Uprooted (58 page)

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 mouth, 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.

“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 horror. 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.