Page 24 of Uprooted

I came staggering out of the Wood at dawn, with Kasia slung across my shoulders like a bundle of firewood.

The Wood had drawn back from me as I went, as if it feared driving me back to the spell.

Fulmia rang in my head like a deep bell sounding with every heavy step I took, Kasia’s weight on top of mine, dirt still covering my hands on her pale arm and leg.

Finally I floundered out of the trees into the deep snow at the border and fell.

I crawled out from under Kasia and pushed her over.

Her eyes were still closed. Her hair was matted and sticky around her face where sap had soaked it.

I heaved her head up against my shoulder and closed my eyes, and spoke the spell.

The Dragon was waiting for us in the high tower room.

His face was hard and grim as ever I had seen it, and he gripped me by the chin and jerked my head up.

I looked back at him, exhausted and empty, while he studied my face and searched my eyes.

He was holding a bottle of some cordial in his hands; after he’d looked at me a long while he jerked out the stopper and thrust it at me. “Drink it,” he said. “The whole thing.”

He went over to where Kasia sprawled on the floor, still unmoving: he held his hands out over her and glared down at me when I made a note of protest and reached out.

“ Now, ” he snapped, “unless you want to force me to incinerate her at once, so I can deal with you.” He waited until I began drinking, then murmured a quick spell, sprinkling some crushed dust over her body: a shining amber-golden net sprang out over her, like a birdcage, and he turned to watch me drink.

The first taste was inexpressibly good: like a swallow of warm honey with lemon down a sore throat. But as I kept drinking, my stomach began to turn from too much sweetness. I had to halt halfway through. “I can’t,” I said, choking.

“All of it,” he said. “And then a second one, if I think it necessary. Drink, ” and I forced down another swallow, and another, and another, until I drained the glass.

Then he seized me by the wrists and said, “Ulozishtus sovjenta, megiot kozhor, ulozishtus megiot,” and I screamed: it felt like he’d set fire to me from the inside.

I could see light shining through my own skin, making a blazing lantern of my body, and when I held up my hands, I saw to my horror faint shadows moving there beneath the surface.

Forgetting the feverish pain, I caught at my dress and dragged it off over my head.

He knelt down on the floor with me. I was shining like a sun, the thin shadows moving through me like fish swimming beneath the ice in winter.

“Get them out,” I said. Now that I saw them, I suddenly felt them, also, leaving a trail inside me like slime.

I’d thought, stupidly, that I was safe because I hadn’t been scratched, or cut, or bitten.

I’d thought he was only taking precautions.

Now I understood: I’d breathed in corruption with the very air, under the boughs of the Wood, and I hadn’t noticed the creeping feeling of them because they’d slipped in, small and subtle. “Get them out—”

“Yes, I’m trying,” he bit out, gripping me by the wrists.

He shut his eyes and began to speak again, a long slow chanting that went on and on, feeding the fire.

I fixed my eyes on the window, on the sunlight coming in, and tried to breathe while I burned.

Tears ran down my face in rivulets, scorching hot against my cheeks.

His grip on my arms felt cool by comparison, for once.

The shadows beneath my skin were growing smaller, their edges burning away in the light, sand wearing away in water.

They darted around, trying to find places to hide, but he didn’t let the light fade anywhere.

I could see my bones and my organs as glowing shapes inside me, one of them my very heart thumping in my breast. It was slowing, each beat heavier.

I understood dimly that the question was whether he could burn the corruption out of me quicker than my body could bear.

I swayed in his hands. He shook me abruptly and I opened my eyes to find him glaring at me: he didn’t break the course of his spell even for a moment, but he didn’t need to say a word: Don’t you dare waste my time, you outrageous idiot, his furious eyes said, and I set my teeth in my lip and held on a little longer.

The last few shadow-fish were being worn away to wriggling threads, and then they vanished, grown so thin they couldn’t be seen. He slowed the chant, and paused it. The fire banked a little, an inexpressible relief. He demanded, grimly, “Enough?”

I opened my mouth to say yes, to say please.

“No,” I whispered, horribly afraid now. I could feel the faint quicksilver trace of the shadows still inside me.

