Uprooted. Part 5

I fell through them onto suddenly weak knees-as the Dragon delighted in telling me, caustically, there was good reason that the more powerful spells were also the more complicated-but I staggered up and caught Wensa's hands as she raised them to knock. Her face, seen close, was wrung with weeping; her hair was hanging down her back, clouds of it pulling out of the long thick plait, and her clothing was torn and stained with dirt: she was wearing her nightshift and a smock flung over it. "Nieshka," she said, gripping my hands too hard, strangling the feeling out of them and her nails digging into my skin. "Nieshka, I had to come."

"Tell me," I said.

"They took her this morning, when she went for water," Wensa said. "Three of them. Three walkers," her voice breaking.

It was a bad spring when even one of the walkers came out of the Wood, and went plucking people out of the forests like fruit. I'd seen one once, a long way off through the trees: like an enormous twig-insect, at once almost impossible to see among the underbrush and jointed wrong and dreadful, so when it moved I had shuddered back from it, queasy. They had arms and legs like branches, with long twiggy stalk-fingers, and they would pick their way through the woods and find places near foot-paths and near water, near clearings, and wait in silence. If someone came in arm's reach, there was no saving them, unless you had a great many men with axes and fire nearby. When I was twelve, they caught one half a mile past Zatochek, the tiny village that was the last in the valley, the last before the Wood. The walker had taken a child, a little boy, bringing a pail of water to his mother for the washing; she'd seen him s.n.a.t.c.hed and screamed. There had been enough women nearby to raise the alarm, and slow it down.

They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day's work to hack it to pieces. The walker broke the child's arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs. Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy's body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.

Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn't know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn't know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope. We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren't dead, and then had to be hunted down.

"Not Kasia," I said. "Not Kasia."

Wensa had bent her head. She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron. "Please, Nieshka. Please." She spoke hoa.r.s.ely, without hope. She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better. But she had come to me.

She couldn't stop weeping. I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her. She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.

The Dragon stood in the doorway watching us. I held up the locket from around Wensa's neck. "She has a lock of Kasia's hair." I knew she'd cut it from Kasia's head the night before the choosing, thinking she would have nothing left to remember her daughter by. "If I use loytalal-"

He shook his head. "What do you imagine you're going to find, besides a smiling corpse? The girl is gone." He jerked his chin at Wensa, whose eyes had drifted shut. "She'll be calmer after she sleeps. Tell that driver to come back in the morning to take her home."

He turned and left, and the worst of it was how matter-of-factly he'd spoken. He hadn't snapped at me, or called me a fool; he hadn't said the life of a village girl wasn't worth the chance the Wood might take me to add to its host. He hadn't told me I was an idiot drunk on success in throwing potions, in pulling flowers from the air, to suddenly think I could save someone the Wood had taken.

The girl is gone. He'd even sounded sorry, in his abrupt way.

I sat with Wensa, numb and cold, holding her hard red callused hand in my lap. It was growing dark outside. If Kasia was still alive, she was in the Wood, watching the sun go down, light dying through the leaves. How long did it take, to hollow someone out from the inside? I thought of Kasia in the grip of the walkers, the long fingers curled around her arms and legs, knowing all the while what was happening, what would happen to her.

I left Wensa sleeping and went downstairs to the library. The Dragon was there, looking through one of the vast ledgers he made records in. I stood in the doorway staring at his back. "I know you held her dear," he said over his shoulder. "But there's no kindness in offering false hope."

I didn't say anything. Jaga's book of spells was lying open on the table, small and worn. I'd been studying only spells of earth this week: fulmkea, fulmedesh, fulmishta, solid and fixed, as far from the air and fire of illusion as magic could get. I took the book and slipped it into my pocket behind the Dragon's back, and then I turned around and went silently down the stairs.

Borys was still outside, waiting, his face long and bleak: he looked up from his blanketed horses when I came out of the tower. "Will you drive me to the Wood?" I asked him.

He nodded, and I climbed into his sleigh and drew the blankets around me as he made the horses ready again. He climbed aboard and spoke to them, jingling his reins, and the sleigh leapt out over the snow.

