Uprooted. Part 6

"Very old," he said. "Older than Polnya: it might even be older than the Wood."

I stared at him; it hadn't occurred to me even to think, before then, that the Wood hadn't always been here, always been what it was.

He shrugged. "For all we know, it has. It's certainly older than Polnya and Rosya: it was here before this valley was ever settled by either of us." He tapped the parchment in the gla.s.s. "These were the first people who lived in this part of the world, so far as we know, some thousand years ago. Their sorcerer-kings brought the tongue of magic west with them, from the barren lands on the far side of Rosya, when they first settled this valley. And then the Wood rolled over them, brought their fortresses low and laid their fields waste. There's little left of their work now."

"But," I said, "if the Wood wasn't here when they first settled the valley, where did it come from?"

The Dragon shrugged. "If you go to the capital, you'll find any number of troubadours who will be happy to sing you the rising of the Wood. It's a popular subject among them, at least when they have an audience that knows less about it than they do: it offers them enormous scope for creativity. I suppose there's a chance one of them has. .h.i.t on the true story. Light the fire and let's begin again."

It wasn't until late that evening, as the light was failing, that he was satisfied with my work. He tried to send me to bed, but I wouldn't have it. Wensa's words still grated and sc.r.a.ped in the back of my head, and it occurred to me that perhaps he'd wanted me exhausted so he could put me off for another day. I wanted to see Kasia with my own eyes; I wanted to know what I was facing, this corruption I had to find a way to fight. "No," I said. "No. You said I could see her when I could protect myself."

He threw up his hands. "All right," he said. "Follow me."

He led me to the bottom of the stairs, and into the cellars past the kitchen. I remembered searching all those walls in desperation, when I'd thought he was draining my life; I had run my hands over every wall, poked my fingers into every crack, and tugged on every worn brick, trying to find a way out. But he led me to a smooth-polished part of the wall, a single entire slab of pale white stone unbroken by any mortar. He touched it lightly with the fingers of one hand and crooked them up like a spider; I felt the faint thrill of his magic working. The whole slab swung back into the wall, revealing a stairwell of the same pale stone, shining dimly, that bent steeply downwards.

I followed him down the pa.s.sage. It was different from the rest of the tower: older and more strange. The steps were hard-edged on either side but worn in the middle to softness, and letters had been carved in a line running along the base of both walls, a script neither ours nor Rosyan: very much like the shape of the letters on the parchment with the protection spell. We seemed to go down for a long time, and I was increasingly aware of the weight of stone around us, of silence. It felt like a tomb.

"It is a tomb," he said. We had reached the bottom of the stairs, coming into a small round room. The very air seemed thicker. The writing came off one wall of the stairwell, continued all around it in an unbroken line that circled to the opposite side, went up the wall in a tall curve that drew an arch, and then came back and went up the other side of stairs. There was a small patch of lighter stone inside the arch, towards the bottom-as though the rest of the wall had been built, and then had been closed up afterwards. It looked perhaps the size for a man to crawl through.

"Is-is someone still buried here?" I asked, timidly. My voice came out hushed.

"Yes," the Dragon said. "But even kings don't object to sharing once they're dead. Listen to me now," he said, turning to me. "I'm not going to teach you the spell to walk through the wall. When you want to see her, I'll take you through myself. If you try to touch her, if you let her come in arm's reach of you, I'll take you out again at once. Now lay on your protections, if you insist on doing this."

I lit the small handful of pine needles on the floor and made the chant, putting my face in their smoke, and then I put my hand in his, and let him draw me through the wall.

He'd made me fear the worst: Kasia as tormented as Jerzy, foaming-mouthed and tearing at her own skin; Kasia full of those slithering corrupted shadows, eating away at everything inside her. I was prepared for anything; I braced myself. But when he brought me through the wall, she was only sitting huddled and small in the corner on a thin pallet, her arms around her knees. There was a plate of food and water on the floor next to her, and she'd eaten and drunk; she'd washed her face, her hair was neatly plaited. She looked tired and afraid, but still herself, and she struggled up to her feet and came to me, holding out her hands. "Nieshka," she said. "Nieshka, you found me."

"No closer," the Dragon said flatly, and added, "Valur polzhys," and a sudden line of hot flame leapt up across the floor between us: I'd been reaching towards her without being able to help it.

I dropped my hands to my sides and clenched them into fists-and Kasia stepped back, too, staying behind the fire; she nodded obediently to the Dragon. I stood staring at her, helplessly, full of involuntary hope. "Are you-" I said, and my voice choked in my throat.

