Uprooted. Part 7

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, pa.s.sing 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.

I groped for something to do, anything, and then I swallowed my own hesitation and reached out with a shaking hand to cover his where he held the page down. His eyes darted towards me, and I took a breath and began to read along.

He didn't stop, although he glared at me ferociously-What do you think you're doing?-but after a moment he understood and caught the idea of what I was trying to do. Our voices sounded terrible at first when we tried to bring them together, off-key and grating against each other: the working wobbled like a child's tower made of pebbles. But then I stopped trying to read like him and simply read with him instead, letting instinct guide me: I found myself letting him read the words off the page, and with my own voice almost making a song of them, choosing a single word or line to chant over again twice or three times, sometimes humming instead of words, my foot tapping to give a beat.

He resisted at first, holding for a moment to the clean precision of his own working, but my own magic was offering his an invitation, and little by little he began to read-not any less sharply, but to the beat I gave. He was leaving room for my improvisations, giving them air. We turned the page together and kept on without a pause, and halfway down the page a line flowed out of us that was music, his voice crisply carrying the words while I sang them along, high and low, and abruptly, shockingly, it was easy.

No-not easy; that wasn't even an adequate word. His hand had closed on mine, tightly; our fingers were interlaced, and our magic also. The spell came singing out of us, effortless as water running downhill. It would have been harder to stop than to keep going.

And I understood now why he hadn't been able to find the right words, why he hadn't been able to tell me whether the spell would help Kasia or not. The Summoning didn't bring forth any beast or object, or conjure up some surge of power; there was no fire or lightning. The only thing it did at all was fill the room with a clear cool light, not even bright enough to be blinding. But in that light everything began to look, to be different. The stone of the walls grew translucent, white veins moving like rivers, and when I gazed at them, they told me a story: a strange deep endless story unlike anything human, so much slower and farther away that it felt almost like being stone again myself. The blue fire that danced in its stone cup was in an endless dream, a song circling on itself; I looked into its flickering and saw the temple where that fire had come from, a long way from here and long since fallen into ruin. But nevertheless I knew suddenly where that temple stood, and how I could cast that very spell and make a flame that would live on after me. The carved walls of the tomb were coming alive, the inscriptions shining. If I looked at them long enough, I would be able to read them, I was sure.

The chains were rattling. Kasia was struggling against them now, furiously, and the noise of the iron links against the wall would have been a horrible noise, if the spell had left room for it. But the sc.r.a.ping was m.u.f.fled into a mild rattling, somewhere far away, and it didn't distract me from the spell. I didn't dare look at her, not yet. When I did-I would know. If Kasia was gone, if there was nothing left of her, I would know. I stared at the pages, too afraid to look, while we kept on chanting. He lifted each one halfway; I took it and carefully finished turning it. The sheaf of pages under my hand grew and grew, and still the spell poured out of us, and finally I lifted my head, my belly tight, to look at her.

The Wood stared back at me out of Kasia's face: an endless depth of rustling leaves, whispering hatred and longing and rage. But the Dragon paused; my hand had clenched on his. Kasia was there, too. Kasia was there. I could see her, lost and wandering in that dark forest, her hands groping ahead of her, her eyes staring without seeing as she flinched away from branches that slapped in her face, thorns that drank blood from deep scratches on her arms. She didn't even know she wasn't in the Wood anymore. She was still trapped, while the Wood tore at her little by little, drinking up her misery.

I let go of him and stepped towards her. The working didn't fail: the Dragon kept on reading, and I kept feeding my magic to the spell. "Kasia," I called, and cupped my hands before her face. The light of the spell pooled in them: a brilliant sharp terrible white light, hard to bear. I saw my own face reflected in her wide gla.s.sy eyes, and my own secret jealousies, how I had wanted all her gifts, if not the price she would have to pay for them. Tears crept into my eyes; it felt like Wensa haranguing me all over again, and this time there was no escape. All the times I'd felt like nothing, the girl who didn't matter, that no lord would ever want; all the times I'd felt myself a gangly tangled mess beside her. All the ways she'd been treated specially: a place set aside for her, gifts and attention lavished, everyone taking the chance to love her while they could. There had been times I had wanted to be the special one, the one everyone knew would be chosen. Not for long, never for long, but now that seemed like cowardice: I'd enjoyed a dream of being special and nursed a secret seed of envy against her, though I'd had the luxury of putting it aside whenever I chose.

