Uprooted. Part 10

"All right, Falcon," Prince Marek said, when we were all back on our horses. He drew off his gauntlet. He had a ring sitting above the first joint of his smallest finger, a delicate round band of gold set with small blue jewels; a woman's ring. "Show us the way."

"Hold your thumb above the band," the Falcon said, and leaning over from his own horse, he p.r.i.c.ked Marek's finger with a jeweled pin and squeezed it. A fat drop of blood fell onto the ring, painting the gold red while the Falcon murmured a finding spell.

The blue stones turned dark purple. A violet light gathered around Marek's hand, and even when he pulled his gauntlet back on, the light still limned it. He raised his fist up before him and moved it from side to side: it brightened when he held it towards the Wood. He led us forward, and one after another our horses crossed over the ash and went into the dark trees.

The Wood was a different place in spring than in winter. There was a sense of quickening and wakefulness. My skin shivered with the sense of watching eyes all around as soon as the first bough-shadows touched me. The horses' hooves fell with m.u.f.fled blows on the ground, picking over moss and underbrush, edging past brambles that reached for us with long p.r.i.c.king thorns. Silent dark birds darted almost invisible from tree to tree, pacing us. I was sure suddenly that if I had come alone, in spring, I wouldn't have reached Kasia at all; not without a fight.

But today, we rode with thirty men around us, all of them armored and armed. The soldiers carried long heavy blades and torches and sacks of salt, as the Dragon had ordered. The ones riding in the lead hacked at the brush, widening the trails as we pushed our way along them. The rest burned back the brambles to either side, and salted the earth of the path behind us so we'd be able to retreat the way we'd come.

But their laughter died. We rode silently but for the m.u.f.fled jingle of harness, the soft thuds of hooves on the bare track, a murmur of a word to one another here and there. The horses didn't even whicker anymore. They watched the trees with large eyes rimmed with white. We all felt that we were hunted.

Kasia rode next to me, and her head was bowed deeply over her horse's neck. I managed to reach out and catch her fingers with mine. "What is it?" I said softly.

She looked away from our path and pointed towards a tree in the distance, an old blackened oak struck years before by lightning; moss hung from its dead branches, like a bent old woman spreading wide her skirts to curtsy. "I remember that tree," she said. She dropped her hand and stared straight ahead through her horse's ears. "And that red rock we pa.s.sed, and the grey bramble-all of them. It's as though I didn't leave." She was whispering, too. "It's as though I never left at all. I don't know if you're even real, Nieshka. What if I've only been having another dream?"

I squeezed her hand, helplessly. I didn't know how to comfort her.

"There's something nearby," she said. "Something up ahead."

The captain heard her and glanced back. "Something dangerous?"

"Something dead," Kasia said, and dropped her eyes to her saddle, her hands clenched on the reins.

The light was brightening around us, and the track widened beneath the horses' feet. Their shoes clopped hollowly. I looked down and saw cobblestones half-buried beneath moss, broken. When I looked back up, I flinched: in the distance, through the trees, a ghostly grey face stared back at me, with a huge hollow eye above a wide square mouth: a gutted barn.

"Get off the track," the Dragon said sharply. "Go around: north or south, it doesn't matter. But don't ride through the square, and keep moving."

"What is this place?" Marek said.

"Porosna," the Dragon said. "Or what's left of it."

We turned our horses and went north, picking our way through brambles and the ruins of small poor houses, sagging on their beams, thatched roofs fallen in. I tried not to look at the ground. Moss and fine gra.s.s covered it thickly, and tall young trees were stretching up for sun, already spreading out overhead and breaking the sunlight into moving, shifting dapples. But there were shapes still half-buried beneath the moss, here and there a hand of bones breaking the sod, white fingertips poking through the soft carpeting green that caught the light and gleamed cold. Above the houses, if I looked towards where the village square would have stood, a vast shining silver canopy spread, and I could hear the far-off rustling whisper of the leaves of a heart-tree.

"Couldn't we stop and burn it?" I whispered to the Dragon, as softly as I could.

