by Naomi Novik
“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 shore 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 sturdy tall tree now, its branches spreading wide. One of the carved boats was tied up to the shore, 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 hor
ror. 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 hoarsely, 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 hoarsely, 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 scrape 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 bloody, 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, “Vanalem.”
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 grass, 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 grass unfurling. At the he
ad 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-balls 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-balls 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.