Uprooted. Part 21

We walked down to Olshanka together, the road still dusty from so much use yesterday. Yesterday. I tried not to think about it: yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone. They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down. I saw their faces in the dust while we walked. Someone in Olshanka saw us coming, and Borys came out with a wagon to carry us the rest of the way. In the back we swayed with the wheels like sacks of grain. The creaking was every song I'd ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

Borys's wife Natalya put me to sleep in Marta's old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt. She'd gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her, a warm welcoming place ready to receive me, and Natalya's hand on my forehead was my mother, telling me to sleep, sleep; the monsters wouldn't come. I shut my eyes and pretended to believe her.

I didn't wake again until evening, a warm summer evening with the gentle twilight falling blue. There was a familiar comfortable rising bustle in the house, someone getting supper, others coming in from the day's work. I sat at the window without moving for a long time more. They were much richer than my family: they had an upstairs part in their house just for the bedrooms. Marisha was running in the big garden with a dog and four other children, most of them older than her; she was in a fresh cotton dress marked up with gra.s.s stains, and her hair slipping out of tidy braids. But Stashek was sitting near the door watching them, though one of the others was a boy his age. Even in simple clothes he didn't look anything like an ordinary child, with his shoulders very straight and his face solemn as church.

"We have to take them back to Kralia," Solya said. Given time to rest, he'd gathered back up some of his outrageous self-a.s.surance, sitting himself down in our company as though he'd been with us all along.

It was dark; the children had been put to bed. We were sitting in the garden with gla.s.ses of cool plum brandy, and I felt as though I were pretending to be grown-up. It was too much like my parents taking visitors to sit in the chairs and the shady swinging bench just inside the forest, talking of crops and families, and meanwhile all of us children ran cheerfully amok, finding berries or chestnuts, or just having games of tag.

I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn't have been able to just sneak up on me. It didn't seem real even to be sitting here at all, much less talking of thrones and murder, quite seriously, as if those were themselves real things and not just bits out of songs.

I felt even more peculiar, listening to them all argue. "Prince Stashek must be crowned at once, and a regency established," Solya was going on. "The Archduke of Gidna and the Archduke of Varsha, at least-"

"Those children aren't going anywhere but to their grandparents," Kasia said, "if I have to put them on my back and carry them all the way myself."

"My dear girl, you don't understand-" Solya said.

"I'm not your dear girl," Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him. "If Stashek's the king now, all right; the king's asked me to take him and Marisha to their mother's family. That's where they're going."

"The capital is too close in any case." Sarkan flicked his fingers, impatient, dismissive. "I do understand the Archduke of Varsha won't want the king in the hands of Gidna," he added peevishly, when Solya drew breath to argue, "and I don't care. Kralia wasn't safe before; it won't be safer now."

"But nowhere will be safe," I said, breaking in on them, bewildered. "Not for long." They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.

After a moment, Sarkan said, "Gidna is on the ocean. The northern castles will be well placed to mount a substantial defense-"

"The Wood will come anyway!" I said. I knew it. I'd looked into the Wood-queen's face, felt that implacable wrath beating against my skin. All these years, Sarkan had held the Wood back like a tide behind a dam of stone; he'd diverted its power away into a thousand streams and wells of power, scattered throughout the valley. But it was a dam that couldn't hold forever. Today, next week, next year, the Wood would break through. It would reclaim all those wells, those streams, go roaring up to the mountainside. And fueled with all that new-won strength, it would come over the mountain pa.s.ses.

There wasn't going to be any strength to meet them. The army of Polnya was shattered, the army of Rosya wounded-and the Wood could afford to lose a battle or two or a dozen; it would establish its footholds and scatter its seeds, and even if it was pushed back over one mountain pa.s.s or another, that wouldn't matter in the end. It would keep coming. She would keep coming. We might hold the Wood off long enough for Stashek and Marisha to grow up, grow old, even die, but what about Borys and Natalya's grandchildren, running with them in the garden? Or their own children, growing up in the lengthening shadow?