"Certainly," he said. "If we used fire-heart, and retreated the way we came at once. It would be the wise thing to do."

He didn't keep his voice down. But Prince Marek didn't look around, though a few of the soldiers glanced at us. The horses stretched their necks, trembling, and we rode on quickly, leaving the dead behind us.

We stopped a little while later to give the horses a rest. They were all tired, from fear as much as effort. The path had widened around some marshy ground, the end of a spring creek that was drying up now as the snowmelt stopped running. A small trickle still came bubbling along and made a wide clear pool over a bed of rocks. "Is it safe to let the horses drink?" Prince Marek asked the Dragon, who shrugged.

"You may as well," he said. "It's not much worse than having them beneath the trees. You'd have to put them all down after this in any case."

Janos had already slid down from his horse; he had a hand on its nose, calming the animal. He jerked his head around. "These are trained warhorses! They're worth their weight in silver."

"And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold," the Dragon said. "If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn't have brought them into the Wood. But don't distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won't arise."

Prince Marek threw him a hard look, but he didn't quarrel; instead he caught Janos aside and spoke to him consolingly.

Kasia had gone to stand by the edge of the clearing where a handful of deer tracks continued on; she was looking away from the pool. I wondered if she'd seen this place, too, in her long wandering imprisonment. She stared into the dark trees. The Dragon came past her; he glanced at her and spoke; I saw her head turn towards him.

"I wonder if you know what he owes you," the Falcon said unexpectedly, behind me; I startled and turned my head around. My horse was drinking thirstily; I gripped the reins and edged a little closer to its warm side. I didn't say anything.

The Falcon only raised one narrow eyebrow, black and neat. "The kingdom hasn't a limitless store of wizards. By law, the gift places you beyond va.s.salage. You have a right to a place at court, now, and the patronage of the king himself. You should never have been kept here in this valley in the first place, much less treated like a drudge." He waved a hand up and down at my clothes. I had dressed myself as I would have to go gleaning, in tall mud-boots, loose work trousers sewn of sacking, and a brown smock over it all. He still wore his white cloak, although the Wood's malice was stronger than whatever charm he'd used to keep it neat in the ordinary woods; there were threads snagged along the edge of it.

He misunderstood my doubtful look. "Your father is a farmer, I suppose?"

"A woodcutter," I said.

He flicked a hand as if to say it made not the least difference. "Then you know nothing of the court, I imagine. When the gift rose in me, the king raised my father to a knighthood, and when I finished my training, to a barony. He will not be less generous to you." He leaned towards me, and my horse snorted bubbles in the water as I leaned hard against her. "Whatever you may have heard, growing up in this backwater, Sarkan is by no means the only wizard of note in Polnya. I a.s.sure you that you needn't feel bound to him, simply because he's found an-interesting way to use you. I'm certain there are many other wizards you could align yourself with." He extended his hand towards me, and raised a thin spiraling flame in the palm of his hand with a murmured word. "Perhaps you'd care to try?"

"With you?" I blurted, undiplomatically; his eyes narrowed a little at the corners. I didn't feel at all sorry, though. "After what you did to Kasia?"

He put on injured surprise like a second cloak. "I've done her and you a favor. Do you imagine anyone would have been willing to take Sarkan's word for her cure? Your patron might charitably be called eccentric, burying himself out here and coming to court only when he's summoned, gloomy as a storm and issuing warnings of inevitable disasters that somehow never come. He hasn't any friends at court, and the few who would stand beside him are the very doom-sayers who insisted on having your friend put to death at once. If Prince Marek hadn't intervened, the king would have sent an executioner instead, and summoned Sarkan to the capital to answer for the crime of letting her live this long."

He'd come to be exactly that executioner, but apparently he didn't mean to let that stand in the way of claiming he'd done me a kindness. I didn't know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss. But he didn't force me to that point. He said only, in a gentle voice that suggested I was being unreasonable, "Think a little about what I've told you. I don't blame you for your anger, but don't let it make you spurn good advice," and gave me a courtly bow. He withdrew gracefully even as Kasia rejoined me. The soldiers were getting back on their horses.

