by Naomi Novik
“I’ve propped the tower up for the moment,” he added as he laid down a corked, well-sealed flask of violet smoke. “I’ll take the fire-heart with me. You might start the repairs in the—”
“I won’t be here,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m going back to the Wood.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Do you think the death of a witch turns all her works to dust, or that her change of heart can repair them all at once? The Wood is still full of monstrosities and corruption, and will be for a long time to come.”
He wasn’t wrong, and the Wood-queen wasn’t dead anyway; she was only dreaming. But he wasn’t going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he’d drunk Spindle-water, and he’d held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He’d keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn’t feel the lack of them anymore.
“It won’t get any less full of them for my sitting in a heap of stones,” I said. I turned and left him with his bottles and his books.
Above my head, the Wood was aflame with red and gold and orange, but a few confused spring flowers in white poked up through the forest floor. A last wave of summer heat had struck this week, just at harvest-time. In the fields, the threshers labored under fierce sun, but it was cooler here in the dim light beneath the heavy canopy, alongside the running gurgle of the Spindle. I walked barefoot on crackling fallen leaves with my basket full of golden fruit, and stopped at a curving in the river. A walker was crouched by the water, putting its stick-head down to drink.
It saw me and held still, wary, but it didn’t run away. I held out one of the fruits from my basket. The walker crept towards me little by little on its stiff legs. It stopped just out of arm’s reach. I didn’t move. Finally it stretched out two forelegs and took the fruit and ate it, turning it around and around in its hands, nibbling until it had cleaned it down to the seed. Afterwards it looked at me, and then tentatively took a few steps into the forest. I nodded.
The walker led me a long way into the forest, into the trees. At last it held aside a heavy mat of vines from what looked like a sheer stone cliff face, and showed me a narrow cut in the rock, a thick sweet rotten stench rolling out. We climbed through the passage into a sheltered narrow vale. At one end stood an old, twisted heart-tree, grey with corruption, the trunk bulging unnaturally. Its boughs hung forward over the grass of the vale, so laden with fruit that the tips brushed the ground.
The walker stood anxiously aside. They’d learned that I would cleanse the sickened heart-trees if I could, and a few of them had even begun to help me. They had a gardener’s instinct, it seemed to me, now that they were free of the Wood-queen’s driving rage; or maybe they only liked the uncorrupted fruit better.
There were still nightmare things in the Wood, nursing too much rage of their own. They mostly avoided me, but now and then I stumbled over the torn and spoiled body of a rabbit or a squirrel, killed as far as I could see just for cruelty; and sometimes one of the walkers who had helped me would reappear torn and limping, a limb snapped off as by mantis-jaws, or its sides scored deeply by claws. Once in a dim part of the Wood, I fell into a pit trap, cleverly covered over with leaves and moss to blend into the forest floor, and full of broken sticks and a hideous glistening ooze that clung and burned my skin until I went to the grove and washed it off in the pool. I still had a slow-healing scab on my leg where one of the sticks had cut me. It might have been just an ordinary animal’s trap, set for prey, but I didn’t think so. I thought it had been meant for me.
I hadn’t let it stop my work. Now I ducked under the branches and went to the heart-tree’s trunk with my jug. I poured a drink of the Spindle-water over its roots, but I knew even as I began that there wasn’t much hope for this one. There were too many souls caught inside, twisting the tree in every direction, and they’d been there too long; there wasn’t enough left of them to bring out, and it would be almost impossible to calm and ease them all together, to slip them into dreaming.
I stood with my hands on the bark for a long time, trying to reach them, but even the ones I found had been lost so long they had forgotten their names. They lay without walking in shadowed dim places, blank-eyed and exhausted. Their faces had half-lost their shape. I had to let go at last and step away, shivering and chilled through, though the hot sun came down through the leaves. The misery clung to my skin, wanting to climb inside. I ducked back out from beneath the tree’s heavy branches and sat down in a patch of open sunlight at the other end of the vale. I took a drink from my jug, resting my forehead against the beaded wet side.