"I don't know," Kasia said, her voice trembling. "I don't-remember. Not anything after they took me into the Wood. They took me into the Wood and they-they-" She stopped, her mouth open a little. There was horror in her eyes, the same horror I'd felt when I'd found her in the tree, buried beneath the skin.

I had to stop myself reaching out to her. I was in the Wood again myself, seeing her blind, choked face, her pleading hands. "Don't speak of it," I said, thick and miserable. I felt a surge of anger at the Dragon for holding me back this long. I had already made plans in my head: I would use Jaga's spell to find where that corruption had taken root in her; then I would ask the Dragon to show me the purging spells he'd used on me. I would look through Jaga's book and find others like it, and drive it out of her. "Don't think of it yet, just tell me, how do you feel? Are you-sick, or cold-"

I finally looked around at the room itself. The walls were of that same polished bone-white marble, and in a deep niche at the back a heavy stone box lay, longer than the height of a man, carved along the top in the same letters and other designs on the sides: tall flowering trees and vines curling over each other. A single blue flame burned on top of it, and air flowed in from a thin slit in the wall. It was a beautiful room, but utterly cold; it wasn't a place for any living thing. "We can't keep her here," I said to the Dragon fiercely, even as he shook his head. "She needs sun, and fresh air-we can lock her into my room instead-"

"Better here than the Wood!" Kasia said. "Nieshka, please tell me, is my mother all right? She tried to follow the walkers-I was afraid they'd take her, too."

"Yes," I said, wiping my face, taking a deep breath. "She's all right. She's worried for you-she's so worried. I'll tell her you're all right-"

"Can I write her a letter?" Kasia asked.

"No," the Dragon said, and I wheeled on him.

"We can give her a stub of pencil and some paper!" I said angrily. "It's not too much to ask."

His face was bleak. "You aren't this much a fool," he said to me. "Do you think she was buried in a heart-tree for a night and a day and came out talking to you, ordinarily?"

I stopped, silent, afraid. Jaga's rot-finding spell hovered on my lips. I opened my mouth to cast it-but it was Kasia. It was my own Kasia, who I knew better than anyone in the world. I looked at her and she looked back at me, unhappy and afraid, but refusing to weep or cower. It was her. "They put her in the tree," I said. "They saved her for it, and I brought her out before it got a hold-"

"No," he said flatly, and I glared at him and turned back to her. She smiled at me anyway, a struggling valiant smile.

"It's all right, Nieshka," she said. "As long as Mama's all right. What-" She swallowed. "What's to happen to me?"

I didn't know how to answer her. "I'll find a way to cleanse you," I said, half-desperate, and didn't look at the Dragon. "I'll find a spell to be sure you're all right-" but those were just words. I didn't know how I could ever prove to the Dragon that Kasia was well. He plainly didn't want to be convinced. And if I couldn't persuade him somehow, he would keep Kasia down here the rest of her life if need be, entombed with this ancient king and without a sc.r.a.p of sunlight-never to see anyone she loved, never to live at all. He was as great a danger to Kasia as the Wood-he hadn't wanted me to rescue her at all.

And even before then, it occurred to me in a flash of bitterness, he had meant to steal her for himself-he'd meant to take her as much as the Wood had, to devour her in his own way. He hadn't cared about uprooting her life before, making her a prisoner in a tower, only to serve him-why would he care now, why would he ever risk letting her out?

He stood a few steps behind me, farther from the fire and from Kasia. His face was closed, yielding nothing, his thin mouth pressed hard. I looked away and tried to smooth out my face and hide my thoughts. If I could find a spell to let me pa.s.s through the wall, I would only have to find a way to evade his notice. I could try and put a spell of sleep on him, or I could put something in his cup with his dinner: Wormwood brewed with yew berries, cook the juice down to a paste, put in three drops of blood and speak an incantation, and it will make a quick poison with no taste- The sudden sharp pungent smell of burning pine needles came back into my nose, and the thought took on a strange bitter edge that made the wrongness of it leap out. I flinched away from it, startled, and I took a step back from the line of fire, trembling. On the other side, Kasia was waiting for me to speak: her face resolute, clear-eyed, full of trust and love and grat.i.tude-and a little fear and worry, but nothing but ordinary human feeling. I looked at her, and she looked back at me anxiously, still herself. But I couldn't speak. The smell of pine was still in my mouth, and my eyes stung with smoke.

"Nieshka?" Kasia said, her voice wavering with growing fear. I still said nothing. She was staring at me across the line of fire, and her face through the haze seemed to be first smiling and then unhappy, her mouth trembling through one shape and another, trying-trying different expressions. I took another step back, and it grew worse. Her head tilted, eyes fixed on my face, widening a little. She shifted her weight, a different stance. "Nieshka," she said, not sounding afraid anymore, only confident and warm, "it's all right. I know you'll help me."

