Uprooted(51)

Even then, I still didn’t understand his grimness, and still less when he went on. “The walkers have already torn it down and replanted a seedling, but if it were winter instead of spring, if the clearing had been closer to the edges of the Wood—if we’d only been prepared, we might have gone in with a party of axemen, to clear and burn back the Wood all the way to that clearing.”

“Can we—” I blurted out, shocked, and couldn’t quite make myself even put the idea into words.

“Do it again?” he said. “Yes. Which means that the Wood must make an answer, and soon.”

I began finally to catch his urgency. It was like his worry about Rosya, I suddenly understood: we were in a war against the Wood as well, and our enemy knew that we now had a new weapon we might turn against them. He’d been expecting the Wood to attack not simply for revenge, but to defend itself.

“There’s a great deal of work to do before we can hope to repeat the effects,” he added, and gestured to the table, littered with still more pages. I looked at them properly and realized for the first time that they were notes about the working—our working. There was a sketched diagram: the two of us reduced to blank figures at the farthest possible corners of the Summoning tome, Kasia opposite us reduced to a circle and labeled CHANNEL, and a line drawn back to a neatly rendered picture of a heart-tree. He tapped the line.

“The channel will offer the greatest difficulty. We can’t expect to conveniently obtain a victim ripped straight out of a heart-tree on every occasion. However, a captured walker might serve instead, or even a victim of lesser corruption—”

“Jerzy,” I said suddenly. “Could we try it with Jerzy?”

The Dragon paused and pressed his lips together, annoyed. “Possibly,” he said.

“First, however,” he added, “we must codify the principles of the spell, and you need to practice each separate component. I believe it falls into the category of fifth-order workings, wherein the Summoning provides the frame, the corruption itself provides the channel, and the purging spell provides the impulse—do you remember absolutely nothing I’ve taught you?” he demanded, seeing me bite my lip.

It was true I hadn’t bothered to remember much of his insisted-on lessons about the orders of spells, which were mostly for explaining why certain spells were more difficult than others. As far as I could see, it all came down to the obvious: if you put together two workings to make a new spell, usually it would be harder than either one of those alone; but beyond that, I didn’t find the rules very useful. If you put together three workings, it would be harder than any one of them alone, but at least when I tried it, that didn’t mean it would be harder than either two: it all depended on what you were trying to do, and in what order. And his rules didn’t have anything to do with had happened down there in the chamber.

I didn’t want to speak of it, and I knew he didn’t, either. But I thought of Kasia, struggling towards me while the Wood tore at her; and of Zatochek, on the edge of the Wood, one attack away from being swallowed. I said, “None of that matters, and you know it.”

His hand tightened on the papers, crumpling pages, and for a moment I thought he would start to shout at me. But he stared down at them and didn’t say a word. After a moment, I went for my spellbook and dug out the illusion spell we’d cast together, in winter, all those long months ago. Before Kasia.

I pushed away the heap of papers enough to clear some room before us, and set the book down in front of me. After a moment, without a word, he went and took another volume off the shelf: a narrow black book, whose cover glimmered faintly where he touched it. He opened it to a spell covering two pages, written in crisp letters, with a diagram of a single flower and every part of it attached to a syllable of the spell somehow. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.” And he held his hand out to me across the table.

It was harder to take it this time, to make that deliberate choice, without the useful distraction of desperation. I couldn’t help but think about the strength of his clasp, the long graceful lines of his fingers closed around my hand, the warm callused tips brushing my wrist. I could feel his pulse beating against my own fingers, and the heat of his skin. I stared down at my book and tried to make sense of the letters, my cheeks hot, while he began to cast his own spell, his voice clipped. His illusion started taking shape, another single perfectly articulated flower, fragrant and beautiful and thoroughly opaque, and the stem nearly covered in thorns.

I began in a whisper. I was trying desperately not to think, not to feel his magic against my skin. Nothing whatsoever happened. He didn’t say anything to me: his eyes were fixed determinedly on a point above my head. I stopped and gave myself a private shake. Then I shut my eyes and felt out the shape of his magic: as full of thorns as his illusion, prickly and guarded. I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it. I heard him draw a sharp breath, and the sharp edifice of his spell began grudgingly to let mine in. The rose between us put out long roots all over the table, and new branches began to grow.

It wasn’t the jungle of the first time we’d cast the spell: he was holding back his magic, and so was I, both of us letting only a thin stream of power feed the working. But the rosebush took on a different kind of solidity. I couldn’t tell it was an illusion anymore, the long ropy roots twisting together, putting fingers into the cracks of the table, winding around the legs. The blossoms weren’t just the picture of a rose, they were real roses in a forest, half of them not open yet, the other half blown, petals scattering and browning at the edges. The thick fragrance filled the air, too sweet, and as we held it, a bee came hovering in through the window and crept into one of the flowers, prodding it determinedly. When it couldn’t get any nectar out, it tried another, and another, small legs scrabbling at the petals, which gave way exactly as if they could bear the weight of a bee.