.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What were you expecting? Isn’t it good that the Wood isn’t preparing an attack?”
“Tell me,” he said, “did you think she would live?”
I hadn’t, of course. It had seemed like a miracle, and one I’d longed for too badly to examine. I hadn’t let myself think about it. “It let her go?” I whispered.
“Not precisely,” he said. “It couldn’t keep her: the Summoning and the purge were driving it out. But I’m certain it could have held on long enough for her to die. And the Wood is hardly inclined to be generous in such cases.” He was tapping his fingers against the window-sill in a pattern that felt oddly familiar; I recognized it as the rhythm of our Summoning chant at the same time he did. He stilled his hand at once. He demanded stiffly, “Is she recovered?”
“She’s better,” I said. “She climbed all the stairs this morning. I’ve put her in my room—”
He made a dismissive flick of his hand. “I thought her recovery might have been meant as a distraction,” he said. “If she’s already well—” He shook his head.
After a moment, his shoulders went back and squared. He dropped his hand from the sill and turned to face me. “Whatever the Wood intends, we’ve lost enough time,” he said, grimly. “Get your books. We need to begin your lessons again.”
I stared at him. “Stop gaping at me,” he said. “Do you even understand what we’ve done?” He gestured to the window. “That wasn’t by any means the only sentinel I sent out. Another of them found the heart-tree that had held the girl. It was highly notable,” he added dryly, “because it was dead. When you burned the corruption out of the girl’s body, you burned the tree itself, too.”
Even then, I still didn’t understand his grimness, and still less when he went on. “The walkers have already torn it down and replanted a seedling, but if it were winter instead of spring, if the clearing had been closer to the edges of the Wood—if we’d only been prepared, we might have gone in with a party of axemen, to clear and burn back the Wood all the way to that clearing.”
“Can we—” I blurted out, shocked, and couldn’t quite make myself even put the idea into words.
“Do it again?” he said. “Yes. Which means that the Wood must make an answer, and soon.”
I began finally to catch his urgency. It was like his worry about Rosya, I suddenly understood: we were in a war against the Wood as well, and our enemy knew that we now had a new weapon we might turn against them. He’d been expecting the Wood to attack not simply for revenge, but to defend itself.
“There’s a great deal of work to do before we can hope to repeat the effects,” he added, and gestured to the table, littered with still more pages. I looked at them properly and realized for the first time that they were notes about the working—our working. There was a sketched diagram: the two of us reduced to blank figures at the farthest possible corners of the Summoning tome, Kasia opposite us reduced to a circle and labeled CHANNEL, and a line drawn back to a neatly rendered picture of a heart-tree. He tapped the line.
“The channel will offer the greatest difficulty. We can’t expect to conveniently obtain a victim ripped straight out of a heart-tree on every occasion. However, a captured walker might serve instead, or even a victim of lesser corruption—”
“Jerzy,” I said suddenly. “Could we try it with Jerzy?”
The Dragon paused and pressed his lips together, annoyed. “Possibly,” he said.
“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.