Alluvium

Chapter 4

I tried to teach her.

‘I can see you’ll be making a mark on the firmament,’ I’d said, telling myself I had given up on any notion of making her a great witch. But the truth is that I am bad at giving up on things – something that has, without fail, caused me no end of grief in one way or another.

The girl proved to be no exception.

I laid books of ageless knowledge before her, I made demonstrations of my own power – great spiralling flames of blue and silver light, an illusion of a dragon which swooped low across the table, its wings in gleaming green scales and coiling smoke. She tolerated all of this with an air of mild condescension, as if she were allowing me to entertain the mad notion that I might teach her something, before she then disappeared off to undertake more worthy pursuits. This, it turned out, involved ignoring all of the cleaning cantrips I had taught her, rolling up her sleeves and scrubbing the tower clean by hand.

I despaired.

There was such a wealth of potential between us, so much greatness I could show her, and yet none of it seemed to so much as interest her. Oh, she smiled sometimes – brightly, infuriatingly – as if my intention had been to impress her, rather than to show her what she herself could be capable of with even the smallest amount of application. She, however, was content not to try. She would come before me, profane some minor charm with slurred words and inattention, slump over exhausted and depart as if in success.

A swathe of destruction followed in her path. It was not enough simply to fail at magic; she seemed to feel the need to defile my library while she was at it. A working meant to lay ingredients out for a pie not only utterly failed to do so, but also turned them into a coagulated, brown mess so solid it would take one of Alosha’s knives to pry it from my table. I had to work three cleaning spells and a minor charm of purification to rid myself of it, which I muttered angrily, interspersed with the words ‘stubborn,’ ‘useless’ and ‘menace.’

At least she no longer cringed away from me in fear. That had seemed a blessing at first, but I soon realised this extended even to the times at which I would have preferred her to shy away from me with some degree of deference.

‘It is really quite simple,’ I hissed, looming over her as she crouched moodily by the hearth and attempted a simple spell to bank the fire.

She stared at the fading embers and they stared back at her, utterly unmoved by her annoyance. She was chewing her lip and twisting a thick knot of hair between her fingers, the last orange glow of the dying fire reflected back in her eyes.

‘I don’t understand,’ she whined up at me. ‘If you could just tell me—’

‘I have been telling you for the last hour,’ I snapped. ‘If your thick tongue could find its way around the very simple syllables I have—’

‘But I said what you told me to,’ she mumbled, interrupting me without so much as blinking. ‘What part of it was wrong this time?’

I felt a muscle in my cheek tick; the truth was, I wasn’t entirely sure how she had managed to mangle it this time.

‘If you could deign to devote even an iota of your unfocused attention to—’ I hesitated. I could feel it: a halting, uneven flow of magic, trickling untidily out of her. I turned my head and sniffed, certain I could hear the faintest crackling coming from above my head. ‘What have you done this time?’

I stalked out of the library, my feet breaking into a run as the acrid smell of smoke filled my nostrils. I took the stairs three at a time, and even as I reached the landing above, I could see the flickering outline of flames – green, of course – spitting out of the fireplace in the guest-chamber above us, the great embroidered bedcurtains going up. I was moving my hands and uttering the words to put it out even as I walked towards it – but the fire resisted me: me, whose name was wrought in fire and smoke. The determined blaze wrestled against my will with an obstinance matched only by the intractable witch who had cast it.

I was panting a little when I rounded on her. ‘Of all the dangerous, ill-conceived, delinquent students in the history of magic,’ I yelled at her. ‘How did you do this? How can you fail so spectacularly to fill a jug of water, and then set an entire room on fire? I am sorry to have interrupted your idle descent into mediocre obscurity, but magic cannot be left untamed, least of all in your grubby, incompetent hands.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Why can I not even impress upon you the importance of proper focus? Do you have any notion of what happens to a witch who cannot control their power?’

My rage whistled around her like the wind around a particularly ancient and stubborn tree. I yelled at her solidly for almost ten minutes, the only measurable effect being the increased redness of my own face. She did look mildly repentant, but it was only when I called her a witless muttonheaded spawn of a pig-farmer that she felt moved to answer me.