Her face was sober, and she was rubbing her arms. The Dragon had gone to mount his own horse; I glanced over at him, wondering what he'd said to her. "Are you all right?" I asked Kasia.

"He told me not to fear I was still corrupted," she said. Her mouth moved a little, the ghost of a smile. "He said if I could fear it, I probably wasn't." Then even more unexpectedly she added, "He told me he was sorry I'd been afraid of him-of being chosen, I mean. He said he wouldn't take anyone again."

I had shouted at him over that; I hadn't ever expected him to listen. I stared at her, but I didn't have any time to wonder: Janos had mounted, looked his men over, and he said abruptly, "Where's Michal?"

We counted heads and horses, and called loudly in every direction. There was no answer, and no trail of broken branches or stirred leaves to show which way he'd gone. He'd been seen only a few moments before, waiting to give his horse water. If he'd been s.n.a.t.c.hed, it had been silently.

"Enough," the Dragon said at last. "He's gone."

Janos looked at the prince in protest. But after a silent moment, Marek said finally, "We go on. Ride two by two, and keep in each other's sight."

Janos's face was hard and unhappy as he wrapped the scarf closely over his nose and mouth again, but he jerked his head at the first two soldiers, and after a moment they started into motion down the path. We rode on into the Wood.

Beneath the boughs it was hard to tell what time it was, how long we'd been riding. The Wood was silent as no forest ever was: no hum of insects, not even the occasional twig-snap under a rabbit's foot. Even our own horses made very little noise, hooves coming down on soft moss and gra.s.s and saplings instead of bare dirt. The track was running out. The men in the front had to hack at the brush all the time to give us a way through at all.

A faint sound of rushing water came to us through the trees. The track abruptly widened again. We halted; I stood up in my stirrups, and over the shoulders of the soldier in front of me I could just see a break in the trees. We were on the bank of the Spindle again.

We came out of the forest nearly a foot above the river, on a soft sloping bank. Trees and brush overhung the water, willows trailing long weedy branches into the reeds that cl.u.s.tered thickly at the water's edge, between the pale tangle of exposed tree-roots against the wet dirt. The Spindle was wide enough that over the middle, sunlight broke through the interlaced canopy of the trees. It glittered on the river's surface without penetrating, and we could tell most of the day had gone. We sat for a long moment in silence. There was a wrongness to meeting the river like this, cutting across our path. We'd been riding east; we should have been alongside it.

When Prince Marek raised his fist towards the water, the violet gleam shone bright, beckoning us across to the other side, but the water was moving swiftly, and we couldn't tell how deep it was. Janos tossed in a small twig from one of the trees: it was dragged away downstream at once and vanished almost immediately under a little glossy swell. "We'll look for a ford," Prince Marek said.

We turned and went on riding single-file along the river, the soldiers hacking away at the vegetation to give the horses a foothold on the bank. There was never any sign of an animal track leading down to the edge, and the Spindle ran on, never narrowing. It was a different river here than in the valley, running fast and silent beneath the trees; as shadowed by the Wood as we were. I knew that the river never came out on the other side in Rosya; it vanished somewhere in the deep part of the Wood, swallowed up in some dark place. That seemed almost impossible to believe here, looking at the wide dark stretch of it.

Somewhere behind me, one of the men sighed deeply-a relieved noise, as though he were setting down a heavy weight. It was loud in the Wood's silence. I looked around. His scarf had sagged down from his face: it was the friendly young soldier with the broken nose who'd led my horse to water. He reached out with a knife drawn, sharp and bright silver, and he caught the head of the man riding in front of him and cut his throat in one deep red gash from side to side.

The other soldier died without a sound. The blood sprayed out over the animal's neck and onto the leaves. It reared wildly, crying out, and as the man sagged down off its back, it floundered into the brush and disappeared. The young soldier with the knife was still smiling. He threw himself off his own horse, into the water.

