Uprooted (55 page)

They were still there, a stone company, pushed out of the way, blank grey eyes fixed on the tower. Most of them hadn’t been badly broken. We stood around them, silently. None of us had enough strength to undo the spell. Finally I reached out to Sarkan. He shifted Marisha to his other arm and let me take his hand.

We managed to pool enough magic to undo the spell. The soldiers writhed and jerked as they came loose from the stone, shaking with the sudden return of time and breath. Some of them had lost fingers, or had new pitted scars where their bodies had been chipped, but these were trained men, who managed cannon that roared as terribly as any spell. They edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least. “Orders, sir?” one of them asked him, uncertainly.

He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly.

We walked down to Olshanka together, the road still dusty from so much use yesterday. Yesterday. I tried not to think about it: yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone. They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down. I saw their faces in the dust while we walked. Someone in Olshanka saw us coming, and Borys came out with a wagon to carry us the rest of the way. In the back we swayed with the wheels like sacks of grain. The creaking was every song I’d ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

Borys’s wife Natalya put me to sleep in Marta’s old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt. She’d gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her, a warm welcoming place ready to receive me, and Natalya’s hand on my forehead was my mother, telling me to sleep, sleep; the monsters wouldn’t come. I shut my eyes and pretended to believe her.

I didn’t wake again until evening, a warm summer evening with the gentle twilight falling blue. There was a familiar comfortable rising bustle in the house, someone getting supper, others coming in from the day’s work. I sat at the window without moving for a long time more. They were much richer than my family: they had an upstairs part in their house just for the bedrooms. Marisha was running in the big garden with a dog and four other children, most of them older than her; she was in a fresh cotton dress marked up with grass stains, and her hair slipping out of tidy braids. But Stashek was sitting near the door watching them, though one of the others was a boy his age. Even in simple clothes he didn’t look anything like an ordinary child, with his shoulders very straight and his face solemn as church.

“We have to take them back to Kralia,” Solya said. Given time to rest, he’d gathered back up some of his outrageous self-assurance, sitting himself down in our company as though he’d been with us all along.

It was dark; the children had been put to bed. We were sitting in the garden with glasses of cool plum brandy, and I felt as though I were pretending to be grown-up. It was too much like my parents taking visitors to sit in the chairs and the shady swinging bench just inside the forest, talking of crops and families, and meanwhile all of us children ran cheerfully amok, finding berries or chestnuts, or just having games of tag.

I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn’t have been able to just sneak up on me. It didn’t seem real even to be sitting here at all, much less talking of thrones and murder, quite seriously, as if those were themselves real things and not just bits out of songs.

I felt even more peculiar, listening to them all argue. “Prince Stashek must be crowned at once, and a regency established,” Solya was going on. “The Archduke of Gidna and the Archduke of Varsha, at least—”

“Those children aren’t going anywhere but to their grandparents,” Kasia said, “if I have to put them on my back and carry them all the way myself.”

“My dear girl, you don’t understand—” Solya said.

“I’m not your dear girl,” Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him. “If Stashek’s the king now, all right; the king’s asked me to take him and Marisha to their mother’s family. That’s where they’re going.”

“The capital is too close in any case.” Sarkan flicked his fingers, impatient, dismissive. “I
do
understand the Archduke of Varsha won’t want the king in the hands of Gidna,” he added peevishly, when Solya drew breath to argue, “and I don’t care. Kralia wasn’t safe before; it won’t be safer now.”

“But nowhere will be safe,” I said, breaking in on them, bewildered. “Not for long.” They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.

After a moment, Sarkan said, “Gidna is on the ocean. The northern castles will be well placed to mount a substantial defense—”

“The Wood will come anyway!” I said. I knew it. I’d looked into the Wood-queen’s face, felt that implacable wrath beating against my skin. All these years, Sarkan had held the Wood back like a tide behind a dam of stone; he’d diverted its power away into a thousand streams and wells of power, scattered throughout the valley. But it was a dam that couldn’t hold forever. Today, next week, next year, the Wood would break through. It would reclaim all those wells, those streams, go roaring up to the mountainside. And fueled with all that new-won strength, it would come over the mountain passes.

There wasn’t going to be any strength to meet them. The army of Polnya was shattered, the army of Rosya wounded—and the Wood could afford to lose a battle or two or a dozen; it would establish its footholds and scatter its seeds, and even if it was pushed back over one mountain pass or another, that wouldn’t matter in the end. It would keep coming.
She
would keep coming. We might hold the Wood off long enough for Stashek and Marisha to grow up, grow old, even die, but what about Borys and Natalya’s grandchildren, running with them in the garden? Or their own children, growing up in the lengthening shadow?

“We can’t keep holding the Wood back with Polnya burning behind us,” Sarkan said. “The Rosyans will come over the Rydva for vengeance, as soon as they know Marek is dead—”

“We can’t hold the Wood back at all!” I said. “That’s what
they
tried—that’s what you’ve been doing. We have to stop it for good. We have to stop
her
.”

He glared at me. “Yes, what a marvelous idea. If Alosha’s blade couldn’t kill her, nothing can. What do you propose to do?”

I stared back and saw the knotting fear in my stomach reflected in his eyes. His face stilled. He stopped glaring. He sank back in his chair, still staring at me. Solya eyed us both in confusion and Kasia watched me with worry in her face. But there wasn’t anything else to do.

“I don’t know,” I said to Sarkan, my voice shaking. “But I’ll do something. Will you come into the Wood with me?”

