Uprooted(31)

So being dead wasn’t a bar to her sudden return to claim her spellbook back, but the Dragon only grew even more annoyed at my expression. “Stop looking like a solemn six-year-old. Contrary to popular imagination, she is dead, and whatever time-wandering she may have done beforehand, I assure you she would have had a larger purpose than to run around eavesdropping on gossip about herself. As for that book, I spent an inordinate amount of money and trouble to get it, and congratulated myself on the acquisition until I realized how infuriatingly incomplete it was. She plainly used it only to jog her memory: it has no details of real spellwork.”

“The four I’ve tried have all worked perfectly well,” I said, and he stared at me.

He didn’t believe me until he’d made me throw half a dozen of Jaga’s spells. They were all alike: a few words, a few gestures, a few bits of herbs and things. No particular piece mattered; there was no strict order to the incantations. I did see why he called her spells unteachable, because I couldn’t even remember what I did when I cast them, much less explain why I did any one step, but for me they were an inexpressible relief after all the stiff, overcomplicated spells he’d set me. My first description held true: I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There’s an easy way through the brambles on the left. She didn’t care how I got to the blueberries: she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet.

He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him. He finally resorted to standing over me while I cast the final spell, noting down every small thing I did, even the sneeze from breathing in too deep over the cinnamon, and when I was finished he tried it again himself. It was very strange watching him, like a delayed and flattering mirror: he did everything exactly the way I had done, but more gracefully, with perfect precision, enunciating every syllable I had slurred, but he wasn’t halfway through before I could tell it wasn’t working. I twitched to interrupt him. He shot me a furious look, so I gave up and let him finish working himself into a thicket, as I thought of it, and when he was done and nothing whatsoever had happened, I said, “You shouldn’t have said miko there.”

“You did!” he snapped.

I shrugged helplessly: I didn’t doubt that I had, though to be perfectly honest I didn’t remember. But it hadn’t been an important thing to remember. “It was all right when I did it,” I said, “but when you did it, it was wrong. As though—you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it—”

“There are no hedges!” he roared.

“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

He ordered me from the room in stiff fury.

I must give him this credit: he sulked for the rest of the week, and then he dug out a small collection of other spellbooks from his shelves, dusty and unused, full of untidy spells like the ones in Jaga’s book. They all came to my hands like eager friends. He picked through them and consulted dozens of references in his other books, and with that knowledge laid out a course of study and practice for me. He warned me of all the dangers of higher workings: of the spell slipping out of your hands midway and thrashing around wild; of losing yourself in magic, and wandering through it like a dream you could touch, while your body died of thirst; of attempting a spell past your limits and having it drain away strength you didn’t have. Though he still couldn’t understand how the spells that suited me worked at all, he made himself a ferocious critic of my results, and demanded that I tell him beforehand what I meant to happen, and when I couldn’t properly predict the outcome, he forced me to work that same spell over and over again until I could.

In short, he tried to teach me as best he could, and to advise me in my blundering through my new forest, though it was foreign country to him. He did still resent my success, not from jealousy but as a matter of principle: it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work, and he scowled as much when I was doing well as when I had made some evident mistake.

A month into my new training, he was glaring at me while I struggled to make an illusion of a flower. “I don’t understand,” I said—whined, if I tell the truth: it was absurdly difficult. My first three attempts had looked like they were made of cotton rags. Now I had managed to put together a tolerably convincing wild rose, as long as you didn’t try to smell it. “It’s far easier just to grow a flower: why would anyone bother?”

“It’s a matter of scale,” he said. “I assure you it is considerably easier to produce the illusion of an army than the real thing. How is that even working?” he burst out, as he sometimes did when pressed past his limits by the obvious dreadfulness of my magic. “You aren’t maintaining the spell at all—no chanting, no gesture—”

“I’m still giving it magic. A great deal of magic,” I added, unhappily.

The first few spells that didn’t yank magic out of me like pulling teeth had been so purely a relief that I had half-thought that was the worst of it over: now that I understood how magic ought to work—whatever the Dragon said on that subject—everything would be easy. Well, I soon learned better. Desperation and terror had fueled my first working, and my next few attempts had been the equivalent of the first cantrips he’d tried to teach me, the little spells he had expected me to master effortlessly. So I had indeed mastered those effortlessly, and then he had unmercifully set me at real spells, and everything had once again become—if not unbearable in the same way, at least exceedingly difficult.