by Naomi Novik
The walkers reached up and plucked fruits off the tree and crammed them into his mouth. He screamed around them, choking, but they pressed more upon him and forced his jaw shut around them, juice spilling in rivulets down his face. His whole body arched, thrashing in their grip. They held him upside down over the earth. The mantis jabbed him in the throat with one sharp point of its claw, and the blood came spurting out of him and watered the dry parched roots like rain.
The tree made a sighing, shivering sound as thin lines of red flushed down the roots and faded into the silver of its trunk. I was sobbing in horror, watching the life drain out of his face—a knife took him in the chest, sinking into his heart: Prince Marek had thrown it.
But much of our work had already been undone, and the walkers were ringing us all around, waiting, hungrily it now seemed: the men drew closer together, panting. The Dragon cursed under his breath; he turned back to the tree and used another spell, one I had seen him use before to form his potion-bottles. He cast it now and reached down into the desiccated sand around our feet and began to pull out ropes and skeins of glowing glass. He flung them in swooping heaps onto the exposed roots, the falling leaves. Small fires began to catch around us, putting up a haze of smoke.
I was shaking, dazed with horror and blood. Kasia pushed me behind her, the sword in her hand, sheltering me even while tears were sliding down her face, too. “Look out!” she shouted, and I turned to see a great branch above the Dragon’s head crack. It came falling heavily onto his shoulder and knocked him forward.
He caught himself instinctively on the trunk, dropping the rope of glass he was holding. He tried to pull away, but the tree was already seizing him, bark growing over his hands. “No!” I screamed, reaching for him.
He managed to drag one arm free at the cost of the other, silver bark climbing to the elbow, roots whipping themselves out of the ground and twining about his leg, dragging him in closer. They were tearing at his clothes. He seized a pouch at his waist, jerked the strap loose, and thrust something into my hands: it gurgled, a vial glowing fierce red-violet. It was fire-heart, a dram of it, and he shook me by the arm. “Now, you fool! If it takes me, you’re all dead! Burn it and run!”
I looked up from the bottle and stared at him. He meant me to fire the tree, I realized; he meant me to burn the tree—and him with it. “Do you think I’d rather live like this?” he said to me, his voice tight and clenched, as though he was speaking past horror: the bark had already swallowed one of his legs, and climbed nearly to the shoulder.
Kasia was next to me, her face pale and stricken; she said, “Nieshka, it’s worse than dying. It’s worse.”
I stood with the vial clutched in my hand, glowing between my fingers, and then I put my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “Ulozishtus. The purging spell. Cast it with me.”
He stared at me. Then he gave one short jerk of a nod. “Give her the vial,” he said, between his clenched teeth. I gave Kasia the fire-heart and gripped the Dragon’s hand, and together we said the spell: I whispered, “Ulozishtus, ulozishtus,” a steady drumbeat, and then he joined in with me, reciting all the long careful song of it. But I didn’t let the purging magic flow: I held it back. In my mind I built a dam before the power of it, let our joined spell fill up a vast lake within me as the working built and built.
The swelling heat of it filled me, burning bright, almost unbearable. I couldn’t breathe, my lungs crushed against my rib cage; my heart strained to beat. I couldn’t see: the fighting went on somewhere behind me, a distant clamoring only: shouts, the eerie clatter of the walkers, the hollow ring of swords. It was coming closer and closer still. I felt Kasia’s back pressed to mine; she was making herself a final shield. The fire-heart was singing cheerful and hungry in the vial she held, hoping to be let out, hoping to devour us all, almost comforting.
I held the working as long as I could, until the Dragon’s voice failed, and then I opened my eyes again. The bark had climbed over his neck, up his cheek. It had sealed over his mouth, it was creeping around his eye. He squeezed my hand once, and then I poured the power through him, down the half-formed channel to the devouring tree.
He stiffened, his eyes going wide and unseeing. His hand clenched on mine in silent agony. Then the bark over his mouth withered away, flaking like the shed skin of some monstrous snake, and he was screaming aloud. I clutched his hand with both of mine, biting my lip against the pain of his brutal grip while he cried out, the tree blackening and charring away around him, leaves above us crackling into flames. They were falling, stinging bits of ash, the hideous smell of the fruit cooking and liquefying. Juice ran down the limbs, and sap came bursting in boiling-hot gouts from the trunks and the bark.
