Uprooted. Part 22

"Our people were alone here a long time," she said, and I wondered, what was long to a tree? A thousand years, two thousand, ten? Endless generations, the roots growing deeper every one. "We began to forget how to be people. We dwindled away little by little.

"When the sorcerer-king came with his people, my sister let them come into the valley. She thought they could teach us to remember. She thought we could be renewed, and teach them in turn; we could give each other life. But they were afraid. They wanted to live, they wanted to grow stronger, but they didn't want to change. They learned the wrong things." Years were slipping past us as she spoke, blurred like rain, grey and soft and piling on one another. And then it was summer again, a different summer a long time later, and the wood-people were coming back through the trees.

Many of them moved slowly, somehow wearily. Some were hurt: they nursed blackened arms, and one man limped on a leg that looked like a log clumsily chopped apart. Two others were helping him. At the end of the stump, I think the leg was growing back. A few parents led children, and a woman carried a baby in her arms. In the distance, far to the west, a thin black pillar of smoke rose into the air.

As the wood-people came, they gathered fruit from the heart-trees and made cups out of fallen bark and leaves, the way Kasia and I had done as children for tea-parties in the forest. They dipped up the bright clear water of the pool and spread out through the grove, wandering apart in ones and twos, sometimes three. I stood watching them, and my eyes were full of tears, without knowing why. Some of them were stopping in open places, where the sun came down. They were eating the fruit, drinking the water. The mother chewed a piece of fruit and put it in her baby's mouth, and gave it a sip from her cup.

They were changing. Their feet were growing, toes stretching long, plunging into the earth. Their bodies were stretching, and they put their arms up towards the sun. Their clothing fell away into blown leaves, dry gra.s.s. The children changed quickest; they rose suddenly into great beautiful grey pillars, branches bursting wide and filling with white flowers, silver leaves coming out everywhere, as if all the life that might have been in them went rushing out in one furious gasp.

Linaya left the mound and moved out among them. A few of the people, the wounded, the old, were struggling: they were caught half-changed. The baby had changed, a beautiful shining tree crowned with flowers. But the mother knelt crouched and shivering by the trunk, her hands upon it, her cup spilled, her face blind agony. Linaya touched her shoulder gently. She helped the mother stand, stumble a little way from the baby's tree. She stroked the mother's head and gave her the fruit to eat, and a drink from her own cup; she sang to her in that strange deep voice. The mother stood there with her head bent, tears dripping, and then all at once her face lifted to the sun and she was growing, she was gone.

Linaya helped the last few trapped ones, gave them a drink from her own cup, held another piece of fruit to their mouth. She stroked their bark and sang magic into them until they slipped the rest of the way over. Some made small gnarled trees; the oldest ones dwindled down into narrow saplings. The grove was full of heart-trees. She was the only one left.

She came back to the pool. "Why?" I asked her, helplessly. I had to know, but I almost felt I didn't want the answer; I didn't want to know what had driven them to this.

She pointed away, down the river. "They are coming," she said in her deep voice. "Look," and I looked down at the river. Instead of the reflection of the sky I saw men coming in carved boats; they carried lanterns, burning torches, and great axes. A flag streamed at the head of the first boat, and in the prow stood the young man from the wedding-party, older and settled into his hard face; the one who'd bricked up the Wood-queen. He wore a crown of his own now.

"They are coming," Linaya said again. "They betrayed my sister, and imprisoned her where she could not grow. Now they are coming for us."

"Can't you fight them?" I asked. I could feel the magic deep and still in her, not a stream but a well that went down and down. "Can't you run away-"

"No," she said.

I stopped. There were forest depths in her eyes, green and unending. The longer I looked at her, the less like a woman she seemed. The part of her I saw was only half: the crowning trunk, the wide-spread branches, the leaves and flowers and fruit; below there was a vast network of roots that went long and spreading, deep into the valley floor. I had roots, too, but not like that. I could be carefully dug up, and shaken loose, and transplanted into a king's castle, or a tower built of marble-unhappily, perhaps, but I could survive. There was no way to dig her up.

"They learned the wrong things," Linaya said again. "But if we stay, if we fight, we will remember the wrong things. And then we would become-" She stopped. "We decided that we would rather not remember," she said finally.

She bent down and filled her cup again. "Wait!" I said. I caught her arm before she could drink, before she could leave me. "Can you help me?"

