Uprooted(18)

I pulled on the gown of russet and green, and went slowly down the stairs to the library. The Dragon was back at his chair, the book open on his lap, and he turned to look at me. “Very well,” he said, sour as always. “Today we’ll try—”

“Wait,” I interrupted him, and he paused. “Can you tell me how to make this something I can wear?”

“If you haven’t grasped vanastalem by now, there is nothing I can possibly do to help you,” he snapped. “In fact, I’m inclined to believe you mentally defective.”

“No! I don’t want—that spell,” I said, hastily avoiding even saying the word. “I can’t even move in one of these dresses, or lace it for myself, or clean anything—”

“Why wouldn’t you just use the cleaning cantrips?” he demanded. “I’ve taught you at least five.”

I’d done my best to forget them all. “It tires me less to scrub!” I said.

“Yes, I can see you’ll be making a mark on the firmament,” he said, irritably; but that hadn’t any power to wound me: any magic was bad enough, I didn’t feel the least desire to be a great and powerful witch. “What a strange creature you are: don’t all peasant girls dream of princes and ballgowns? Try to degrade it, then.”

“What?” I said.

“Drop part of the word,” he said. “Slur it, mumble it, something of the sort—”

“Just—any part?” I said doubtfully, but tried it: “Vanalem?”

The shorter word felt better in my mouth: smaller and more friendly somehow, although perhaps that was just my imagination. The gown shuddered and the skirts deflated all around me into a fine letnik of undyed linen stopping at the shin, and over it a simple brown dress with a green sash to draw it snug. I pulled in a glad deep breath: no dragging weight pulling me down from shoulders to ankles, no strangling corsets, no endless train: plain and comfortable and easy. Even the magic hadn’t dragged out of me so horribly. I didn’t feel tired at all.

“If you’ve arranged yourself to your satisfaction,” the Dragon said, his voice dripping sarcasm. He held out his hand, and summoned a book flying over from the shelf. “We’ll begin with syllabic composition.”





Chapter 4


As little as I liked having magic, I was glad not to be so afraid all the time. But I was no prize pupil: when I didn’t just forget the spell-words he taught me, they went wrong in my mouth. I slurred and mumbled and muddled them together, so a spell that ought to have set a dozen ingredients neatly out for a pie—“I am certainly not trying to train you on potions,” he had said, caustically—instead mixed them into a solid mess that couldn’t even be saved for my supper. Another that should have neatly banked the fire in the library, where we were working, instead seemed to do nothing at all—until we heard a distant and ominous crackling, and we ran upstairs to find green-tinged flames leaping out of the fireplace in the guest chamber directly above, and the embroidered bedcurtains going up.

He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers—“My father’s a woodcutter,” I said—“Of axe-swinging lummocks!” he snarled. But even so, I wasn’t afraid anymore. He only spluttered himself into exhaustion and then sent me away, and I didn’t mind his shouting at all, now I knew there were no teeth in it to rend me.

I was almost sorry not to be better, for now I could tell his frustration was that of the lover of beauty and perfection. He hadn’t wanted a student, but, having been saddled with me, he wanted to make a great and skillful witch of me, to teach me his art. I could see, as he made me examples of higher workings, great intricate interweavings of gesture and word that went on like songs, that he loved the work: his eyes grew glittering and dazzled in the spell-light, his face almost handsome with a kind of transcendence. He loved his magic, and he would have shared that love with me.

But I was just as happy to mumble my way through a few cantrips, take my inevitable lecture, and go cheerfully downstairs to the cellars and chop onions for dinner by hand. It maddened him to no end, not without some justice. I know I was being foolish. But I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as anyone important. I’d always been able to glean more nuts and mushrooms and berries than anyone, even if a patch of forest had been picked over half a dozen times; I could find late herbs in autumn and early plums in spring. Anything, my mother used to say, that involved getting as dirty as possible: if I had to dig for it or push through brambles or climb a tree to get at it, I would come back with a basketful, to bribe her into sighs of tolerance instead of cries of dismay at my clothing.

But that was as far as my gifts went, I’d always thought; nothing that mattered except to my own family. Even now it hadn’t occurred to me to think of what magic might mean, besides making absurd dresses and doing small chores that I would just as soon do by hand. I didn’t mind my own lack of progress, or how much it maddened him. I was even able to settle into a kind of contentment, until the days rolled past and Midwinter came.

I could look out my window and see the candle-trees lit up in the squares of every village, small shining beacons dotting the dark valley all the way to the edge of the Wood. In my house, my mother was basting the great ham with lard, and turning the potatoes in the dripping-pan beneath. My father and brothers would be hauling great loads of firewood for the holiday to every house, with fresh-cut pine boughs atop; they would have cut down our village’s candle-tree, and it would be tall and straight and full-branched.