Uprooted

Chapter 15

The 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.

He managed to drag one arm free at the cost of the other, silver bark climbing to the elbow, roots whipping themselves out of the ground and twining about his leg, dragging him in closer. They were tearing at his clothes. He seized a pouch at his waist, jerked the strap loose, and thrust something into my hands: it gurgled, a vial glowing fierce red-violet. It was fire-heart, a dram of it, and he shook me by the arm. “Now, you fool! If it takes me, you’re all dead! Burn it and run!”

I looked up from the bottle and stared at him. He meant me to fire the tree, I realized; he meant me to burn the tree — and him with it. “Do you think I’d rather live like this?” he said to me, his voice tight and clenched, as though he was speaking past horror: the bark had already swallowed one of his legs, and climbed nearly to the shoulder.

Kasia was next to me, her face pale and stricken; she said, “Nieshka, it’s worse than dying. It’s worse.”

I stood with the vial clutched in my hand, glowing between my fingers, and then I put my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “Ulozishtus. The purging spell. Cast it with me.”

He stared at me. Then he gave one short jerk of a nod. “Give her the vial,” he said, between his clenched teeth. I gave Kasia the fire-heart and gripped the Dragon’s hand, and together we said the spell: I whispered, “Ulozishtus, ulozishtus,” a steady drumbeat, and then he joined in with me, reciting all the long careful song of it. But I didn’t let the purging magic flow: I held it back. In my mind I built a dam before the power of it, let our joined spell fill up a vast lake within me as the working built and built.

The swelling heat of it filled me, burning bright, almost unbearable. I couldn’t breathe, my lungs crushed against my rib cage; my heart strained to beat. I couldn’t see: the fighting went on somewhere behind me, a distant clamoring only: shouts, the eerie clatter of the walkers, the hollow ring of swords. It was coming closer and closer still. I felt Kasia’s back pressed to mine; she was making herself a final shield. The fire-heart was singing cheerful and hungry in the vial she held, hoping to be let out, hoping to devour us all, almost comforting.

I held the working as long as I could, until the Dragon’s voice failed, and then I opened my eyes again. The bark had climbed over his neck, up his cheek. It had sealed over his mouth, it was creeping around his eye. He squeezed my hand once, and then I poured the power through him, down the half-formed channel to the devouring tree.

He stiffened, his eyes going wide and unseeing. His hand clenched on mine in silent agony. Then the bark over his mouth withered away, flaking like the shed skin of some monstrous snake, and he was screaming aloud. I clutched his hand with both of mine, biting my lip against the pain of his brutal grip while he cried out, the tree blackening and charring away around him, leaves above us crackling into flames. They were falling, stinging bits of ash, the hideous smell of the fruit cooking and liquefying. Juice ran down the limbs, and sap came bursting in boiling-hot gouts from the trunks and the bark.

The roots caught as quickly as well-seasoned firewood: we’d pulled so much water out of them. The bark was loosening and peeling off in great strips. Kasia grabbed the Dragon’s arm and wrestled his limp body away from the tree, blistered and seared. I helped her pull him away through the gathering smoke, and then she turned and plunged through the haze again. Dimly I saw her gripping a slab of bark, pulling it away in a thick sheet; she hacked at the tree with her sword and pried at it, and more of the sides broke away. I laid the Dragon down and stumbled to help her: the tree was too hot to touch, but I put my hands over it anyway and after a groping moment I blurted, “Ilmeyon!” Come out, come out, as if I were Jaga calling a rabbit out of a burrow for dinner.

Kasia hacked at it again, and then the wood split with a crack, and I saw through it a sliver of a woman’s face, blank, a staring blue eye. Kasia reached into the edges of the broken gap and started pulling away more of the wood, breaking it away, and suddenly the queen came falling out, her whole body bending limply forward out of a hollow of wood and leaving a woman’s shape behind, scraps of desiccated cloth falling away from her body and catching fire even as she tipped through the broken opening. She stopped, hanging: her head wouldn’t come free, held by a net of golden hair, impossibly long and embedded in the wood all around her. Kasia slashed the sword down through the cloud, and the queen came loose and fell into our arms.

She was as heavy and inert as a log. Smoke and fire wreathed us, and above us the moaning and thrashing of the branches: the tree had become a pillar of fire. The fire-heart was clamoring so loudly in its vial it seemed to me I could hear it with my ears, eager to come out and join the blaze.

We staggered forward, Kasia all but dragging the three of us: me, Queen Hanna, and the Dragon. We fell out from beneath the branches into the clearing. The Falcon and Prince Marek alone of the soldiers remained, fighting back-to-back with ferocious skill, Marek’s sword lit with the same white fire the Falcon held. The last four walkers crowded close. They made a sudden rush; the Falcon whipped them back with a circling lash of fire, and Marek chose one and leapt for it through the blaze: he caught its neck in one mailed fist and wrapped his boots about the body, one foot hooked underneath one of the forelimbs. He drove his sword down hard between the base of the neck and the body and twisted himself: almost exactly the motion of pulling a twig away from a living branch, and the long narrow head of the walker splintered and cracked.