The Dragon, beside me, was silent. I dragged in a breath. I still said nothing. My throat was shut. I managed, on a whisper, "Aishimad."

A pungent, bitter smell rose in the air between us. "Please," Kasia said to me. Her voice suddenly broke on a sob, an actor in a play moving from one act to the next. She lifted her hands towards me, came a little closer to the fire, her body leaning in. She came a little too close. The smell grew stronger: like greenwood burning, full of sap. "Nieshka-"

"Stop it!" I cried. "Stop it."

She stopped. For a moment still Kasia stood there, and then it let her arms drop to her sides, and her face emptied out. A wave of rotting-wood smell rolled over the room.

The Dragon raised a hand. "Kulkias vizhkias haishimad," he said, and a light shone out of his hand and onto her skin. Where it played over her I saw thick green shadows, mottled like deep layers of leaves on leaves. Something looked at me out of her eyes, its face still and strange and inhuman. I recognized it: what looked out at me was the same thing I had felt in the Wood, trying to find me. There was no trace of Kasia left at all.

Chapter 9.

He was half-supporting me as he pulled me through the wall and out into the antechamber of the tomb again. When we were through I slid to the floor next to my small heap of pine-needle ashes and stared at them, hollow. I almost hated them for stealing the lie from me. I couldn't even cry; it was worse than if Kasia were dead. He stood over me. "There's a way," I said, looking up at him. "There's a way to get it out of her." It was a child's cry, a plea. He said nothing. "That spell you used on me-"

"No," he said. "Not for this. The purging spell barely worked even on you. I warned you. Did it try to persuade you to harm yourself?"

I shivered all over horribly, remembering the ashen taste of that horrible thought creeping through my head: Wormwood and yew berries, a quick poison. "You," I said.

He nodded. "It would have liked that: persuade you to kill me, then find some way to lure you back to the Wood."

"What is it?" I said. "What is that-thing inside her? We say the Wood, but those trees-" I was abruptly sure of it. "-those trees are corrupted, too, as much as Kasia. That's where it lives, not what it is."

"We don't know," he said. "It was here before we came. Perhaps before they were," he added, gesturing to the walls with their strange foreign inscription. "They woke the Wood, or made it, and they fought it awhile, and then it destroyed them. This tomb is all that's left. There was an older tower here. Little of it remained except bricks scattered on the earth by the time Polnya claimed this valley and roused the Wood again."

He fell silent. I remained sunk in on myself, curled up around my knees on the floor. I couldn't stop shivering. Finally he said, heavily, "Are you ready to let me end this? Most likely there's nothing left of her to rescue."

I wanted to say yes. I wanted that thing gone, destroyed-the thing that wore Kasia's face, that used not only her hands but everything in her heart, in her mind, to destroy those she loved. I almost didn't care if Kasia was in there. If she was, I couldn't imagine anything more horrible than to be trapped in her own body, that thing dangling her like a monstrous puppet. And I couldn't persuade myself to doubt the Dragon anymore when he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.

But I had saved him, when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too. And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another. I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked. "Not yet," I whispered. "Not yet."

- If I had been an indifferent student before, now I was dreadful in a wholly different way. I turned ahead in books and took ones he didn't give me down from the shelves if he didn't catch me. I looked into anything and everything I could find. I would work spells out halfway, discard them, and go onward; I would throw myself into workings without being sure I had the strength. I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out of my way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.

At least every few days I would find something with enough faint promise that I would convince myself it was worth trying. The Dragon took me down to Kasia to try whenever I asked, which was far more often than I managed to find anything really worth trying. He let me tear apart his library, and said nothing when I spilled oils and powders across his table. He didn't press me to let Kasia go. I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.

She-the thing inside her-didn't try to pretend anymore. She watched me with bird-bright eyes, and smiled occasionally when my workings did nothing: a horrible smile. "Nieshka, Agnieszka," she sang softly, over and over, sometimes, if I was trying an incantation, so I had to stumble on through it while listening to her. I would come out feeling bruised and sick to my bones, and climb the stairs again slowly, with tears dripping from my face.

Spring was rolling over the valley by then. If I looked from my window, which I did now only rarely, every day I could watch the Spindle running riotous white with melted ice, and a band of open gra.s.s widening from the lowlands, chasing the snow up into the mountains on either side. Rain swept over the valley in silver curtains. Inside the tower I was parched as barren ground. I had looked at every page of Jaga's book, and the handful of other tomes that suited my wandering magic, and any other books the Dragon could suggest. There were spells of healing, spells of cleansing, spells of renewal and life. I had tried anything with any promise at all.

