Uprooted (54 page)

I saw the buried king’s body take shape between her and us. He was carried by six men on a sheet of white linen, his face still and unmoving, the eyes filmed over with milk. They carried him into the tomb; they lowered him gently into the great stone coffin; they folded in the linen over his body.

In the
Summoning
-light, that other queen followed the men into the tomb-chamber. She bent over the coffin. There was no sorrow in her face, only a bewildered confusion, as if she didn’t understand. She touched the king’s face, touched the lids of his eyes with strangely long fingers knobbled like twigs. He didn’t stir. She startled and drew her hand back, out of the way of the men. They put the lid upon the coffin, and the blue flame erupted atop it. She watched them, still baffled.

One of the attending men spoke to her, ghostly, telling her I think to stay as long as she wished; he bowed and, stooping, left the tomb through the opening, leaving her. There was something in his face as he turned away from her that the
Summoning
caught even from so long ago, something cold and determined.

The Wood-queen didn’t see it. She was standing at the stone coffin, her hands spread over the top of it, uncomprehending as Marisha had been. She didn’t understand death. She stared at the blue flame, watching it leap; she turned all around in the bare stone room, looking around it with a wounded, appalled face. And then she stopped and looked again. Bricks were being laid in the small opening of the wall. She was being closed up inside the tomb.

She stared for a moment, and then rushed forward and knelt before the remaining opening. The men had already pushed blocks into most of the space, working quickly; the cold-faced man was speaking sorcery while they worked, blue-silver light crackling out of his hands, over the blocks, mortaring them together. She reached a hand through in protest. He didn’t answer her; he didn’t look at her face. None of them looked at her. They closed up the wall with one last block, pushing her hand back into the room with it.

She stood up, alone. She was startled, angry, full of confusion; but she wasn’t yet afraid. She raised a hand; she meant to do something. But behind her, the blue flame was leaping on the stone tomb. The letters around the sides were catching the light, shining out, completing the long sentence from the stairs. She whirled, and I could read them with her:
REMAIN
ETERNAL
,
REST
ETERNAL
,
NEVER
MOVING
,
NEVER
LEAVING
, and they weren’t just a poem for the king’s rest. This wasn’t a tomb; this was a prison. A prison meant to hold
her
. She turned and beat against the wall, she tried vainly to push against it, to work her fingers into the cracks. Terror was climbing in her. Stone shut her in, cold and still. They had quarried this room out of the roots of the mountains. She couldn’t get out. She couldn’t—

Abruptly the Wood-queen heaved the memories away. The light of the
Summoning
broke and ran away over the stones of the tomb like water. Sarkan staggered back; I nearly fell against the wall. We were back in the round room, but the queen’s fear rattled against the inside of my ribs like a bird beating itself against walls. Shut away from the sun, shut away from water, shut away from air. And she still couldn’t die. She hadn’t died.

She stood among us, only half-hidden behind Queen Hanna’s face, and she wasn’t the queen in that vision anymore, either. She’d fought her way out, somehow. She’d won free, and then she’d—killed them? She’d killed them, and not only them, but their lovers and children and all their people; she’d devoured them, become as monstrous as they had been. She’d made the Wood.

She hissed softly in the dark, not a snake’s hiss but the rustling of leaves, the scrape of tree-branches rubbing in the wind, and as she stepped forward vines came boiling down the stairs behind her, grabbing all the remaining men by ankle and wrist and throat, dragging them up against the walls and ceiling, out of her way.

Sarkan and I were still struggling to our feet. Kasia put herself before us like a shield and chopped the vines away from us, keeping us free, but others snaked around behind her and into the tomb. They lashed around the children and started to drag them forward, Marisha screaming as Stashek hacked at the vines uselessly, until they seized his arm, too. Kasia took a step away from us towards the children, her face in agony, unable to protect us all.

And then Marek sprang forward. He slashed the vines apart, his own sword gleaming around the edges. He put himself between the queen and the children, and thrust them with his shield-arm back into the safety of the burial-chamber. He stood before the queen. She halted before him, and he said,
“Mother,”
fiercely, and dropped his sword to seize her by the wrists. He looked down into her face as she turned it slowly up towards him. “Mother,” he said. “Fight free of her. It’s Marek—it’s Marechek. Come back to me.”

I pulled myself up the wall. He blazed with determination, with longing. His armor was washed with blood and smoke, his face smeared with one bright red streak, but he looked for a moment like a child, or maybe a saint, pure with want. And the queen looked at him, and put her hand on his chest, and killed him. Her fingers turned into thorns and twigs and vines; she sank them through his armor, and closed her hand like a fist.

If there was anything left of Queen Hanna, any thin scraping of will, maybe she spent it then, on one small mercy: he died without knowing he’d failed. His face didn’t change. His body slid easily off her hand, not much altered; only the hole in his breastplate where her wrist had gone in. He fell to the floor on his back, his armor ringing on the flagstones, still clear-eyed and certain,
certain
he would be heard, certain he would be victorious. He looked like a king.

He’d caught us all in his own certainty. For a moment we were all shocked into stillness. Solya inhaled once, stricken. Then Kasia sprang forward, swinging her sword. The queen caught it on her own blade. They stood fixed, pressed against each other, a few sparks glittering away from the grinding blades, and the queen leaned in and forced her slowly down.

Sarkan was speaking, an incantation of heat and flame rolling off his tongue, and fire came gouting out of the ground around the queen’s legs, yellow-red and searing. The flames blackened Kasia’s skin where they licked against her; it ate up both the swords. Kasia had to roll away. The queen’s silver mail melted and ran off her in streams of shining liquid that puddled on the floor and covered over with blackened crust; her shift billowed into hot smoky flames. But the fire didn’t touch her body; the queen’s pale limbs stayed straight and unmarred. Solya was throwing his white lash against her as well, the flames crackling to blue where his fire and the Dragon’s met; that mingled blue fire ran twisting all over her body, trying to seek out a weakness, find a way in.

