Uprooted (29 page)

The mare was panting beneath me, shuddering, and I knew she couldn’t last; even strong, trained warhorses would founder, ridden like this after swimming a cold river.
“Nen elshayon,”
I whispered to her ears,
“nen elshayon,”
and let her have a little strength, a little warmth. She stretched out her fine head and tossed it, gratefully, and I closed my eyes and tried to widen it to all of them, saying,
“Nen elshayine,”
pushing out my hand towards Kasia’s horse as though throwing it a line.

I felt that imagined line catch; I flung more of them out, and the horses drew closer together, running more easily again. The Dragon threw a brief look back at me over his shoulder. We kept on, riding behind the blowing horn, and now I started to see something moving through the trees at last. Walkers, many walkers, and they were coming towards us rapidly, all their long stick-legs moving in unison. One of them stretched out a long arm and caught one of the soldiers off his horse, but they were falling behind us, as if they hadn’t expected our pell-mell speed. We burst together through a wall of pines into a vast clearing, the horses leaping to clear a stand of brush, and before us stood a monstrous heart-tree.

The trunk of it was broader than the side of a horse, towering up into an immensity of spreading branches. Its boughs were laden with pale silver-green leaves and small golden fruits with a horrible stink, and beneath the bark looking at us was a human face, overgrown and smoothed out into a mere suggestion, with two hands crossed across the breast like a corpse. Two great roots forked at its feet, and in the hollow between them lay a skeleton, almost swallowed by moss and rotting leaves. A smaller root twisted out through one open eye socket, and grass poked through ribs and scraps of rusted mail. The remains of a shield lay across the body, barely marked with a black double-headed eagle: the royal crest of Rosya.

We pulled up our snorting, heaving horses just short of its branches. Behind me I heard a sudden snapping noise like the door of an oven slamming shut, and at the same moment I was struck by a heavy weight out of nowhere, thrown out of my saddle. I hit the bare ground painfully, the air knocked out of my lungs, my elbow scraped and legs bruised.

I twisted. Kasia was on top of me: she’d knocked me off my horse. I stared up past her. My horse was in the air above us, headless. A monstrous thing like a praying mantis was holding it up in two forelegs. The mantis blended against the heart-tree: narrow golden eyes the same shape as the fruits, and a body of the same silvery green as the leaves. It had bitten the horse’s head off with a single snap, in the same lunging movement. Behind us, another of the soldiers had fallen headless, and a third was screaming, his leg gone, thrashing in the grip of another mantis: there were a dozen of the creatures, coming out of the trees.

Chapter 15

T
he silver mantis dropped my horse to the ground and spat out the head. Kasia was scrambling up, dragging me away. We were all caught in horror for a moment, and then Prince Marek shouted wordlessly and flung his horn at the head of the silver mantis. He dragged out his sword. “Fall in! Get the wizards behind us!” he roared, and spurred his horse onward, getting between us and the thing, slashing at it. His sword skidded down the carapace, peeling up a long translucent strip as though he’d been paring a carrot.

The warhorses showed they really were worth their weight in silver: they weren’t panicking now, as any ordinary beast would have done, but rearing and lashing out, their voices shrilling. Their hooves struck with hollow thumps against the mantis shells. The soldiers made a loose circle around me and Kasia, the Dragon and the Falcon pulling their horses in on either side of us. All the soldiers were putting their reins in their teeth; half of them had already drawn swords, making a bristling wall of points to protect us, while the others settled their shields on their arms first.

The mantis creatures were coming out of the trees to surround us. They were still hard to see in the dappled light with the trees moving, but no longer invisible. They didn’t move like the walkers, slow and stiff; they ran lightly forward on four legs, the wide spiked jaws of their front legs quivering.
“Suitah liekin, suitah lang!”
the Falcon was shouting, summoning that blazing white fire he’d used in the tower. He flung it out like a lash to curl around the forelegs of the nearest mantis as it reared up to snatch for another man. He jerked on the line like a man pulling in a resisting calf, and dragged the mantis forward: there was a crackling bitter smell of burning oil where the fire pressed against its shell, thin plumes of white smoke curling away. Off-balance, the mantis snapped its terrible mandibles on thin air. The Falcon pulled its head into the line, and one of the soldiers hacked at its neck.

I didn’t have much hope: in the valley, our ordinary axes and swords and scythes barely scraped the skin of the walkers. But this sword somehow bit deep. Chips of chitin flew into the air, and the man on the other side worked the point of his sword into the joint where the neck met the head. He put his weight against the hilt and shoved it through. The mantis’s shell cracked loudly like a crab’s leg, and its head sagged, the jaws going limp. Ichor oozed out of its body over the sword-blade, steaming, and I briefly saw letters gleam golden through the haze before they faded again into the steel.

But even as the mantis died, its whole body lurched forward, pushing through the ring and nearly knocking into the Falcon’s horse. Another mantis leaned in through the opened space, reaching for him, but he seized the reins in a fist and controlled his mount as it tried to rear, then pulled his lash of fire back and cracked it into the second mantis’s face.

