Uprooted

Chapter 31

Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin. I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open. I clawed wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes. Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out — and I realized everything was different.

There was no trace of fire or fighting. I didn’t see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere. Even the vast heart-tree was gone. So were most of the others. The glade was more than half-empty. I stood on the shore of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world. It was bright morning instead of afternoon. Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.

I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn’t feel like the Wood. It wasn’t the terrible twisted shadow-place where I’d seen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree. It didn’t even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence. The pool lapped gently at my ankles. I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle. Sarkan couldn’t cast the Summoning alone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.

Yet even the Spindle was different here. The stream grew wider, gently, and began to deepen, but no cloud of mist rose to meet me; I didn’t hear the roaring of the waterfall. I stopped finally at a curving that felt a little familiar, and stared at a sapling on the bank: a slender heart-tree sapling, maybe ten years old, growing over that enormous grey old-man boulder we’d seen at the base of the cliff. It was the first heart-tree, the one we’d landed beneath in our mad slide down the cliff, half-lost in fog at the base of the waterfall.

But here there was no waterfall, no cliff; the ancient tree was small and young. Another heart-tree stood opposite it on the other bank of the Spindle, and beyond those two sentinels the river gradually widened, going away dark and deep into the distance. I didn’t see any more heart-trees farther along, only the ordinary oaks and tall pines.

Then I realized I wasn’t alone. A woman was standing on the opposite bank, beneath the older heart-tree.

For one moment I thought she was the Wood-queen. She looked so much like her that they might have been kin. She had the same look of alder and tree-bark, the same tangled hair, but her face was longer, and her eyes were green. Where the Wood-queen was gold and russet, she was simpler browns and silver-greys. She was looking down the river, just as I was, and before I could say anything a distant creaking came drifting down the river. A boat came into view, riding gently; a long wooden boat elaborately carved, beautiful, and the Wood-queen stood in it.

She didn’t seem to see me. She stood in the prow smiling, flowers wreathing her hair, with a man beside her, and it took me time to recognize his face. I’d only ever seen it dead: the king in the tower. He looked far younger and taller, his face unworn. But the Wood-queen looked much the same as she had in the tomb, the day they’d bricked her in. Behind them sat a young man with a tight look, not much more than a boy, but I could see the man he’d grow up to be in his bones: the hard-faced man from the tower. More of the tower-people were in the boat with them, rowing: men in silver armor, who glanced around themselves warily at the massive trees as they stroked their oars through the water.

Behind them came more boats, dozens of them: but these were makeshift-looking things more like overgrown leaves than real boats. They were crowded full of a kind of people I’d never seen before, all with a look of tree to them, a little like the Wood-queen herself: dark walnut and bright cherry, pale ash and warm beech. There were a few children among them, but no one old.

The carved boat bumped gently against the bank, and the king helped the Wood-queen down. She went to the wood-woman smiling, her hands outstretched. “Linaya,” she said, a word that I somehow knew was and wasn’t magic, was and wasn’t a name; a word that meant sister, and friend, and fellow-traveler. The name echoed strangely away from her through the trees. The leaves seemed to whisper it back; the ripple of the stream picked it up, as if it were written into everything around me.

The Wood-queen didn’t seem to notice. She kissed her sister on both cheeks. Then she took the king’s hand and led him on through the heart-trees, going towards the grove. The men from the tower tied their boat up and followed the two of them.

Linaya waited silently on the bank and watched the rest of the boats unload, one after another. As each one emptied, she touched it, and the boat dwindled into a leaf floating on the water; the stream carried it tidily into a small pocket by the bank. Soon the river was empty. The last of the wood-people were already walking onward towards the glade. Then Linaya turned to me and said, in a low deep resonating voice, like drumming on a hollow log, “Come.”

I stared at her. But she only turned and walked away from me through the stream, and after a moment I followed. I was afraid, but somehow instinctively not afraid of her. My feet splashed in the water. Hers didn’t. The water where it landed on her skin soaked in.

Time seemed to flow around us strangely. By the time we reached the grove, the wedding was over. The Wood-queen and her king were standing on the green mound with their hands clasped, a chain of braided flowers wrapped over their arms. The wood-people were gathered around them, scattered loosely through the trees, watching and silent. There was a quiet in all of them, a deep inhuman stillness. The handful of men from the tower eyed them warily, and flinched from the rustling murmurs of the heart-trees. The young hard-faced man was standing just to one side of the couple, looking with a twist of distaste at the Wood-queen’s strange, long, gnarled fingers where they wrapped around the king’s hands.

Linaya moved into the scene to join them. Her eyes were wet, glistening like green leaves after rain. The Wood-queen turned to her, smiling, and held out her hands. “Don’t weep,” she said, and her voice was laughing as a stream. “I’m not going far. The tower is only at the end of the valley.”

The sister didn’t answer. She only kissed her cheek, and let her hands go.

The king and the Wood-queen left together, with the men from the tower. The people drifted away quietly through the trees. Linaya sighed, softly, and it was the sighing of wind in the boughs. We were alone again, standing together on the green mound. She turned to me.

“Our people were alone here a long time,” she said, and I wondered, what was long to a tree? A thousand years, two thousand, ten? Endless generations, the roots growing deeper every one. “We began to forget how to be people. We dwindled away little by little.