"I can help you change," she said. "You are deep enough to come with me. You can grow with me, and be at peace."

"I can't," I said.

"If you will not come, you will be alone here," she said. "Your sorrow and your fear will poison my roots."

I stood silent, afraid. I was beginning to understand: this was where the Wood's corruption came from. The wood-people had changed willingly. They still lived, they dreamed long deep dreams, but it was closer to the life of trees and not the life of people. They weren't awake and alive and trapped, humans locked behind bark who could never stop wanting to get out.

But if I wouldn't change, if I stayed human, alone and wretched, my misery would sicken her heart-tree, just like the monstrous ones outside the grove, even as my strength kept it alive.

"Can't you let me go?" I said desperately. "She put me into your tree-"

Her face drew in with sorrow. I understood then this was the only way she could help me. She was gone. What still lived of her in the tree was deep and strange and slow. The tree had found these memories, these moments, so she could show me a way out-her way out-but that was all that she could do. It was the only way she'd found for herself and all her people.

I swallowed and stepped back. I dropped my hand from her arm. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she drank. Standing there at the edge of the pool she began to take root; the dark roots unfurling and silver branches spreading, rising, going up and up, as high as that depthless lake inside her. She rose and grew and grew, flowers blooming in white ropes; the trunk furrowing lightly beneath ash-silver bark.

I was alone in the grove again. But now the voices of the birds were falling silent. Through the trees I saw a few deer bounding away, frightened, a flash of white tails and gone. Leaves were drifting down from the trees, dry and brown, and underfoot they crackled with their edges bitten by frost. The sun was going down. I put my arms around myself, cold and afraid, my breath coming in white cloudy bursts, my bare feet wincing away from the frozen ground. The Wood was closing in around me. And there was no way out.

But a light dawned behind me, sharp and brilliant and familiar: the Summoning-light. I turned in sudden hope, into a grove now drifted with snow: time had moved on again. The silent trees were bare and stark. The Summoning-light poured down like a single shaft of moonbeam. The pool shone molten silver, and someone was coming out of it.

It was the Wood-queen. She dragged herself up the bank, leaving a black gash of exposed earth through the snow behind her, and collapsed on the sh.o.r.e still in her sodden white mourning-dress. She lay huddled on her side to catch her breath, and then she opened her eyes. She slowly pushed up on trembling arms and looked around the grove, at all the new heart-trees standing, and her face widened into horror. She struggled to her feet. Her dress was muddy and freezing to her skin. She stood on the mound looking out at the grove, and slowly she turned to look up and up at the great heart-tree above her.

She took a few halting steps up the mound through the snow, and put her hands on the heart-tree's wide silver trunk. She stood there a moment trembling. Then she leaned in and slowly rested her cheek against the bark. She didn't weep. Her eyes were open and empty, seeing nothing.

I didn't know how Sarkan had managed to cast the Summoning alone, or what I was seeing, but I stood waiting and tense, hoping for the vision to show me a way out. Snow was coming down around us, brilliant in the crisp light. It didn't touch my skin, but it drifted swiftly over her tracks, covering the ground with white again. The Wood-queen didn't move.

The heart-tree rustled its branches softly, and one low branch dipped gently towards her. A flower was budding on the branch, despite winter. It bloomed, and petals fell away, and a small green fruit swelled and ripened gold. It hung off the bough towards her, a gentle invitation.

The Wood-queen took the fruit. She stood with it cupped in her hands, and in the silence of the grove a hard familiar thunk came down the river: an axe biting into wood.

The Wood-queen halted, the fruit nearly to her lips. We both stood, caught, listening. The thunk came again. Her hands dropped. The fruit fell to the ground, disappearing into the snow. She caught up her tangled skirts away from her feet and ran back down the mound and into the river.

I ran after her, my heart beating in time with the regular axe-thumps. They led us on to the end of the grove. The sapling had grown into a st.u.r.dy tall tree now, its branches spreading wide. One of the carved boats was tied up to the sh.o.r.e, and two men were cutting down the other heart-tree. They were working cheerfully together, taking turns with their heavy axes, each one biting deep into the wood. Silver-grey chips flew into the air.

The Wood-queen gave a cry of horror that howled through the trees. The woodcutters halted, shocked, clutching their axes and looking around; then she was on them. She caught them up by the throats with her long-fingered hands and threw them away from her, into the river; they thrashed up coughing. She dropped to her knees beside the sagging tree. She pressed all her fingers over the oozing cut, as if she could close it up. But the tree was too wounded to save. It was already leaning deeply over the water. In an hour, in a day, it would come down.