They held the Spring Festival in the valley before the planting began, the great bonfire in Olshanka a tall heap of seasoned wood so large I could see it plainly from the tower. I was alone in the library when I heard a faint s.n.a.t.c.h of the music drifting on the wind, and looked out to see the celebration. It seemed to me that the entire valley had burst into life, early shoots prodding their way out of all the fields, the forests bursting into pale and misty green around every village. And far down those cold stone stairs, Kasia was in her tomb. I turned away and folded my arms on the table and put my head down on them and sobbed.

When I lifted my head again, blotchy and tearstained, he was there, sitting near me, looking out of the window, his face bleak. His hands were folded in his lap, the fingers laced, as though he had held himself back from reaching out to touch me. He had laid a handkerchief on the table before me. I took it up and wiped my face and blew my nose.

"I tried, once," he said abruptly. "When I was a young man. I lived in the capital, then. There was a woman-" His mouth twisted slightly, self-mocking. "The foremost beauty of the court, naturally. I suppose there's no harm anymore in saying her name now she's forty years in the grave: Countess Ludmila."

I nearly gaped at him, not sure what confused me the most. He was the Dragon: he had always been in the tower and always would be, a permanent fixture, like the mountains in the west. The idea that he had ever lived somewhere else, that he had ever been a young man, seemed perfectly wrong; and yet at the same time, I stumbled just as much over the idea that he'd loved a woman forty years dead. His face was familiar to me now, but I looked at him startled all over again. There were those lines at the corners of his eye and mouth, if I looked for them, but that was all that betrayed his years. In everything else, he was a young man: the still-hard edges of his profile, his dark hair untouched with silver, his pale smooth unweathered cheek, his long and graceful hands. I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind-he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely n.o.blewoman-and there my imagination stumbled. He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.

"She-became corrupted?" I asked, helplessly.

"Oh, no," he said. "Not her. Her husband." He paused, and I wondered if he would say anything more. He had never spoken of himself to me at all, and he'd said nothing of the court but to disparage it. After a moment he went on, however, and I listened, fascinated.

"The count had gone to Rosya to negotiate a treaty, across the mountain pa.s.s. He came back with unacceptable terms and a thread of corruption. Ludmila had a wise-woman at her house, her nursemaid, who knew enough to warn her: they locked him up in the cellar and barred the door with salt, and told everyone he was ill.

"No one in the capital thought anything of a beautiful young wife making a scandal of herself while her older husband ailed out of sight; least of all myself, when she made me the object of her pursuit. I was still young and foolish enough at the time to believe myself and my magic likely to elicit admiration instead of alarm, and she was clever and determined enough to take advantage of my vanity. She had me thoroughly on a string before she asked me to save him.

"She had a particularly deft understanding of human nature," he added, dryly. "She told me that she couldn't leave him in such a state. She professed herself willing to give up her place at court, her t.i.tle, her reputation, but so long as he was corrupted, honor demanded she remain chained to his side; only by saving him could I free her to run away with me. She tempted my selfishness and my pride at once: I a.s.sure you I thought of myself as a n.o.ble hero, promising to save my lover's husband. And then-she let me see him."

He fell silent. I hardly breathed, sitting like a mouse under an owl's tree so he would go on talking. His gaze was turned inward, bleak, and I felt a kind of recognition: I thought of Jerzy laughing dreadfully at me out of his sickbed, of Kasia below with the terrible brightness in her eyes, and knew that same look lived in my own face.

"I spent half a year trying," he said finally. "I was already accounted the most powerful wizard of Polnya by then; I was certain there was nothing I couldn't do. I ransacked the king's library and the University, and brewed a score of remedies." He waved towards the table, where Jaga's book lay shut. "That was when I bought that book, among other less wise attempts. Nothing served."

His mouth twisted again. "Then I came here." He indicated the tower with one finger, circling. "There was another witch here guarding the Wood then, the Raven. I thought she might have an answer. She was growing old at last, and most of the wizards at court avoided her carefully; none of them wanted to be sent to replace her when she finally died. I wasn't afraid of that: I was too strong to be sent away from court."

"But-" I said, startled into speaking, and bit my lip; he looked at me for the first time, one of those sarcastic eyebrows raised. "But you were sent here, in the end?" I said uncertainly.

"No," he said. "I chose to stay. The king at the time wasn't particularly enthusiastic about my decision: he preferred to keep me under his eye, and his successors have often pressed me to return. But she-persuaded me." He looked away from me again, out the window and over the valley towards the Wood. "Have you ever heard of a town called Porosna?"

