by Naomi Novik
Her eyes flew open. The dress caught, the roots of the heart-tree caught, her hair caught, fire roaring up around her like a cloud as Sarkan pulled me back. She screamed a hoarse, furious cry. Smoke and flame gouted out of her mouth, and bursts of fire were going off beneath her skin like orange stars flaring, in one part of her and another. She thrashed on the mound beneath the roots, the green grass charring swiftly away. Clouds of smoke billowed around her, over her. Within her I saw lungs, heart, liver, like shadows inside a burning house. The long tree roots crisped up, curling away, and she burst up from the mound.
She faced us, burning like a log that had been on the fire a long time: her skin charred to black charcoal, cracking to show the orange flames beneath, pale ash blowing off her skin. Her hair was a torrent of flames wreathing her head. She screamed again, a red glow of fire in her throat, her tongue a black coal, and she didn’t stop burning. Fire spurted from her in places, but skin like new bark closed over it, and even as the endless heat blackened the fresh skin once more, it healed again. She staggered forward towards the pool. Watching in horror, I remembered the Summoning-vision and her bewilderment, her terror when she’d known she was trapped in stone. It wasn’t simply that she was immortal unless slain. She hadn’t known how to die at all.
Sarkan seized a handful of sand and pebbles from the floor of the stream and threw them at her, calling out a spell of increase; they swelled as they flew through the air, became boulders. They smashed into her, billows of sparks going up from her body like a fire jabbed with a poker, but even then she didn’t collapse into ashes. She kept burning, unconsumed. She kept coming. She plunged to her hands and knees in the pool, steam hissing up in clouds around her.
The narrow stream came running in suddenly quicker over the rocks, as if it knew the pool needed replenishing. Even beneath the clear rippling water, she still glowed; the fire-heart gleamed deep in her, refusing to be doused. She cupped water to her mouth with both hands. Most of the water boiled away from her charred skin. Then she seized one of the boulders Sarkan had flung at her, and with a strange twisting jerk of magic she scooped the middle of it out, to give herself a bowl to drink from.
“With me, together,” Sarkan shouted to me. “Keep the fire on her!” I startled; I’d been mesmerized, watching her live and burn at the same time. I took his hand. “Polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,” he chanted, and I sang about the burning hearth, about blowing gently on a flame. The burning roots crackled up again behind the Wood-queen, and within her the fire glowed fresh. She lifted her head from the bowl with a cry of rage. Her eyes were black hollowed pits glowing with fire.
Vining plants sprouted from the riverbed and wrapped themselves tangling around our legs. Barefoot, I managed to pull away from them, but they caught the laces of Sarkan’s boots, and he fell into the water. Other vines at once launched themselves up his arms, reaching for his throat. I plunged my hands down and gripped them and said, “Arakra,” and a green fierce sparking ran along their lengths and made them dart away, my own fingers stinging. He spoke a quick charm and pulled free, leaving his boots still imprisoned in the water, and we scrambled out onto the bank.
All around us, the heart-trees had roused; they trembled and waved in shared distress, a rustling whisper. The Wood-queen had turned away from us. She was still using the bowl, to drink but also to throw water onto the burning roots of the towering heart-tree, trying to put the fire out. The Spindle-water was quenching the flames in her, little by little; already her feet deep in the pool were solid blackened cinders, no longer burning.
“The tree,” Sarkan said, hoarsely, pushing himself up from the bank: there were stinging red tracks around his throat like a necklace of thorn-prickles. “She’s trying to protect it.”
I stood on the bank and looked up: it was late afternoon, and the air was heavy and moist. “Kalmoz,” I said to the sky, calling; clouds began to gather and mass together. “Kalmoz.” A drizzle began, pattering in drops on the water, and Sarkan said sharply, “We’re not trying to put it out—”
“Kalmoz!” I shouted, and put my hands up, and pulled the lightning out of the sky.
This time I knew what was going to happen, but that didn’t mean I was ready for it: there wasn’t a way to be ready for it. The lightning took away the world again, that single terrible moment of blind white silence everywhere around me, and then it jumped away from me roaring with thunder and struck the massive heart-tree, a shattering blow down the middle.