"We can't keep holding the Wood back with Polnya burning behind us," Sarkan said. "The Rosyans will come over the Rydva for vengeance, as soon as they know Marek is dead-"

"We can't hold the Wood back at all!" I said. "That's what they tried-that's what you've been doing. We have to stop it for good. We have to stop her."

He glared at me. "Yes, what a marvelous idea. If Alosha's blade couldn't kill her, nothing can. What do you propose to do?"

I stared back and saw the knotting fear in my stomach reflected in his eyes. His face stilled. He stopped glaring. He sank back in his chair, still staring at me. Solya eyed us both in confusion and Kasia watched me with worry in her face. But there wasn't anything else to do.

"I don't know," I said to Sarkan, my voice shaking. "But I'll do something. Will you come into the Wood with me?"

- Kasia stood with me irresolute at the crossroads outside Olshanka, unhappy. The sky was still the first pale pink-grey of morning. "Nieshka, if you think I can help you," she said softly, but I shook my head. I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a distant shadow but happy anyway. Then the sun came down the road and touched us. We let go and stepped back: she was golden and stern, almost too beautiful to be living, and there was magic in my hands. I took her face in my hands a moment; we leaned our foreheads together, and then she turned away.

Stashek and Marisha were sitting in the wagon, watching anxiously for Kasia, with Solya next to them; one of the soldiers was driving. Some more men had come wandering back into town, those who'd run away from the fighting and the tower before the end, a mix of men from the Yellow Marshes and Marek's men. They were all going along as escort. They weren't enemies anymore; they hadn't really been enemies to begin with. Even Marek's men had thought they were saving the royal children. They'd all just been put on opposite sides of a chessboard by the Wood-queen, so she could sit to the side and watch them taken off by one another.

The wagon was loaded with supplies from the whole town, goods that would have gone to Sarkan's tribute later that year. He'd given Borys gold for the horses and the wagon. "They'll pay you to drive them as well," he'd said, handing him the purse. "And take your family along; you'd have enough to make a new start of it."

Borys looked at Natalya. She shook her head a little. He turned back and said, "We'll stay."

Sarkan muttered as he turned away, impatient with what looked to him like folly. But I met Borys's eyes. The low murmur of the valley sang beneath my feet, home. I had deliberately come outside without shoes, so I could curl my toes into the soft gra.s.s and the dirt and draw that strength into me. I knew why he wasn't going; why my mother and father wouldn't go if I went to Dvernik and asked them to leave. "Thank you," I told him.

The wagon creaked away. The soldiers fell in behind it. From the back, Kasia looked at me, her arms around the children, until the dust of marching raised up a muddy cloud behind them and I couldn't see their faces anymore. I turned back to Sarkan: he regarded me with a hard, grim face. "Well?" he said.

We walked down the road from Borys's big house, towards the wooden swish-thump of the flour mill's water-wheel, the river steadily churning it along. Under our feet, the road gradually turned into loose pebbles, then slipped beneath the clear just-foaming water. There were a handful of boats tied up on the sh.o.r.e. We untied the smallest one and we pushed it out into the river, my skirts hiked up and his boots thrown into the boat; we weren't very graceful about getting in, but we managed it without soaking ourselves, and he picked up the oars.

He sat down with his back to the Wood and said, "Keep time for me." I sang Jaga's quickening song in a low voice while he pulled, and the banks went blurring by.

- The Spindle ran clear and straight under the rising hot sun. It sparkled on the water. We slipped quickly along it, half a mile with each oar-stroke. I had a glimpse of women doing the washing on the bank at Poniets, sitting up with heaps of white linens around them to watch us dart hummingbird-by, and when we pa.s.sed Viosna for a moment we were under the cherry-trees, small fruits just forming, the water still drifted with fallen petals. I didn't catch sight of Dvernik, though I knew when we pa.s.sed it. I recognized a curve of riverbank, half a mile east of the village, and looked back to see the bright bra.s.s c.o.c.kerel on the church steeple. The wind was blowing at our backs.