But I couldn't stop: the light was reaching her. She turned towards me. Lost in the Wood, she turned towards me, and in her face I saw her own deep anger, an anger years long. She'd known all her life she was going to be taken, whether she wanted it or not. The terror of a thousand long nights stared back out at me: with her lying in the dark, wondering what would happen to her, imagining a terrible wizard's hands on her and his breath on her cheek, and behind me I heard the Dragon draw in a sharp breath; he stumbled over the words, and halted. The light pooled in my hands flickered.

I threw a desperate look back at him, but even as I did, he took up the spell again, his voice rigidly disciplined, his eyes fixed on the page. The light shone through him entirely: as though he'd somehow made himself clear as gla.s.s, emptied himself of thought and feeling to carry on the spell. Oh, how I wanted to do that; I didn't think I could. I had to turn back to Kasia full of all my messy tangled thoughts and secret wishes, and I had to let her see them, see me, like an exposed pale squirming worm from under an overturned log. I had to see her, bare before me, and that hurt even worse: because she'd hated me, too.

She'd hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn't set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn't forced me to go three hours' walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn't turned her back to me when I'd cried, and told me I had to be brave. My mother hadn't brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love-oh, I hadn't even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.

And then-and then she'd even hated me for being taken. She hadn't been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place, everyone whispering; she had never imagined herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn't meant to welcome her back. She'd made up her mind to pay the price, and be brave; but now there was nothing left to be brave for, no glittering future ahead. The older village boys smiled at her with a kind of strange, satisfied confidence. Half a dozen of them had spoken to her during the feast: boys who'd never said a word to her, or had only looked at her from afar as though they didn't dare to touch, now came and spoke to her familiarly, as if she had nothing to do but sit there and be chosen by someone else instead. And I'd come back in silk and velvet, my hair caught in a net of jewels, my hands full of magic, the power to do as I liked, and she'd thought, That should be me, it should have been me, as though I was a thief who'd taken something that belonged to her.

It was unbearable, and I saw her recoil from it, too; but somehow we had to bear it. "Kasia!" I called to her, choked out, and held the light steady for her to see. I saw her stand there hesitating a moment longer, and then she came stumbling towards me, hands reaching forward. The Wood tore at her as she came, though, branches clawing and vines tangling around her legs, and I could do nothing. I could only stand there and hold the light while she fell and struggled up again, and fell again, terror rising in her face.

"Kasia!" I cried. She was crawling now, still coming, her jaw set with determination, leaving a b.l.o.o.d.y trail on the fallen leaves and dark moss behind her. She grabbed at roots and pulled herself forward, even while the branches lashed her back, but she was still so far away.

And then I looked back up at her body, at the face inhabited by the Wood, and it smiled at me. She couldn't escape. The Wood was deliberately letting her try, feasting on her very courage, on my own hope. It could drag her back at any moment. It would let her come close enough to see me, maybe even to feel her own body, the air on her face, and then vines would spring up and lash around her, a storm of falling leaves would shroud her, and the Wood would close up around her again. I moaned a protest, and I almost lost the thread of the spell, and then the Dragon said behind me, his voice strange and remote, as though he spoke from far away, "Agnieszka, the purging. Ulozishtus. Try it. I can finish alone."

I carefully drew my magic back from the Summoning, carefully, carefully, like tipping up a bottle without letting it drip down the neck. The light held, and I whispered, "Ulozishtus." It was one of the Dragon's spells, not the kind that came to me easily; I didn't remember the rest of the words he'd said over me. But I let the word roll over my tongue, shaping it carefully, and remembered the feeling of it-the fire that had burned in my veins, the terrible sweetness of the potion on my tongue. "Ulozishtus," I said again, drawing it out slowly, "Ulozishtus," and made each syllable a small spark struck on tinder, a sc.r.a.p of magic flying out. And inside the Wood, I saw a thin trail of smoke going up from one patch of the undergrowth closing around Kasia; I whispered "Ulozishtus," to it, and to another thread of smoke that rose ahead of her, and when I did it to a third, a tiny struggling yellow flame bloomed near her grasping arm.

"Ulozishtus," I said to it again, giving it another bit of magic, like laying sc.r.a.ps of kindling to a new fire in a dead hearth. The flame grew stronger, and where it touched the vines recoiled, pulling back. "Ulozishtus, ulozishtus," I chanted, feeding it, building it higher, and as it climbed I took burning branches from it and set the rest of the Wood alight.