The force hurled me wildly back, spinning; I fell dazed half into the running streambed, my cheek pressed to pebbles and grass, gold-leaf-laden branches waving above me. I was dim and dazed and blank. The world was queerly silenced, but even through that cottony muffling I could hear a rising dreadful shriek of horror and rage. I managed with trembling arms to push my head up. The heart-tree was burning, all its leaves in flames, the whole trunk blackened; the lightning-bolt had struck at one of the great branchings lower on the trunk, and nearly a quarter of the tree was cracking away.
The Wood-queen was screaming. As if by instinct she put her hands on the tree, trying to push the cracked limb back, but she was still burning; where she touched the bark it caught again. She pulled her hands back. Ivy tendrils erupted from the ground and climbed the heart-tree’s trunk, weaving around it, trying to hold it together in one piece. She turned and came at me through the pool, her face twisting in fury. I tried to scramble back on hands and feet, shaking, knowing that it hadn’t worked. She wasn’t mortally wounded herself, even though the tree was. The heart-tree wasn’t a channel to her life.
The lightning had flung Sarkan back among the trees; he staggered out of them, his own clothes singed and blackened with smoke, and pointed at the stream. “Kerdul foringan,” he said, his voice rasping like hornets and faint in my ears, and the stream quivered. “Tual, kerdul—” and the riverbank crumbled away. The stream turned uncertainly, slowly, and ran into the new bed: diverting from the pool and from the burning tree. The water left standing in the pool began rising up in hot gouts of steam.
The Wood-queen whirled on him. She held out her hands and more plants came bursting up out of the water. She gripped the vine-tops in her fists and pulled them up, and then she flung them at him. The vines grew and swelled as they flew through the air, and they lashed themselves around him, arms and legs, thickening; they toppled him to the ground. I tried to push myself up. My hands were stinging, my nose was full of smoke. But she came towards me too quickly, a living coal, tangled threads of smoke and mist still thick about her body. She seized me and I screamed. I smelled my own flesh crisping, blackening where she gripped me by the arms.
She dragged me off my feet. I couldn’t see or think for pain. My shift was smoldering, the sleeves burning and falling off my arms below the curl of her branding fingers. The air around her was oven-hot, rippling like water. I turned my face away from her to fight for breath. She dragged me with her through the pond and up onto the blackened ruin of her resting-mound, towards the shattered tree.
I guessed what she meant to do to me then, and even through pain I screamed and fought her. Her grip was implacable. I kicked at her with my bare feet, scorching them; I reached blindly for magic and cried out half a spell, but she shook me so furiously my teeth clacked on it in my mouth. She was a burning ember around me, fire everywhere. I tried to grab her, to pull myself against her. I would rather have burned to death. I didn’t want to know what corruption she would make out of me, what she would do with my strength poured into that vast heart-tree, here in the center of the Wood.
But she kept her arms rigid. She thrust me through crisping wood and ash into the hollow my lightning had left in the shattered heart of the tree. The wrapping vines tightened. The heart-tree closed around me like a coffin-lid.
Chapter 31
Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin. I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open. I clawe
d wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes. Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out—and I realized everything was different.
There was no trace of fire or fighting. I didn’t see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere. Even the vast heart-tree was gone. So were most of the others. The glade was more than half-empty. I stood on the shore of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world. It was bright morning instead of afternoon. Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.
I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn’t feel like the Wood. It wasn’t the terrible twisted shadow-place where I’d seen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree. It didn’t even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence. The pool lapped gently at my ankles. I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle. Sarkan couldn’t cast the Summoning alone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.
Yet even the Spindle was different here. The stream grew wider, gently, and began to deepen, but no cloud of mist rose to meet me; I didn’t hear the roaring of the waterfall. I stopped finally at a curving that felt a little familiar, and stared at a sapling on the bank: a slender heart-tree sapling, maybe ten years old, growing over that enormous grey old-man boulder we’d seen at the base of the cliff. It was the first heart-tree, the one we’d landed beneath in our mad slide down the cliff, half-lost in fog at the base of the waterfall.