I kept singing softly until the dark wall of trees came into view ahead. Sarkan put the oars down into the bottom of the boat. He turned and looked at the ground before the trees, and his face was grim. I realized after a moment that there wasn't a line of burnt ground visible anymore; only thick green gra.s.s.

"We had burned it back a mile all along the border," he said. He looked south towards the mountains, as if he was trying to judge the distance the Wood had already come. I didn't think it mattered now. However far was too far, and not as far as it would be, either. We'd find a way to stop it or we wouldn't.

The Spindle's current carried us along, drifting. Up ahead, the slim dark trees put up long arms and laced fingers alongside the river, a wall rising on either bank. He turned back to me, and we joined hands. He chanted a spell of distraction, of invisibility, and I took it and murmured to our boat, telling it to be an empty stray boat on the water, rope frayed and broken, b.u.mping gently over rocks. We tried to be nothing to notice, nothing to care about. The sun had climbed high overhead, and a band of light ran down the river, between the shadows of the trees. I put one of the oars behind us as a rudder, and kept us on the shining road.

The banks became thicker and wilder, brambles full of red berries and thorns like dragon's teeth, pale white and deadly sharp. The trees grew thick and misshapen and enormous. They leaned over the river; they threw thin whips of branches into the air, clawing for more of the sky. They looked the way a snarl sounds. Our safe path dwindled smaller and narrower, and the water beneath us ran silent, as if it, too, was in hiding. We huddled in the middle of the boat.

A b.u.t.terfly betrayed us, a small sc.r.a.p of fluttering black and yellow that had gotten lost flying over the Wood. It sank down to rest on the prow of our boat, exhausted, and a bird like a black knife darted out of the trees and s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. It perched on the prow with the crushed b.u.t.terfly wings sticking out of its beak, and snapped them up, three quick clacks, staring at us with eyes like small black beads. Sarkan tried to grab it, but it darted away into the trees, and a cold wind rolled down the river at our backs.

A groaning came from the banks. One of the old ma.s.sive trees leaned deeply down, roots pulling free from the earth, and fell with a roar into the water just behind our boat. The river heaved underneath us. My oar spun away. We grabbed at the sides of the boat and clung as we went spinning over the surface and plunged onward, stern-first. The boat dipped, and water came pouring in over the sides, ice-cold on my bare feet. We kept spinning, buffeted; I saw as we turned a walker clattering out on the fallen tree, from the bank. It turned its stick-head to see us.

Sarkan shouted, "Rendkan selkhoz!" and our boat straightened itself out. I pointed a hand at the walker, but I knew it was already too late. "Polzhyt," I said, and a fire bloomed suddenly orange-bright along its twiggy back. But it turned and ran away into the woods on its four legs, smoke and orange glow trailing away behind it. We'd been seen.

The full force of the Wood's gaze came down on us like a hammer-blow. I fell back into the bottom of the boat, struck, the cold water soaking like a shock through my clothes. The trees were reaching for us, stretching th.o.r.n.y branches over the water, leaves coming down around us and gathering in the wake of our boat. We came around a bend and up ahead there were half a dozen walkers, a deep green mantis at their head, all of them wading out into the river like a living dam.

The water had quickened, as if the Spindle would have liked to carry us past them, but there were too many, and still more coming into the river beyond. Sarkan stood up in the boat, drawing breath for a spell, ready to strike them with fire, with lightning. I heaved myself up and caught his arm and pulled him with me over the back of the boat, into the water, feeling his startled thrash of indignation through my hand. We plunged deep into the current and came up again floating as a leaf holding on to a twig, pale green and brown, swirling with all the others. It was illusion and it wasn't; I held it with all my heart, wanting nothing more than to be a leaf, a tiny blown leaf. The river seized us in a narrow swift current and carried us on eagerly, as if it had only been waiting for the chance.

The walkers s.n.a.t.c.hed up our boat, and the mantis tore it apart with its clawed forelegs, smashing it into splinters and putting its head in, as if trying to find us. It took its gleaming faceted eyes out again and looked around and around. But by then we had already shot by their legs; the river sucked us briefly down through a whirling eddy into murky green silence, out of the Wood's gaze, and spat us out again farther down into a square sc.r.a.p of sunlight, another dozen leaves bursting up with us. Back farther upstream, the walkers and the mantis were churning up the water, threshing it with their limbs. We drifted away on the surface, in silence; the water took us along.