Two more walkers had come creeping through the passageway to join the first: they were sitting in a row, their long heads all bent intently towards my basket. I fed each of them a clean fruit, and when I started working they helped me. Together we heaped dry kindling against the trunk, and dug a broad circle of dirt around the limits of the heart-tree’s branches.
I stood up and arched my tired back when we were done, stretching. Then I rubbed my hands with dirt. I went back to the heart-tree and put my hands back on its sides, but this time I didn’t try to speak with the trapped souls. “Kisara,” I said, and drew the water out. I worked gently, slowly. The water beaded up in fat droplets on the bark and trickled slowly down in thin wet rivulets to sink into the ground. The sun moved onward overhead, coming ever more strongly through the leaves as they curled up and went dry. It was dipping out of sight by the time I finished, my forehead sticky with sweat and my hands covered with sap. The ground beneath my feet was soft and damp, and the tree had gone pale as bone, its branches making a noise like rattling sticks in the wind. The fruit had all withered on the boughs.
I stood clear and kindled it with a word. Then I sat heavily and wiped my hands on the grass as well as I could, and pulled my knees up to my chest. The walkers folded their legs neatly and sat around me. The tree didn’t thrash or shriek, already more than half gone; it went up quickly and burned without much smoke. Flakes of ash fell on the damp ground and melted into it like early snowflakes. They landed on my bare arms sometimes, not big enough to burn, just tiny sparks. I didn’t back away. We were the only mourners the tree and its dreamers had left.
I fell asleep at some point while the bonfire went on, tired from my work. When I woke in the morning, the tree was burned out, a black stump that crumbled easily into ash. The walkers raked the ash evenly around the clearing with their many-fingered hands, leaving a small mound at the center where the old tree had stood. I planted a fruit from my basket beneath it. I had a vial of growing-potion that I’d brewed up out of river-water and the seeds of heart-trees. I sprinkled a few drops over the mound, and sang encouragement to the fruit until a silver sapling poked its head out and climbed up to three years’ height. The new tree didn’t have a dream of its own, but it carried on the quiet dream of the grove-tree the fruit had come from, instead of tormented nightmares. The walkers would be able to eat the fruit, when it came.
I left them tending it, busily putting up a shade of tall branches to keep its fresh new leaves from crisping in the hot sun, and went away through the stones, back out into the Wood. The ground was full of ripened nuts and tangles of bramble-berries, but I didn’t gather while I walked. It would be a long time yet before it would be safe to eat any fruit from outside the grove. There was too much sorrow under the boughs, too many of the tormented heart-trees still anchoring the forest.
I’d brought out a handful of people from a heart-tree in Zatochek, and another handful from the Rosyan side. But those had been people taken only very lately. The heart-trees took everything: flesh and bone and not just dreams. Marek’s hope had always been a false one, I’d discovered. Anyone who’d been caught inside for more than a week or two was too much a part of the tree to be brought out again.
I had been able to ease some of those, and help them slide into the long deep dream. A fe
w of them had even found their way into dreaming by themselves, once the Wood-queen had slipped away, her animating rage gone. But that left hundreds of heart-trees still standing, many of them in dark and secret places of the Wood. Drawing the water out of them and giving them to the fire was the gentlest way I’d found to set them free. It still felt like killing someone, every time, although I knew it was better than leaving them trapped and lingering. The grey sorrow of it stayed with me afterwards.
This morning, a clanging bell surprised me out of my weary fog, and I pushed aside a bush to find a yellow cow staring back at me, chewing grass meditatively. I was near the border on the Rosyan side, I realized. “You’d better go back home,” I told the cow. “I know it’s hot, but you’re too likely to eat the wrong thing in here.” A girl’s voice was calling her in the distance, and after a moment she came through the bushes and stopped when she saw me; nine years old or so.
“Does she run away into the forest a lot?” I asked her, stumbling a little over my Rosyan.
“Our meadow is too small,” the girl said, looking up at me with clear blue eyes. “But I always find her.”
