you at once kept them from getting a hold on you,” he said. “This isn’t anything like that, nor even some thirdhand infestation, like that luckless cow-herder you turned to stone for no good reason. Do you understand that the tree you saw is one of the heart-trees of the Wood? Where they take root, its borders spread, the walkers are fed on their fruit. She was as deep in the Wood’s power as any person can be. Go to sleep. A few hours won’t make a difference to her, and it may keep you from committing some new folly.”
I was too tired, and I knew it, reluctantly, though I felt argument coiling in my belly. I put it away for later. But if I’d listened to him and his caution in the first place, Kasia would still be there inside the heart-tree, being devoured and rotted away; if I’d swallowed everything he told me of magic, I’d still have been chanting cantrips to my exhaustion. He had told me himself no one had ever been brought out of a heart-tree, no one had ever come out of the Wood—but Jaga had done it, and now I had, too. He could be mistaken; he was mistaken about Kasia. He was.
I was up before first light. In Jaga’s book I found a spell for smelling out rot; a simple chant, Aish aish aishimad, and I worked it down in the kitchens, picking out a place where mold grew on the back of a barrel, a spot of rotting mortar in the walls, bruised apples and one spoiled cabbage that had rolled away under a shelf of wine-bottles. When sunlight finally brightened the stairway, I went up to the library and started banging books off the shelves loudly until he appeared, tired-eyed and irritable. He didn’t chide me; he only looked a brief frown, and then turned away without saying a word. I would have preferred it if he’d shouted.
But he took a small gold key and unlocked a closed cabinet of black wood on the far side of the room. I peered into it: it was full of thin flat sheets of glass in a rack, pieces of parchment pressed between them. He took one and brought it out. “I’ve preserved it mostly as a curiosity,” he said, “but that seems to suit you best.”
He laid it on the table still in its glass: a single page in sprawling messy script, many of the letters oddly shaped, with rough illustrations of a branch of pine needles, the smoke going into the nostrils of a face. There were a dozen different variations listed: suoltal videl, suoljata akorata, videlaren, akordel, estepum, more besides. “Which one do I use?” I asked him.
“What?” he said, and prickled up indignantly when I told him they were separate incantations, not all one long chant, in the way that meant he hadn’t realized it before. “I haven’t the least idea,” he said shortly. “Choose one and try.”
I couldn’t help but be secretly, passionately glad: another proof that his knowledge had limits. I went to the laboratory for pine needles and made a small smudgy bonfire of them in a glass bowl on the library table, then bent my head eagerly over the parchment and tried. “Suoltal,” I said, feeling the shape of it in my mouth—but there was something wrong, a kind of sideways sliding to it.
“Valloditazh aloito, kes vallofozh,” he said, a hard bitter sound that curled into me like fishhooks, and then he made a quick jerk of one finger, and my hands rose up from the table and clapped themselves together three times. It wasn’t like having no control, the involuntary lurch of coming out of a dream of falling. I could feel the deliberation behind the movement, the puppet-strings digging into my skin. Someone had moved my arms, and it hadn’t been me. I nearly reached for some spell to strike at him, and then he crooked his finger again and the fishhook came loose and the line slithered back out of me.
I was up on my feet, halfway across the room from him, panting, before I could stop myself. I glared, but he didn’t offer me an apology. “When the Wood does it,” he said, “you won’t feel the hook. Try again.”
It took me an hour to work out an incantation. None of the ones came out right, not the way they were on paper. I had to try them all on my