- We were leaf and twig for a long time in the dark. The river had dwindled around us, and the trees had grown so monstrous and high that their branches entwined overhead into a canopy so thick that no sunlight came through, only a filtered dim glow. The underbrush had died away, starved of the sun. Thin-bladed ferns and red-capped mushrooms cl.u.s.tered on the banks with drowned grey reeds and snarled nests of pale exposed roots in black mud, drinking up the river. There was more room among the dark trunks. Walkers and mantises came to the banks to look for us, as did other things: one of them a great snouting boar the size of a pony with too-heavy furred shoulders and eyes like red coals, sharp teeth hooked over its upper jaw. It came closer to us than anything else, snuffling at the banks, tearing through the mud and heaped dead leaf mulch only a short way from where we drifted carefully, carefully by. We are leaf and twig, I sang silently, leaf and twig, nothing more, and as we eddied on I saw the boar shake its head and snort in dissatisfaction, going back into the trees.

That was the last beast we saw. The terrible beating rage of the Wood had lightened when we fell out of its gaze. It was looking for us, but it didn't know where to look anymore. The pressure faded still more now as we were carried onward. All the calls and whistling noises of birds and insects were dying away. Only the Spindle went on gurgling to itself, louder; it widened a little again, running quicker over a shallow bed full of polished rocks. Suddenly Sarkan moved, gasped out of human lungs, and hauled me thrashing up into the air. Not a hundred feet away the river roared over a cliff's-edge, and we weren't really leaves, even if I'd been careful to forget that.

The river tried to keep pulling at us, coaxingly. The rocks were as slippery as wet ice. They barked my ankles and elbows and knees, and we fell three times. We dragged ourselves to the bank barely feet from the waterfall's edge, wet and shivering. The trees around us were silent, dark; they weren't watching us. They were so tall that down here on the ground they were only long smooth towers, their hearts grown ages ago; to them we weren't anything more than squirrels, poking around their roots. An enormous cloud of mist rose up from the base of the falls, hiding the edges of the cliff and everything below. Sarkan looked at me: Now what?

I walked into the fog, carefully, feeling my way. The earth breathed moist and rich beneath my feet, and the river-mist clung to my skin. Sarkan kept a hand on my shoulder. I found footholds and handholds, and we worked our way down the ragged, tumbled cliffside, until abruptly my foot slipped out from under me and I sat down hard. He fell with me, and we went slithering together down the rest of the hill, just managing to stay on our rears instead of tumbling head-over-foot, until the slope spilled us out hard against the base of a tree-trunk, leaning precariously over the churning basin of the waterfall, its roots clutching a ma.s.sive boulder to keep from toppling in.

We lay there stunned out of our breath, lying on our backs staring upwards. The grey boulder frowned down at us, like nothing more than an old big-nosed man with bushy-eyebrow roots. Even bruised and sc.r.a.ped, I felt an immense instinctive relief; as if for a moment I'd come to rest in a pocket of safety. The Wood's wrath didn't reach here. The fog rolled in thick gusts off the water and drifted back and forth, and through it I watched the leaves gently bobbing up and down, pale yellow on silver branches, desperately glad to rest, and then Sarkan muttered half a curse and heaved himself back up, grabbing me by the arm. He dragged me almost protesting up and away, ankle-deep into the water. He stopped there, just beyond the branches, and I looked back through the fog. We'd been lying beneath an ancient gnarled heart-tree, growing on the bank.

We fled away from it down the narrow track of the river. The Spindle was barely more than a stream here, just wide enough for us to run together splashing, the bottom of grey and amber sand. The fog thinned, the last of the mist-cover blowing away, and a final gust cleared it completely. We stopped, frozen. We were in a wide glade thick with heart-trees, and they were standing in a host around us.

Chapter 30.

