by Naomi Novik
We opened the cover and began to read. Sarkan’s voice recited clear and steady, marching on precisely, and slowly the fog over my mind blew away. I hummed and sang and murmured all around him. The soldiers around us grew quiet; they settled down in corners and against the walls, listening the way you would listen in a tavern to a good singer and a sad song, late at night. Their faces were vaguely puzzled with trying to follow the story, trying to remember it, even while they were being towed onward by the spell.
The spell towed me along with them, and I was glad to lose myself inside it. All the horrors of the day didn’t vanish, but the Summoning made them only one part of the story, and not the most important part. The power was building, running bright and clean. I felt the spell rising up like a second tower. We’d open the doors, when we were ready, and spill the irresistible light into the courtyard before the gates. Outside the windows, the sky was growing lighter: the sun was coming up.
The doors creaked. Something was coming in underneath them, over the tops, through the barely there gap between the two doors. The men nearest them shouted warning. Thin wriggling shadows were climbing through every tiny crack, narrow and quick as snakes: the squirming tendrils of vines and roots, crumbling wood and stone as they found ways inside. They spread across the wood like frost climbing a pane, gripping and grasping, and a familiar, too-sweet smell came rolling off them.
It was the Wood. Striking openly now, as if it knew what we were doing, that we were about to expose the deception. The soldiers of the Yellow Marshes were hacking at the tendrils with their swords and knives, afraid: they knew enough of the Wood to recognize it, too. But more of the vines kept coming in, through cracks and holes the first ones opened for them. Outside, Marek’s battering ram struck again, and the doors shook from top to bottom. The vines caught at the iron brackets of the hinges and the bar and tore at them. Rust spread in an orange-red pool as quickly as spilling blood, the work of a century in moments. The tendrils pushed inside them, coiled around the bolts and shook them ferociously back and forth. The brackets rattled noisily.
Sarkan and I couldn’t stop. We kept reading, tongues stumbling in haste, turning pages as quickly as we could. But the Summoning demanded its own pace. The story couldn’t be rushed. The edifice of power we’d already built was wavering beneath our speed, like a storyteller about to lose the thread of her own tale. The Summoning had us.
With a loud splintering crack, a larger corner broke off at the bottom of the right door. More vines came spilling through, thicker ones, uncoiling long. Some of them seized the arms of the soldiers, ripped swords out of their hands, flung them bodily aside. Others found the heavy bar and curled around it and dragged it slowly aside, grating inch by inch, until it slid free of the first bracket entirely. The battering ram outside struck against the doors again, and they burst wide open, knocking men out of their way sprawling.
Marek was on the other side still on his horse, standing in his stirrups and blowing his horn. His face was bright with blood-lust and fury, so eager he didn’t even look to see why the doors had opened so suddenly. The vines were rooted in the earth around the stairs, thick dark nests of woody roots hiding in the corners and in the crevices of the broken steps, barely visible in the early light of morning. Marek leaped his horse straight over them without a glance, charging up the stairs and through the broken doorway, and all his remaining knights came pouring in behind him. Their swords rose and fell in a bloody rain, and the baron’s soldiers were stabbing up at them with spears. Horses screamed and fell, kicking in their death-throes as men died around them.
Tears were falling off my face onto the pages of the book. But I couldn’t stop reading. Then something struck me, a hard blow that knocked out all my breath. The spell slid off my tongue. Perfect silence in my ears at first, then a hollow roaring everywhere around me and Sarkan, drowning out all other sound without touching us; like being directly in the narrow eye of a thunderstorm in the middle of a wide field, seeing the grey furious rain on every side not touching you, but knowing that in a moment—
Cracks began to open up running away from us, going through the book, through the chair, through the dais, through the floors and walls. They weren’t cracks in wood and stone; they were cracks in the world. Inside them was nothing but flat dark absence. The beautiful golden volume of the Summoning folded up on itself and sank like a stone vanishing into deep water. Sarkan had me by the arm and out of the chair and was leading me down from the dais. The chair was falling in, too, then the whole dais, all of it collapsing into emptiness.