Kasia staggered up, pulling her arms free of smoking vines, her own flesh marked pink with the heat. But she could move quicker again, and she came towards me through the smoke, through the crackling leaves, running as the trees went up, as scorching branches fell around her. Her hair was burning, and her torn clothing, tears running down her face as her skin reddened and blistered. Her body before me was jerking in the manacles, writhing in a scream of rage, and I wept and shouted, "Ulozishtus!" again. The fire was growing, and I knew that just as the Dragon might have killed me, purging me of the shadows, Kasia might die here now, might burn to death at my hands.

I was grateful now for the long terrible months trying to find something, anything; I was grateful for all the failures, for every minute I had spent here in this tomb with the Wood laughing at me. It gave me the strength to keep the spell going. The Dragon's voice was steady behind me, an anchor, chanting to the end of the Summoning. Kasia was coming nearer, and all around her the Wood was burning. I could see very little of the trees now-she was close enough that she was looking out of her own eyes, and there were flames licking at her skin, roaring, crackling. Her body arched against the stone, thrashing. Her fingers stiffened, going wide, and suddenly her veins ran brilliant green in her arms.

Drops of sap burst trickling from her eyes and nose in rivulets down her face like tears, the bright fresh sweet smell horribly wrong. Her mouth hung open in a silent round cry, and then tiny white rootlets crept out from beneath her nails, like an oak-tree growing overnight. They climbed with sudden horrible speed all over the manacles, hardening into grey wood even as they went, and with a noise like ice breaking in midsummer, the chains broke.

I did nothing. There was no time to do anything: it happened quicker than I could even see it. One moment Kasia was chained, the next she was leaping for me. She was impossibly strong, flinging me to the ground. I caught her shoulders and held her off with a scream. Sap was running from her face, staining her dress, and it fell on me with a pattering like rain. It crawled over my skin, beading up against my protection spell. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. Her hands closed around my throat like brands, hot, burning hot, and those strangling rootlets began to crawl over me. The Dragon was chanting faster, running through the final words, racing to the end of the spell.

I strangled out, "Ulozishtus!" again, looking up into the Wood and into Kasia's face, twisting half in rage and half in agony, as her hands tightened. She stared down at me. The light of the Summoning was brightening, filling every corner of the room, impossible to evade, and we looked full into each other, every secret petty hate and jealousy laid open, and tears were mingling with the sap on her face. I was weeping, too, tears sliding from my eyes even as she pressed the air out of me and darkness started to creep in over my sight.

She said, strangled, "Nieshka," in her own voice, shuddering with determination, and one by one she forced her fingers open and away from my throat. My vision cleared, and looking into her face I saw the shame falling away. She looked at me with fierce love, with courage.

I sobbed again, once. The sap was running dry, and the fire was consuming her. The little rootlets had withered and crumbled to ash. Another purging would kill her. I knew it: I could see it. And Kasia smiled at me, because she couldn't speak again, and lowered her head in a single slow nod. I felt my own face crumpling and ugly and wretched, and then I said, "Ulozishtus."

I looked up into Kasia's face, hungry for one last sight of her, but the Wood looked out of her eyes at me: black rage, full of smoke, burning, roots planted too deep to uproot. Kasia still held her own hands away from my throat.

And then-the Wood was gone.

Kasia fell upon me. I screamed with joy and threw my arms around her, and she clutched at me shaking, sobbing. She was still feverish, her whole body trembling, and she vomited onto the floor even as I held her, crying weakly. Her hands hurt me: they were scorching hot and hard, and she clung to me too tight, my ribs creaking painfully under my skin. But it was her. The Dragon closed the book with a final heavy thump. The room was full of blazing light: there was nowhere for the Wood to hide. It was Kasia, and only Kasia. We had won.

Chapter 11.

The Dragon was strange and silent afterwards, as we wrestled Kasia slowly and wearily up the stairs. She was almost insensible, jerking out of a daze only to claw the air before subsiding again. Her limp body was unnaturally heavy: heavy as solid oak, as though the Wood had somehow left her trans.m.u.ted and changed. "Is it gone?" I said to him, desperately. "Is it gone?"

"Yes," he said shortly as we heaved her up the long spiraling stairs: even with his own peculiar strength, every step was a struggle, as though we were trying to carry a fallen log between our hands, and we were both weary. "The Summoning would have shown us otherwise." He said nothing more until we had taken her upstairs to the guest chamber, and then he stood by the side of the bed looking down at her, his brow drawn, and then he turned and left the room.