‘My father’s a woodcutter,’ she said primly, thrusting her chin up and gazing fearlessly into my eyes.

‘Of axe-swinging lummocks!’ I snarled back at her, my face mere inches from hers.

Even then I could feel my rage bleeding out of me, sputtering out beneath her unending indifference.

‘Get out,’ I ordered, pointing towards the door, my heart still thudding uncomfortably in my chest. ‘I’d say make yourself useful, but I’m quite certain you’d find that impossible. Get out.’

For a while I just stood and stared at the ruined drapes and the blackened fireplace. Even after all my efforts, a small flicker of green still glowed stubbornly in the hearth; I closed my fist and quashed its power with my own. In truth, I didn’t understand how she had done this. What I had asked her to do was easy; what she had actually done was not. I ran a long-fingered hand over my face. She was an unfathomable contradiction. It seemed to me more and more that her very power itself was chaotic and unstable, and I was failing to bring it under control.

As if all of this weren’t enough to deal with, I was having my own problems with her power.

Like all the other ‘Dragonborn’ girls before her, I had brought Agnieszka into my tower for her connection to the Valley’s magic. Even apart from the Wood itself, it was clear that this place contained an old and immeasurable power. Great magic could be drawn from it, in exchange for making a connection with this dreadful place. The people of the Valley were all held to it in some way, caught like unsuspecting flies in a branching web of power; why else would anyone continue to live in the shadow of the Wood? I had no desire to further lock myself to this sorry existence and so it was a connection that I would not make – but I needed every advantage in my fight against the Wood, and so I took the power from the Dragonborn girls.

The magic itself lived in the Spindle, that great artery of water which stretched across the Valley and disappeared into the blackness of the Wood. Alluvium, I’d called it, thinking myself very clever: as if the magic were a particulate matter carried by a river and deposited into the people of the Valley, where I could tap it safely for its power. Yet, as was so often the case, when confronted by the girl – by Agnieszka – I was forced to re-evaluate my long-held beliefs.

When I tried to gain magic from her, it was not like drawing from some neatly deposited well of power but more like falling through a waterfall headfirst in spring; she was less like a pool of contained magic and more like a roaring tributary of the Spindle itself. Any attempt to strengthen myself from her connection exhausted me in equal measure, and every time I reached for it, I felt something pulling back against me, as if this magic were not mine to take. It wouldn’t matter if I could train her – if I had a true witch to fight alongside me when the Wood began to stir in spring – but with every failure I felt this possibility slipping further and further through my fingers.

So this is how we spent our weeks as we limped our way toward midwinter: in failed lessons and increasing unease. The girl herself seemed unperturbed by her failings, though I did notice a growing sullenness in her as we drew towards Midwinter’s Day. It was not uncommon for the Dragonborn girls to become melancholy at this time of year, though I had thought her beyond such common sentiment.

One lesson she stood staring out the window at the candle-trees with such a mournful expression that I almost felt moved to say something to her. Of course, at the exact moment I opened my mouth, she knocked over a pot of ink just as she slurred the words of a spell of mending; it knotted together one of her wool dresses with thick smudges of black ink, drawing it into her untidy working, along with the papers on my table and anything else her sloppy magic could get its claws into. I had to throw my own magic around it to keep her from devouring the book I was holding, and as usual I felt her magic beat hotly against my own.

Anything I had meant to say was swallowed up in my anger.

Her churlish moods did not depart even after the Midwinter’s Day festival, and two days later she came before me all red-eyed and morose for her lesson, her mind even more distracted than normal. Fortunately, I was saved from actually having to teach her anything by the approaching sound of galloping hoofbeats, followed by the scraping and scrabble as the horse was brought abruptly to a halt outside my door. I was on my feet even as the pounding on my gates began, a frown creasing my forehead – I was not expecting any kind of rider.

I beckoned open the doors with barely a twitch of my fingers and a man from the Yellow Marshes stumbled in, a bitter winter wind spilling in behind him. Yet, despite the cold, the man’s grey face was slick with sweat. Undoubtedly a bad sign.