- The moon was high that night, full and beautiful, blue light on the shining snow all around. I opened Jaga's book as we flew, and found a spell for the quickening of feet. I sang it softly to the horses, their ears p.r.i.c.king back to listen to me, and the wind of our pa.s.sage grew m.u.f.fled and thick, pressing hard on my cheeks and blurring my sight. The Spindle, frozen over, was a pale silver road running alongside, and a shadow grew in the east ahead of us, grew and grew until the horses, uneasy, slowed and came to a halt without any word or any movement of reins. The world stopped moving. We were stopped under a small ragged cl.u.s.ter of pine-trees. The Wood stood ahead of us across an open stretch of unbroken snow.

Once a year, when the ground thawed, the Dragon took all the unmarried men older than fifteen out to the borders of the Wood. He burned a swath of ground along its edge bare and black, and the men followed his fire, sprinkling the ground with salt so nothing could grow or take root. In all our villages we saw the plumes of smoke rising. We saw them going up also on the other side of the Wood, far away in Rosya, and knew they were doing the same. But the fires always died when they reached the shadow beneath the dark trees.

I climbed down from the sleigh. Borys looked down at me, his face tense and afraid. But he said, "I'll wait," although I knew he couldn't: Wait how long? For what? Wait here, in the Wood's very shadow?

I thought of my own father, waiting for Marta, if our places had been changed. I shook my head. If I could bring Kasia out, I thought I could get her to the tower. I hoped the Dragon's spell would let us in. "Go home," I said, and then I asked him, wanting suddenly to know, "Is Marta well?"

He nodded slightly. "She's married," he said, and then he hesitated and said, "There's a child coming."

I remembered her at the choosing, five months ago: her red dress, her beautiful black braids, her narrow pale frightened face. It didn't seem possible we'd ever stood next to each other, just the same: her and me and Kasia in a row. It took my breath, hard and painful, to imagine her sitting at her own hearth, already a young matron, getting ready for childbed.

"I'm glad," I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred: someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't. Even if I came some-how out of the Wood alive again, I'd never have what she had. And Kasia-Kasia might already be dead.

But I wouldn't go into the Wood with ill-wishing. I took a deep hard breath and made myself say, "I wish her an easy birth and a healthy child." I even managed to mean it: childbirth was frightening enough, even if it was a more familiar terror. "Thank you," I added, and turned away to cross over the barren ground, to the wall of great dark trunks. I heard the jingle of the harness behind me as Borys turned the horses and trotted away, but the sound was m.u.f.fled, and soon faded. I didn't look around, taking step after step until I stopped just beneath the first boughs.

A little snow was falling, soft and quiet. Wensa's locket was cold in my hand as I opened it. Jaga had half a dozen different finding spells, small and easy-it seemed she'd had a habit of misplacing things. "Loytalal," I said softly, to the small coiled braid of Kasia's hair: good for finding the whole, from a part, the scribbled note on the spell had said. My breath fogged into a small pale cloud and drifted away from me, leading the way into the trees. I stepped between two trunks, and followed it inside the Wood.

- I expected it to be more dreadful than it was. But at first it seemed only an old, old forest. The trees were great pillars in a dark endless hall, well apart from one another, their twisting gnarled roots blanketed in dark green moss, small feathery ferns curled up close for the night. Tall pale mushrooms grew in hosts like toy soldiers marching. The snow hadn't reached the ground beneath the trees, not even now in the deep of winter. A thin layer of frost clung to the leaves and fine branches. I heard an owl calling somewhere distantly as I picked my way carefully through the trees.

The moon was still above, clear white light coming through the bare branches. I followed my own faint breath and imagined myself a small mouse hiding from owls: a small mouse hunting for a piece of corn, a hidden nut. When I went gleaning in the forest, I often daydreamed as I walked: I lost myself in the cool shady green, in the songs of birds and frogs, in the running gurgle of a stream over rocks. I tried to lose myself the same way now, tried to be only another part of the forest, nothing worthy of attention.

But there was something watching. I felt it more and more with every step the deeper I went into the Wood, a weight laid heavily across my shoulders like an iron yoke. I had come inside half-expecting corpses hanging from every bough, wolves leaping at me from the shadows. Soon I was wishing for wolves. There was something worse here. The thing I had glimpsed looking out of Jerzy's eyes was here, something alive, and I was trapped inside an airless room with it, pressed into a small corner. There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage. I crept on, my shoulders hunched, trying to be small.