I had little time to think of him. Kasia lay feverish and sick for a month. She would start up half-awake and lost in nightmares, still in the Wood, and she could throw even the Dragon off her and nearly across the room. We had to tie her down in the heavy postered bed, with ropes and finally with chains. I slept curled up on the rug at the foot, leaping up to give her water whenever she cried out, and to try and press a few morsels of food into her mouth: she couldn't keep down more than a bite or two of plain bread, at first.

My days and nights ran into each other, broken with her wakings-every hour at first, and ten minutes to settle her, so I could never sleep properly, and I staggered dazed through the hours. It was only after the first week that I began to be sure she would live, and I stole a few moments to scribble a note to Wensa to let her know that Kasia was free, that she was getting well. "Will she keep it to herself?" the Dragon demanded, when I asked him to send it; and I was too drained to ask why he cared; I only opened the letter and scribbled on a line, Tell no one yet, and handed it to him.

I should have asked; he should have pressed me harder to be cautious. But we were both frayed like worn cloth. I didn't know what he was working on, but I saw his light burning in the library late at night, as I stumbled down to the kitchens for more broth and back up again, and loose pages covered with diagrams and inscriptions stacked into heaps on his table. One afternoon, following the smell of smoke, I found him asleep in his laboratory, the bottom of an alembic flask blackening over a candle in front of him, already run dry. He jumped when I woke him, and he knocked the whole thing over and started a fire with what for him was wholly uncharacteristic clumsiness. We had to scramble to put it out together, and his shoulders were as stiff as a cat's, disliking the insult to his dignity.

Three weeks later, though, Kasia woke after a full four hours of sleep and turned her head to me and said, "Nieshka," exhausted but herself, her dark brown eyes warm and clear. I cupped her face in my hands, smiling through tears, and she managed to close her claw-like hands around mine and smile back.

From then she began to recover quickly. Her strange new strength made her clumsy at first, even once she could stand up. She blundered into furniture and fell all the way down the stairs the first time she tried to make her own way down to the kitchens, once when I was downstairs cooking more soup. But when I whirled from the fire and flew to her calling in alarm, I found her at the foot of the stairs unhurt, not even bruised, and only struggling to get back onto her feet again.

I took her to the great hall to learn how to walk again, and tried to steady her as we went slowly around the room, although more often than not she knocked me down by accident instead. The Dragon was coming down the stairs to get something from the cellars. He stood and watched our awkward progress for a little while from the archway, his face hard and unreadable. After I got her back upstairs and she crawled carefully into bed and fell asleep again, I went down to the library to speak to him. "What's wrong with her?" I demanded.

"Nothing," the Dragon said flatly. "As far as I can tell, she is uncorrupted." He didn't sound particularly pleased.

I didn't understand. I wondered if it bothered him to have someone else staying in the tower. "She's already better," I said. "It won't be for long."

He looked at me with bright irritation. "Not for long?" he said. "What do you mean to do with her?"

I opened my mouth and shut it again. "She'll-"

"Go home?" the Dragon said. "Marry a farmer, if she can find one who won't mind his wife is made of wood?"

"She's still flesh, she's not made of wood!" I said, protesting, but I was already realizing, quicker than I wanted to, that he was right: there was no more place for Kasia back in our village than there was for me. I sat slowly down, my hands braced on the table. "She'll-take her dowry," I said, fumbling for some answer. "She'll have to go away-to the city, to University, like the other women-"

He had been about to speak; he paused and said, "What?"

"The other chosen ones, the other ones you took," I said, without thinking anything of it: I was too worried for Kasia: what could she do? She wasn't a witch; at least people understood what that was. She was simply changed, dreadfully, and I didn't think she could conceal it.

He broke in on my thoughts. "Tell me," he bit out, caustic, and I startled and looked up at him, "did all of you a.s.sume I forced myself on them?"

I only gaped at him, while he glared at me, his face hard and offended. "Yes?" I said, bewildered at first. "Yes, of course we did. Why wouldn't we? If you didn't, why wouldn't you-why don't you just hire a servant-" Even as I said it, I began to wonder if that other woman, the one who'd left me the letter, had been right. That he just wanted a little human company-but only a little, on his own terms; not someone who could leave him when they liked.

"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.

I pushed away the heap of papers enough to clear some room before us, and set the book down in front of me. After a moment, without a word, he went and took another volume off the shelf: a narrow black book, whose cover glimmered faintly where he touched it. He opened it to a spell covering two pages, written in crisp letters, with a diagram of a single flower and every part of it attached to a syllable of the spell somehow. "Very well," he said. "Let's begin." And he held his hand out to me across the table.