She stood up. She was still trembling, not with cold but rage, and the ground was trembling with her. In front of her feet, a crack opened suddenly and ran away in both directions along the edge of the grove. She stepped over the widening split, and I followed her just in time. The boat toppled into the opening chasm, vanishing, as the river began to roar wildly down the waterfall, as the grove sank down the new sheltering cliff into the clouds of mist. One of the woodcutters slipped in the water and was dragged over the edge with a scream, the other one crying out, trying to catch his hand too late.

The sapling sank away with the grove; the broken tree rose with us. The second woodcutter struggled up onto the bank, clinging to the shuddering ground. He swung his axe at the Wood-queen as she came towards him; it struck against her flesh and sprang away, ringing, jumping out of his hands. She paid no attention. Her face was blank and lost. She took hold of the woodcutter and carried him over to the wounded heart-tree. He struggled against her, uselessly, as she pushed him against the trunk, and vines sprouted from the ground to hold him in place.

His body arched, horror in his face. The Wood-queen stepped back. His feet and ankles were bound against the chipped gap where the axes had bitten into the tree, and they were already changing, grafting onto the trunk, boots splitting open and falling away as his toes were stretched out into new roots. His struggling arms were stiffening into branches, the fingers melting into one another. His wide agonized eyes were disappearing beneath a skin of silver bark. I ran to him, in pity and horror. My hands couldn't get hold of the bark, and magic wouldn't answer me in this place. But I couldn't bear to just stand and watch.

Then he managed to lean forward. He whispered, "Agnieszka," in Sarkan's voice, and then he vanished; his face disappeared into a large dark hollow opening up in the trunk. I caught the edges and pulled myself into the hollow after him, into the dark. The tree-roots were close and tight; the damp warm smell of freshly turned earth choked my nose, and also the lingering smell of fire and smoke. I wanted to pull back out; I didn't want to be here. But I knew that going back was wrong. I was here, inside the tree. I pushed and shoved and forced my way forward, against every instinct and terror. I forced myself to reach out and feel the blasted, scorched wood around me, splinters piercing my skin, the slick of sap clogging my eyes and my nose, the air I couldn't get.

My nostrils were full of wood and rot and burning. "Alamak," I whispered hoa.r.s.ely, for walking through walls, and then I pushed my way out through bark and blasted wood, and back into the smoking wreck of the heart-grove.

- I came out on the mound, my dress soaked green with sap, the shattered tree behind me. The light of the Summoning still blazed across the water, and the last shallow remnants of the pool shone beneath it like a full moon just up over the horizon, so bright it hurt to look at it. Sarkan was on the other side of the pool, on his knees. His mouth was wet, his hand dripping, the only parts of him not blackened with soot and dirt and smoke: he'd cupped water to his mouth. He'd drunk from the Spindle, water and power both, to gather enough strength to cast the Summoning alone.

But now the Wood-queen was standing over him with her long fingers wrapped choking around his neck: silver bark was climbing up from the bank over his knees and his legs as he struggled to pry her grip from around his throat. She let him go and whirled with a cry of protest at my escape, too late. With a long groaning above me, the great broken branch of the heart-tree cracked away from the trunk and finally fell, thundering, leaving a gaping hollow wound.

I stepped down from the mound to meet her on the wet stones as she came furious towards me. "Agnieszka!" Sarkan shouted hoa.r.s.ely, reaching an arm out, struggling half-rooted in the earth. But even as she reached me, the Wood-queen slowed and halted. The Summoning-light illuminated her from behind: the terrible corruption in her, the sour black cloud of long despair. But it shone on me also, on me and through me, and I knew that in my face she saw someone else, looking out at her.

I could see in her where she'd gone from the grove: how she'd hunted them down, all the people of the tower, wizards and farmers and woodcutters all alike. How she'd planted one corrupt heart-tree after another in the roots of her own misery, and fed that misery onward. Mingled with my horror, I felt Linaya's pity moving in me, deep and slow: pity and sorrow and regret. The Wood-queen saw it, too, and it held her still before me, trembling.

"I stopped them," she said, her voice the sc.r.a.pe of a branch against the window-pane at night, when you imagine some dark thing is outside the house scratching to get in. "I had to stop them."

