Uprooted

Chapter 29

We carried the children out of the tower into morning sun, pouring down bright and improbable on the silent wreckage of six thousand men. There were flies already buzzing thickly, and the crows had come in flocks; when we came out they burst up from the ground and perched on the walls to wait for us to get out of their way.

We had passed the baron in the cellar, leaning against the wall of the hearth, his eyes blank and unseeing, blood puddled beneath him. Kasia had found one of the sleep-potions still unbroken in its flask, gripped in the hand of the man-at-arms slumped dead beside him. She opened it and gave the children each a swallow, down there, before we brought them out. They’d seen more than enough already.

Now Stashek hung limp over her shoulder, and Sarkan carried a huddled Marisha in his arms. I struggled on behind them, too hollow to be sick anymore, too dry for tears. My breath was still short and painful in my chest. Solya walked with me, giving me a hand occasionally over a particularly high mound of armored corpses. We hadn’t taken him prisoner; he’d just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn’t dreaming, but felt he should have been. Down in the cellar, he’d given Sarkan what was left of his cloak to wrap around the little princess.

The tower was still standing, barely. The floor of the great hall was a maze of broken flagstones, dead roots and withered vines sprawled over them, charred up like the queen’s body below. Several of the columns had collapsed entirely. There was a hole in the ceiling into the library above, and a chair had fallen partway into it. Sarkan looked up at it as we left, climbing over blocks and rubble.

We had to walk the full length of the walls we’d built to try and keep Marek out. The voices of the old stone whispered sadly to me as we came through the archways. We saw no one living until we came out into the abandoned camp. At least there were a few soldiers there, rummaging through the supplies; a couple of them burst out of the pavilion running away from us, carrying silver cups. I would have gladly paid a dozen silver cups just to hear another mortal voice, to be able to believe that not everyone was dead. But they all fled, or hid from us behind tents or supply-heaps, peering out. We stood in the silent field and after a moment I said, “The cannon-crew,” remembering.

They were still there, a stone company, pushed out of the way, blank grey eyes fixed on the tower. Most of them hadn’t been badly broken. We stood around them, silently. None of us had enough strength to undo the spell. Finally I reached out to Sarkan. He shifted Marisha to his other arm and let me take his hand.

We managed to pool enough magic to undo the spell. The soldiers writhed and jerked as they came loose from the stone, shaking with the sudden return of time and breath. Some of them had lost fingers, or had new pitted scars where their bodies had been chipped, but these were trained men, who managed cannon that roared as terribly as any spell. They edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least. “Orders, sir?” one of them asked him, uncertainly.

He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly.

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 grass 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-assurance, 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 glasses 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 passes.

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 pass 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 grass 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 shore. 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 passed 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 passed it. I recognized a curve of riverbank, half a mile east of the village, and looked back to see the bright brass cockerel 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 grass.

“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, bumping 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 butterfly betrayed us, a small scrap 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 snatched it up. It perched on the prow with the crushed butterfly 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 massive 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 thorny 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 snatched 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 scrap 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 clustered 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 massive 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 scraped, 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.