We stood with our hands clenched tight, barely breathing, as if we could keep the trees from noticing us if only we didn't move. The Spindle continued onward away from us through the trees, murmuring gently. It was so clear I could see the grains of sand in the bottom, black and silver-grey and brown, tumbled with polished drops of amber and quartz. The sun was shining again.

The heart-trees weren't monstrous silent pillars like the trees above the hill. They were vast, but only oak-tall; they spread wide instead, full of entwining branches and pale white spring flowers. Dried golden leaves carpeted the ground beneath them, last autumn's fall, and beneath them rose a faint drifting wine-scent of old fallen fruit, not unpleasant. My shoulders kept trying to unknot themselves.

There should have been endless birds singing in those branches, and small animals gathering fruits. Instead there was a deep strange stillness. The river sang on quietly, but nothing else moved here; nothing else lived. Even the heart-trees didn't seem to stir. A breeze stirred the branches a little, but the leaves only whispered drowsily a moment and fell silent. The water was running over my feet, and the sun was shining through the leaves.

Finally I took a step. Nothing came leaping from the trees; no bird shrilled the alarm. I took another step, and another. The water was warm, and the sun dappling through the trees was strong enough to begin drying my linen clothes on my back. We walked through the hush. The Spindle led us in a gently curving path between and among the trees, until it spilled at last into a small still pool.

On the far side of the pool there stood one last heart-tree: broad and towering above all the others, and in front of it a green mound rose, heaped over with fallen white flowers. On it lay the body of the Wood-queen. I recognized the white mourning-gown she'd worn in the tower: she was still wearing it, or what was left of it. The long straight skirt was ragged, torn along the sides; the sleeves had mostly rotted. The cuffs woven of pearls around her wrists were brown with old bloodstains. Her green-black hair spilled down the sides of the mound and tangled with the roots of the tree; the roots had climbed over the mound and wrapped long brown fingers gently over her body, curled around her ankles and her thighs, and her shoulders and her throat; they combed through her hair. Her eyes were closed, dreaming.

If we'd still had Alosha's sword, we might have put it down into her, through her heart, and pinned her to the earth. Maybe that might have killed her, here at the source of her power, in her own flesh. But the sword was gone.

Then Sarkan brought out the last of his vial of fire-heart instead: the red-gold hunger of it leaping with eagerness inside the gla.s.s. I looked down at it and was silent. We'd come here to make an ending. We'd come to burn the Wood; this was the heart of it. She was the heart of it. But when I imagined pouring fire-heart on her body, watching her limbs thrashing- Sarkan looked at my face and said, "Go back to the falls," offering to spare me.

But I shook my head. It wasn't that I felt squeamish about killing her. The Wood-queen deserved death and horror: she'd sowed it and tended it and harvested it by the bushel, and wanted more. Kasia's soundless cry beneath the heart-tree's bark; Marek's face, shining, as his own mother killed him. My mother's terror when her small daughter brought home an ap.r.o.n full of blackberries, because the Wood didn't spare even children. The hollow gutted walls of Porosna, with the heart-tree squatting over the village, and Father Ballo twisted out of his own body into a slaughtering beast. Marisha's small voice, saying, "Mama," over her mother's stabbed corpse.

I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she'd put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain. The people of the tower had walled her up, then she'd struck them all down. She'd raised up the Wood to devour us; now we'd give her to the fire-heart, and choke all this shining clear water with ash. None of that seemed right. But I didn't see anything else we could do.

I waded across the pool with Sarkan. The water didn't come higher than our knees. Small round stones were smooth beneath our feet. Close, the Wood-queen seemed even more strange, not quite alive; her lips were parted, but her breast didn't seem to rise and fall. She might have been carved from wood. Her skin had the faint banded pattern of wood split lengthwise and smoothed, waves of light and dark. Sarkan opened the vial, and with one quick tip he poured the fire-heart directly between her lips, and then spilled the final dregs over her body.

