Uprooted(38)

“Wensa,” I said, my dull, exhausted mind latching on to one thing. “I have to go tell Wensa.” I looked towards the hallway, but he cut in.

“Tell her what?” he said.

“That Kasia’s alive,” I said. “That she’s out of the Wood—”

“And that she will surely have to die?” he said, brutally.

Instinctively I backed towards Kasia, putting myself between them, holding my hands up—futile, if he had meant to overcome me, but he shook his head. “Stop mantling at me like a rooster,” he said, more weary than irritated: the tone made my chest clench in dismay. “The last thing we need is any further demonstrations that you’ll go to fool’s lengths for her sake. You can keep her alive as long as we can keep her restrained. But you’ll find it a mercy by the end.”

I did tell Wensa, when she woke a little later that morning. She clutched my hands, wild-eyed. “Let me see her,” she demanded, but that much, the Dragon had flatly forbidden.

“No,” he said. “You can torment yourself if you want to; that’s as far as I’ll go. Make that woman no false promises, and don’t let her come anywhere near. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll tell her the girl is dead, and let her get on with her life.”

But I steeled myself and told her the truth. Better, I thought, to know that Kasia was out of the Wood, that there was an end to her torment, even if there wasn’t a cure. I wasn’t sure if I was right. Wensa wailed and wept and begged me; if I could have, I would have disobeyed and taken her. But the Dragon didn’t trust me with Kasia: he had already taken her away and put her in a cell somewhere, deep beneath the tower. He’d told me he wouldn’t show me the way down until I’d learned a spell of protection, something to guard myself from the Wood’s corruption.

I had to tell Wensa that I couldn’t; I had to swear it to her on my heart, over and over, before she would believe me. “I don’t know where he’s put her,” I cried out finally. “I don’t!”

She stopped begging and stared at me, panting, her hands gripping my arms. Then she said, “Wicked, jealous—you always hated her, always. You wanted her to be taken! You and Galinda, you knew he’d take her, you knew and you were glad, and now you hate her because he took you instead—”

She was shaking me, in jerks, and for a moment I couldn’t stop her. It was too horrible, hearing her say these things to me, like poison spilling out where I’d looked for clean water. I was so desperately tired, ill from the purging and all my strength spent in bringing Kasia out. I wrenched myself loose at last and ran from the room, unable to bear it, and stood in the hallway leaning against the wall crying messily, too spent even to wipe my face. Wensa crept out after me in a moment, weeping herself. “Forgive me,” she said. “Nieshka, forgive me. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.”

I knew she hadn’t meant it, but it was also true, a little, in twisted ways. It dredged up my own secret guilt, my cry: Why didn’t you take Kasia instead? We had been glad all those years, my mother and I, to think I wouldn’t be taken, and I had been miserable afterwards, even if I’d never hated Kasia for it.

I wasn’t sorry when the Dragon sent Wensa home. I didn’t even argue very much when he refused to try and teach me the spell of protection that very day. “Try not to be more of a fool than you can help,” he snapped. “You need rest, and if you don’t, I certainly do before facing the undoubtedly torturous process of drumming the necessary protections into your head. There’s no need for haste. Nothing is going to change.”

“But if Kasia’s infested, as I was,” I started, and stopped: he was shaking his head.

“A few shadows slipped between your teeth; purging you at once kept them from getting a hold on you,” he said. “This isn’t anything like that, nor even some thirdhand infestation, like that luckless cow-herder you turned to stone for no good reason. Do you understand that the tree you saw is one of the heart-trees of the Wood? Where they take root, its borders spread, the walkers are fed on their fruit. She was as deep in the Wood’s power as any person can be. Go to sleep. A few hours won’t make a difference to her, and it may keep you from committing some new folly.”

I was too tired, and I knew it, reluctantly, though I felt argument coiling in my belly. I put it away for later. But if I’d listened to him and his caution in the first place, Kasia would still be there inside the heart-tree, being devoured and rotted away; if I’d swallowed everything he told me of magic, I’d still have been chanting cantrips to my exhaustion. He had told me himself no one had ever been brought out of a heart-tree, no one had ever come out of the Wood—but Jaga had done it, and now I had, too. He could be mistaken; he was mistaken about Kasia. He was.

I was up before first light. In Jaga’s book I found a spell for smelling out rot; a simple chant, Aish aish aishimad, and I worked it down in the kitchens, picking out a place where mold grew on the back of a barrel, a spot of rotting mortar in the walls, bruised apples and one spoiled cabbage that had rolled away under a shelf of wine-bottles. When sunlight finally brightened the stairway, I went up to the library and started banging books off the shelves loudly until he appeared, tired-eyed and irritable. He didn’t chide me; he only looked a brief frown, and then turned away without saying a word. I would have preferred it if he’d shouted.