“Nothing,” the Dragon said.“No gathering of strength, no preparations—” He shook his head.“Move back,” he said over his shoulder to me.He prodded the floating wisp back outside the window, then picked up what I had imagined to be a wizard’s staff from the wall, lit the end in the fireplace, and thrust it out directly into the middle of the wisp.The whole floating shimmer of it caught fire in one startling blue burst, burned up, and was gone; a faint sweet smell came through the window: like corruption.
“They can’t see them?”I asked, fascinated.
“Very occasionally one doesn’t come back: I imagine they catch them sometimes,” the Dragon said.“But if they touch it, the sentinel only bursts.”He spoke abstractly; frowning.
“I don’t understand,” I said.“What were you expecting?Isn’t it good that the Wood isn’t preparing an attack?”
“Tell me,” he said, “did you think she would live?”
I hadn’t, of course.It had seemed like a miracle, and one I’d longed for too badly to examine.I hadn’t let myself think about it.“It let her go?”I whispered.
“Not precisely,” he said.“It couldn’t keep her: theSummoningand the purge were driving it out.But I’m certain it could have heldon long enough for her to die.And the Wood is hardly inclined to be generous in such cases.”He was tapping his fingers against the window-sill in a pattern that felt oddly familiar; I recognized it as the rhythm of ourSummoningchant at the same time he did.He stilled his hand at once.He demanded stiffly, “Is she recovered?”
“She’s better,” I said.“She climbed all the stairs this morning.I’ve put her in my room—”
He made a dismissive flick of his hand.“I thought her recovery might have been meant as a distraction,” he said.“If she’s already well—” He shook his head.
After a moment, his shoulders went back and squared.He dropped his hand from the sill and turned to face me.“Whatever the Wood intends, we’ve lost enough time,” he said, grimly.“Get your books.We need to begin your lessons again.”
I stared at him.“Stop gaping at me,” he said.“Do you even understand what we’ve done?”He gestured to the window.“That wasn’t by any means the only sentinel I sent out.Another of them found the heart-tree that had held the girl.It was highly notable,” he added dryly, “because it wasdead.When you burned the corruption out of the girl’s body, you burned the tree itself, too.”
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, andsoon.”
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 wemight 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 theSummoningtome, Kasia opposite us reduced to a circle and labeledChannel,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 theSummoningprovides 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 togetherthreeworkings, 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 eithertwo:it all depended on what you were trying to do, and in what order.And his rules didn’t have anythingto 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 myown 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.
“You won’t get anything here,” I told the hovering bee, and blew at it, but it only tried again.
The Dragon had stopped staring over my head, any awkwardness falling before his passion for magic: he was studying our twined spells with the same fierce intent look he bent on his most complicated workings, the light of the spell bright in his face and his eyes; he was hungry to understand.“Can you hold it alone?”he demanded.
“I think so,” I said, and he slowly eased his hand from mine, leaving me to keep up the wild sprawling rosebush.Without the rigid frame of his casting, it half-wanted to collapse like a vine with its trellis gone, but I found I could keep hold of his magic: just a corner of it, enough to be a skeleton, and feeding the spell more of my own magic to make up for its weakness.