He let its twitching body drop, then dived back through the dying ring of fire before the other walkers could close in on him. Four other dead walkers lay sprawled in the exact same way on the ground: he’d worked out a method, then, for killing them. But the walkers had almost caught him at the end, and he was staggering with fatigue. He had thrown aside his helm. He ducked his head and wiped his tabard across his dripping forehead, panting. The Falcon was sagging beside him, also. Though his lips never stopped moving, the silver fire around his hands was burning low; the white cloak had been discarded across the dirt, smoking where burning leaves were falling upon it. The three walkers backed away, making ready for another rush; he drew himself up.

“Nieshka,” Kasia said, spurring me out of dull staring, and I stumbled forward, opening my mouth. Only a ragged croak came out, smoke-hoarsened. I struggled for another breath, and managed to whisper, “Fulmedesh,” or at least enough of a suggestion of the word to give my magic form, even as I fell forward and put my hands on the ground. The earth cracked along a line running away from me, opening beneath the walkers. As they fell into it thrashing, the Falcon flung fire into the crevice, and it closed up around them.

Marek turned, and then he suddenly came running towards me as I staggered up. He slid into the dirt heels-first and kicked my legs back out from under me. The silver mantis had lunged out of the burning cloud of the heart-tree, its wings alight and crackling with fire, seeking some last vengeance. I stared up into its golden, inhuman eyes; its dreadful claws drew back for another lunge. Marek was flat on the ground beneath its belly. He set his sword against a seam of the carapace and kicked its leg out from under it, one of only three remaining. It fell, impaling itself, even as he heaved up: it thrashed wildly, going over, and he pushed it off his sword with one final kick to join the raging blaze of the heart-tree. It lay still.

Marek turned and dragged me up to my feet. My legs were shaking; my whole body trembling. I couldn’t hold myself upright. I had always been dubious of war stories, songs of battle: the occasional fights between boys in the village square had always ended in mud and bloody noses and clawing, snot and tears, nothing graceful or glorious, and I didn’t see how adding swords and death to the mix could make it any better. But I couldn’t have imagined the horror of this.

The Falcon was stumbling over to another man lying curled in the dirt. He had a vial of some elixir in his belt: he fed the man a swallow of it and helped him up. Together they went to a third with one arm only left: he had cauterized the stump in the fire, and lay dazed on the ground, staring up. Two men left, of thirty.

Prince Marek didn’t seem stricken. He absently wiped an arm across his forehead again, smearing more soot across his face. He had already caught his breath, nearly; his chest rose and fell, but easily, not in the struggling heaves I could barely get as he easily pulled me with him, away from the flames to the cooler shelter of the trees beyond the clearing’s edge. He didn’t speak to me. I don’t know if he even knew me: his eyes were half-glazed. Kasia joined us, the Dragon heaved over her shoulders; she stood incongruously easily beneath his deadweight.

Marek blinked a few more times while the Falcon gathered the two men towards us, and then he seemed to finally become aware of the spreading bonfire of the tree, the blackening branches falling. His grip on my arm tightened into bruising pain, the edges of the gauntlet digging into my flesh as I tried to pry at it. He turned to me and shook me, his eyes widening with rage and horror. “What have you done?” he snarled at me, harsh with smoke, and then he went suddenly very still.

The queen was standing in front of us, unmoving, lit golden in the light of the blazing tree. She stood like a statue where Kasia had propped her onto her feet, and her arms dangled by her sides. Her cropped hair was as yellow as Marek’s, thin and fine; it floated around her head like a cloud. He stared at her, his face open as the beak of a hungry bird. He let go of me and reached out a hand.

“Don’t touch her!” the Falcon said sharply, hoarse with smoke. “Get the chains.”

Marek halted. He didn’t take his eyes off her. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t listen; then he turned and stumbled across the ruin of the battlefield to the corpse of his horse. The chains the Falcon had put on Kasia, while he’d examined her, were bundled up in cloth on the back of his saddle. Marek dragged them down and brought them back to us. The Falcon took the yoke from him with the cloth and cautiously, as wary as if he’d been approaching a mad dog, went towards the queen.

She didn’t stir, her eyes didn’t blink; it was as though she didn’t even see him. He hesitated even so, and then he spoke the protection spell over himself again, and he put the yoke over her neck in one swift movement and backed away. She still didn’t move. He reached out again, still with the cloth, and clasped the manacles onto her wrists one after another; then he draped the cloth over her shoulders.

There was a loud terrible crack behind us. We all jumped like rabbits. The heart-tree had split down its trunk, one whole massive half leaning away. It came down with a roaring crash, smashing through the hundred-year oaks on the edge of the clearing; a cloud of orange sparks roared up out of the heart of the trunk. The second half suddenly burst entirely into flames: consumed and roaring, and the branches thrashed once more and were still.

The queen’s body came alive with one jerky, clenched motion; the chains scraped and clanked as she moved within them, a whine of metal, and she staggered away from us, putting her hands up in front of her. The cloth slid off her shoulders; she didn’t notice it. She was groping at her own face with her curling, too-long nails, clawing at herself, with a low incoherent moan.

Marek sprang forward and caught her by the manacled wrists; she convulsively flung him off her with unnatural strength. Then she stopped and fixed a stare on him. He staggered back and caught his balance, straightened. Bloodstained, smeared with soot and sweat, he still looked a warrior and a prince; the green crest was still visible on his chest, the crown above the hydra. She looked at it and then at his face. She didn’t speak, but her eyes didn’t leave him.

He drew one quick harsh breath and said, “Mother.”