Then I came stumbling to a small stream-barely a rivulet, frost thick on both banks and black water running between them, the moonlight coming through the break in the trees. And there was a walker on the other side, its strange narrow stick-head bent to the water to drink, its mouth like a crack open in its face. It lifted its head and looked straight at me, dripping. Its eyes were knots in wood, round dark pouched holes that some small animal might have lived in. There was a sc.r.a.p of green woolen cloth dangling from one of its legs, caught on a jutting spar at the joint.

We stared at each other across the narrow running thread of the river. "Fulmedesh," I said, my voice shaking, and a crack in the ground opened beneath the walker and swallowed up its back legs. It scrabbled at the bank with the rest of its long stick-limbs, thrashing silently, throwing up sprays of water, but the earth had closed up around the middle of its body, and it couldn't pull itself out.

But I folded in on myself and swallowed a cry of pain. It felt like someone had hit me with a stick across my shoulders: the Wood had felt my working. I was sure of it. The Wood was looking for me now. It was looking, and soon it would find me. I had to force myself to move. I sprang over the stream and ran after my faint cloudy spell, which still drifted on ahead of me. The walker tried to catch at me with its long cracked-wood fingers as I skirted around it, but I ran past. I came through a ring of larger trunks and found myself in an open s.p.a.ce around a smaller tree, the ground here heavy with snow.

There was a fallen tree stretching across the s.p.a.ce, a giant, its trunk taller across than I was. Its fall had opened up this clearing, and in the middle of it, a new tree had sprung up to take its place. But not the same kind of tree. All the other trees I'd seen in the Wood had been familiar kinds, despite their stained bark and the twisted unnatural angles of their branches: oaks and black birch, and tall pines. But this was no kind of tree I had ever seen.

It was already larger around than the circle my arms could make, even though the giant tree couldn't have fallen very long ago. It had smooth grey bark over a strangely knotted trunk, with long branches in even circles around it, starting high up the trunk like a larch. Its branches weren't bare with winter, but carried a host of dried-up silvery leaves that rustled in the wind, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere else, as though there were people just out of sight speaking softly together.

The trail of my breath had dissolved into the air. Looking down at the deep snow, I could see the marks where the walkers' legs had poked through and the lines their bellies had drawn, all going to the tree. I took a wary step through the snow towards it, and then another, and then I stopped. Kasia was bound to the tree. Her back was against the trunk and her arms drawn backwards around it.

I hadn't seen her at first because the bark had already grown over her.

Her face was turned up a little, and beneath the skim of the covering bark I could see her mouth had been open, screaming while the bark closed over her. I made a choked cry, helplessly, and staggered forward and put out my hands to touch her. The bark was hard beneath my fingers already, the grey skin smooth and hard, as though she had been swallowed into the trunk whole, all of her made a part of the tree, of the Wood.

I couldn't get a hold on the bark, though I tried frantically to claw and peel it away. But I managed at last to sc.r.a.pe off a little thin piece over her cheek, and beneath I found her own soft skin-still warm, still alive. But even as I touched it with my fingertip, the bark crept quickly over it, and I had to draw back my hand, not to be caught myself. I covered my mouth with my hands, even more desperate. I still knew so little: no spell came to my mind, nothing that could get Kasia out, nothing that would even put an axe in my hands, a knife, even if there had been time to carve her free.

The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still. I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.

With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga's book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower. I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn't believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots. But now I fell to the ground and dug away the snow and the fallen leaves and rot and moss until I came to the hard-frozen dirt. I pried up a large stone and began to smash at the earth, again and again, breaking up the dirt and breathing on it to make it softer, pounding in the snow that melted around my hands, pounding in the hot tears that dripped from my eyes as I worked. Kasia was above me with her head flung up, her mouth open in its soundless cry like a statue in a church.

"Fulmia," I said, my fingers deep in the dirt, crushing the solid clods between my fingers. "Fulmia, fulmia," I chanted over and over, bleeding from broken nails, and I felt the earth hear me, uneasily. Even the earth was tainted here, poisoned, but I spat on the dirt and screamed, "Fulmia," and imagined my magic running into the ground like water, finding cracks and weaknesses, spreading out beneath my hands, beneath my cold wet knees: and the earth shud dered and turned over. A low trembling began where my hands drove into the ground, and it followed me as I started prying at the roots of the tree. The frozen dirt began to break up into small chunks all around them, the tremors going on and on like waves.