Sarkan was still continuing the spell, or rather holding it in place, repeating his last line over and over. I tried to join in with him again, just humming, but my breath kept disappearing. I felt so strange. My shoulder throbbed, but when I looked down at it, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. Then I looked farther down, slowly. There was an arrow-shaft jutting out of me, just below my breast. I stared at it, puzzled. I couldn’t feel it at all.
The high beautiful stained-glass windows shattered outwards with faint muffled pops as the cracks reached them, showers of colored glass falling. The cracks were spreading. Men fell into them with cries that vanished as they did, swallowed up into silence. Chunks of the stone walls and floors were disappearing, too. The walls of the tower groaned.
Sarkan was holding the rest of the spell by the edge, barely, like a man trying to control a maddened horse. I tried to push him magic to do it with. He was supporting all my weight, his arm like iron around me. My legs stumbled over one another, almost dragging. My chest was beginning to hurt now, a sharp shocking pain as though my body had finally woken up and noticed something was very badly wrong. I couldn’t breathe without wanting to scream, and I couldn’t get enough air to scream. The soldiers were still fighting in a few places, others just fleeing the tower, trying to get away from the crumbling world. I glimpsed Marek kicking free of his dead horse, jumping over another crack that ran down the floor towards him.
Between the ruined doors the queen appeared, morning light shining behind her, and for one moment I thought instead of a woman there was a tree in the doorway, a silver-barked tree, stretching from the floor up to the ceiling. Then Sarkan drew me back with him into the stairway, and led me down. The tower was shuddering, and stones were tumbling down the stairs behind us. Sarkan chanted his last line of the spell with each step, keeping the rest of the spell from bursting free. I couldn’t help him.
I opened my eyes again with Kasia kneeling next to me, anxiously. The air was full of dust, but the shuddering of the walls had stopped at least. I was leaning against the wall of the cellar; we were underground. I didn’t remember coming the rest of the way down the stairs. Nearby, the baron was shouting instructions to his remaining soldiers; they were pushing over wine racks and barrels and heaping iron pots into a barricade at the bottom of the stairs, shoring it up with crumbled stone. I could see sunlight coming down from above, around the turn in the stairs. Sarkan was next to me, still chanting the same line over and over, his voice going hoarse.
He’d put me next to a locked cabinet beside us made of metal; there were scorch marks around the handles. He motioned Kasia towards the lock. She took it by the handle. Flame boiled out of the lock, lapping around her hands, but she gritted her teeth and broke it open anyway. A rack of small jars of faintly glowing liquid stood inside. Sarkan took one out and pointed at me. Kasia stared at him and then down at the arrow. “I should pull it out?” she said. He made a pushing gesture with his hand, forward—she swallowed and nodded. She knelt down next to me again and said, “Nieshka, hold on.”
She took the arrow between her hands and broke off the feathered shaft that still stuck out of my chest. The arrow-head shivered inside me. My mouth opened and closed, agony silent. I couldn’t breathe. Hurrying, she picked off the worst splinters and made it smooth as she could, and then she turned me to my side, against the wall, and with one horrible shove pushed the arrow the rest of the way thro
ugh me. She caught the arrow-head coming out of my back and pulled it all the rest of the way through.
I moaned, and blood ran hot down my front and back. Sarkan had opened the jar. He poured the liquid into the cup of his hand and now rubbed it on my skin, pressing it into the open wound. It burned horribly. I tried to push him away with one feeble hand. He ignored me, pulling my dress aside to put on more of it; then Kasia pushed me forward, and they poured it down into the wound on my back. I screamed then, and suddenly I could scream. Kasia gave me a wad of cloth to bite on; I bit and shuddered around it.