Her eyes flew open. The dress caught, the roots of the heart-tree caught, her hair caught, fire roaring up around her like a cloud as Sarkan pulled me back. She screamed a hoa.r.s.e, furious cry. Smoke and flame gouted out of her mouth, and bursts of fire were going off beneath her skin like orange stars flaring, in one part of her and another. She thrashed on the mound beneath the roots, the green gra.s.s charring swiftly away. Clouds of smoke billowed around her, over her. Within her I saw lungs, heart, liver, like shadows inside a burning house. The long tree roots crisped up, curling away, and she burst up from the mound.

She faced us, burning like a log that had been on the fire a long time: her skin charred to black charcoal, cracking to show the orange flames beneath, pale ash blowing off her skin. Her hair was a torrent of flames wreathing her head. She screamed again, a red glow of fire in her throat, her tongue a black coal, and she didn't stop burning. Fire spurted from her in places, but skin like new bark closed over it, and even as the endless heat blackened the fresh skin once more, it healed again. She staggered forward towards the pool. Watching in horror, I remembered the Summoning-vision and her bewilderment, her terror when she'd known she was trapped in stone. It wasn't simply that she was immortal unless slain. She hadn't known how to die at all.

Sarkan seized a handful of sand and pebbles from the floor of the stream and threw them at her, calling out a spell of increase; they swelled as they flew through the air, became boulders. They smashed into her, billows of sparks going up from her body like a fire jabbed with a poker, but even then she didn't collapse into ashes. She kept burning, unconsumed. She kept coming. She plunged to her hands and knees in the pool, steam hissing up in clouds around her.

The narrow stream came running in suddenly quicker over the rocks, as if it knew the pool needed replenishing. Even beneath the clear rippling water, she still glowed; the fire-heart gleamed deep in her, refusing to be doused. She cupped water to her mouth with both hands. Most of the water boiled away from her charred skin. Then she seized one of the boulders Sarkan had flung at her, and with a strange twisting jerk of magic she scooped the middle of it out, to give herself a bowl to drink from.

"With me, together," Sarkan shouted to me. "Keep the fire on her!" I startled; I'd been mesmerized, watching her live and burn at the same time. I took his hand. "Polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo," he chanted, and I sang about the burning hearth, about blowing gently on a flame. The burning roots crackled up again behind the Wood-queen, and within her the fire glowed fresh. She lifted her head from the bowl with a cry of rage. Her eyes were black hollowed pits glowing with fire.

Vining plants sprouted from the riverbed and wrapped themselves tangling around our legs. Barefoot, I managed to pull away from them, but they caught the laces of Sarkan's boots, and he fell into the water. Other vines at once launched themselves up his arms, reaching for his throat. I plunged my hands down and gripped them and said, "Arakra," and a green fierce sparking ran along their lengths and made them dart away, my own fingers stinging. He spoke a quick charm and pulled free, leaving his boots still imprisoned in the water, and we scrambled out onto the bank.

All around us, the heart-trees had roused; they trembled and waved in shared distress, a rustling whisper. The Wood-queen had turned away from us. She was still using the bowl, to drink but also to throw water onto the burning roots of the towering heart-tree, trying to put the fire out. The Spindle-water was quenching the flames in her, little by little; already her feet deep in the pool were solid blackened cinders, no longer burning.

"The tree," Sarkan said, hoa.r.s.ely, pushing himself up from the bank: there were stinging red tracks around his throat like a necklace of thorn-p.r.i.c.kles. "She's trying to protect it."

I stood on the bank and looked up: it was late afternoon, and the air was heavy and moist. "Kalmoz," I said to the sky, calling; clouds began to gather and ma.s.s together. "Kalmoz." A drizzle began, pattering in drops on the water, and Sarkan said sharply, "We're not trying to put it out-"

"Kalmoz!" I shouted, and put my hands up, and pulled the lightning out of the sky.

This time I knew what was going to happen, but that didn't mean I was ready for it: there wasn't a way to be ready for it. The lightning took away the world again, that single terrible moment of blind white silence everywhere around me, and then it jumped away from me roaring with thunder and struck the ma.s.sive heart-tree, a shattering blow down the middle.