We were frozen by the suddenness of it. Up ahead of me, Prince Marek gave a shout and flung himself off his own mount and down the slope, dirt furrowing away from his boots as he slid to the water's edge. He tried to reach out and catch the soldier's hand, but the man didn't reach back. He went past the prince on his back, floating like driftwood, the ends of his scarf and cloak trailing away in the water behind him. His legs were already being dragged down as his boots filled with water, then his whole body was sinking. We had one last pale flash of his round face staring upwards in the sun. The water closed in over his head, over the broken nose; the cloak went down with a last green billowing. He was gone.

Prince Marek had climbed back up to his feet. He stood down on the bank watching, gripping the trunk of one narrow sapling for balance, until the soldier went under. Then he turned and clambered up the slope. Janos had slid down from his own mount, catching Marek's reins; he reached down an arm to help him up. Another one of the soldiers had caught the reins of the other now-riderless horse; it was trembling, its nostrils flaring, but it stood still. Everything settled back into quiet again. The river ran on, the branches hung still, the sun shone on the water. We didn't even hear any noise from the horse that had run away. It was as though nothing had happened.

The Dragon pushed his horse down the line and looked down at Prince Marek. "The rest of them will go by nightfall," he said bluntly. "If not you as well."

Marek looked up at him, his face for the first time open and uncertain; as though he'd just seen something beyond his understanding. I saw the Falcon beside them looking back along the line of the men with unblinking eyes, his piercing eyes trying to see something invisible. Marek looked at him; the Falcon looked back and nodded very slightly, confirming.

The prince hauled himself up into his saddle. He spoke to the soldiers ahead of him. "Cut us a clearing." They started to hack at the brush around us; the rest of them joined in, burning and salting it as they went, until we had cleared enough room to crowd in together. The horses were eager to push their heads in and b.u.t.t up closely against one another.

"All right," Marek said to the soldiers, their gazes fixed on him. "You all know why you're here. Every one of you is hand-picked. You're men of the north, the best I have. You've followed me into Rosyan sorcery and made a wall beside me against their cavalry charges; there's not a one of you who doesn't wear the scars of battle. I asked every one of you, before we left, if you'd ride into this benighted place with me; every one of you said yes.

"Well, I won't swear to you now I'll bring you out alive; but you have my oath that every man who does come out with me will have every honor I can bestow, and every one of you made a landed knight. And we'll ford the river here, now, however best we can, and we will ride on together: to death or worse perhaps, but like men and not like frightened voles."

They must have known, by then, that Marek himself didn't know what would happen; that he hadn't been ready for the shadow of the Wood. But I could see his words lift some of that shadow from all of their faces: a brightness came into them, a deep breath. None of them asked to turn back. Marek took his hunting horn from his saddle. It was a long thing made all of bra.s.s, bright-polished and circled on itself. He put it to his mouth and blew with all his voice, an enormous martial noise that shouldn't have made my heart leap but did: brash and ringing. The horses stamped and flicked their ears back and forth, and the soldiers drew their swords and roared along with that note. Marek wheeled his horse and led us in a single headlong rush down the slope and into the cold dark water, and all the other horses followed.

The river hit my legs like a shock as we plunged into it, foaming away from my horse's broad chest. We kept going. The water climbed up over my knees, over my thighs. My horse had its head held up high, nostrils flaring as its legs beat at the riverbed, surging forward and trying to keep purchase on the bottom.

Somewhere behind me, one of the horses stumbled and lost its footing. It was tumbled over at once and carried into another soldier's horse. The river swept them away and swallowed them whole. We didn't stop: there was no way to stop. I groped for a spell, but I couldn't think of anything: the water was roaring at me, and then they were gone.

Prince Marek sounded another blast from his horn: he and his horse were lurching up on the other side of the river, and he was kicking it onward into the trees. One by one we came up out of the river, dripping wet, and kept going without a pause: all of us crashing through the brush, following the purple blaze of Marek's light up ahead, following the sound of his calling horn. The trees were whipping by us. The underbrush was lighter on this side of the river, the trunks larger and farther apart. We weren't riding in a single line anymore: I could see some of the other horses weaving through the trees beside me as we flew, as we fled, running away as much as running towards. I had given up all hope of the reins and just clung to my own horse with my fingers woven into the mane, bent over its neck away from lashing branches. I could see Kasia near me, and the bright flash of the Falcon's white cloak ahead.