“When the sorcerer-king came with his people, my sister let them come into the valley. She thought they could teach us to remember. She thought we could be renewed, and teach them in turn; we could give each other life. But they were afraid. They wanted to live, they wanted to grow stronger, but they didn’t want to change. They learned the wrong things.” Years were slipping past us as she spoke, blurred like rain, grey and soft and piling on one another. And then it was summer again, a different summer a long time later, and the wood-people were coming back through the trees.

Many of them moved slowly, somehow wearily. Some were hurt: they nursed blackened arms, and one man limped on a leg that looked like a log clumsily chopped apart. Two others were helping him. At the end of the stump, I think the leg was growing back. A few parents led children, and a woman carried a baby in her arms. In the distance, far to the west, a thin black pillar of smoke rose into the air.

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.

I could see in her where she’d gone from the grove: how she’d hunted them down, all the people of the tower, wizards and farmers and woodcutters all alike. How she’d planted one corrupt heart-tree after another in the roots of her own misery, and fed that misery onward. Mingled with my horror, I felt Linaya’s pity moving in me, deep and slow: pity and sorrow and regret. The Wood-queen saw it, too, and it held her still before me, trembling.

“I stopped them,” she said, her voice the scrape of a branch against the window-pane at night, when you imagine some dark thing is outside the house scratching to get in. “I had to stop them.”

She wasn’t speaking to me. Her eyes were looking past me, deep towards her sister’s face. “They burned the trees,” she said, pleading for understanding from someone long gone. “They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.”

Her sister didn’t have a voice to speak with anymore, but the sap of the heart-tree clung to my skin, and its roots went deep beneath my feet. “We’re meant to go,” I said softly, answering for both of us. “We’re not meant to stay forever.”

The Wood-queen finally looked at me then, instead of through me. “I couldn’t go,” she said, and I knew she’d tried. She’d killed the tower-lord and his soldiers, she’d planted all the fields with new trees, and she’d come here with her hands bloody, to sleep with her people at last. But she hadn’t been able to take root. She’d remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow. All she’d been able to do in the end was lie down beside her sister: not quite dreaming, not quite dead.

I reached out, and from the one low-hanging bough of the broken tree, I took the single waiting fruit, glowing and golden. I held it out to her. “I’ll help you,” I told her. “If you want to save her, you can.”

She looked up at the shattered, dying tree. Mud-tears were leaking from her eyes, thick brown rivulets sliding over her cheeks, dirt and ash and water mingled. She put her hands slowly up to take the fruit from me, her long gnarled twiggy fingers curling carefully around it, gently. They brushed against mine, and we looked at one another. For a moment, through the winding smoke between us, I might have been the daughter she’d hoped for, the child halfway between the tower-people and her own; she might have been my teacher and my guide, like Jaga’s book showing me the way. We might never have been enemies at all.

I bent down, and in one curled-up leaf I drew a little water for her, the last clear water left in the pool. We stepped together up onto the mound. She lifted the fruit to her mouth and bit, juices running down her chin in pale golden dripping lines. She shut her eyes and stood there. I put my hand on her, felt hate and agony like a strangler vine tangled deep through her. I put my other hand on the sister-tree, though, and reached for the deep well in her; the stillness and the calm. Being struck by lightning hadn’t changed her; the stillness would remain, even when the whole tree had fallen, even while the years crumbled it back into the earth.

The Wood-queen leaned against the tree’s gaping wound and put her arms around the blackened trunk. I gave her the last drops of the pool’s water, tipped them into her mouth, and then I touched her skin and said softly, very simply, “Vanalem.”

And she was changing. The last remnants of her white gown blew away, and the charred surface of her scorched skin peeled off in huge black flakes, fresh new bark whirling up from the ground around her like a wide silver skirt, meeting and merging into the old tree’s broken trunk. She opened her eyes one last time and looked at me, with sudden relief, and then she was gone, she was growing, her feet plunging new roots over the old.

I backed away, and when her roots had sunk deep into the earth, I turned and ran to Sarkan through the mud of the emptied pool. The bark had stopped climbing up over him. Together we broke him the rest of the way loose, peeling it away from his skin, until his legs came free. I pulled him up from the stump and we sat together, sagged together, on the bank of the stream.

I was too spent to think of anything. He was scowling down at his own hands, almost resentfully. Abruptly he lurched forward and leaned over the streambed and dug into the soft wet earth. I watched him blankly for a while, and then I realized he was trying to restore the course of the stream. I pulled myself up and reached in to help. I could feel it, as soon as I started, the same feeling he hadn’t wanted to have: the sure sense that this was the right thing to do. The river wanted to run this way, wanted to feed into the pool.

It only took moving a few handfuls of dirt, and then the stream was running over our fingers, clearing the rest of the bed for itself. The pool began to fill once more. We sat back again, wearily. Next to me he was trying to get the dirt and water off his hands, wiping them on a corner of his ruined shirt, on the grass, on his trousers, mostly just spreading the mud around. Black half-circles were crusted deep under the fingernails. He finally heaved an exasperated noise and let his hands fall into his lap; he was too tired to use magic.

I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace. The ash had sunk into the muddy bottom of the pool, and been swallowed up. The trees were letting their scorched leaves fall into the water, and moss crept over the torn bare patches of earth, new blades of grass unfurling. At the head of the pool, the new heart-tree tangled with the old one, bracing it up, sealing over the jagged scar. They were putting out small white flowers, like stars.