The roots caught as quickly as well-seasoned firewood: we’d pulled so much water out of them. The bark was loosening and peeling off in great strips. Kasia grabbed the Dragon’s arm and wrestled his limp body away from the tree, blistered and seared. I helped her pull him away through the gathering smoke, and then she turned and plunged through the haze again. Dimly I saw her gripping a slab of bark, pulling it away in a thick sheet; she hacked at the tree with her sword and pried at it, and more of the sides broke away. I laid the Dragon down and stumbled to help her: the tree was too hot to touch, but I put my hands over it anyway and after a groping moment I blurted, “Ilmeyon!” Come out, come out, as if I were Jaga calling a rabbit out of a burrow for dinner.
Kasia hacked at it again, and then the wood split with a crack, and I saw through it a sliver of a woman’s face, blank, a staring blue eye. Kasia reached into the edges of the broken gap and started pulling away more of the wood, breaking it away, and suddenly the queen came falling out, her whole body bending limply forward out of a hollow of wood and leaving a woman’s shape behind, scraps of desiccated cloth falling away from her body and catching fire even as she tipped through the broken opening. She stopped, hanging: her head wouldn’t come free, held by a net of golden hair, impossibly long and embedded in the wood all around her. Kasia slashed the sword down through the cloud, and the queen came loose and fell into our arms.
She was as heavy and inert as a log. Smoke and fire wreathed us, and above us the moaning and thrashing of the branches: the tree had become a pillar of fire. The fire-heart was clamoring so loudly in its vial it seemed to me I could hear it with my ears, eager to come out and join the blaze.
We staggered forward, Kasia all but dragging the three of us: me, Queen Hanna, and the Dragon. We fell out from beneath the branches into the clearing. The Falcon and Prince Marek alone of the soldiers remained, fighting back-to-back with ferocious skill, Marek’s sword lit with the same white fire the Falcon held. The last four walkers crowded close. They made a sudden rush; the Falcon whipped them back with a circling lash of fire, and Marek chose one and leapt for it through the blaze: he caught its neck in one mailed fist and wrapped his boots about the body, one foot hooked underneath one of the forelimbs. He drove his sword down hard between the base of the neck and the body and twisted himself: almost exactly the motion of pulling a twig away from a living branch, and the long narrow head of the walker splintered and cracked.
He let its twitching body drop, then dived back through the dying ring of fire before the other walkers could close in on him. Four other dead walkers lay sprawled in the exact same way on the ground: he’d worked out a method, then, for killing them. But the walkers had almost caught him at the end, and he was staggering with fatigue. He had thrown aside his helm. He ducked his head and wiped his tabard across his dripping forehead, panting. The Falcon was sagging beside him, also. Though his lips never stopped moving, the silver fire around his hands was burning low; the white cloak had been discarded across the dirt, smoking where burning leaves were falling upon it. The three walkers backed away, making ready for another rush; he drew himself up.
“Nieshka,” Kasia said, spurring me out of dull staring, and I stumbled forward, opening my mouth. Only a ragged croak came out, smoke-hoarsened.
I struggled for another breath, and managed to whisper, “Fulmedesh,” or at least enough of a suggestion of the word to give my magic form, even as I fell forward and put my hands on the ground. The earth cracked along a line running away from me, opening beneath the walkers. As they fell into it thrashing, the Falcon flung fire into the crevice, and it closed up around them.
Marek turned, and then he suddenly came running towards me as I staggered up. He slid into the dirt heels-first and kicked my legs back out from under me. The silver mantis had lunged out of the burning cloud of the heart-tree, its wings alight and crackling with fire, seeking some last vengeance. I stared up into its golden, inhuman eyes; its dreadful claws drew back for another lunge. Marek was flat on the ground beneath its belly. He set his sword against a seam of the carapace and kicked its leg out from under it, one of only three remaining. It fell, impaling itself, even as he heaved up: it thrashed wildly, going over, and he pushed it off his sword with one final kick to join the raging blaze of the heart-tree. It lay still.