I gripped Sarkan’s hand; I fed him magic and strength, so he could keep beating her back with flame. His fires were crisping up the vines. The soldiers who hadn’t been strangled were dragging themselves staggering away, back up the stairs—at least they were escaping. Other spells, one after another, came to me, but I knew without beginning that they wouldn’t work. Fire wouldn’t burn her; blade wouldn’t cut her, no matter how long we hacked away. I wondered in horror if we shouldn’t have let the
Summoning
fail; if that great nothingness could have taken her. But I didn’t think even that would have done it. There was too much of her. She could have filled in any holes we made in the world and still had more of herself left over. She was the Wood, or the Wood was her. Her roots went too deep.

Sarkan’s breath was coming in long drags, whenever he could get it. Solya sank down onto the stairs, spent, and his white fire died. I gave Sarkan more strength, but soon he’d fall, too. The queen turned towards us. She didn’t smile. There wasn’t triumph in her face, only an unending wrath and the awareness of victory.

Behind her, Kasia stood up. She drew Alosha’s sword from over her shoulder. She swung.

The sword-blade sliced into the queen’s throat and stuck there, halfway through. A hollow roaring noise began, my ear bones crackling and the whole room darkening. The queen’s face stilled. The sword began to drink and drink and drink, endlessly thirsty, wanting more. The noise climbed higher.

It felt like a war between two endless things, between a bottomless chasm and a running river. We all stood, frozen, watching, hoping. The queen’s expression didn’t change. Where the sword stuck in her throat, a black glossy sheen was trying to take hold of her flesh, spreading from the wound like ink clouding through a glass of clean water. She put a hand slowly up and touched the wound with her fingers, and a little of the same gloss came away on her fingertips. She looked down at it.

And then she looked back up at us with sudden contempt, almost a shake of her head, as if to tell us we’d been foolish.

She sank down suddenly onto her knees, her head and body and limbs all jerking—like a marionette whose puppeteer had dropped the strings. And all at once Sarkan’s flames caught in Queen Hanna’s body. Her short golden hair went up in a smoky cloud, her skin blackened and split. Pale gleams showed through beneath the charred skin. For a moment I thought maybe it had worked, maybe the sword had broken the Wood-queen’s immortality.

But pale white smoke came billowing out of those cracks, torrents of it, and roared away past us—escaping, just like the Wood-queen had escaped her prison once before. Alosha’s sword kept trying to drink her up, to catch at the streams of smoke, but they boiled away too quickly, rushing past even the sword’s hungry grasp. Solya covered his head as they fled over him and up the stairs; others twisted out through the air-channel; still more dived into the burial-chamber and up and vanished through a tiny chink in the roof I couldn’t have noticed, the thinnest crack. Kasia had flung herself atop the children; Sarkan and I huddled against the wall, covering our mouths. The Wood-queen’s essence dragged over our skin with the oily horror of corruption, the warm stink of old leaves and mold.

And then it was gone—she was gone.

Uninhabited now, Queen Hanna’s body crumbled away all at once, like a used-up log falling into ashes. Alosha’s sword fell to the floor clattering. We were alone, our rasping breaths the only sound. All the living soldiers had fled; the dead had been swallowed by the vines and the fire, leaving nothing but smoky ghosts on the white marble walls. Kasia sat up slowly, the children gathered against her. I sank to the floor on my knees, shaking with horror and despair. Marek’s hand lay open near me. His face gazed up sightless from the middle of the room, surrounded by charred stone and melted steel.

The dark blade was dissolving into the air. In a moment nothing remained but the empty hilt. Alosha’s sword was spent. And the Wood-queen had survived.

Chapter 29

W
e carried the children out of the tower into morning sun, pouring down bright and improbable on the silent wreckage of six thousand men. There were flies already buzzing thickly, and the crows had come in flocks; when we came out they burst up from the ground and perched on the walls to wait for us to get out of their way.

We had passed the baron in the cellar, leaning against the wall of the hearth, his eyes blank and unseeing, blood puddled beneath him. Kasia had found one of the sleep-potions still unbroken in its flask, gripped in the hand of the man-at-arms slumped dead beside him. She opened it and gave the children each a swallow, down there, before we brought them out. They’d seen more than enough already.

Now Stashek hung limp over her shoulder, and Sarkan carried a huddled Marisha in his arms. I struggled on behind them, too hollow to be sick anymore, too dry for tears. My breath was still short and painful in my chest. Solya walked with me, giving me a hand occasionally over a particularly high mound of armored corpses. We hadn’t taken him prisoner; he’d just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn’t dreaming, but felt he should have been. Down in the cellar, he’d given Sarkan what was left of his cloak to wrap around the little princess.

The tower was still standing, barely. The floor of the great hall was a maze of broken flagstones, dead roots and withered vines sprawled over them, charred up like the queen’s body below. Several of the columns had collapsed entirely. There was a hole in the ceiling into the library above, and a chair had fallen partway into it. Sarkan looked up at it as we left, climbing over blocks and rubble.

We had to walk the full length of the walls we’d built to try and keep Marek out. The voices of the old stone whispered sadly to me as we came through the archways. We saw no one living until we came out into the abandoned camp. At least there were a few soldiers there, rummaging through the supplies; a couple of them burst out of the pavilion running away from us, carrying silver cups. I would have gladly paid a dozen silver cups just to hear another mortal voice, to be able to believe that not everyone was dead. But they all fled, or hid from us behind tents or supply-heaps, peering out. We stood in the silent field and after a moment I said, “The cannon-crew,” remembering.