The mare was panting beneath me, shuddering, and I knew she couldn't last; even strong, trained warhorses would founder, ridden like this after swimming a cold river. "Nen elshayon," I whispered to her ears, "nen elshayon," and let her have a little strength, a little warmth. She stretched out her fine head and tossed it, gratefully, and I closed my eyes and tried to widen it to all of them, saying, "Nen elshayine," pushing out my hand towards Kasia's horse as though throwing it a line.

I felt that imagined line catch; I flung more of them out, and the horses drew closer together, running more easily again. The Dragon threw a brief look back at me over his shoulder. We kept on, riding behind the blowing horn, and now I started to see something moving through the trees at last. Walkers, many walkers, and they were coming towards us rapidly, all their long stick-legs moving in unison. One of them stretched out a long arm and caught one of the soldiers off his horse, but they were falling behind us, as if they hadn't expected our pell-mell speed. We burst together through a wall of pines into a vast clearing, the horses leaping to clear a stand of brush, and before us stood a monstrous heart-tree.

The trunk of it was broader than the side of a horse, towering up into an immensity of spreading branches. Its boughs were laden with pale silver-green leaves and small golden fruits with a horrible stink, and beneath the bark looking at us was a human face, overgrown and smoothed out into a mere suggestion, with two hands crossed across the breast like a corpse. Two great roots forked at its feet, and in the hollow between them lay a skeleton, almost swallowed by moss and rotting leaves. A smaller root twisted out through one open eye socket, and gra.s.s poked through ribs and sc.r.a.ps of rusted mail. The remains of a shield lay across the body, barely marked with a black double-headed eagle: the royal crest of Rosya.

We pulled up our snorting, heaving horses just short of its branches. Behind me I heard a sudden snapping noise like the door of an oven slamming shut, and at the same moment I was struck by a heavy weight out of nowhere, thrown out of my saddle. I hit the bare ground painfully, the air knocked out of my lungs, my elbow sc.r.a.ped and legs bruised.

I twisted. Kasia was on top of me: she'd knocked me off my horse. I stared up past her. My horse was in the air above us, headless. A monstrous thing like a praying mantis was holding it up in two forelegs. The mantis blended against the heart-tree: narrow golden eyes the same shape as the fruits, and a body of the same silvery green as the leaves. It had bitten the horse's head off with a single snap, in the same lunging movement. Behind us, another of the soldiers had fallen headless, and a third was screaming, his leg gone, thrashing in the grip of another mantis: there were a dozen of the creatures, coming out of the trees.

Chapter 15.

The silver mantis dropped my horse to the ground and spat out the head. Kasia was scrambling up, dragging me away. We were all caught in horror for a moment, and then Prince Marek shouted wordlessly and flung his horn at the head of the silver mantis. He dragged out his sword. "Fall in! Get the wizards behind us!" he roared, and spurred his horse onward, getting between us and the thing, slashing at it. His sword skidded down the carapace, peeling up a long translucent strip as though he'd been paring a carrot.

The warhorses showed they really were worth their weight in silver: they weren't panicking now, as any ordinary beast would have done, but rearing and lashing out, their voices shrilling. Their hooves struck with hollow thumps against the mantis sh.e.l.ls. The soldiers made a loose circle around me and Kasia, the Dragon and the Falcon pulling their horses in on either side of us. All the soldiers were putting their reins in their teeth; half of them had already drawn swords, making a bristling wall of points to protect us, while the others settled their shields on their arms first.

