Uprooted(40)

I followed him down the passage. It was different from the rest of the tower: older and more strange. The steps were hard-edged on either side but worn in the middle to softness, and letters had been carved in a line running along the base of both walls, a script neither ours nor Rosyan: very much like the shape of the letters on the parchment with the protection spell. We seemed to go down for a long time, and I was increasingly aware of the weight of stone around us, of silence. It felt like a tomb.

“It is a tomb,” he said. We had reached the bottom of the stairs, coming into a small round room. The very air seemed thicker. The writing came off one wall of the stairwell, continued all around it in an unbroken line that circled to the opposite side, went up the wall in a tall curve that drew an arch, and then came back and went up the other side of stairs. There was a small patch of lighter stone inside the arch, towards the bottom—as though the rest of the wall had been built, and then had been closed up afterwards. It looked perhaps the size for a man to crawl through.

“Is—is someone still buried here?” I asked, timidly. My voice came out hushed.

“Yes,” the Dragon said. “But even kings don’t object to sharing once they’re dead. Listen to me now,” he said, turning to me. “I’m not going to teach you the spell to walk through the wall. When you want to see her, I’ll take you through myself. If you try to touch her, if you let her come in arm’s reach of you, I’ll take you out again at once. Now lay on your protections, if you insist on doing this.”

I lit the small handful of pine needles on the floor and made the chant, putting my face in their smoke, and then I put my hand in his, and let him draw me through the wall.

He’d made me fear the worst: Kasia as tormented as Jerzy, foaming-mouthed and tearing at her own skin; Kasia full of those slithering corrupted shadows, eating away at everything inside her. I was prepared for anything; I braced myself. But when he brought me through the wall, she was only sitting huddled and small in the corner on a thin pallet, her arms around her knees. There was a plate of food and water on the floor next to her, and she’d eaten and drunk; she’d washed her face, her hair was neatly plaited. She looked tired and afraid, but still herself, and she struggled up to her feet and came to me, holding out her hands. “Nieshka,” she said. “Nieshka, you found me.”

“No closer,” the Dragon said flatly, and added, “Valur polzhys,” and a sudden line of hot flame leapt up across the floor between us: I’d been reaching towards her without being able to help it.

I dropped my hands to my sides and clenched them into fists—and Kasia stepped back, too, staying behind the fire; she nodded obediently to the Dragon. I stood staring at her, helplessly, full of involuntary hope. “Are you—” I said, and my voice choked in my throat.

“I don’t know,” Kasia said, her voice trembling. “I don’t—remember. Not anything after they took me into the Wood. They took me into the Wood and they—they—” She stopped, her mouth open a little. There was horror in her eyes, the same horror I’d felt when I’d found her in the tree, buried beneath the skin.

I had to stop myself reaching out to her. I was in the Wood again myself, seeing her blind, choked face, her pleading hands. “Don’t speak of it,” I said, thick and miserable. I felt a surge of anger at the Dragon for holding me back this long. I had already made plans in my head: I would use Jaga’s spell to find where that corruption had taken root in her; then I would ask the Dragon to show me the purging spells he’d used on me. I would look through Jaga’s book and find others like it, and drive it out of her. “Don’t think of it yet, just tell me, how do you feel? Are you—sick, or cold—”

I finally looked around at the room itself. The walls were of that same polished bone-white marble, and in a deep niche at the back a heavy stone box lay, longer than the height of a man, carved along the top in the same letters and other designs on the sides: tall flowering trees and vines curling over each other. A single blue flame burned on top of it, and air flowed in from a thin slit in the wall. It was a beautiful room, but utterly cold; it wasn’t a place for any living thing. “We can’t keep her here,” I said to the Dragon fiercely, even as he shook his head. “She needs sun, and fresh air—we can lock her into my room instead—”

“Better here than the Wood!” Kasia said. “Nieshka, please tell me, is my mother all right? She tried to follow the walkers—I was afraid they’d take her, too.”

“Yes,” I said, wiping my face, taking a deep breath. “She’s all right. She’s worried for you—she’s so worried. I’ll tell her you’re all right—”

“Can I write her a letter?” Kasia asked.

“No,” the Dragon said, and I wheeled on him.

“We can give her a stub of pencil and some paper!” I said angrily. “It’s not too much to ask.”

His face was bleak. “You aren’t this much a fool,” he said to me. “Do you think she was buried in a heart-tree for a night and a day and came out talking to you, ordinarily?”

I stopped, silent, afraid. Jaga’s rot-finding spell hovered on my lips. I opened my mouth to cast it—but it was Kasia. It was my own Kasia, who I knew better than anyone in the world. I looked at her and she looked back at me, unhappy and afraid, but refusing to weep or cower. It was her. “They put her in the tree,” I said. “They saved her for it, and I brought her out before it got a hold—”