The force hurled me wildly back, spinning; I fell dazed half into the running streambed, my cheek pressed to pebbles and gra.s.s, gold-leaf-laden branches waving above me. I was dim and dazed and blank. The world was queerly silenced, but even through that cottony m.u.f.fling I could hear a rising dreadful shriek of horror and rage. I managed with trembling arms to push my head up. The heart-tree was burning, all its leaves in flames, the whole trunk blackened; the lightning-bolt had struck at one of the great branchings lower on the trunk, and nearly a quarter of the tree was cracking away.

The Wood-queen was screaming. As if by instinct she put her hands on the tree, trying to push the cracked limb back, but she was still burning; where she touched the bark it caught again. She pulled her hands back. Ivy tendrils erupted from the ground and climbed the heart-tree's trunk, weaving around it, trying to hold it together in one piece. She turned and came at me through the pool, her face twisting in fury. I tried to scramble back on hands and feet, shaking, knowing that it hadn't worked. She wasn't mortally wounded herself, even though the tree was. The heart-tree wasn't a channel to her life.

The lightning had flung Sarkan back among the trees; he staggered out of them, his own clothes singed and blackened with smoke, and pointed at the stream. "Kerdul foringan," he said, his voice rasping like hornets and faint in my ears, and the stream quivered. "Tual, kerdul-" and the riverbank crumbled away. The stream turned uncertainly, slowly, and ran into the new bed: diverting from the pool and from the burning tree. The water left standing in the pool began rising up in hot gouts of steam.

The Wood-queen whirled on him. She held out her hands and more plants came bursting up out of the water. She gripped the vine-tops in her fists and pulled them up, and then she flung them at him. The vines grew and swelled as they flew through the air, and they lashed themselves around him, arms and legs, thickening; they toppled him to the ground. I tried to push myself up. My hands were stinging, my nose was full of smoke. But she came towards me too quickly, a living coal, tangled threads of smoke and mist still thick about her body. She seized me and I screamed. I smelled my own flesh crisping, blackening where she gripped me by the arms.

She dragged me off my feet. I couldn't see or think for pain. My shift was smoldering, the sleeves burning and falling off my arms below the curl of her branding fingers. The air around her was oven-hot, rippling like water. I turned my face away from her to fight for breath. She dragged me with her through the pond and up onto the blackened ruin of her resting-mound, towards the shattered tree.

I guessed what she meant to do to me then, and even through pain I screamed and fought her. Her grip was implacable. I kicked at her with my bare feet, scorching them; I reached blindly for magic and cried out half a spell, but she shook me so furiously my teeth clacked on it in my mouth. She was a burning ember around me, fire everywhere. I tried to grab her, to pull myself against her. I would rather have burned to death. I didn't want to know what corruption she would make out of me, what she would do with my strength poured into that vast heart-tree, here in the center of the Wood.

But she kept her arms rigid. She thrust me through crisping wood and ash into the hollow my lightning had left in the shattered heart of the tree. The wrapping vines tightened. The heart-tree closed around me like a coffin-lid.

Chapter 31.

Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin. I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open. I clawed wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes. Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out-and I realized everything was different.

There was no trace of fire or fighting. I didn't see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere. Even the vast heart-tree was gone. So were most of the others. The glade was more than half-empty. I stood on the sh.o.r.e of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world. It was bright morning instead of afternoon. Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.

I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn't feel like the Wood. It wasn't the terrible twisted shadow-place where I'd seen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree. It didn't even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence. The pool lapped gently at my ankles. I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle. Sarkan couldn't cast the Summoning alone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.

Yet even the Spindle was different here. The stream grew wider, gently, and began to deepen, but no cloud of mist rose to meet me; I didn't hear the roaring of the waterfall. I stopped finally at a curving that felt a little familiar, and stared at a sapling on the bank: a slender heart-tree sapling, maybe ten years old, growing over that enormous grey old-man boulder we'd seen at the base of the cliff. It was the first heart-tree, the one we'd landed beneath in our mad slide down the cliff, half-lost in fog at the base of the waterfall.