She wasn't speaking to me. Her eyes were looking past me, deep towards her sister's face. "They burned the trees," she said, pleading for understanding from someone long gone. "They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring."

Her sister didn't have a voice to speak with anymore, but the sap of the heart-tree clung to my skin, and its roots went deep beneath my feet. "We're meant to go," I said softly, answering for both of us. "We're not meant to stay forever."

The Wood-queen finally looked at me then, instead of through me. "I couldn't go," she said, and I knew she'd tried. She'd killed the tower-lord and his soldiers, she'd planted all the fields with new trees, and she'd come here with her hands b.l.o.o.d.y, to sleep with her people at last. But she hadn't been able to take root. She'd remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She'd remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she'd forgotten how to grow. All she'd been able to do in the end was lie down beside her sister: not quite dreaming, not quite dead.

I reached out, and from the one low-hanging bough of the broken tree, I took the single waiting fruit, glowing and golden. I held it out to her. "I'll help you," I told her. "If you want to save her, you can."

She looked up at the shattered, dying tree. Mud-tears were leaking from her eyes, thick brown rivulets sliding over her cheeks, dirt and ash and water mingled. She put her hands slowly up to take the fruit from me, her long gnarled twiggy fingers curling carefully around it, gently. They brushed against mine, and we looked at one another. For a moment, through the winding smoke between us, I might have been the daughter she'd hoped for, the child halfway between the tower-people and her own; she might have been my teacher and my guide, like Jaga's book showing me the way. We might never have been enemies at all.

I bent down, and in one curled-up leaf I drew a little water for her, the last clear water left in the pool. We stepped together up onto the mound. She lifted the fruit to her mouth and bit, juices running down her chin in pale golden dripping lines. She shut her eyes and stood there. I put my hand on her, felt hate and agony like a strangler vine tangled deep through her. I put my other hand on the sister-tree, though, and reached for the deep well in her; the stillness and the calm. Being struck by lightning hadn't changed her; the stillness would remain, even when the whole tree had fallen, even while the years crumbled it back into the earth.

The Wood-queen leaned against the tree's gaping wound and put her arms around the blackened trunk. I gave her the last drops of the pool's water, tipped them into her mouth, and then I touched her skin and said softly, very simply, "Va.n.a.lem."

And she was changing. The last remnants of her white gown blew away, and the charred surface of her scorched skin peeled off in huge black flakes, fresh new bark whirling up from the ground around her like a wide silver skirt, meeting and merging into the old tree's broken trunk. She opened her eyes one last time and looked at me, with sudden relief, and then she was gone, she was growing, her feet plunging new roots over the old.

I backed away, and when her roots had sunk deep into the earth, I turned and ran to Sarkan through the mud of the emptied pool. The bark had stopped climbing up over him. Together we broke him the rest of the way loose, peeling it away from his skin, until his legs came free. I pulled him up from the stump and we sat together, sagged together, on the bank of the stream.

I was too spent to think of anything. He was scowling down at his own hands, almost resentfully. Abruptly he lurched forward and leaned over the streambed and dug into the soft wet earth. I watched him blankly for a while, and then I realized he was trying to restore the course of the stream. I pulled myself up and reached in to help. I could feel it, as soon as I started, the same feeling he hadn't wanted to have: the sure sense that this was the right thing to do. The river wanted to run this way, wanted to feed into the pool.

It only took moving a few handfuls of dirt, and then the stream was running over our fingers, clearing the rest of the bed for itself. The pool began to fill once more. We sat back again, wearily. Next to me he was trying to get the dirt and water off his hands, wiping them on a corner of his ruined shirt, on the gra.s.s, on his trousers, mostly just spreading the mud around. Black half-circles were crusted deep under the fingernails. He finally heaved an exasperated noise and let his hands fall into his lap; he was too tired to use magic.

I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we'd brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace. The ash had sunk into the muddy bottom of the pool, and been swallowed up. The trees were letting their scorched leaves fall into the water, and moss crept over the torn bare patches of earth, new blades of gra.s.s unfurling. At the head of the pool, the new heart-tree tangled with the old one, bracing it up, sealing over the jagged scar. They were putting out small white flowers, like stars.

Chapter 32.

I fell asleep in the grove, empty-headed and spent. I didn't notice Sarkan lifting me in his arms, or taking me back to the tower; I roused only long enough to mutter a complaint to him after the unpleasant stomach-twist of his jumpIng spell, and then I sank down again.

