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 corner-stone 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.
“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;