On the ground with Kasia, I could barely see anything else of the fighting. I heard Prince Marek and Janos shouting encouragement to the soldiers, and the harsh scraping noise of metal meeting shell. Everything was confusion and noise, happening so quickly I almost couldn’t breathe, much less think. I looked up wildly at the Dragon, who was fighting his own alarmed horse; I saw him snarl something under his breath and kick his feet loose from the stirrups. He threw the reins to one of the soldiers, a man whose horse was sagging with a terrible gaping cut to its chest, and slid down to the ground beside us.

“What should I do?” I cried to him. I groped helplessly for a spell.
“Murzhetor—?”

“No!” he shouted at me, over the cacophony, and seizing my arm turned me around, facing the heart-tree. “We’re here for the queen. If we spend ourselves fighting a useless battle, all of this has been for nothing.”

We had stayed back from the tree, but the mantises were herding us towards it little by little, forcing us all beneath the boughs, and the smell of the fruit was burning in my nostrils. The trunk was hideously vast. I had never seen a tree so large, even in the deepest forest, and there was something grotesque about its size, like a swollen tick full of blood.

This time a threat alone wouldn’t work, even if I could have summoned up the rage to call
fulmia:
the Wood wasn’t going to hand over the queen to save even so large a heart-tree, not now that it knew we could kill the tree afterwards, purging her. I couldn’t imagine what we could do to this tree: the smooth bark shone with a hard luster like metal. The Dragon was staring at it narrowly, muttering as he worked his hands, but even before the leaping current of flame splashed against the bark, I knew instinctively it would do no good; and I didn’t believe even the soldiers’ enchanted swords could bite into that wood at all.

The Dragon kept trying: spells of breaking, spells of opening, spells of cold and lightning, systematic even while the fighting raged around us. He was looking for some weakness, some crack in the armor. But the tree withstood everything, and the smell of the fruit grew stronger. Two more of the mantis creatures had been killed; four more soldiers were dead. Kasia made a muffled cry as something rolled to a thump against my foot, and I looked down at Janos’s head, his clear blue eyes still fixed in an intent frown. I jerked away from it in horror and tripped to my knees, sickened all at once and helplessly: I vomited on the grass. “Not
now
!” the Dragon shouted at me, as though I could help it. I had never seen fighting before, not like this, this slaughter of men. They were being killed like cattle. I sobbed on my hands and knees, tears falling in the dirt, and then I put out my hands and gripped the widest roots near me, and said,
“Kisara, kisara, vizh,”
like a chant.

The roots twitched.
“Kisara,”
I said again, over and over, and droplets of water slowly collected on the surface of the roots, oozing out of them and rolling down to join the tiny damp spots, one after another after another. The dampness spread, became a circle between my hands. The thinnest branching rootlets in the open air were shriveling in on themselves.
“Tulejon vizh,”
I said, whispering, coaxing.
“Kisara.”
The roots began to writhe and squirm in the ground like fat earthworms as the water squeezed out of them, thin rivulets running. There was mud between my hands now, spreading and running away from the bigger roots, exposing more of them.

The Dragon knelt beside me. He took up the song of an enchantment that rang vaguely familiar in my ears, something I had heard once long before: the spring after the Green Year, I remembered, when he’d come to help the fields recover. He’d brought us water from the Spindle, then, with channels that dug themselves from the river all the way to our burned and barren fields. But this time the narrow channels ran away from the heart-tree instead, and as I chanted the water out of the roots, they carried the water far away, and the ground around the roots began to parch into desert, mud cracking into dust and sand.

Then Kasia caught us both by the arms and nearly levered us up from the ground, pulling us stumbling forward. The walkers we’d passed in the trees were coming into the clearing now, a whole host of them: as though they’d been lying in wait for us. The silver mantis had lost a limb but still pressed the attack, darting side-to-side and lashing out with spiked arms wherever an opening afforded. The horses Janos had worried about were nearly all down or fled by now. Prince Marek fought on foot, shoulder-to-shoulder with sixteen men in a row, their shields overlapping into a wall and the Falcon still lashing fire from behind them, but we were being crowded in, ever closer to the trunk. The heart-tree’s leaves were rustling in the wind, louder and louder, a dreadful whispering, and we were nearly at the foot of the tree. I dragged in a breath and almost vomited again from the sweet dreadful stink of the fruit.

One of the walkers tried edging around the side of the line, craning its head around sideways to see us. Kasia snatched a sword from the ground, fallen from some soldier’s hand, and swung it in a wild sideways arc. The blade struck the walker’s side and splintered through it with a crack like a breaking twig. It fell into a twitching heap.

The Dragon was coughing beside me from the stench of the fruit. But we took up our chant again, desperately, and dragged more water from the roots. Here close to the tree, the thicker roots resisted at first, but together our spells pulled the water from them, from the earth, and the dirt began to crumble in around the tree. Its branches were shivering: water was beginning to come rolling down the trunk in thick green-stained droplets, too. Leaves were beginning to dry up and shed like rain from above us, but then I heard a terrible scream: the silver mantis had seized another one of the men from out of the line, and this time it did not kill him. It bit off the hand that held the sword, and flung him to the walkers.

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.