I looked down at her and knew she was telling the truth; there was a strand of silver bright inside her, magic running close to the surface. “Don’t let her go too deep,” I said. “And when you get older, come and find me. I live on the other side of the Wood.”
“Are you Baba Jaga?” she asked, interestedly.
“No,” I said. “But you might call her a friend of mine.”
Now I had woken up enough to know where I was, I turned back westward right away. The Rosyans had sent soldiers to patrol the borders of the Wood on their side, and I didn’t want to distress them. They were still uneasy about me popping out on their side now and then, even after I’d sent back some of their lost villagers, and I couldn’t really blame them. All the songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways, and I suspected that the bards weren’t bringing the most outrageous ones to my side of the valley at all. A man had been booed out of Olshanka tavern a few weeks ago, I’d heard, for trying to sing one where I’d turned into a wolf-beast and eaten up the king.
But my step was lighter anyway: meeting the little girl and her cow had lifted some of the grey weight from my shoulders. I sang Jaga’s walking-song and hurried away, back towards home. I was hungry, so I ate a fruit from my basket as I walked. I could taste the forest in it, the running magic of the Spindle caught in roots and branches and fruit, infused with sunlight to become sweet juice on my tongue. There was an invitation in it, too, and maybe one day I would want to accept; one day when I was tired and ready to dream a long dream of my own. But for now it was only a door standing open on a hill in the distance, a friend waving to me from afar, and the grove’s deep sense of peace.
Kasia had written me from Gidna: the children were doing as well as could be hoped. Stashek was still very quiet, but he had stood up and spoken to the Magnati, when they had been summoned to vote, well enough to persuade them to crown him with his grandfather as his regent. He’d also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha’s daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn’t much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.
There had been a tourney to celebrate Stashek’s coronation, and he’d asked Kasia to be his champion, much to his grandmother’s dismay. It had turned out halfway for the best, because the Rosyans sent a party of knights, and after Kasia knocked them all down, it made them wary about invading us in revenge for the battle at the Rydva. Enough soldiers had escaped the siege of the tower to carry tales of the invulnerable golden warrior-queen, slaughtering and unstoppable; and people had mixed her up with Kasia. So Rosya had grudgingly accepted Stashek’s request for a renewed truce, and our summer had ended in a fragile peace, with time for both sides to mend.
Stashek had also used Kasia’s triumph to name her captain of his guard. Now she was learning how to fight with a sword properly, so she didn’t knock into the other knights and tumble them over accidentally while they were all drilling together. Two lords and an archduke had asked her to marry them, and so, she wrote to me in outrage, had Solya.
Can you imagine? I told him I thought he was a lunatic, and he said he would live in hope. Alosha laughed for ten minutes without stopping except to cough when I told her, and then she said he’d done it knowing I’d say no, just to demonstrate to the court that he’s loyal to Stashek now. I said I wouldn’t go bragging of someone asking me to marry them, and she said just watch, he’d spread it around himself. Sure enough, half a dozen people asked me about it the next week. I almost wanted to go and tell him I’d have him after all, just to see him squirm, but I was too afraid he’d decide to go through with it for some reason or another, and he’d find some way not to let me out.
Alosha’s better every day, and the children are doing well, too. They go sea-bathing together every morning: I come along and sit on the beach, but I can’t swim anymore: I just sink straight to the bottom, and the salt water feels all wrong on my skin, even if I just put my feet into it. Send me another jug of river-water, please! I’m always a little thirsty, here, and it’s good for the children, too. They never have the nightmares about the tower if I let them have a sip of it before they sleep.
I’ll come for a real visit this winter, if you think it’s safe for the children. I thought they’d never want to come back, but Marisha asked if she could come and play at Natalya’s house again.
I miss you.
I took one last blurred hop-step to come to the Spindle, and the clearing where my own little tree-cottage stood, coaxed out of the side of an old drowsy oak. On one side of my doorway, the oak’s roots made a big hollow that I had lined with grass. I tried to keep it full of grove-fruit for the walkers to take. It was emptier than when I’d left, and on the other side of my doorway, someone had filled my wood-box.