The mantis creatures were coming out of the trees to surround us. They were still hard to see in the dappled light with the trees moving, but no longer invisible. They didn't move like the walkers, slow and stiff; they ran lightly forward on four legs, the wide spiked jaws of their front legs quivering. "Suitah liekin, suitah lang!" the Falcon was shouting, summoning that blazing white fire he'd used in the tower. He flung it out like a lash to curl around the forelegs of the nearest mantis as it reared up to s.n.a.t.c.h for another man. He jerked on the line like a man pulling in a resisting calf, and dragged the mantis forward: there was a crackling bitter smell of burning oil where the fire pressed against its sh.e.l.l, thin plumes of white smoke curling away. Off-balance, the mantis snapped its terrible mandibles on thin air. The Falcon pulled its head into the line, and one of the soldiers hacked at its neck.

I didn't have much hope: in the valley, our ordinary axes and swords and scythes barely sc.r.a.ped the skin of the walkers. But this sword somehow bit deep. Chips of chitin flew into the air, and the man on the other side worked the point of his sword into the joint where the neck met the head. He put his weight against the hilt and shoved it through. The mantis's sh.e.l.l cracked loudly like a crab's leg, and its head sagged, the jaws going limp. Ichor oozed out of its body over the sword-blade, steaming, and I briefly saw letters gleam golden through the haze before they faded again into the steel.

But even as the mantis died, its whole body lurched forward, pushing through the ring and nearly knocking into the Falcon's horse. Another mantis leaned in through the opened s.p.a.ce, reaching for him, but he seized the reins in a fist and controlled his mount as it tried to rear, then pulled his lash of fire back and cracked it into the second mantis's face.

On the ground with Kasia, I could barely see anything else of the fighting. I heard Prince Marek and Janos shouting encouragement to the soldiers, and the harsh sc.r.a.ping noise of metal meeting sh.e.l.l. Everything was confusion and noise, happening so quickly I almost couldn't breathe, much less think. I looked up wildly at the Dragon, who was fighting his own alarmed horse; I saw him snarl something under his breath and kick his feet loose from the stirrups. He threw the reins to one of the soldiers, a man whose horse was sagging with a terrible gaping cut to its chest, and slid down to the ground beside us.

"What should I do?" I cried to him. I groped helplessly for a spell. "Murzhetor-?"

"No!" he shouted at me, over the cacophony, and seizing my arm turned me around, facing the heart-tree. "We're here for the queen. If we spend ourselves fighting a useless battle, all of this has been for nothing."

We had stayed back from the tree, but the mantises were herding us towards it little by little, forcing us all beneath the boughs, and the smell of the fruit was burning in my nostrils. The trunk was hideously vast. I had never seen a tree so large, even in the deepest forest, and there was something grotesque about its size, like a swollen tick full of blood.

This time a threat alone wouldn't work, even if I could have summoned up the rage to call fulmia: the Wood wasn't going to hand over the queen to save even so large a heart-tree, not now that it knew we could kill the tree afterwards, purging her. I couldn't imagine what we could do to this tree: the smooth bark shone with a hard l.u.s.ter like metal. The Dragon was staring at it narrowly, muttering as he worked his hands, but even before the leaping current of flame splashed against the bark, I knew instinctively it would do no good; and I didn't believe even the soldiers' enchanted swords could bite into that wood at all.

The Dragon kept trying: spells of breaking, spells of opening, spells of cold and lightning, systematic even while the fighting raged around us. He was looking for some weakness, some crack in the armor. But the tree withstood everything, and the smell of the fruit grew stronger. Two more of the mantis creatures had been killed; four more soldiers were dead. Kasia made a m.u.f.fled cry as something rolled to a thump against my foot, and I looked down at Janos's head, his clear blue eyes still fixed in an intent frown. I jerked away from it in horror and tripped to my knees, sickened all at once and helplessly: I vomited on the gra.s.s. "Not now!" the Dragon shouted at me, as though I could help it. I had never seen fighting before, not like this, this slaughter of men. They were being killed like cattle. I sobbed on my hands and knees, tears falling in the dirt, and then I put out my hands and gripped the widest roots near me, and said, "Kisara, kisara, vizh," like a chant.