Kasia stood with me irresolute at the crossroads outside Olshanka, unhappy. The sky was still the first pale pink-grey of morning. “Nieshka, if you think I can help you,” she said softly, but I shook my head. I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a distant shadow but happy anyway. Then the sun came down the road and touched us. We let go and stepped back: she was golden and stern, almost too beautiful to be living, and there was magic in my hands. I took her face in my hands a moment; we leaned our foreheads together, and then she turned away.

Stashek and Marisha were sitting in the wagon, watching anxiously for Kasia, with Solya next to them; one of the soldiers was driving. Some more men had come wandering back into town, those who’d run away from the fighting and the tower before the end, a mix of men from the Yellow Marshes and Marek’s men. They were all going along as escort. They weren’t enemies anymore; they hadn’t really been enemies to begin with. Even Marek’s men had thought they were saving the royal children. They’d all just been put on opposite sides of a chessboard by the Wood-queen, so she could sit to the side and watch them taken off by one another.

The wagon was loaded with supplies from the whole town, goods that would have gone to Sarkan’s tribute later that year. He’d given Borys gold for the horses and the wagon. “They’ll pay you to drive them as well,” he’d said, handing him the purse. “And take your family along; you’d have enough to make a new start of it.”

Borys looked at Natalya. She shook her head a little. He turned back and said, “We’ll stay.”

Sarkan muttered as he turned away, impatient with what looked to him like folly. But I met Borys’s eyes. The low murmur of the valley sang beneath my feet, home. I had deliberately come outside without shoes, so I could curl my toes into the soft grass and the dirt and draw that strength into me. I knew why he wasn’t going; why my mother and father wouldn’t go if I went to Dvernik and asked them to leave. “Thank you,” I told him.

The wagon creaked away. The soldiers fell in behind it. From the back, Kasia looked at me, her arms around the children, until the dust of marching raised up a muddy cloud behind them and I couldn’t see their faces anymore. I turned back to Sarkan: he regarded me with a hard, grim face. “Well?” he said.

We walked down the road from Borys’s big house, towards the wooden swish-thump of the flour mill’s water-wheel, the river steadily churning it along. Under our feet, the road gradually turned into loose pebbles, then slipped beneath the clear just-foaming water. There were a handful of boats tied up on the shore. We untied the smallest one and we pushed it out into the river, my skirts hiked up and his boots thrown into the boat; we weren’t very graceful about getting in, but we managed it without soaking ourselves, and he picked up the oars.

He sat down with his back to the Wood and said, “Keep time for me.” I sang Jaga’s quickening song in a low voice while he pulled, and the banks went blurring by.

The Spindle ran clear and straight under the rising hot sun. It sparkled on the water. We slipped quickly along it, half a mile with each oar-stroke. I had a glimpse of women doing the washing on the bank at Poniets, sitting up with heaps of white linens around them to watch us dart hummingbird-by, and when we passed Viosna for a moment we were under the cherry-trees, small fruits just forming, the water still drifted with fallen petals. I didn’t catch sight of Dvernik, though I knew when we passed it. I recognized a curve of riverbank, half a mile east of the village, and looked back to see the bright brass cockerel on the church steeple. The wind was blowing at our backs.

I kept singing softly until the dark wall of trees came into view ahead. Sarkan put the oars down into the bottom of the boat. He turned and looked at the ground before the trees, and his face was grim. I realized after a moment that there wasn’t a line of burnt ground visible anymore; only thick green grass.

“We had burned it back a mile all along the border,” he said. He looked south towards the mountains, as if he was trying to judge the distance the Wood had already come. I didn’t think it mattered now. However far was too far, and not as far as it would be, either. We’d find a way to stop it or we wouldn’t.

The Spindle’s current carried us along, drifting. Up ahead, the slim dark trees put up long arms and laced fingers alongside the river, a wall rising on either bank. He turned back to me, and we joined hands. He chanted a spell of distraction, of invisibility, and I took it and murmured to our boat, telling it to be an empty stray boat on the water, rope frayed and broken, bumping gently over rocks. We tried to be nothing to notice, nothing to care about. The sun had climbed high overhead, and a band of light ran down the river, between the shadows of the trees. I put one of the oars behind us as a rudder, and kept us on the shining road.

The banks became thicker and wilder, brambles full of red berries and thorns like dragon’s teeth, pale white and deadly sharp. The trees grew thick and misshapen and enormous. They leaned over the river; they threw thin whips of branches into the air, clawing for more of the sky. They looked the way a snarl sounds. Our safe path dwindled smaller and narrower, and the water beneath us ran silent, as if it, too, was in hiding. We huddled in the middle of the boat.

A butterfly betrayed us, a small scrap of fluttering black and yellow that had gotten lost flying over the Wood. It sank down to rest on the prow of our boat, exhausted, and a bird like a black knife darted out of the trees and snatched it up. It perched on the prow with the crushed butterfly wings sticking out of its beak, and snapped them up, three quick clacks, staring at us with eyes like small black beads. Sarkan tried to grab it, but it darted away into the trees, and a cold wind rolled down the river at our backs.

A groaning came from the banks. One of the old massive trees leaned deeply down, roots pulling free from the earth, and fell with a roar into the water just behind our boat. The river heaved underneath us. My oar spun away. We grabbed at the sides of the boat and clung as we went spinning over the surface and plunged onward, stern-first. The boat dipped, and water came pouring in over the sides, ice-cold on my bare feet. We kept spinning, buffeted; I saw as we turned a walker clattering out on the fallen tree, from the bank. It turned its stick-head to see us.