Uprooted (39 page)

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.

“It’s all right now.” I’d told him that, I suddenly remembered. I’d known, somehow.

“All the same,” he’d said, and we’d never spoken of it again. We’d never even told my mother. We hadn’t wanted to think about what it meant, that I could find evil magic hiding in the trees.

The memory came back to me vividly now: the faint damp smell of the rotting leaves, my breath cold and white in the air, a glaze of frost along the edges of the branches and the raised bark, the heavy silence of the forest. I’d gone out looking for something else; I’d drifted into the clearing that morning with a thread of unease pulling me along. I felt the same way now. But I was in the Charovnikov, in the heart of the king’s palace. How could the Wood be here?

I wiped my fingers on my skirts, braced myself, and drew the book out. The cover was painted and sculpted elaborately by hand, a raised amphisbaena of leather with every serpent-scale painted in a shimmering blue, the eyes red jewels, surrounded by a forest of green leaves with the word
Bestiare
hanging above it in golden letters joined to the branches like fruits.

I turned the pages with a finger and a thumb, holding them by the lower corner only. It was a bestiary, a strange one full of monsters and chimaeras. Not all of them were even real. I turned a few more pages slowly, only glancing at the words and pictures, and with an odd, creeping sensation began to realize that while I read, the monsters
felt
real, I believed in them, and if I went on believing in them long enough—abruptly I shut the book hard and put it down on the floor and stood up away from it. The hot stifling room had gone even more stifling, a thickness like the worst days of summer, the air hot and moist under a smothering weight of still leaves that stopped the wind from ever getting through.

I scrubbed my hands on my skirts, trying to get rid of the oily feeling of the pages against my hands, and watched the book suspiciously. I had the feeling if I took my eyes away, it would turn itself into some kind of twisted thing and come leaping for my face, hissing and clawing. Instinctively I reached for a spell of fire, to burn it, but even as I opened my mouth, I stopped, realizing how stupid that would be: I was standing in a room full of old dry books, the air so desiccated it tasted of dust when I breathed, and outside was an enormous library. But I was sure it wasn’t safe to leave the book there, not even for a moment, and I couldn’t imagine touching it again—

The door swung open. “I understand your caution, Alosha,” Ballo was saying peevishly, “but I hardly see what harm can come from—”

“Stop!” I shouted, and he and Alosha halted in the narrow doorway and stared at me. I suppose I looked bizarre, standing there like a lion-tamer with a particularly vicious beast, and only a single book lying quietly on the floor in front of me.

Ballo stared at me, astonished, and then peered down at the book. “What on earth—”

But Alosha was already moving: she pushed him gently to one side and drew a long dagger off her belt. She crouched down and stretched her arm to its full length and prodded the book with just the tip. The blade lit silver all along its edge, and where it touched the book, the light glowed through a greenish cloud of corruption. She drew the dagger back. “How did you find that?”

“It was just here in the heap,” I said. “It tried to catch me. It felt like—like the Wood.”

“But how could—” Ballo started, but Alosha vanished out of the doorway. A moment later she reappeared, wearing a heavy metal gauntlet. She picked up the book between two fingers and jerked her head. We followed her out into the main part of the library, the lights coming up over our heads where we walked, and she shoved a heap of books off one of the large stone tables and laid the book down upon it. “How did this particular piece of nastiness escape you?” she demanded of Ballo, who was peering down at it over her shoulder, alarmed and frowning.

“I don’t believe I even looked into it,” Ballo said, with a faintly defensive note. “There was no need: I could see at a glance it wasn’t a serious text of magic, and quite plainly had no place in our library. I recall I had rather strong words with poor Georg about it, in fact: he tried to insist on keeping it on the shelves even though there was not the least sign of enchantment about it.”

“Georg?” Alosha said grimly. “Was this just before he disappeared?” Ballo paused and nodded.

“If I’d kept going,” I said, “would it have—
made
one of those things?”

“Made
you
into one, I imagine,” Alosha said, horrifyingly. “We had an apprentice go missing five years ago, the same day a hydra crawled up out of the palace sewers and attacked the castle: we thought it had eaten him. We had better take poor Georg’s head off the wall in the parade-room.”

“But how did it get here in the first place?” I asked, looking down at the book, the dappled leaves of pale and dark green, the two-headed serpent winking at us with its red eyes.

“Oh—” Ballo hesitated, and then he went down the hall to a shelf full of ledgers, each of them nearly half his own height: he muttered some small dusty spell over them as he drew his fingers along, and one page gleamed out far down the shelf. He lifted out the heavy book with a grunt and brought it to the table, supporting it from beneath with absent practice as he opened to the one illuminated page, with one row shining out upon it. “Bestiary, well-ornamented, of unknown origin,” he read. “A gift from the court of … of Rosya.” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the date, his ink-stained index finger resting upon it. “Twenty years ago, and one of half a dozen volumes gifted at the same time,” he said, finally. “Prince Vasily and his embassy must have brought it with them.”