The roots twitched. "Kisara," I said again, over and over, and droplets of water slowly collected on the surface of the roots, oozing out of them and rolling down to join the tiny damp spots, one after another after another. The dampness spread, became a circle between my hands. The thinnest branching rootlets in the open air were shriveling in on themselves. "Tulejon vizh," I said, whispering, coaxing. "Kisara." The roots began to writhe and squirm in the ground like fat earthworms as the water squeezed out of them, thin rivulets running. There was mud between my hands now, spreading and running away from the bigger roots, exposing more of them.

The Dragon knelt beside me. He took up the song of an enchantment that rang vaguely familiar in my ears, something I had heard once long before: the spring after the Green Year, I remembered, when he'd come to help the fields recover. He'd brought us water from the Spindle, then, with channels that dug themselves from the river all the way to our burned and barren fields. But this time the narrow channels ran away from the heart-tree instead, and as I chanted the water out of the roots, they carried the water far away, and the ground around the roots began to parch into desert, mud cracking into dust and sand.

Then Kasia caught us both by the arms and nearly levered us up from the ground, pulling us stumbling forward. The walkers we'd pa.s.sed in the trees were coming into the clearing now, a whole host of them: as though they'd been lying in wait for us. The silver mantis had lost a limb but still pressed the attack, darting side-to-side and lashing out with spiked arms wherever an opening afforded. The horses Janos had worried about were nearly all down or fled by now. Prince Marek fought on foot, shoulder-to-shoulder with sixteen men in a row, their shields overlapping into a wall and the Falcon still lashing fire from behind them, but we were being crowded in, ever closer to the trunk. The heart-tree's leaves were rustling in the wind, louder and louder, a dreadful whispering, and we were nearly at the foot of the tree. I dragged in a breath and almost vomited again from the sweet dreadful stink of the fruit.

One of the walkers tried edging around the side of the line, craning its head around sideways to see us. Kasia s.n.a.t.c.hed a sword from the ground, fallen from some soldier's hand, and swung it in a wild sideways arc. The blade struck the walker's side and splintered through it with a crack like a breaking twig. It fell into a twitching heap.

The Dragon was coughing beside me from the stench of the fruit. But we took up our chant again, desperately, and dragged more water from the roots. Here close to the tree, the thicker roots resisted at first, but together our spells pulled the water from them, from the earth, and the dirt began to crumble in around the tree. Its branches were shivering: water was beginning to come rolling down the trunk in thick green-stained droplets, too. Leaves were beginning to dry up and shed like rain from above us, but then I heard a terrible scream: the silver mantis had seized another one of the men from out of the line, and this time it did not kill him. It bit off the hand that held the sword, and flung him to the walkers.

The walkers reached up and plucked fruits off the tree and crammed them into his mouth. He screamed around them, choking, but they pressed more upon him and forced his jaw shut around them, juice spilling in rivulets down his face. His whole body arched, thrashing in their grip. They held him upside down over the earth. The mantis jabbed him in the throat with one sharp point of its claw, and the blood came spurting out of him and watered the dry parched roots like rain.

The tree made a sighing, shivering sound as thin lines of red flushed down the roots and faded into the silver of its trunk. I was sobbing in horror, watching the life drain out of his face-a knife took him in the chest, sinking into his heart: Prince Marek had thrown it.

But much of our work had already been undone, and the walkers were ringing us all around, waiting, hungrily it now seemed: the men drew closer together, panting. The Dragon cursed under his breath; he turned back to the tree and used another spell, one I had seen him use before to form his potion-bottles. He cast it now and reached down into the desiccated sand around our feet and began to pull out ropes and skeins of glowing gla.s.s. He flung them in swooping heaps onto the exposed roots, the falling leaves. Small fires began to catch around us, putting up a haze of smoke.

I was shaking, dazed with horror and blood. Kasia pushed me behind her, the sword in her hand, sheltering me even while tears were sliding down her face, too. "Look out!" she shouted, and I turned to see a great branch above the Dragon's head crack. It came falling heavily onto his shoulder and knocked him forward.

He caught himself instinctively on the trunk, dropping the rope of gla.s.s he was holding. He tried to pull away, but the tree was already seizing him, bark growing over his hands. "No!" I screamed, reaching for him.