The pain got worse instead of better. I pulled away from them and tried to press myself into the wall, the cool hard stone, as if I could make myself a part of it and be unfeeling. I dug my fingernails into the mortar, whining, Kasia’s hand on my shoulder—and then the worst of it was past. The running blood slowed and stopped. I began to be able to see again, and hear: fighting on the stairs, the dull clang of swords striking each other, the stone walls, scraping metal and occasionally a ringing note. Blood was trickling down through the barricade.
Sarkan had sunk back against the wall next to me, his lips still moving but almost no sound coming anymore, his eyes clenched shut with strain. The Summoning was like a sand-castle with one side washed away, the rest ready to come sliding down; he was holding it up with raw strength. If the rest came down, I wondered if that nothingness would swallow up the whole tower, devour all of us and leave a blank empty hole in the world—and then close in; the mountainside tumbling to fill the eaten-away hollow in the earth, as if all of us had never existed at all.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. He gestured to Kasia, to the children huddled behind her, peering afraid over a barrel. Sarkan gestured again: Go. He meant me to take them and flee, to whisk us away somewhere. I hesitated, and his eyes glittered at me, angrily; he waved his hand in a sweep of the empty floor. The book was gone: the Summoning was gone. We couldn’t finish the spell, and when his strength ran out—
I drew a breath and laced my hand with his, and went back into the spell. He resisted. I sang softly at first, in short bursts of air, feeling my way. We didn’t have a map anymore, and I didn’t remember the words, but we’d done this before. I remembered where we were going, what we were trying to build. I pushed up more sand against the wall, and dug a moat against the coming waves; I made it long and wide. I kept humming, bits of stories and songs. I began to heap up the sand again in my mind. He held back, baffled, not sure how to help me. I sang him something longer, putting a bit of melody like a handful of wet pebbles into his hands, and he slowly gave it back to me, chanted slow and precise and even, laying the stones one by one around along the base of the wet-sand wall, shoring our tower up.
The working was growing stronger, more solid once again. We’d stopped the slide. I kept on going, poking here and there, finding a way and showing it to him. I piled on more sand and let him smooth the wall and make it even; together we stuck a fluttering-leaf branch into the top for a flying pennant. My breath still came short. I could feel an odd puckering knot in my chest and a deep tight pain where the potion still worked away, but magic was running clear through me, bright and quick, overflowing.
Men were shouting. The last of the baron’s men were scrambling over the barricade from the other side, most of them swordless and only trying to escape. A light was coming down the staircase, screams coming before it. The soldiers reached up hands, helped the fleeing men down and over. There weren’t very many of them. The flow stopped, and the soldiers threw the last of the sticks and big iron cauldrons on top, blocked off the passage as much as they could. Marek’s voice echoed from behind it, and I glimpsed the queen’s head, golden. The baron’s soldiers jabbed spears down at her that turned aside on her skin. The barricade was coming apart.
We still couldn’t let the spell go. Kasia was standing up; she was pushing open the door to the tomb. “Down there, quick!” she told the children. They scrambled into the stairwell. She caught my arm and helped me up; Sarkan struggled to his feet. She pushed us inside and picked up her sword from the floor, and snatched another sealed jar from the cabinet. “This way!” she shouted to the men. They came piling in after us.
The Summoning came with us. I went around and around the turning steps, Sarkan just behind me, magic singing between us. I heard a grinding noise above, and the stairway grew darker: up above one of the soldiers had pushed the door shut. The line of old letters to either side shone in the dimness and murmured faintly, and I found myself changing our working a little to slide gently against their magic. Subtly my sense of our inner tower changed; it grew wider and more broad, terraces and windows forming, a gold dome at the top, walls of pale white stone, inscribed in silver like the stairway walls. Sarkan’s voice slowed; he saw it, too: the old tower, the lost tower, long ago. Light was dawning all around us.
We spilled out into the round room at the bottom of the stairs. The air was stifling, not enough for all of us, until Kasia took up one of the old iron candlesticks and used the base of it to smash open the wall to the tomb, bricks tumbling in. Cool air came rushing in as she pushed the children inside, and told them to hide behind the old king’s coffin.