The malevolent carved book sat in the middle of the table. We stood in silence around it. Twenty years ago, Prince Vasily of Rosya had ridden into Kralia, and three weeks later he had ridden out again in the dead of night with Queen Hanna beside him, fleeing towards Rosya. They had gone too close to the edge of the Wood, trying to evade pursuit. That was the story. But perhaps they’d been caught long before then. Maybe some poor scribe or book-binder had wandered too close to the Wood, and under the boughs pounded fallen leaves into paper, brewed ink out of oak galls and water, and wrote corruption into every word, to make a trap that could creep even into the castle of the king.

“Can we burn it here?” I said.

“What?” Ballo said, jerking up in protest as though he were on a string. I think he recoiled instinctively from burning any book at all, which I thought was all very well, but not when it came to
this
one.

“Ballo,” Alosha said, and from her expression she felt just as I did.

“I will attempt a purification, to make it safe to examine,” Ballo said. “If
that
should fail, then we will of course have to consider cruder methods for disposal.”

“This isn’t something to keep, purified or not,” she said grimly. “We should take it to the forge. I’ll build a white fire, and we’ll close it in until it’s ash.”

“We cannot burn it at once, no matter what,” Ballo said. “It is evidence in the queen’s case, and the king must know of it.”

Evidence, I realized too late, of corruption: if the queen had touched this book, if it had led her to the Wood, she had been corrupted even before she was drawn under the boughs. If this were presented at the trial—I looked at Alosha and Ballo in dismay. They hadn’t come here to help me. They’d come to stop me finding anything useful.

Alosha sighed back at me. “I’m not your enemy, though you want to think me so.”

“You
want
them put to death!” I said. “The queen, and Kasia—”

“What I want,” Alosha said, “is to keep the kingdom safe. You and Marek: all you worry about is your own sorrows. You’re too young to be as strong as you are, that’s the trouble of it; you haven’t let go of people. When you’ve seen a century of your own go by, you’ll have more sense.”

I’d been about to protest at her accusation, but that silenced me: I stared at her in horror. Maybe it was silly of me, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment that
I
was going to live like Sarkan, like her, a hundred years, two hundred—when did witches even die? I wouldn’t grow old; I’d just keep
going,
always the same, while everyone around me withered and fell away, like the outer stalks of some climbing vine going up and up away from them.

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if
sense
means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?” Maybe there was some way, I wondered wildly, to give away some of that life: maybe I could give some to my family, to Kasia—if they would take it; who would want anything like that, at the price of falling out of the world, taking yourself out of
life
.

“My dear child, you are growing very distressed,” Ballo said feebly, making a gesture at calming me. I stared at him and the faint fine lines at the corner of his eyes, all his days spent with dusty books, loving nothing else; him and Alosha, who spoke as easily of putting people in the fire as she did books. I remembered Sarkan in his tower, plucking girls out of the valley, and his coldness when I’d first come, as though he couldn’t remember how to think and feel like an ordinary person.

“A nation is people as well,” Alosha said. “More people than just the few you love best yourself. And the Wood threatens them all.”

“I’ve lived seven miles from the Wood all my days,” I said. “I don’t need to be told what it is. If I didn’t care about stopping the Wood, I’d have taken Kasia and run away by now, instead of leaving her to all of you to push her like a pawn from here to there, as if she doesn’t even matter!”

Ballo made startled murmuring noises, but Alosha only frowned at me. “And yet you can speak of letting the corrupted live, as if you didn’t know better,” she said. “The Wood is not just some enclave of evil, lying in wait to catch people who are foolish enough to wander inside, and if you can get someone out of it there’s an end to the harm. We aren’t the first nation to face its power.”

“You mean the people of the tower,” I said slowly, thinking of the buried king.

“You’ve seen the tomb, have you?” Alosha said. “And the magic that made it, magic that’s lost to us now? That should have been enough warning to make you more cautious. Those people weren’t weak or unprepared. But the Wood brought their tower down, wolves and walkers hunted them, and trees choked all the valley. One or two of their weaker sorcerers fled to the north and took a few books and stories with them. The rest of them?” She waved a hand towards the book. “Twisted into nightmares, beasts to hunt their own kind. That’s all the Wood left of that people. There’s something worse than monsters in that place: something that makes monsters.”

“I know it better than you!” I said. My hands still itched, and the book sat there on the table, malevolent. I couldn’t stop thinking about that heavy, monstrous presence looking out of Kasia’s face, of Jerzy’s, the feeling of being hunted beneath the boughs.

“Do you?” Alosha said. “Tell me, if I said to uproot every person living in your valley, to move them elsewhere in the kingdom and abandon it all to the Wood, save them and let it all go; would you come away?” I stared at her. “Why haven’t you already left, for that matter?” she added. “Why do you keep living there, in that shadow? There are places in Polnya that aren’t haunted by evil.”