But here there was no waterfall, no cliff; the ancient tree was small and young. Another heart-tree stood opposite it on the other bank of the Spindle, and beyond those two sentinels the river gradually widened, going away dark and deep into the distance. I didn’t see any more heart-trees farther along, only the ordinary oaks and tall pines.
Then I realized I wasn’t alone. A woman was standing on the opposite bank, beneath the older heart-tree.
For one moment I thought she was the Wood-queen. She looked so much like her that they might have been kin. She had the same look of alder and tree-bark, the same tangled hair, but her face was longer, and her eyes were green. Where the Wood-queen was gold and russet, she was simpler browns and silver-greys. She was looking down the river, just as I was, and before I could say anything a distant creaking came drifting down the river. A boat came into view, riding gently; a long wooden boat elaborately carved, beautiful, and the Wood-queen stood in it.
She didn’t seem to see me. She stood in the prow smiling, flowers wreathing her hair, with a man beside her, and it took me time to recognize his face. I’d only ever seen it dead: the king in the tower. He looked far younger and taller, his face unworn. But the Wood-queen looked much the same as she had in the tomb, the day they’d bricked her in. Behind them sat a young man with a tight look, not much more than a boy, but I could see the man he’d grow up to be in his bones: the hard-faced man from the tower. More of the tower-people were in the boat with them, rowing: men in silver armor, who glanced around themselves warily at the massive trees as they stroked their oars through the water.
Behind them came more boats, dozens of them: but these were makeshift-looking things more like overgrown leaves than real boats. They were crowded full of a kind of people I’d never seen before, all with a look of tree to them, a little like the Wood-queen herself: dark walnut and bright cherry, pale ash and warm beech. There were a few children among them, but no one old.
The carved boat bumped gently against the bank, and the king helped the Wood-queen down. She went to the wood-woman smiling, her hands outstretched. “Linaya,” she said, a word that I somehow knew was and wasn’t magic, was and wasn’t a name; a word that meant sister, and friend, and fellow-traveler. The name echoed strangely away from her through the trees. The leaves seemed to whisper it back; the ripple of the stream picked it up, as if it were written into everything around me.
The Wood-queen didn’t seem to notice. She kissed her sister on both cheeks. Then she took the king’s hand and led him on through the heart-trees, going towards the grove. The men from the tower tied their boat up and followed the two of them.
Linaya waited silently on the bank and watched the rest of the boats unload, one after another. As each one emptied, she touched it, and the boat dwindled into a leaf floating on the water; the stream carried it tidily into a small pocket by the bank. Soon the river was empty. The last of the wood-people were already walking onward towards the glade. Then Linaya turned to me and said, in a low deep resonating voice, like drumming on a hollow log, “Come.”
I stared at her. But she only turned and walked away from me through the stream, and after a moment I followed. I was afraid, but somehow instinctively not afraid of her. My feet splashed in the water. Hers didn’t. The water where it landed on her skin soaked in.
Time seemed to flow around us strangely. By the time we reached the grove, the wedding was over. The Wood-queen and her king were standing on the green mound with their hands clasped, a chain of braided flowers wrapped over their arms. The wood-people were gathered around them, scattered loosely through the trees, watching and silent. There was a quiet in all of them, a deep inhuman stillness. The handful of men from the tower eyed them warily, and flinched from the rustling murmurs of the heart-trees. The young hard-faced man was standing just to one side of the couple, looking with a twist of distaste at the Wood-queen’s strange, long, gnarled fingers where they wrapped around the king’s hands.
Linaya moved into the scene to join them. Her eyes were wet, glistening like green leaves after rain. The Wood-queen turned to her, smiling, and held out her hands. “Don’t weep,” she said, and her voice was laughing as a stream. “I’m not going far. The tower is only at the end of the valley.”
The sister didn’t answer. She only kissed her cheek, and let her hands go.
The king and the Wood-queen left together, with the men from the tower. The people drifted away quietly through the trees. Linaya sighed, softly, and it was the sighing of wind in the boughs. We were alone again, standing together on the green mound. She turned to me.
“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 mout
h, 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 grass. 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.