The branches above me were waving wildly as if in alarm, the whispering of the leaves becoming a muted roaring. I straightened up on my knees. "Let her out!" I screamed at the tree: I beat on its trunk with my muddy fists. "Let her out, or I'll bring you down! Fulmia!" I cried out in rage, and threw myself back down at the ground, and where my fists. .h.i.t, the ground rose and swelled like a river rising with the rain. Magic was pouring out of me, a torrent: every warning the Dragon had ever given me forgotten and ignored. I would have spent every drop of myself and died there, just to bring that horrible tree down: I couldn't imagine a world where I lived, where I left this behind me, Kasia's life and heart feeding this corrupt monstrous thing. I would rather have died, crushed in my own earthquake, and brought it down with me. I tore at the ground ready to break open a pit to swallow us all.

And then with a sound like ice breaking in the spring, the bark cracked open, running up and down the length of Kasia's body. I lunged up from the dirt at once and dug my fingers into the crack, prying the sides wide and reaching in for her. I caught her wrist, her arm limp and heavy, and pulled. She fell out of the horrible dark gap bending at the waist like a rag doll, and I backed away dragging her deadweight free into the snow, both my hands wrapped around her wrist. Her skin was fish-pale, sickly, like all the sun had been drunk out of her. Sap smelling like spring rain ran over her in thin green rivulets, and she didn't move.

I fell to my knees beside her. "Kasia," I said, sobbing. "Kasia." The bark had already closed itself up like a seam around the hole where she had been. I caught Kasia's hands in my wet dirty ones and pressed them to my cheeks, to my lips. They were cold, but not as cold as my own: there was a trace of life in them. I bent down and heaved her onto my shoulders.

Chapter 8.

I came staggering out of the Wood at dawn, with Kasia slung across my shoulders like a bundle of firewood. The Wood had drawn back from me as I went, as if it feared driving me back to the spell. Fulmia rang in my head like a deep bell sounding with every heavy step I took, Kasia's weight on top of mine, dirt still covering my hands on her pale arm and leg. Finally I floundered out of the trees into the deep snow at the border and fell. I crawled out from under Kasia and pushed her over. Her eyes were still closed. Her hair was matted and sticky around her face where sap had soaked it. I heaved her head up against my shoulder and closed my eyes, and spoke the spell.

The Dragon was waiting for us in the high tower room. His face was hard and grim as ever I had seen it, and he gripped me by the chin and jerked my head up. I looked back at him, exhausted and empty, while he studied my face and searched my eyes. He was holding a bottle of some cordial in his hands; after he'd looked at me a long while he jerked out the stopper and thrust it at me. "Drink it," he said. "The whole thing."

He went over to where Kasia sprawled on the floor, still unmoving: he held his hands out over her and glared down at me when I made a note of protest and reached out. "Now," he snapped, "unless you want to force me to incinerate her at once, so I can deal with you." He waited until I began drinking, then murmured a quick spell, sprinkling some crushed dust over her body: a shining amber-golden net sprang out over her, like a birdcage, and he turned to watch me drink.

The first taste was inexpressibly good: like a swallow of warm honey with lemon down a sore throat. But as I kept drinking, my stomach began to turn from too much sweetness. I had to halt halfway through. "I can't," I said, choking.

"All of it," he said. "And then a second one, if I think it necessary. Drink," and I forced down another swallow, and another, and another, until I drained the gla.s.s. Then he seized me by the wrists and said, "Ulozishtus sovjenta, megiot kozhor, ulozishtus megiot," and I screamed: it felt like he'd set fire to me from the inside. I could see light shining through my own skin, making a blazing lantern of my body, and when I held up my hands, I saw to my horror faint shadows moving there beneath the surface. Forgetting the feverish pain, I caught at my dress and dragged it off over my head. He knelt down on the floor with me. I was shining like a sun, the thin shadows moving through me like fish swimming beneath the ice in winter.

