Uprooted(89)

“Then what will you do?” Marek snarled, angry again, and stalked from the room without waiting for me to answer. It was just as well. I didn’t know what to say.





Chapter 20


The guards on the Charovnikov did recognize me, despite my clothes. They opened the heavy wooden doors for me and swung them closed again. I stood with my back pressed up to them, the gilt and turning angels overhead and the endless walls of books looming all the way down one wall and back along the next, dipping into alcoves and back out again. There were a handful of other people working at the tables here and there, young men and women in robes with their heads bent over alembics or books. They didn’t pay attention to me; they were all busy themselves.

The Charovnikov wasn’t welcoming to me, colder than the Dragon’s library and too impersonal, but at least it was a place I understood. I still didn’t know how I was going to save Kasia, but I knew I had more chance of finding a way to do it here than I did in a ballroom.

I took hold of the nearest ladder and dragged it squeaking all the way to the very front of the very first shelf, then I tucked up my skirts, climbed up to the top, and began to rummage. It was a familiar kind of searching. I didn’t go gleaning in the forest to find something in particular; I went to find whatever there was to find, and to let ideas come to me: if I found a heap of mushrooms, we’d have mushroom soup the next day, and if I found flat stones the hole in the road near our house would get mended. I thought surely there had to be at least a few books here that would speak out to me like Jaga’s book; maybe they even had another one of hers somewhere hidden away among all these fancy gold-stamped volumes.

I worked as quickly as I could. I looked at the dustiest books, the ones least-used. I ran my hands over all of them, read the titles off their spines. But it was slow going no matter what, and full of frustration. After I had gone through twelve wide bookcases, ceiling-to-floor, thirty shelves on each, I began to wonder if I would find anything here, after all: there was a dry stiff feeling to all the books beneath my hands, and nothing that invited me to keep looking.

It had grown late while I worked. The handful of other students were gone, and the magical lights had dimmed down to the faint glow of hot ash all along the library, as though they had gone to sleep. Only the one on my shelf still shone firefly-bright, and my back and ankles were complaining. I was twisted up on the ladder, my foot hooked around a rail, so I could reach out and grab the farthest books. I’d barely made it a quarter of the way down one side of the room, and that was going as quick and slipshod as I could, not a tenth of the books looked at properly; Sarkan would have muttered something uncomplimentary.

“What are you looking for?”

I nearly pitched off the ladder onto Father Ballo’s head, just barely catching the side rail in time and barking my ankle painfully on a joint. There was a section of one of the bookshelves standing open halfway down the room, the door to some hidden nook; he’d come out of there. He was carrying four thick volumes in his arms, which I supposed he meant to put back on the shelves, and staring up at me doubtfully from the floor.

I was still twitching inwardly with surprise, and I spoke without thinking. “I’m looking for Sarkan,” I said.

Ballo looked blankly at the shelves I’d been pawing over: did I think I was going to find the Dragon pressed between the pages of a book? But as if I’d told myself at the same time as him, I realized that was exactly what I was after. I wanted Sarkan. I wanted him to look up from among his heaped books and snap at me at the disorder I’d created. I wanted to know what he was doing, if the Wood had struck back. I wanted him to tell me how I could persuade the king to let Kasia go.

“I want to speak to him,” I said. “I want to see him.” I already knew there wasn’t a spell in Jaga’s book, and Sarkan had never shown me such a spell himself. “Father, what spell would you use, if you wanted to talk to someone in another part of the kingdom?”—but Ballo was already shaking his head at me.

“Far-speaking is a thing of fairy-tales, however convenient bards find the notion,” he said, in lecturing tones. “In Venezia they have discovered the art of laying a spell of communion within a pair of mirrors made together from the same pool of quicksilver. The king has such a mirror, with the mate carried by the chief of the army at the front. But even these can speak only with one another. The king’s grandfather purchased them in exchange for five bottles of fire-heart,” he added, making me squeak involuntarily at the price: you might as well buy a kingdom. “Magic may extend the senses, extend sight and hearing; it may amplify the voice, or conceal it into a nut to emerge later. It cannot fling your visage across half a kingdom in an instant, or carry someone’s voice back to you.”

I listened to him dissatisfied, although it made unfortunate sense: why would Sarkan ever send a messenger, or write a letter, if he could simply cast a spell? It was sensible enough, the same way he could only use his transporting spell to go around the valley, his own territory, and not leap straight to the capital and back.

“Are there any other spellbooks like Jaga’s here, that I might look in?” I asked, even though I knew Ballo didn’t have any use for her.

“My child, this library is the heart of the scholarship of magic in Polnya,” he said. “Books are not flung onto these shelves by the whim of some collector, or through the chicanery of a bookseller; they are not here because they are valuable, or painted in gold to please some noble’s eye. Every volume added has been carefully reviewed by at least two wizards in the service of the crown; their virtues have been confirmed and at least three correct workings attested, and even then they must be of real power to merit a place here. I myself have spent nearly my entire life of service pruning out the lesser works, the curiosities and the amusements of earlier days; you will certainly not find anything like that here.”