Uprooted(122)



“Yes, I know,” he said, heaving it onto his reading-chair. “It’s a necromantic text; it’s hideous. But I’d rather spend dead men twice than any more of the living.”

The spell was written out in long old-fashioned script. I tried to help him read it, but I couldn’t; I recoiled from even the first words. The root of that spell was death; it was death from beginning to end. I couldn’t bear to even look at it. Sarkan frowned at my distress in irritation. “Are you being missish?” he demanded. “No, you aren’t. What the devil is the matter? Never mind; go and try to slow them down.”

I sprang away, eager to get far from that book, and hurried to the window. I seized bits of broken stone and rubble from the floor and tried the rain spell on them, the same way I’d used it on the water-jug. Showers of dust and pebbles rained down on Marek’s soldiers. They had to take cover, wrapping their hands over their heads, but the queen didn’t so much as pause. She marched through the breach in the wall; she climbed over the corpses, the hem of her shift soaking up blood.

Marek and his knights surged in front of her, holding their shields over their heads. I threw heavier rocks down at them, bigger chunks that grew into boulders, but even though a few of them staggered down to their knees, most of them stayed safe tucked under their shields. They came to the passageway, and began to seize the corpses and drag them out of the way. The baron’s men stabbed at them with spears. Marek’s knights caught blows on their shields and their armor. And didn’t: half a dozen of them fell, bodies in full gleaming armor heaved back limp and dead. But they pressed on, forced an opening, and the queen stepped inside.

I couldn’t see the fighting inside the tunnel, but it was over quickly. Blood ran out of the passageway, black in the torch-light, and then the queen was stepping through the other side. She hurled down the head of a man she’d been gripping in her free hand, the neck sliced cleanly through. The defenders began backing away from her in fear. Marek and his knights spread out around her, hacking and killing, and his foot-soldiers poured into the trench behind them. Solya lashed magic out in white crackling streams.

The baron’s men began falling back quickly, stumbling over their own feet, away from the queen. I’d imagined Kasia with a sword, this same kind of horror. The queen lifted her sword again and again, stabbed and hacked with brutal practicality, and none of their swords pierced her. Marek was shouting orders. The baron’s men inside the last wall had climbed up onto the top of it and were trying to shoot at the queen from above. But the arrows couldn’t break her skin.

I turned and pulled one of the black-fletched arrows out of the bookcase where it had sunk in, one of the arrows Solya had fired at me, Alosha’s make. I took it to the window and stopped. My hands were shaking. I didn’t see what else to do. None of them could stop her. But—if I killed the queen, Marek would never listen to us, never; I might as well kill him now, too. If I killed her—I felt strange and sick at the thought. She was small and far away on the ground, a doll and not a person, her arm rising and falling.

“A moment,” Sarkan said. I backed away, reprieved and glad of it, although I had to cover my ears while he recited the long shivering words of his spell. A wind breathed out through the window, brushing against my skin like a damp, oily palm, smelling of rot and iron. It kept blowing, steady and awful, and down in the trenches the endless corpses stirred, and slowly began to rise.

They left their swords on the ground. They didn’t need any weapons. They didn’t try to hurt the soldiers, just reached out their empty hands and took hold of them, two and three to a man, grasping. There were already more dead men than living ones in the trenches, and all the dead served the Dragon’s spell. Marek’s soldiers slashed and cut at them in a frenzy, but the dead didn’t bleed. Their faces were sagging and blank, uninterested.

Some of them plodded down the trench to grasp at the knights, at the queen’s arms and legs, taking hold of her. But she flung them off, and the knights in their armor hacked them with their broadswords. The baron’s men were as horrified by the spell as Marek’s; they were scrambling back from the dead as much as from the implacable queen. And she moved forward against them. The dead were holding back the rest of the army, and the baron’s men were hacking down the knights all around her, but she didn’t stop.

There wasn’t any white left in her shift. It was bloody from the ground to the knee; her mail shirt was dyed red. Her arms and hands were red, her face was spattered. I looked down the arrow and touched Alosha’s magic: I felt the arrow’s eagerness to fly again, to seek warm living flesh. There was a nick in the arrow-head; I smoothed it out with my fingers, pressing the steel flat the way I’d seen Alosha work her sword. I pushed a little more magic into it, and felt it grow heavy in my hand, full of death. “In the thigh,” I told it, quailing at murder. Surely it would be enough just to stop the queen. I pointed it at her, and threw.

The arrow dived down, flying straight, whistling joyfully. It struck the queen’s leg high up on the thigh, and tore through the mail shirt. And then it stuck there, hanging half through the mail. There wasn’t any blood. The queen pulled the arrow out, tossed it aside. She looked up towards the window, a brief glance. I stumbled back. She returned to the slaughter.

My face ached as if she’d struck me, with a sharp hollow pressure above the bridge of my nose, familiar. “The Wood,” I said out loud.

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