Uprooted(30)

“Not until I’ve eaten lunch, we won’t,” I said, not pausing: I was chopping carrots.

He muttered something under his breath about recalcitrant idiots. I ignored him. He was happy enough to sit down, and to eat the soup when I gave him a bowl, with a thick slice of peasant bread that I’d made—the day before yesterday, I realized; I had only been out of the tower for a day and a night. It seemed a thousand years. “What happened with the chimaera?” I asked around my spoon as we ate.

“Vladimir’s not a fool, thankfully,” the Dragon said, wiping his mouth with a conjured napkin. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking of the baron. “After he sent his messenger, he baited the thing close to the border by staking out calves and having his pikemen harry it from every other direction. He lost ten of them, but he managed to get it not an hour’s ride from the mountain pass. I was able to kill it quickly. It was only a small one: scarcely the size of a pony.”

He sounded strangely grim about it. “Surely that’s good?” I said.

He looked at me in annoyance. “It was a trap,” he bit out, as though that was obvious to any sensible person. “I was meant to be kept away until the corruption had overrun all of Dvernik, and worn down before I came.” He looked down at his arm, opening and closing his fist. He’d changed his shirt for one of green wool, clasped with gold at the wrist. It covered his arm; I wondered if there were a scar beneath.

“Then,” I ventured, “I did well to go?”

His expression was as sour as milk left out in midsummer. “If anyone could say so when you’ve poured out fifty years’ worth of my most valuable potions in less than a day. Did it never occur to you that if they could be so easily spent, I would give half a dozen flasks to every village headman, and save myself the trouble of ever setting foot in the valley?”

“They can’t be worth more than people’s lives,” I fired back.

“A life before you in the moment isn’t worth a hundred elsewhere, three months from now,” he said. “Listen, you simpleton, I have one bottle of fire-heart in the refining now: I began it six years ago, when the king could afford to give me the gold for it, and it will be finished in another four. If we spend all my supply before then, do you suppose Rosya will generously refrain from firing our fields, knowing that we’ll have starved and sued for peace before we can return the favor? And there are likewise costs for every other vial you spent. All the more because Rosya has three master-wizards who can brew potions, to our two.”

“But we’re not at war!” I protested.

“We will be in the spring,” he said, “if they hear a song of fire-heart and stone-skin and profligacy, and think they might have gained a real advantage.” He paused, and then he added heavily, “Or if they hear a song of a healer strong enough to purge corruption, and think that soon the balance will tip in our favor, instead, when you are trained.”

I swallowed and looked down at my bowl of soup. It was unreal when he spoke of Rosya declaring war because of me, because of things I’d done or what they would imagine I might do. But I remembered again the terror I’d felt on seeing the beacons lit with him gone, knowing just how little I could do to help those I loved. I still wasn’t at all sorry to have taken the potions, but I couldn’t pretend anymore that it mattered nothing whether I ever learned a single spell.

“Do you think I could help Jerzy, once I’ve been trained?” I asked him.

“Help a man already fully corrupted?” The Dragon scowled at me. But then he said, a grudging admission, “You shouldn’t have been able to help me.”

I picked up my bowl and drank the rest of the soup down, and then I put it aside and looked at him across the scarred and pitted kitchen table. “All right,” I said, grimly. “Let’s get on with it.”

Unfortunately, the willingness to learn magic wasn’t the same thing as being any good at it. Groshno’s minor charms stymied me thoroughly, and the conjurations of Metrodora remained resolutely unconjured. After another three days of letting the Dragon set me at healing spells, all of which felt as awkward and wrong as ever, I marched down to the library the next morning with the little worn journal in my hand and put it down on the table before him as he scowled. “Why won’t you teach me from this?” I demanded.

“Because it’s unteachable,” he snapped. “I’ve barely managed to codify the simplest cantrips into any usable form, and none of the higher workings. Whatever her notoriety, in practice it’s worth almost nothing.”

“What do you mean, notoriety?” I said, and then I looked down at the book. “Who wrote this?”

He scowled at me. “Jaga,” he said, and for a moment I stood cold and still. Old Jaga had died a long time ago, but there weren’t very many songs about her, and bards mostly sang them warily, only in summer, at midday. She had been dead and buried five hundred years, but that hadn’t stopped her turning up in Rosya only forty years ago, at the baptism of the newborn prince. She’d turned six guards who tried to stop her into toads, put two other wizards to sleep, then she’d gone over to the baby and peered frowning down at him. Then she’d straightened up and announced in irritation, “I’ve fallen out of time,” before vanishing in a great cloud of smoke.