Marek turned and dragged me up to my feet. My legs were shaking; my whole body trembling. I couldn’t hold myself upright. I had always been dubious of war stories, songs of battle: the occasional fights between boys in the village square had always ended in mud and bloody noses and clawing, snot and tears, nothing graceful or glorious, and I didn’t see how adding swords and death to the mix could make it any better. But I couldn’t have imagined the horror of this.
The Falcon was stumbling over to another man lying curled in the dirt. He had a vial of some elixir in his belt: he fed the man a swallow of it and helped him up. Together they went to a third with one arm only left: he had cauterized the stump in the fire, and lay dazed on the ground, staring up. Two men left, of thirty.
Prince Marek didn’t seem stricken. He absently wiped an arm across his forehead again, smearing more soot across his face. He had already caught his breath, nearly; his chest rose and fell, but easily, not in the struggling heaves I could barely get as he easily pulled me with him, away from the flames to the cooler shelter of the trees beyond the clearing’s edge. He didn’t speak to me. I don’t know if he even knew me: his eyes were half-glazed. Kasia joined us, the Dragon heaved over her shoulders; she stood incongruously easily beneath his deadweight.
Marek blinked a few more times while the Falcon gathered the two men towards us, and then he seemed to finally become aware of the spreading bonfire of the tree, the blackening branches falling. His grip on my arm tightened into bruising pain, the edges of the gauntlet digging into my flesh as I tried to pry at it. He turned to me and shook me, his eyes widening with rage and horror. “What have you done?” he snarled at me, harsh with smoke, and then he went suddenly very still.
The queen was standing in front of us, unmoving, lit golden in the light of the blazing tree. She stood like a statue where Kasia had propped her onto her feet, and her arms dangled by her sides. Her cropped hair was as yellow as Marek’s, thin and fine; it floated around her head like a cloud. He stared at her, his face open as the beak of a hungry bird. He let go of me and reached out a hand.
“Don’t touch her!” the Falcon said sharply, hoarse with smoke. “Get the chains.”
Marek halted. He didn’t take his eyes off her. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t listen; then he turned and stumbled across the ruin of the battlefield to the corpse of his horse. The chains the Falcon had put on Kasia, while he’d examined her, were bundled up in cloth on the back of his saddle. Marek dragged them down and brought them back to us. The Falcon took the yoke from him with the cloth and cautiously, as wary as if he’d been approaching a mad dog, went towards the queen.
She didn’t stir, her eyes didn’t blink; it was as though she didn’t even see him. He hesitated even so, and then he spoke the protection spell over himself again, and he put the yoke over her neck in one swift movement and backed away. She still didn’t move. He reached out again, still with the cloth, and clasped the manacles onto her wrists one after another; then he draped the cloth over her shoulders.
There was a loud terrible crack behind us. We all jumped like rabbits. The heart-tree had split down its trunk, one whole massive half leaning away. It came down with a roaring crash, smashing through the hundred-year oaks on the edge of the clearing; a cloud of orange sparks roared up out of the heart of the trunk. The second half suddenly burst entirely into flames: consumed and roaring, and the branches thrashed once more and were still.
The queen’s body came alive with one jerky, clenched motion; the chains scraped and clanked as she moved within them, a whine of metal, and she staggered away from us, putting her hands up in front of her. The cloth slid off her shoulders; she didn’t notice it. She was groping at her own face with her curling, too-long nails, clawing at herself, with a low incoherent moan.
Marek sprang forward and caught her by the manacled wrists; she convulsively flung him off her with unnatural strength. Then she stopped and fixed a stare on him. He staggered back and caught his balance, straightened. Bloodstained, smeared with soot and sweat, he still looked a warrior and a prince; the green crest was still visible on his chest, the crown above the hydra. She looked at it and then at his face. She didn’t speak, but her eyes didn’t leave him.
He drew one quick harsh breath and said, “Mother.”