When I woke up, tucked under a blanket in my narrow bed in my narrow room, I kicked the blanket off my legs and got up without thinking about clothes. There was a rip all the way across the valley painting where a jagged chip of rock had torn it: the canvas hung down in flaps, all the magic gone out of it. I went out into the hallway, picking my way over bits of broken stone and cannon-b.a.l.l.s littering the floor and rubbing at my gritty eyes. When I came down the stairs, I found Sarkan packing to leave.

"Someone has to clear out the corruption from the capital before it spreads any farther," he said. "Alosha will be a long time recovering, and the court will have to return south by the end of the summer."

He was in riding clothes, and boots of red-dyed leather tooled in silver. I was still a shambling mess of soot and mud, ragged enough to be a ghost but too mucky.

He barely looked me in the face, stuffing flasks and vials into a padded case, another sack full of books already waiting on the laboratory table between us. The floor slanted askew beneath our feet. The walls gaped here and there where cannon-b.a.l.l.s had struck or stones had fallen, and the summer-warm wind whistled cheerfully between the cracks and blew papers and powders all over the floor, leaving faint smeared drifts of red and blue on the stone.

"I've propped the tower up for the moment," he added as he laid down a corked, well-sealed flask of violet smoke. "I'll take the fire-heart with me. You might start the repairs in the-"

"I won't be here," I said, cutting him off. "I'm going back to the Wood."

"Don't be absurd," he said. "Do you think the death of a witch turns all her works to dust, or that her change of heart can repair them all at once? The Wood is still full of monstrosities and corruption, and will be for a long time to come."

He wasn't wrong, and the Wood-queen wasn't dead anyway; she was only dreaming. But he wasn't going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he'd drunk Spindle-water, and he'd held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He'd keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn't feel the lack of them anymore.

"It won't get any less full of them for my sitting in a heap of stones," I said. I turned and left him with his bottles and his books.

- Above my head, the Wood was aflame with red and gold and orange, but a few confused spring flowers in white poked up through the forest floor. A last wave of summer heat had struck this week, just at harvest-time. In the fields, the threshers labored under fierce sun, but it was cooler here in the dim light beneath the heavy canopy, alongside the running gurgle of the Spindle. I walked barefoot on crackling fallen leaves with my basket full of golden fruit, and stopped at a curving in the river. A walker was crouched by the water, putting its stick-head down to drink.

It saw me and held still, wary, but it didn't run away. I held out one of the fruits from my basket. The walker crept towards me little by little on its stiff legs. It stopped just out of arm's reach. I didn't move. Finally it stretched out two forelegs and took the fruit and ate it, turning it around and around in its hands, nibbling until it had cleaned it down to the seed. Afterwards it looked at me, and then tentatively took a few steps into the forest. I nodded.

The walker led me a long way into the forest, into the trees. At last it held aside a heavy mat of vines from what looked like a sheer stone cliff face, and showed me a narrow cut in the rock, a thick sweet rotten stench rolling out. We climbed through the pa.s.sage into a sheltered narrow vale. At one end stood an old, twisted heart-tree, grey with corruption, the trunk bulging unnaturally. Its boughs hung forward over the gra.s.s of the vale, so laden with fruit that the tips brushed the ground.

The walker stood anxiously aside. They'd learned that I would cleanse the sickened heart-trees if I could, and a few of them had even begun to help me. They had a gardener's instinct, it seemed to me, now that they were free of the Wood-queen's driving rage; or maybe they only liked the uncorrupted fruit better.

There were still nightmare things in the Wood, nursing too much rage of their own. They mostly avoided me, but now and then I stumbled over the torn and spoiled body of a rabbit or a squirrel, killed as far as I could see just for cruelty; and sometimes one of the walkers who had helped me would reappear torn and limping, a limb snapped off as by mantis-jaws, or its sides scored deeply by claws. Once in a dim part of the Wood, I fell into a pit trap, cleverly covered over with leaves and moss to blend into the forest floor, and full of broken sticks and a hideous glistening ooze that clung and burned my skin until I went to the grove and washed it off in the pool. I still had a slow-healing scab on my leg where one of the sticks had cut me. It might have been just an ordinary animal's trap, set for prey, but I didn't think so. I thought it had been meant for me.

