didn’t quite believe his own eyes, and then he spluttered at me, “You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?”
I sat back on my heels in some indignation: this, when I had just saved not only his life, but everything he might be, and all the kingdom from whatever the Wood might have made from him. “What ought I have done?” I demanded. “And how was I to know to do it? Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”
For some reason, this only made him nearly incoherent with fury, and he levered himself up from my cot, threw the book across the room, all the notes flying everywhere, and flung himself out into the hallway without another word. “You might thank me!” I shouted after him, outraged myself, and his footsteps had vanished before I recalled that he had been wounded at all in saving my life—that he had surely pressed himself to terrible lengths to come to my aid at all.
That thought only made me feel more sulky, of course. So, too, did the slogging work of cleaning my poor little room and changing my bed; the stains wouldn’t come out, and everything smelled foul, though without the terrible wrongness. Finally I decided, for this, I would use magic after all. I began to use one of the charms the Dragon had taught me, but then I instead went and dug up the journal from the corner. I was grateful to that little book and the past wizard or witch who had written it, even if the Dragon wasn’t to me, and I was happy to find, near the beginning, a charm for freshening a room: Tishta, sung up and down, with work to show the way. I warbled it half in my head while I turned out all the damp, stained ticking. The air grew cold and crisp around me, but without any unpleasant bite; by the time I had finished, the bedclothes were clean and bright as though they were new-washed, and my ticking smelled like it was fresh from a summer haystack. I assembled my bed again, and then I sat down upon it very heavily, almost surprised, as the last dregs of desperation left me, and with them all my strength. I fell down on the bed and barely managed to drag my coverlet over me before I slept.
—
I woke slowly, peacefully, serenely, with sunlight coming in the window over me, and only gradually became aware that the Dragon was in my room.
He was sitting by the window, in the small work-chair, glaring at me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and glared back. He held up the tiny book in his hand. “What made you pick this up?” he demanded.
“It was full of notes!” I said. “I thought it must be important.”
“It is not important,” he said, although for how angry he seemed over it, I didn’t believe him. “It is useless—it has been useless, for all five hundred years since it was written, and a century of study has not made it anything other than useless.”
“Well, it wasn’t useless today,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.
“How did you know how much rosemary to use?” he said. “How much lemon?”
“You used all sorts of amounts, in those tables!” I said. “I supposed it didn’t much matter.”
“The tables are of failures, you blundering imbecile!” he shouted. “None of them had the least effect—not in any parts, not in any admixture, not with any incantation—what did you do?”
I stared at him. “I used enough to make a nice smell, and steeped them to make it stronger. And I used the chant on the page.”
“There is no incantation here!” he said. “Two trivial syllables, with no power—”
“When I sang it long enough, it made the magic flow,” I said. “I sang it to ‘Many Years,’ ” I added. He went even more red and indignant.
He spent the next hour interrogating me as to every particular of how I had cast the spell, growing ever more upset: I could scarcely answer any of his questions. He wanted exact syllables and repetitions, he wanted to know how close I had been to his arm, he wanted the number of rosemary twigs and the number of peels. I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong, and finally I blurted out, as he wrote angrily on his sheets, “But none of that matters at all.”