Uprooted(90)

I stared down at him: his entire life! And he would surely have pounced instantly on anything that I could use. I took the sides of the ladder and slid myself to the foot, to his pinched disapproving look: I suppose he would have stared to see anyone climb a tree, too. “Did you burn them?” I said, hopelessly.

He recoiled as if I’d suggested burning him. “A book need not be magical to be of value,” he said. “Indeed, I would have liked to move them to the University’s collection for more thorough study, but Alosha insisted on their being kept here, under lock—which I cannot deny is a sensible precaution, as such books can attract the worst sort of elements of lower society; occasionally enough of the gift crops up to make a street apothecary dangerous, if they get the wrong book in their hands. However, I do believe the University archivists, who are men of excellent training, might with the proper instruction and a rigorous scheme of oversight have been entrusted with the safekeeping of lesser—”

“Where are they?” I interrupted.

The tiny room he showed me to was crammed full of old, ragged-edged books with not even an arrow-slit window for air. I had to leave the door cracked open. I was happier rummaging through these messy heaps, where I didn’t have to worry about putting them back in any order, but most of the books were just as useless to me as the ones on the shelves. I pushed aside any number of dry histories of magic, and others that were tomes of elaborate small cantrips—at least half of which would have taken twice as long and made five times the mess of doing whatever they wanted to do by hand—and others that seemed perfectly reasonable formal spellbooks to me, but evidently hadn’t met Father Ballo’s more rigorous standards.

There were stranger things in the piles. One very peculiar volume looked just like a spellbook, full of mysterious words and pictures, diagrams like those in many of the Dragon’s books, and writing that made no sense. After I lost ten solid minutes to puzzling over the thing, I realized slowly that it was mad. I mean, a madman had written it, pretending he was a wizard, wanting to be one: it wasn’t real spells at all, just made-up ones. There was something hopelessly sad about it. I pushed that one away into a dark corner.

Then finally my hand fell on one small thin black book. On the outside it looked like my mother’s recipe-book for dishes to serve on holidays, and it felt warm and friendly to me at once. The paper was cheap, yellowing and crumbly, but it was full of small, comfortable spells, sketched out in a neat hand. I looked through the pages, smiling down at it involuntarily, and then I looked at the inside of the front cover. In that same neat hand was written, Maria Olshankina, 1267.

I sat looking down at it, surprised and not surprised at the same time. This witch had lived in my valley more than three hundred years ago. Not long after the valley had been settled: the big cornerstone on Olshanka’s stone church, the oldest building in the valley, was engraved with the year 1214. Where had Jaga been born? I wondered, suddenly. She had been Rosyan. Had she lived in the valley on the other side of the Wood, before Polnya settled it from the other direction?

I knew it wasn’t going to help me. It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can’t change what’s wrong. There were folk-witches who cured some kinds of sickness and dealt with crop-blight, in most big towns; I think Maria had been one of them. For a moment I saw her, a big, cheerful woman with a red apron sweeping out her front yard, children and chickens underfoot, going inside to brew up some cough-potion for an anxious young father with a sick baby at home, pouring it into his cup with a lecture on running across town without a hat on. There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life. I sighed and put the book into my pocket anyway. I didn’t want to leave it here thrown away and forgotten.

I found two more like that, among the thousands of tumbled books, and paged through them; they had a few useful spells between them, a little good advice. They didn’t have places written in them, but somehow I knew they, too, had come from my valley. One had been written by a farmer who’d found a working that could call clouds together so they’d bring rain. On that page he had sketched a field beneath clouds, and in the distance a familiar toothy line of grey mountains.

There was a note of warning at the bottom of that spell: Be careful when it’s already grey: if you call too many, thunder comes too. I touched the short simple word with my fingers, kalmoz, and I knew I could call thunder, lightning forking down from the sky. I shivered and put that book aside. I could imagine how Solya would like to help me with that kind of spell.

None of them had what I needed. I cleared a space around me on the floor and kept on going, bent over reading one book while my free hand groped through the piles for the next. Without looking, my fingers caught on a scalloped edge of raised leather, and I jerked back my hand and sat up, shaking it out uneasily.

Once out gleaning in winter, still young, not quite twelve, I’d found a strange big white sac on a tree, between the roots, buried beneath wet dead leaves. I’d poked it with a stick a few times, and then I ran to where my father was working and brought him back to show him. He’d cut down the nearest trees for a fire-break, and then burned the sac and the tree with it. In the ashes we’d poked through with a stick and found a curled skeleton of some misshapen growing thing, not any beast we recognized. “You keep away from this clearing, Nieshka, you hear me?” my father had said.