"Get them out," I said. Now that I saw them, I suddenly felt them, also, leaving a trail inside me like slime. I'd thought, stupidly, that I was safe because I hadn't been scratched, or cut, or bitten. I'd thought he was only taking precautions. Now I understood: I'd breathed in corruption with the very air, under the boughs of the Wood, and I hadn't noticed the creeping feeling of them because they'd slipped in, small and subtle. "Get them out-"

"Yes, I'm trying," he bit out, gripping me by the wrists. He shut his eyes and began to speak again, a long slow chanting that went on and on, feeding the fire. I fixed my eyes on the window, on the sunlight coming in, and tried to breathe while I burned. Tears ran down my face in rivulets, scorching hot against my cheeks. His grip on my arms felt cool by comparison, for once.

The shadows beneath my skin were growing smaller, their edges burning away in the light, sand wearing away in water. They darted around, trying to find places to hide, but he didn't let the light fade anywhere. I could see my bones and my organs as glowing shapes inside me, one of them my very heart thumping in my breast. It was slowing, each beat heavier. I understood dimly that the question was whether he could burn the corruption out of me quicker than my body could bear. I swayed in his hands. He shook me abruptly and I opened my eyes to find him glaring at me: he didn't break the course of his spell even for a moment, but he didn't need to say a word: Don't you dare waste my time, you outrageous idiot, his furious eyes said, and I set my teeth in my lip and held on a little longer.

The last few shadow-fish were being worn away to wriggling threads, and then they vanished, grown so thin they couldn't be seen. He slowed the chant, and paused it. The fire banked a little, an inexpressible relief. He demanded, grimly, "Enough?"

I opened my mouth to say yes, to say please. "No," I whispered, horribly afraid now. I could feel the faint quicksilver trace of the shadows still inside me. If we stopped now, they would curl up deep, hiding in my veins and my belly. They would take root and grow and grow and grow, until they strangled all the rest of me.

He nodded once. He held out his hand, murmured a word, and another flask appeared. I shuddered; he had to help me tip a swallow into my open mouth. I choked it down, and he took up the chant again. The fire rose in me again, endless, blinding, burning.

After three more swallows, each one stoking the fire back up to full height, I was almost sure. I forced myself to one more after that, to be certain, and then finally, almost sobbing, I said, "Enough. It's enough." But then he took me by surprise and forced another swallow on me. As I spluttered, he put his hand over my mouth and nose, and used a different chant, one that didn't burn but closed my lungs. For five horrible heartbeats I couldn't breathe at all, clawing at him and drowning in the open air: it was worse than everything else had been. I was staring at him, seeing his dark eyes fixed on me, implacable and searching. They began to swallow up all the world; my sight was closing, my hands were going weak; then at last he stopped and my frantic lungs swelled open like a bellows dragging in a rush of air. I yelled with it, a furious wordless shout, and shoved him away from me so he went sprawling back across the floor.

He twisted up, managing to keep the flask from spilling, and we glared at each other, equally angry. "Of all the extraordinary stupidities I have ever seen you perform," he snarled at me.

"You could have told me!" I shouted, arms wrapped around my body, still shaking with the horror of it. "I stood all the rest, I could have stood that, too-"

"Not if you were corrupted," he said flatly, breaking in. "If you were taken deep, you would have tried to evade it, if I'd told you."

"Then you would have known, anyway!" I said, and he pressed his mouth hard, into a thin line, and looked away from me with an odd stiffness.

"Yes," he said shortly. "I would have known."

And then-would have had to kill me. He would have had to slay me while I pleaded, maybe; while I begged him and pretended to be-perhaps even thought myself, as I had-untainted. I fell silent, catching my breath in slow, measured, deep drafts. "And am I-am I clean?" I asked finally, dreading the answer.

"Yes," he said. "No corruption could have hidden from that last spell. If we'd done it sooner, it would have killed you. The shadows would have had to steal the breath from your blood to live."

I sagged limply in on myself and covered my face. He pulled himself to his feet and stoppered the flask. He murmured, "Vanastalem," moving his hands, and stepped over to me: he thrust out a neatly folded cloak, heavy silk-lined velvet, deep green, embroidered in gold. I looked at it blankly, and stared up at him, and only when he looked away from me with an annoyed, stiff expression did I realize that the last glowing embers were dying beneath my skin, and I was still naked.

Then I staggered up to my feet abruptly, holding the cloak clutched against me, forgotten. "Kasia," I said urgently, and turned towards her where she lay beneath the cage.