It sounded only vaguely familiar. "The baker in Dvernik," I said. "Her grandmother was from Porosna. She made a kind of bun-"

"Yes, yes," he said, impatient. "And do you have any idea where it is?"

I groped helplessly: I barely knew the name. "Is it in the Yellow Marshes?" I offered.

"No," he said. "It was five miles down the road from Zatochek."

Zatochek was not two miles from the barren strip that surrounded the Wood. It was the last town in the valley, the last bastion before the Wood; so it had been all my life. "The Wood-took it?" I whispered.

"Yes," the Dragon said. He rose and went for the great ledger I had seen him write in, the day that Wensa had come to tell us about Kasia being taken, and he brought it to the table and opened it. Each of the great pages was divided into neat lines, rows and columns, careful entries like an account-book: but in each row stood the name of a town, names of people, and numbers: this many corrupted, this many taken; this many cured, this many slain. The pages were thick with entries. I reached out and turned the pages back, the parchment unyellowed, the ink still dark: there was a faint clinging magic of preservation on them. The years grew thinner and the numbers smaller as I went back. There had been more incidents lately, and larger ones.

"It swallowed Porosna the night the Raven died," the Dragon said. He reached out and turned a thick sheaf of pages to where someone else, less orderly, had been keeping the records: each incident was merely written out like a story, the writing larger and the lines a little shaky.

Today a rider from Porosna: they have a fever there with seven sick. He did not stop in any towns. He was sickening, too. A woodbane infusion eased his fever, and Agata's Seventh Incantation was effective at purifying the root of the sickness. Sevenweight of silver worth of saffron consumed in the incantation, and fifteen for the woodbane.

It was the last entry in that hand.

"I was on my way back to the court by then," the Dragon said. "The Raven had told me the Wood was growing-she asked me to stay. I refused, indignantly; I thought it beneath me. She told me there was nothing to be done for the count, and I resented it; I told her grandly I would find a way. That whatever the Wood's magic had done, I could undo. I told myself she was an old weak fool; that the Wood was encroaching because of her weakness."

I hugged myself as he spoke, staring down at the implacable ledger, the blank page beneath that entry. I wished now he would stop speaking: I didn't want to hear any more. He was trying to be kind, baring his own failure to me, and all I could think was Kasia, Kasia, a cry inside me.

"So far as I could learn, afterwards-a frantic messenger caught me on the road-she went to Porosna, taking her stores with her, and wore herself out healing the sick. That, of course, was when the Wood struck. She managed to fling a handful of children to the next town-I imagine your baker's grandmother was among them. They told a story of seven walkers coming, carrying a seedling heart-tree.

"I was still able to make it through the trees when I came, half a day later. They had planted the heart-tree in her body. She yet lived, if you can call it that. I managed to give her a clean death, but that was all I could do before I had to flee. The village was gone, and the Wood had pushed its borders out.

"That was the last great incursion," he added. "I halted the advance by taking her place, and I've held it since then-more or less. But it's always trying."

"And if you hadn't come?" I said.

"I'm the only wizard in Polnya strong enough to hold it back," the Dragon said, without any particular arrogance: a statement of fact. "Every few years it tests my strength, and once a decade or so makes a serious attempt-like this last a.s.sault on your own village. Dvernik is only one village out from the edge of the Wood. If it had managed to kill or corrupt me there, and establish a heart-tree-by the time another wizard came, the Wood would have swallowed up both your village and Zatochek, and been on the doorstep of the eastern pa.s.s to the Yellow Marshes. And it would continue on from there, if given the chance. If I'd allowed them to send a weaker wizard when the Raven died, by now the whole valley would have been taken over.

"That's what's happening on the Rosyan side. They've lost four villages in the last decade, and two before that. The Wood will reach the southern pa.s.s to Kyeva Province in the next, and then-" He shrugged. "We'll learn whether it can spread itself over a mountain pa.s.s, I suppose."

We sat in silence. In his words I saw a vision of the Wood marching slow but implacable over my home, over all the valley, over all the world. I imagined looking down from the tower windows at endless dark trees, besieged; a whispering hateful ocean in every direction, moving with the wind, not another living thing in sight. The Wood would strangle all of them, and drag them down under its roots. Like it had with Porosna. Like it had with Kasia.

Tears were sliding down my face, a slow trail, not hard weeping. I was too desolate to cry anymore. The light outside was growing dim; the witch-lanterns hadn't yet lit. His face had settled into abstraction, unseeing, and in the dusk his eyes were impossible to read. "What happened to them?" I asked to fill the silence, feeling hollow. "What happened to her?"

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 n.o.ble 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 p.r.i.c.kled 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 sum moned 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.