I hadn't let it stop my work. Now I ducked under the branches and went to the heart-tree's trunk with my jug. I poured a drink of the Spindle-water over its roots, but I knew even as I began that there wasn't much hope for this one. There were too many souls caught inside, twisting the tree in every direction, and they'd been there too long; there wasn't enough left of them to bring out, and it would be almost impossible to calm and ease them all together, to slip them into dreaming.

I stood with my hands on the bark for a long time, trying to reach them, but even the ones I found had been lost so long they had forgotten their names. They lay without walking in shadowed dim places, blank-eyed and exhausted. Their faces had half-lost their shape. I had to let go at last and step away, shivering and chilled through, though the hot sun came down through the leaves. The misery clung to my skin, wanting to climb inside. I ducked back out from beneath the tree's heavy branches and sat down in a patch of open sunlight at the other end of the vale. I took a drink from my jug, resting my forehead against the beaded wet side.

Two more walkers had come creeping through the pa.s.sageway to join the first: they were sitting in a row, their long heads all bent intently towards my basket. I fed each of them a clean fruit, and when I started working they helped me. Together we heaped dry kindling against the trunk, and dug a broad circle of dirt around the limits of the heart-tree's branches.

I stood up and arched my tired back when we were done, stretching. Then I rubbed my hands with dirt. I went back to the heart-tree and put my hands back on its sides, but this time I didn't try to speak with the trapped souls. "Kisara," I said, and drew the water out. I worked gently, slowly. The water beaded up in fat droplets on the bark and trickled slowly down in thin wet rivulets to sink into the ground. The sun moved onward overhead, coming ever more strongly through the leaves as they curled up and went dry. It was dipping out of sight by the time I finished, my forehead sticky with sweat and my hands covered with sap. The ground beneath my feet was soft and damp, and the tree had gone pale as bone, its branches making a noise like rattling sticks in the wind. The fruit had all withered on the boughs.

I stood clear and kindled it with a word. Then I sat heavily and wiped my hands on the gra.s.s as well as I could, and pulled my knees up to my chest. The walkers folded their legs neatly and sat around me. The tree didn't thrash or shriek, already more than half gone; it went up quickly and burned without much smoke. Flakes of ash fell on the damp ground and melted into it like early snowflakes. They landed on my bare arms sometimes, not big enough to burn, just tiny sparks. I didn't back away. We were the only mourners the tree and its dreamers had left.

I fell asleep at some point while the bonfire went on, tired from my work. When I woke in the morning, the tree was burned out, a black stump that crumbled easily into ash. The walkers raked the ash evenly around the clearing with their many-fingered hands, leaving a small mound at the center where the old tree had stood. I planted a fruit from my basket beneath it. I had a vial of growing-potion that I'd brewed up out of river-water and the seeds of heart-trees. I sprinkled a few drops over the mound, and sang encouragement to the fruit until a silver sapling poked its head out and climbed up to three years' height. The new tree didn't have a dream of its own, but it carried on the quiet dream of the grove-tree the fruit had come from, instead of tormented nightmares. The walkers would be able to eat the fruit, when it came.

I left them tending it, busily putting up a shade of tall branches to keep its fresh new leaves from crisping in the hot sun, and went away through the stones, back out into the Wood. The ground was full of ripened nuts and tangles of bramble-berries, but I didn't gather while I walked. It would be a long time yet before it would be safe to eat any fruit from outside the grove. There was too much sorrow under the boughs, too many of the tormented heart-trees still anchoring the forest.

I'd brought out a handful of people from a heart-tree in Zatochek, and another handful from the Rosyan side. But those had been people taken only very lately. The heart-trees took everything: flesh and bone and not just dreams. Marek's hope had always been a false one, I'd discovered. Anyone who'd been caught inside for more than a week or two was too much a part of the tree to be brought out again.

I had been able to ease some of those, and help them slide into the long deep dream. A few of them had even found their way into dreaming by themselves, once the Wood-queen had slipped away, her animating rage gone. But that left hundreds of heart-trees still standing, many of them in dark and secret places of the Wood. Drawing the water out of them and giving them to the fire was the gentlest way I'd found to set them free. It still felt like killing someone, every time, although I knew it was better than leaving them trapped and lingering. The grey sorrow of it stayed with me afterwards.

This morning, a clanging bell surprised me out of my weary fog, and I pushed aside a bush to find a yellow cow staring back at me, chewing gra.s.s meditatively. I was near the border on the Rosyan side, I realized. "You'd better go back home," I told the cow. "I know it's hot, but you're too likely to eat the wrong thing in here." A girl's voice was calling her in the distance, and after a moment she came through the bushes and stopped when she saw me; nine years old or so.