I put the rest of my gathered fruit into the hollow and went inside for a moment. The house didn’t need tidying: the floor was soft moss and the grass coverlet turned itself back over the bed without my help after I climbed out in the mornings. I did need tidying, badly, but I’d wasted too much time wandering grey and tired this morning. The sun was climbing past noon, and I didn’t want to be late. I only picked up my reply for Kasia and the corked jug of Spindle-water, and put them in my basket, so I could give them to Danka to post for me.
I went back out onto the riverbank and took three more big steps going west to come out of the Wood at last. I crossed the Spindle at Zatochek bridge, in the shade of the tall young heart-tree growing there.
The Wood-queen had made a final furious push at the same time as Sarkan and I were floating down the river to find her, and the trees had half swallowed Zatochek before we stopped her. People fleeing the village met me on the road as I walked away from the tower. I ran the rest of the way and found the handful of desperate defenders about to chop down the newly planted heart-tree.
They’d stayed behind to buy time for their families to escape, but they’d done it expecting to be taken, corrupted; they were wild-eyed and terrified even in their courage. I don’t think they would have listened to me if it hadn’t been for my ragged flapping clothes, my hair in snarls and blackened with soot, and my feet bare in the road: I couldn’t easily have been anything but a witch.
Even then, they weren’t quite sure whether to believe me when I told them the Wood had been defeated, defeated for good. None of us had imagined such a thing ever happening. But they’d seen the mantises and the walkers go fleeing suddenly back into the Wood, and they were all very tired by then. In the end they stood back and let me work. The tree hadn’t been even a day old: the walkers had bound the village headman and his three sons into it, to make it grow. I was able to bring the brothers out, but their father refused
: a hot coal of pain had been burning slowly in his belly for a year.
“I can help you,” I’d offered, but the old man shook his head, his eyes half-dreaming already, smiling, and the hard knobs of his bones and body trapped beneath the bark melted away suddenly beneath my hands. The crooked heart-tree sighed and straightened up. It dropped all its poisonous blooms at once; new flowers budded on the branches instead.
We all stood together for a moment under the silver branches, breathing in their faint fragrance, nothing like the overwhelming rotten sweetness of the corrupt flowers. Then the defenders noticed what they were doing, shifted nervously and backed away. They were as afraid to accept the heart-tree’s peace as Sarkan and I had been, in the grove. None of us knew how to imagine something that came from the Wood and wasn’t evil and full of hate. The headman’s sons looked at me helplessly. “Can’t you bring him out, too?” the eldest asked.
I had to tell them that there wasn’t anything to bring him out of, anymore; that the tree was him. I was too tired to explain very well, but anyway it wasn’t something people could easily understand, even people from the valley. The sons stood in baffled silence, confused whether to grieve or not. “He missed Mother,” the eldest said finally, and they all nodded.
None of the villagers felt easy about having a heart-tree growing on their bridge, but they trusted me enough at least that they’d left it standing. It had grown well since then: its roots were already twining themselves enthusiastically with the logs of the bridge, promising to take it over. It was laden with fruit and birds and squirrels. Not many people were ready to eat a heart-tree’s fruit yet, but the animals trusted their noses. I trusted mine, too: I picked a dozen more for my basket and went on, singing my way down the dusty long road to Dvernik.
Little Anton was out with his family’s flock, lazing on his back in the grass. He jumped up when I lurched into his field, a little nervously, but mostly everyone had gotten used to my appearing now and then. I might have been shy of going home at first, after everything that had happened, but I’d been so tired after that terrible day, tired and lonely and angry and sad all at once, the Wood-queen’s sorrow and my own all tangled up. After I finally finished clearing out Zatochek, almost without thinking my weary feet turned and took me home. My mother took one look at me in the doorway and didn’t say anything, just put me to bed. She sat beside me and stroked my hair, singing until I fell asleep.