But here there was no waterfall, no cliff; the ancient tree was small and young. Another heart-tree stood opposite it on the other bank of the Spindle, and beyond those two sentinels the river gradually widened, going away dark and deep into the distance. I didn't see any more heart-trees farther along, only the ordinary oaks and tall pines.

Then I realized I wasn't alone. A woman was standing on the opposite bank, beneath the older heart-tree.

For one moment I thought she was the Wood-queen. She looked so much like her that they might have been kin. She had the same look of alder and tree-bark, the same tangled hair, but her face was longer, and her eyes were green. Where the Wood-queen was gold and russet, she was simpler browns and silver-greys. She was looking down the river, just as I was, and before I could say anything a distant creaking came drifting down the river. A boat came into view, riding gently; a long wooden boat elaborately carved, beautiful, and the Wood-queen stood in it.

She didn't seem to see me. She stood in the prow smiling, flowers wreathing her hair, with a man beside her, and it took me time to recognize his face. I'd only ever seen it dead: the king in the tower. He looked far younger and taller, his face unworn. But the Wood-queen looked much the same as she had in the tomb, the day they'd bricked her in. Behind them sat a young man with a tight look, not much more than a boy, but I could see the man he'd grow up to be in his bones: the hard-faced man from the tower. More of the tower-people were in the boat with them, rowing: men in silver armor, who glanced around themselves warily at the ma.s.sive trees as they stroked their oars through the water.

Behind them came more boats, dozens of them: but these were makeshift-looking things more like overgrown leaves than real boats. They were crowded full of a kind of people I'd never seen before, all with a look of tree to them, a little like the Wood-queen herself: dark walnut and bright cherry, pale ash and warm beech. There were a few children among them, but no one old.

The carved boat b.u.mped gently against the bank, and the king helped the Wood-queen down. She went to the wood-woman smiling, her hands outstretched. "Linaya," she said, a word that I somehow knew was and wasn't magic, was and wasn't a name; a word that meant sister, and friend, and fellow-traveler. The name echoed strangely away from her through the trees. The leaves seemed to whisper it back; the ripple of the stream picked it up, as if it were written into everything around me.

The Wood-queen didn't seem to notice. She kissed her sister on both cheeks. Then she took the king's hand and led him on through the heart-trees, going towards the grove. The men from the tower tied their boat up and followed the two of them.

Linaya waited silently on the bank and watched the rest of the boats unload, one after another. As each one emptied, she touched it, and the boat dwindled into a leaf floating on the water; the stream carried it tidily into a small pocket by the bank. Soon the river was empty. The last of the wood-people were already walking onward towards the glade. Then Linaya turned to me and said, in a low deep resonating voice, like drumming on a hollow log, "Come."

I stared at her. But she only turned and walked away from me through the stream, and after a moment I followed. I was afraid, but somehow instinctively not afraid of her. My feet splashed in the water. Hers didn't. The water where it landed on her skin soaked in.

Time seemed to flow around us strangely. By the time we reached the grove, the wedding was over. The Wood-queen and her king were standing on the green mound with their hands clasped, a chain of braided flowers wrapped over their arms. The wood-people were gathered around them, scattered loosely through the trees, watching and silent. There was a quiet in all of them, a deep inhuman stillness. The handful of men from the tower eyed them warily, and flinched from the rustling murmurs of the heart-trees. The young hard-faced man was standing just to one side of the couple, looking with a twist of distaste at the Wood-queen's strange, long, gnarled fingers where they wrapped around the king's hands.

Linaya moved into the scene to join them. Her eyes were wet, glistening like green leaves after rain. The Wood-queen turned to her, smiling, and held out her hands. "Don't weep," she said, and her voice was laughing as a stream. "I'm not going far. The tower is only at the end of the valley."

The sister didn't answer. She only kissed her cheek, and let her hands go.

The king and the Wood-queen left together, with the men from the tower. The people drifted away quietly through the trees. Linaya sighed, softly, and it was the sighing of wind in the boughs. We were alone again, standing together on the green mound. She turned to me.