If we stopped now, they would curl up deep, hiding in my veins and my belly.

They would take root and grow and grow and grow, until they strangled all the rest of me.

He nodded once. He held out his hand, murmured a word, and another flask appeared. I shuddered; he had to help me tip a swallow into my open mouth. I choked it down, and he took up the chant again. The fire rose in me again, endless, blinding, burning.

After three more swallows, each one stoking the fire back up to full height, I was almost sure.

I forced myself to one more after that, to be certain, and then finally, almost sobbing, I said, “Enough. It’s enough.

” But then he took me by surprise and forced another swallow on me.

As I spluttered, he put his hand over my mouth and nose, and used a different chant, one that didn’t burn but closed my lungs.

For five horrible heartbeats I couldn’t breathe at all, clawing at him and drowning in the open air: it was worse than everything else had been.

I was staring at him, seeing his dark eyes fixed on me, implacable and searching.

They began to swallow up all the world; my sight was closing, my hands were going weak; then at last he stopped and my frantic lungs swelled open like a bellows dragging in a rush of air.

I yelled with it, a furious wordless shout, and shoved him away from me so he went sprawling back across the floor.

He twisted up, managing to keep the flask from spilling, and we glared at each other, equally angry. “Of all the extraordinary stupidities I have ever seen you perform,” he snarled at me.

“You could have told me!” I shouted, arms wrapped around my body, still shaking with the horror of it. “I stood all the rest, I could have stood that, too—”

“Not if you were corrupted,” he said flatly, breaking in. “If you were taken deep, you would have tried to evade it, if I’d told you.”

“Then you would have known, anyway!” I said, and he pressed his mouth hard, into a thin line, and looked away from me with an odd stiffness.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “I would have known.”

And then—would have had to kill me. He would have had to slay me while I pleaded, maybe; while I begged him and pretended to be—perhaps even thought myself, as I had—untainted.

I fell silent, catching my breath in slow, measured, deep drafts.

“And am I—am I clean?” I asked finally, dreading the answer.

“Yes,” he said. “No corruption could have hidden from that last spell. If we’d done it sooner, it would have killed you. The shadows would have had to steal the breath from your blood to live.”

I sagged limply in on myself and covered my face.

He pulled himself to his feet and stoppered the flask.

He murmured, “Vanastalem,” moving his hands, and stepped over to me: he thrust out a neatly folded cloak, heavy silk-lined velvet, deep green, embroidered in gold.

I looked at it blankly, and stared up at him, and only when he looked away from me with an annoyed, stiff expression did I realize that the last glowing embers were dying beneath my skin, and I was still naked.

Then I staggered up to my feet abruptly, holding the cloak clutched against me, forgotten. “Kasia,” I said urgently, and turned towards her where she lay beneath the cage.

He didn’t say anything. I looked back at him desperately. “Go and dress,” he said finally. “There’s no urgency.”

He’d seized me the instant I came into the tower: he hadn’t let a moment pass. “There must be a way,” I said. “There has to be a way. They’d only just taken her—she couldn’t have been in the tree for long.”

“What?” he said sharply, and listened with his brows drawing as I spilled out the horror of the clearing, of the tree.

I tried to tell him about the dreadful weight of the Wood, watching me; the feeling of being hunted.

I stumbled over it all: words didn’t seem enough.

But his face grew more dark, until at last I finished with that last staggering rush out into the clean snow.

“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally.

“And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing. No one has gone into the Wood as deep as you and come out whole: not since—” He halted, and I somehow knew without his saying her name that it was Jaga: that Jaga had walked in the Wood, and come out again.

He saw my realization, and glared at me.

“And at the time,” he said, icily, “she was a hundred years old, and so steeped in magic that black toadstools would spring up where she walked. And even she wasn’t stupid enough to start a great working in the middle of the place, although I will grant that in this case, it’s the only thing that saved you.

” He shook his head. “I should have chained you to the wall as soon as that peasant woman came here to weep on your shoulder, I suppose.”

“Wensa,” I said, my dull, exhausted mind latching on to one thing. “I have to go tell Wensa.” I looked towards the hallway, but he cut in.

“Tell her what ?” he said.