Far above came the sound of breaking stone. The queen was leading Marek and his men in after us. A few dozen soldiers crammed themselves into the room and against the walls, their faces afraid. They wore yellow surcoats, or what was left of them, so they were with us, but I didn’t recognize any of their faces. I didn’t see the baron. Swords rang again distantly: the last of the Yellow Marshes soldiers still pent up on the stairs were fighting. The light of the Summoning was building quickly.
Marek stabbed the last man in the stairwell and kicked the body tumbling in onto the floor. Soldiers jumped forward to meet him, almost eagerly: at least he was an enemy who made sense; someone who could be defeated. But Marek met one swing on his shield, ducked under it, and thrust his sword through the man’s body; he whirled and took off the head of the man on the other side; clubbed one man with his sword-hilt as he finished the swing, and stabbed forward to take another one in the eye. Kasia took a step beside me, a cry of protest, her sword rising: but they were all down before she’d even finished the sound.
But we finished the Summoning. I sang the last three words and Sarkan sang them after, and we sang them together once more. Light dawned blazing through the room, glowing almost from within the marble walls. Marek pushed forward into the space he’d cleared, and the queen came down behind him.
Her sword hung, dripping blood. Her face was calm and still and serene. The light shone on her and through her, steady and deep; there was no trace of corruption. Marek was clear, and Solya behind him also; the light washing over her caught them both at the edges, and there weren’t shadows in them: only a hard glittering kind of selfishness, pride like spiked citadel walls. But there wasn’t even any of that in the queen. I stared at her, panting, baffled. There was no corruption inside her.
Nothing at all was inside her. The light of the Summoning shone straight through. She was rotted out from the inside, her body just the skin of bark around an empty space. There wasn’t anything left of her to corrupt. I understood too late: we’d gone in to save Queen Hanna, so the Wood had let us find what we were looking for. But what we’d found had only ever been a hollow remnant, a fragment of a heart-tree’s core. A puppet, empty and waiting until we’d finished all our trials, convinced ourselves there was nothing wrong, and the Wood could reach out and take up the strings.
The light kept pouring over her, and slowly I made out the Wood at last, as if I’d looked again at a cloud-shape and seen a tree instead of a woman’s face. The Wood was there—it was the only thing there. The golden strands of her hair were the pale veins of leaves, and her limbs were branches, and her toes were long roots crawling out over the floor, roots going deep into the ground.
She was looking at the wall behind us, at the broken opening going through to the tomb with its blue fl
ame, and for the first time her face changed, a change like the twisting of a slim willow bending in a high wind, the rage of a storm in the treetops. That animating power in the Wood—whatever it was, it had been here before.
Queen Hanna’s milk-pale face was slipping away under the Summoning’s light, like paint washed away by running water. There was another queen beneath, all brown and green and golden, her skin patterned like alder wood and her hair a deep green nearly black, threaded with red and gold and autumn brown. Someone had picked the gold strands of her hair out and braided them into a circlet for her head, white ribbons threaded through, and she wore a white dress that sat on her wrongly; she’d put it on, though it meant nothing to her.
I saw the buried king’s body take shape between her and us. He was carried by six men on a sheet of white linen, his face still and unmoving, the eyes filmed over with milk. They carried him into the tomb; they lowered him gently into the great stone coffin; they folded in the linen over his body.
In the Summoning-light, that other queen followed the men into the tomb-chamber. She bent over the coffin. There was no sorrow in her face, only a bewildered confusion, as if she didn’t understand. She touched the king’s face, touched the lids of his eyes with strangely long fingers knobbled like twigs. He didn’t stir. She startled and drew her hand back, out of the way of the men. They put the lid upon the coffin, and the blue flame erupted atop it. She watched them, still baffled.
One of the attending men spoke to her, ghostly, telling her I think to stay as long as she wished; he bowed and, stooping, left the tomb through the opening, leaving her. There was something in his face as he turned away from her that the Summoning caught even from so long ago, something cold and determined.