Uprooted(45)

“No, don’t be absurd,” the Dragon said, impatiently. “Calling spirits is nothing but charlatanry. It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal. The Summoning does nothing so trivial. It summons—” He paused, and I was surprised to see him struggling for words. “Truth,” he said finally, with half a shrug, as though that was inadequate and wrong, but as close as he could come. I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie.

“But why were you so angry that I had started reading it, then?” I demanded.

He glared at me. “Does that seem to you a trivial working? I thought you’d been set on to an impossible task by some other enchanter at court—with the intention, on their part, of blasting the roof off the tower when you’d spent all your strength and your working fell in on itself, and thereby making me look an incompetent fool not to be trusted with an apprentice.”

“But that would have killed me,” I said. “You thought someone from court would—?”

“Spend the life of a peasant with half an ounce of magic to score a victory over me—perhaps to see me ordered back to court, humiliated?” the Dragon said. “Of course. Most courtiers set peasants one degree above cows, and somewhat below their favorite horses. They’re perfectly delighted to spend a thousand of you in a skirmish with Rosya for some minor advantage on the border; they’d hardly blink at this.” He waved the viciousness of it aside. “In any case, I certainly didn’t expect you to succeed.”

I stared at the book on the shelf under my hands. I remembered reading it, that sense of sure satisfaction, and abruptly I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to him, clutching it to my body. He eyed me warily. “Could it help Kasia?” I asked him.

He opened his mouth to deny it, I could tell; but then he hesitated. He looked at the book, frowning and silent. Finally he said, “I doubt it. But the Summoning is—a strange work.”

“It can’t hurt anything,” I said, but that won me an irritated look.

“Certainly it can hurt,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to what I just said? The entire book must be invoked in a single sitting to make the spell, and if you haven’t the strength to do it, the whole edifice of the spell will collapse, disastrously, when you exhaust yourself. I’ve seen it cast only once, by three witches together, each having taught the next younger, passing the book from one to another to read. It almost killed them, and they were by no means weak.”

I looked down at the book, heavy and golden in my hands. I didn’t doubt him. I remembered how I’d liked the taste of it on my tongue, the way it had pulled at me. I drew a deep breath and said, “Will you cast it with me?”





Chapter 10


We chained her first. The Dragon carried down heavy iron manacles and with an incantation thrust one end of them deep into the stone walls of the chamber while Kasia—the thing inside Kasia—stood back and watched us, unblinking. I held a ring of fire around her, and when he was done, I herded her over, and with another spell he forced her arms into the manacles. She resisted, more to have the pleasure of putting us to the trouble than out of any worry, I thought—her expression remained that same inhuman blankness all along, and her eyes never left my face. She was thinner than she had been. The thing ate only sparingly. Enough to keep Kasia alive, not enough to keep me from watching her wear away, her body growing gaunt and her face hollow-cheeked.

The Dragon conjured a narrow wooden stand and set the Summoning upon it. He looked at me. “Are you ready?” he asked me, in stiff and formal tones. He had dressed in fine garments of silk and leather and velvet in endless layers, and he wore gloves; as though armoring himself against anything like what had happened the last time we’d cast a working together. It seemed to me as long ago as a century and as distant as the moon. I was untidy in homespun, my hair pulled into a haphazard knot just to keep it out of my eyes. I reached down and opened the cover, and began to read aloud.

The spell caught me up again almost at once, and by now I knew enough of magic to feel it drawing on my strength. But the Summoning didn’t insist on tearing away chunks of me: I tried to feed it as I did most of my spells, with a steady measured stream of magic instead of a torrent, and it permitted me to do so. The words no longer felt so impenetrable. I still couldn’t follow the story, or remember one sentence to the next, but I began to have the feeling that I wasn’t meant to. If I could have remembered, at least some of the words would have been wrong: like hearing again a half-remembered favorite tale from childhood and finding it unsatisfying, or at least not as I’d remembered it. And that was how the Summoning made itself perfect, by living in that golden place of vague and loving memory. I let it flow through me, and when I finished the page I stopped, and let the Dragon take it up: he’d insisted grimly he would read two to my one, when I wouldn’t be dissuaded from trying.

His voice sounded the words a little differently than I had, with crisper edges and less of a running rhythm, and it didn’t feel quite right to me at first. The working continued to build without any difficulty as far as I could tell, and by the end of his two pages, his own reading did sound well to me after all—as though I were hearing a gifted storyteller tell a different version of a tale than the one I loved, and he had overcome my instinctive annoyance at hearing it told differently. But when I had to begin again myself, I struggled to pick up the thread of it, and it was a greater effort than the first page had been. We were trying to tell the story together, but pulling in different ways. I realized in dismay even as I read that it wasn’t going to be enough that he was my teacher: those three witches he’d seen cast the spell must have been more like one another, in their magic and their working, than he and I were.