"Does she run away into the forest a lot?" I asked her, stumbling a little over my Rosyan.

"Our meadow is too small," the girl said, looking up at me with clear blue eyes. "But I always find her."

I looked down at her and knew she was telling the truth; there was a strand of silver bright inside her, magic running close to the surface. "Don't let her go too deep," I said. "And when you get older, come and find me. I live on the other side of the Wood."

"Are you Baba Jaga?" she asked, interestedly.

"No," I said. "But you might call her a friend of mine."

Now I had woken up enough to know where I was, I turned back westward right away. The Rosyans had sent soldiers to patrol the borders of the Wood on their side, and I didn't want to distress them. They were still uneasy about me popping out on their side now and then, even after I'd sent back some of their lost villagers, and I couldn't really blame them. All the songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways, and I suspected that the bards weren't bringing the most outrageous ones to my side of the valley at all. A man had been booed out of Olshanka tavern a few weeks ago, I'd heard, for trying to sing one where I'd turned into a wolf-beast and eaten up the king.

But my step was lighter anyway: meeting the little girl and her cow had lifted some of the grey weight from my shoulders. I sang Jaga's walking-song and hurried away, back towards home. I was hungry, so I ate a fruit from my basket as I walked. I could taste the forest in it, the running magic of the Spindle caught in roots and branches and fruit, infused with sunlight to become sweet juice on my tongue. There was an invitation in it, too, and maybe one day I would want to accept; one day when I was tired and ready to dream a long dream of my own. But for now it was only a door standing open on a hill in the distance, a friend waving to me from afar, and the grove's deep sense of peace.

Kasia had written me from Gidna: the children were doing as well as could be hoped. Stashek was still very quiet, but he had stood up and spoken to the Magnati, when they had been summoned to vote, well enough to persuade them to crown him with his grandfather as his regent. He'd also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha's daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn't much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.

There had been a tourney to celebrate Stashek's coronation, and he'd asked Kasia to be his champion, much to his grandmother's dismay. It had turned out halfway for the best, because the Rosyans sent a party of knights, and after Kasia knocked them all down, it made them wary about invading us in revenge for the battle at the Rydva. Enough soldiers had escaped the siege of the tower to carry tales of the invulnerable golden warrior-queen, slaughtering and unstoppable; and people had mixed her up with Kasia. So Rosya had grudgingly accepted Stashek's request for a renewed truce, and our summer had ended in a fragile peace, with time for both sides to mend.

Stashek had also used Kasia's triumph to name her captain of his guard. Now she was learning how to fight with a sword properly, so she didn't knock into the other knights and tumble them over accidentally while they were all drilling together. Two lords and an archduke had asked her to marry them, and so, she wrote to me in outrage, had Solya.

Can you imagine? I told him I thought he was a lunatic, and he said he would live in hope. Alosha laughed for ten minutes without stopping except to cough when I told her, and then she said he'd done it knowing I'd say no, just to demonstrate to the court that he's loyal to Stashek now. I said I wouldn't go bragging of someone asking me to marry them, and she said just watch, he'd spread it around himself. Sure enough, half a dozen people asked me about it the next week. I almost wanted to go and tell him I'd have him after all, just to see him squirm, but I was too afraid he'd decide to go through with it for some reason or another, and he'd find some way not to let me out.

Alosha's better every day, and the children are doing well, too. They go sea-bathing together every morning: I come along and sit on the beach, but I can't swim anymore: I just sink straight to the bottom, and the salt water feels all wrong on my skin, even if I just put my feet into it. Send me another jug of river-water, please! I'm always a little thirsty, here, and it's good for the children, too. They never have the nightmares about the tower if I let them have a sip of it before they sleep.

I'll come for a real visit this winter, if you think it's safe for the children. I thought they'd never want to come back, but Marisha asked if she could come and play at Natalya's house again.

I miss you.

I took one last blurred hop-step to come to the Spindle, and the clearing where my own little tree-cottage stood, coaxed out of the side of an old drowsy oak. On one side of my doorway, the oak's roots made a big hollow that I had lined with gra.s.s. I tried to keep it full of grove-fruit for the walkers to take. It was emptier than when I'd left, and on the other side of my doorway, someone had filled my wood-box.