Chapter 16
She didn’t answer him. Marek stood with his hands clenched, waiting, his eyes fixed on her face. But she didn’t answer.
We stood silent and oppressed, still breathing the smoke of the heart-tree, the burning corpses of men and the Wood’s creatures. Finally the Falcon gathered himself and limped forward. He raised his hands towards her face, hesitating a moment, but she didn’t flinch from him. He put his hands on her cheeks and turned her towards him. He looked into her, his pupils widening and narrowing, changing shape; the color of his irises went from green to yellow to black. Hoarsely he said, “There’s nothing. I can’t find any corruption in her at all,” and let his hands drop.
But there was nothing else, either. She didn’t look at us, or if she did, that was even worse; her wide staring eyes didn’t see our faces. Marek stood still panting in heaving breaths, staring at her. “Mother,” he said again. “Mother, it’s Marek. I’ve come to take you home.”
Her face didn’t change. The first horror had faded out of it. She was staring and empty now, hollowed out. “Once we’re out of the Wood … ,” I said, but my voice died in my throat. I felt odd and sick. Did you ever get out of the Wood, if you’d been in it for twenty years?
But Marek seized on the suggestion. “Which way?” he demanded, sliding his sword back into its sheath.
I rubbed ash away with a sleeve over my face. I looked down at my blistered and cracked hands, stained with blood. The whole from a part. “Loytalal,” I whispered to my blood. “Take me home.”
I led them out of the Wood as best I could. I didn’t know what we’d do if we met another walker, much less another mantis. We were a far distance from that shining company that had ridden into the Wood that morning. In my mind, I imagined us a gleaning-party creeping through the forest on our way home before nightfall, trying not to startle so much as a bird. I picked our way carefully through the trees. We didn’t have any hope of breaking a trail, so we had to keep to the deer tracks and the thinner brush.
We crept out of the Wood half an hour before nightfall. I stumbled out from under the trees still following the glimmer of my spell: home, home, over and over again in my head, singsong. The glowing line ran curving towards the west and south, towards Dvernik. My feet kept carrying me after it, across the barren strip of razed dirt and into a wall of tall grass that finally became thick enough to halt me. Above the top edge of the grass, when I slowly raised my head, forested slopes rose up like a wall in the distance, hazy brown with the setting sun thrown along them.
The northern mountains. We’d come out not far from the mountain pass from Rosya. That made a certain sense, if the queen and Prince Vasily
had been fleeing towards Rosya, and had been caught and taken into the Wood from there. But it meant we were miles and miles away from Zatochek.
Prince Marek came out of the Wood behind me with his head bent, his shoulders stooped as if he were dragging a heavy weight behind him. The two soldiers followed him raggedly. They’d pulled off their mail shirts and abandoned them somewhere along the way inside the Wood; their sword-belts, too. He alone was still in armor, and his sword was still in his hand, but when he reached the grass he sank in on himself, to his knees, and stayed there without moving. The soldiers came up to him and fell to either side of him, flat on their faces, as though they’d only been pulled along in his wake.
Kasia laid the Dragon down on the ground next to me, trampling the grass flat with her feet to make room. He was limp and still, his eyes closed. His right side was scorched and blistered everywhere, red and deadly glistening, his clothes torn away and burned off his skin. I’d never seen burns so dreadful.
The Falcon sagged to the ground on his other side. He held one end of a chain that reached to the yoke on the queen’s neck; he tugged on it, and she halted, too, standing still and alone in the razed barren strip around the Wood. Her face had the same inhuman stillness as Kasia’s, only worse, because no one was looking out of her eyes. It was like being followed by a marionette. When we tugged the chain forward, she walked, with a stiff, swinging puppet-stride as if she didn’t entirely know how to use her arms and legs anymore, as if they wouldn’t bend properly.
Kasia said, “We have to get farther from the Wood.” None of us answered her, or moved; it seemed to me she was speaking from very far away. She carefully gripped me by the shoulder and shook me. “Nieshka,” she said. I didn’t answer. The sky was deepening to twilight, and the early spring mosquitoes were busy around us, whining in my ear. I couldn’t even lift my hand to slap away a big one sitting right on my arm.