He dropped nervously to one knee, his eyes fixed on the tip of my boots, but he stuttered out a panicked torrent of words before I’d even opened my mouth to bid him to speak. ‘My lord baron begs you to come at once. There is a chimaera come upon us, out of the mountain pass—’

‘What?’ I flinched in surprise. ‘It’s not the season. What sort of beast is it exactly? Has some idiot called a wyvern a chimaera, and been repeated by others—’

‘Serpent’s tail, bat’s wings, goat’s head,’ the man recited as if he’d memorised it from a bestiary. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, lord Dragon, it’s why my lord sent me—’

‘Enough.’ I waved raised my hand to halt his babbling; I was convinced of his belief at least. ‘ I will come. Wait here.’

I turned away and let an uneasy sigh escape me. A chimaera was no great threat to me – I suppose even a witless fool like Prince Marek might be capable of slaying a small one – but if one truly had been seen, now, in behaviour so at odds with its natural habits; well, it was an ill omen. I felt the dark, damp touch of the Wood at my back, and wondered what it reached for this time.

‘I wouldn’t have thought magical beasts have a season?’ said the girl, bobbing along uselessly behind me. ‘Don’t they just… do as they like?’

‘Try not to be a complete fool,’ I said, as we entered the laboratory. I reached for a case and shooed her towards the rack of potions, telling her which of the brightly coloured vials I would need. ‘A chimaera is engendered through corrupt magic, that doesn’t mean it’s not still a living beast, with its own nature. They’re spawned of snakes, mainly, because they hatch from eggs. Their blood is cold. They spend the winters keeping still and lying in the sun as much as they can. They fly in summer.’

‘So why has this one come now?’ she asked with surprising acuity.

‘Most likely it hasn’t, and that gasping yokel below frightened himself fleeing a shadow,’ but even as I said it, I knew I didn’t really believe it. I was startled from any further thought as I saw her reach for a potion of bright scarlet fire-heart. ‘No, not the red one, idiot girl,’ I snapped, trying not to imagine a bottle of fire-heart tumbling from her clumsy fingers. ‘That’s fire-heart. A chimaera would drink it up by the gallon if it had the chance, and become next kin to a real dragon, then. The red-violet, two farther on.’

She stumbled to obey, managing somehow to convey all the glass bottles to my outstretched hand without breaking anything.

‘All right,’ I closed the case and rounded on her. ‘Don’t read any of the books, don’t touch anything in this room, don’t touch anything in any room if you can help it, and try if you can not to reduce the place to rubble before I return.’

Her brow crumpled into a confused frown and she gaped at me. ‘What am I going to do here alone? Can’t I – come with you? How long will you be gone?’

I stared back at her, as equally surprised as she seemed to be. ‘A week, a month, or never, if I grow distracted, do something particularly clumsy, and get myself torn in half by a chimaera.’ However, the image I saw in my mind’s eye was of the chimaera swooping down not towards me, but towards her. ‘Which means the answer is no, you may not. And you are to do absolutely nothing, so far as possible.’ I had no doubt that plea was falling on deaf ears.

I gathered my case and hurried down to where the Baron’s man was waiting; he’d retreated back outside and was shuffling and stamping his feet in the breathless cold.

‘I’m taking your horse,’ I said. ‘Walk down to Olshanka after me; I’ll leave it there for you and take a fresh one.’

It was not a short walk to the nearest town, particularly in the depths of winter, but there was nothing else to be done. I swung myself easily into the saddle, the already exhausted creature shifting and side-stepping beneath me.

‘Kor szferila polzhyt palya kor,’ I uttered, waving a hand out towards the road before me. The snow had fallen thickly in the recent weeks, blanketing road, field, tree and the Wood alike. I sent forth a shimmering ball of raw fire, which rolled out away from me, cutting a clean path through the snow – it would ease the path of the Baron’s man as well. The horse twitched uneasily, shying backwards, its ears flat against its head, and so I pushed it forwards, urging it to a trot and then on to a swift, rolling canter.

I resolutely did not look back to the tower, nor up to the library window, where I knew a small face was pressed up at the glass, watching me go.