He didn't say anything. I looked back at him desperately. "Go and dress," he said finally. "There's no urgency."

He'd seized me the instant I came into the tower: he hadn't let a moment pa.s.s. "There must be a way," I said. "There has to be a way. They'd only just taken her-she couldn't have been in the tree for long."

"What?" he said sharply, and listened with his brows drawing as I spilled out the horror of the clearing, of the tree. I tried to tell him about the dreadful weight of the Wood, watching me; the feeling of being hunted. I stumbled over it all: words didn't seem enough. But his face grew more dark, until at last I finished with that last staggering rush out into the clean snow.

"You've been inexpressibly lucky," he said finally. "And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing. No one has gone into the Wood as deep as you and come out whole: not since-" He halted, and I somehow knew without his saying her name that it was Jaga: that Jaga had walked in the Wood, and come out again. He saw my realization, and glared at me. "And at the time," he said, icily, "she was a hundred years old, and so steeped in magic that black toadstools would spring up where she walked. And even she wasn't stupid enough to start a great working in the middle of the place, although I will grant that in this case, it's the only thing that saved you." He shook his head. "I should have chained you to the wall as soon as that peasant woman came here to weep on your shoulder, I suppose."

"Wensa," I said, my dull, exhausted mind latching on to one thing. "I have to go tell Wensa." I looked towards the hallway, but he cut in.

"Tell her what?" he said.

"That Kasia's alive," I said. "That she's out of the Wood-"

"And that she will surely have to die?" he said, brutally.

Instinctively I backed towards Kasia, putting myself between them, holding my hands up-futile, if he had meant to overcome me, but he shook his head. "Stop mantling at me like a rooster," he said, more weary than irritated: the tone made my chest clench in dismay. "The last thing we need is any further demonstrations that you'll go to fool's lengths for her sake. You can keep her alive as long as we can keep her restrained. But you'll find it a mercy by the end."

- I did tell Wensa, when she woke a little later that morning. She clutched my hands, wild-eyed. "Let me see her," she demanded, but that much, the Dragon had flatly forbidden.

"No," he said. "You can torment yourself if you want to; that's as far as I'll go. Make that woman no false promises, and don't let her come anywhere near. If you'll take my advice, you'll tell her the girl is dead, and let her get on with her life."

But I steeled myself and told her the truth. Better, I thought, to know that Kasia was out of the Wood, that there was an end to her torment, even if there wasn't a cure. I wasn't sure if I was right. Wensa wailed and wept and begged me; if I could have, I would have disobeyed and taken her. But the Dragon didn't trust me with Kasia: he had already taken her away and put her in a cell somewhere, deep beneath the tower. He'd told me he wouldn't show me the way down until I'd learned a spell of protection, something to guard myself from the Wood's corruption.

I had to tell Wensa that I couldn't; I had to swear it to her on my heart, over and over, before she would believe me. "I don't know where he's put her," I cried out finally. "I don't!"

She stopped begging and stared at me, panting, her hands gripping my arms. Then she said, "Wicked, jealous-you always hated her, always. You wanted her to be taken! You and Galinda, you knew he'd take her, you knew and you were glad, and now you hate her because he took you instead-"

She was shaking me, in jerks, and for a moment I couldn't stop her. It was too horrible, hearing her say these things to me, like poison spilling out where I'd looked for clean water. I was so desperately tired, ill from the purging and all my strength spent in bringing Kasia out. I wrenched myself loose at last and ran from the room, unable to bear it, and stood in the hallway leaning against the wall crying messily, too spent even to wipe my face. Wensa crept out after me in a moment, weeping herself. "Forgive me," she said. "Nieshka, forgive me. I didn't mean it. I didn't."

I knew she hadn't meant it, but it was also true, a little, in twisted ways. It dredged up my own secret guilt, my cry: Why didn't you take Kasia instead? We had been glad all those years, my mother and I, to think I wouldn't be taken, and I had been miserable afterwards, even if I'd never hated Kasia for it.

I wasn't sorry when the Dragon sent Wensa home. I didn't even argue very much when he refused to try and teach me the spell of protection that very day. "Try not to be more of a fool than you can help," he snapped. "You need rest, and if you don't, I certainly do before facing the undoubtedly torturous process of drumming the necessary protections into your head. There's no need for haste. Nothing is going to change."