He managed to drag one arm free at the cost of the other, silver bark climbing to the elbow, roots whipping themselves out of the ground and twining about his leg, dragging him in closer. They were tearing at his clothes. He seized a pouch at his waist, jerked the strap loose, and thrust something into my hands: it gurgled, a vial glowing fierce red-violet. It was fire-heart, a dram of it, and he shook me by the arm. "Now, you fool! If it takes me, you're all dead! Burn it and run!"

I looked up from the bottle and stared at him. He meant me to fire the tree, I realized; he meant me to burn the tree-and him with it. "Do you think I'd rather live like this?" he said to me, his voice tight and clenched, as though he was speaking past horror: the bark had already swallowed one of his legs, and climbed nearly to the shoulder.

Kasia was next to me, her face pale and stricken; she said, "Nieshka, it's worse than dying. It's worse."

I stood with the vial clutched in my hand, glowing between my fingers, and then I put my hand on his shoulder and said to him, "Ulozishtus. The purging spell. Cast it with me."

He stared at me. Then he gave one short jerk of a nod. "Give her the vial," he said, between his clenched teeth. I gave Kasia the fire-heart and gripped the Dragon's hand, and together we said the spell: I whispered, "Ulozishtus, ulozishtus," a steady drumbeat, and then he joined in with me, reciting all the long careful song of it. But I didn't let the purging magic flow: I held it back. In my mind I built a dam before the power of it, let our joined spell fill up a vast lake within me as the working built and built.

The swelling heat of it filled me, burning bright, almost unbearable. I couldn't breathe, my lungs crushed against my rib cage; my heart strained to beat. I couldn't see: the fighting went on somewhere behind me, a distant clamoring only: shouts, the eerie clatter of the walkers, the hollow ring of swords. It was coming closer and closer still. I felt Kasia's back pressed to mine; she was making herself a final shield. The fire-heart was singing cheerful and hungry in the vial she held, hoping to be let out, hoping to devour us all, almost comforting.

I held the working as long as I could, until the Dragon's voice failed, and then I opened my eyes again. The bark had climbed over his neck, up his cheek. It had sealed over his mouth, it was creeping around his eye. He squeezed my hand once, and then I poured the power through him, down the half-formed channel to the devouring tree.

He stiffened, his eyes going wide and unseeing. His hand clenched on mine in silent agony. Then the bark over his mouth withered away, flaking like the shed skin of some monstrous snake, and he was screaming aloud. I clutched his hand with both of mine, biting my lip against the pain of his brutal grip while he cried out, the tree blackening and charring away around him, leaves above us crackling into flames. They were falling, stinging bits of ash, the hideous smell of the fruit cooking and liquefying. Juice ran down the limbs, and sap came bursting in boiling-hot gouts from the trunks and the bark.

The roots caught as quickly as well-seasoned firewood: we'd pulled so much water out of them. The bark was loosening and peeling off in great strips. Kasia grabbed the Dragon's arm and wrestled his limp body away from the tree, blistered and seared. I helped her pull him away through the gathering smoke, and then she turned and plunged through the haze again. Dimly I saw her gripping a slab of bark, pulling it away in a thick sheet; she hacked at the tree with her sword and pried at it, and more of the sides broke away. I laid the Dragon down and stumbled to help her: the tree was too hot to touch, but I put my hands over it anyway and after a groping moment I blurted, "Ilmeyon!" Come out, come out, as if I were Jaga calling a rabbit out of a burrow for dinner.

Kasia hacked at it again, and then the wood split with a crack, and I saw through it a sliver of a woman's face, blank, a staring blue eye. Kasia reached into the edges of the broken gap and started pulling away more of the wood, breaking it away, and suddenly the queen came falling out, her whole body bending limply forward out of a hollow of wood and leaving a woman's shape behind, sc.r.a.ps of desiccated cloth falling away from her body and catching fire even as she tipped through the broken opening. She stopped, hanging: her head wouldn't come free, held by a net of golden hair, impossibly long and embedded in the wood all around her. Kasia slashed the sword down through the cloud, and the queen came loose and fell into our arms.