"But if Kasia's infested, as I was," I started, and stopped: he was shaking his head.

"A few shadows slipped between your teeth; purging you at once kept them from getting a hold on you," he said. "This isn't anything like that, nor even some thirdhand infestation, like that luckless cow-herder you turned to stone for no good reason. Do you understand that the tree you saw is one of the heart-trees of the Wood? Where they take root, its borders spread, the walkers are fed on their fruit. She was as deep in the Wood's power as any person can be. Go to sleep. A few hours won't make a difference to her, and it may keep you from committing some new folly."

I was too tired, and I knew it, reluctantly, though I felt argument coiling in my belly. I put it away for later. But if I'd listened to him and his caution in the first place, Kasia would still be there inside the heart-tree, being devoured and rotted away; if I'd swallowed everything he told me of magic, I'd still have been chanting cantrips to my exhaustion. He had told me himself no one had ever been brought out of a heart-tree, no one had ever come out of the Wood-but Jaga had done it, and now I had, too. He could be mistaken; he was mistaken about Kasia. He was.

I was up before first light. In Jaga's book I found a spell for smelling out rot; a simple chant, Aish aish aishimad, and I worked it down in the kitchens, picking out a place where mold grew on the back of a barrel, a spot of rotting mortar in the walls, bruised apples and one spoiled cabbage that had rolled away under a shelf of wine-bottles. When sunlight finally brightened the stairway, I went up to the library and started banging books off the shelves loudly until he appeared, tired-eyed and irritable. He didn't chide me; he only looked a brief frown, and then turned away without saying a word. I would have preferred it if he'd shouted.

But he took a small gold key and unlocked a closed cabinet of black wood on the far side of the room. I peered into it: it was full of thin flat sheets of gla.s.s in a rack, pieces of parchment pressed between them. He took one and brought it out. "I've preserved it mostly as a curiosity," he said, "but that seems to suit you best."

He laid it on the table still in its gla.s.s: a single page in sprawling messy script, many of the letters oddly shaped, with rough ill.u.s.trations of a branch of pine needles, the smoke going into the nostrils of a face. There were a dozen different variations listed: suoltal videl, suoljata akorata, videlaren, akordel, estepum, more besides. "Which one do I use?" I asked him.

"What?" he said, and p.r.i.c.kled up indignantly when I told him they were separate incantations, not all one long chant, in the way that meant he hadn't realized it before. "I haven't the least idea," he said shortly. "Choose one and try."

I couldn't help but be secretly, pa.s.sionately glad: another proof that his knowledge had limits. I went to the laboratory for pine needles and made a small smudgy bonfire of them in a gla.s.s bowl on the library table, then bent my head eagerly over the parchment and tried. "Suoltal," I said, feeling the shape of it in my mouth-but there was something wrong, a kind of sideways sliding to it.

"Valloditazh aloito, kes vallofozh," he said, a hard bitter sound that curled into me like fishhooks, and then he made a quick jerk of one finger, and my hands rose up from the table and clapped themselves together three times. It wasn't like having no control, the involuntary lurch of coming out of a dream of falling. I could feel the deliberation behind the movement, the puppet-strings digging into my skin. Someone had moved my arms, and it hadn't been me. I nearly reached for some spell to strike at him, and then he crooked his finger again and the fishhook came loose and the line slithered back out of me.

I was up on my feet, halfway across the room from him, panting, before I could stop myself. I glared, but he didn't offer me an apology. "When the Wood does it," he said, "you won't feel the hook. Try again."

It took me an hour to work out an incantation. None of the ones came out right, not the way they were on paper. I had to try them all on my tongue, rolling them this way and that, before I finally realized that some of the letters weren't meant to sound the same way I thought they did. I tried changing them until I stumbled over a syllable that felt right in my mouth; then another, and another, until I had put it together. He made me practice it over and over for hours more. I breathed in pine smoke and breathed out the words, and then he prodded at my mind with one unpleasant twisting of a spell and another.

He finally let me stop for a rest at noon. I crumpled into a chair, hedgehog-p.r.i.c.kled and exhausted; the barriers had held, but I felt very much as though I'd been jabbed repeatedly with sharp sticks. I looked down at the old vellum, so carefully sealed away, with the strange-shaped letters; I wondered how old it was.