Uprooted(123)

“What?” Sarkan said.

“The Wood,” I said. “The Wood is in her.” Every spell we’d cast on the queen, every purging, the holy relics, every trial: none of them mattered. I was suddenly sure. That had been the Wood looking back at me. The Wood had found a way to hide.

I turned to him. “The Summoning,” I said. “Sarkan, we have to show them. Marek and Solya, all their men. If they see that she’s been taken by the Wood—”

“And you think he’ll believe it?” he said. He looked out the window, though, and after a moment said, “All right. We’ve lost the walls in any case. We’ll bring the survivors inside the tower. And hope the doors hold long enough for us to cast the spell.”





Chapter 28


We ran down to the great hall and flung the doors open. The baron’s men came pouring in: so horribly few of them left. A hundred maybe. They crowded into the hall and down the stairs into the cellars, all of them smudged and exhausted, faces wrung with one horror after another. They were glad to come inside, but they flinched from Sarkan and from me. Even the baron himself looked at us askance. “That wasn’t them,” he said, as he came to stand before Sarkan in the hall, his men eddying to either side of us, leaving a circle around us. “The dead men.”

“No, and if you would have preferred to have lost the rest of the living ones, do tell me, and I’ll be sure and keep your tender sensibilities in mind next time.” Sarkan was drawn tight, and I felt just as spent. I wondered how long it was until morning, and didn’t want to ask. “Let them get what rest they can, and share out all the stores you can find.”

Soon Kasia pushed up the stairs, through the crowding soldiers; the baron had sent the wounded and the worst-exhausted men downstairs; only his best remained with him. “They’re breaking into the wine and the beer casks,” she said to me in an undertone. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for the children. Nieshka, what’s happening?”

Sarkan had climbed the dais: he was laying out the Summoning across the arms of his high seat. He swore under his breath. “That’s the last thing we need now. Go down there and turn it all into cider,” he told me. I ran down with Kasia. The soldiers were drinking out of cupped hands and helmets, or just jabbing holes in the casks and putting their heads underneath, or tipping back bottles; some of them were quarreling already. Shouting over wine must have felt safer than shouting over horrors, over dead men and slaughter.

Kasia pushed them out of my way, and they didn’t fight her when they saw me there; I got up to the biggest barrel and put my hands on it. “Lirintalem,” I said, with a tired shove of magic, and sagged as it ran away from me and shivered through all the bottles and casks. The soldiers kept on pushing and shoving to get a drink; it would be a while before they realized they weren’t getting any drunker.

Kasia touched my shoulder, carefully, and I turned and hugged her tight for one moment, glad of her strength. “I have to go back up,” I said. “Keep the children safe.”

“Should I come stand with you?” she said quietly.

“Keep the children safe,” I said. “If you have to—” I caught her arm and took her back to the far wall of the cellar. Stashek and Marisha were sitting up there, awake and watching the soldiers, wary; Marisha was rubbing her eyes. I put my hands on the wall and found the edges of the passageway. I put Kasia’s hand on the crack, showed her where it was, and then I pulled a thin line woven of magic out of it, as a handle. “Push the door open and take them inside, and close it behind you,” I said. Then I put my hand into the air and said, “Hatol,” pulling, and drew Alosha’s sword out of the air back to me. I held it out to her. “Keep this, too.”

She nodded, and slung the sword over her shoulder. I kissed her one last time and ran back upstairs.

The baron’s men had all come inside. The walls still did us this much good: Marek’s cannon couldn’t be turned on the doors. A few of the baron’s men had climbed up to the arrow-slit window seats to either side of them and were shooting down at the soldiers outside. Heavy thumps landed against the door, and once a bright flare of magic; shouts and noise came. “They’re laying a fire against the doors,” one of the men called from the window as I came back up into the great hall.

“Let them,” Sarkan said, without looking up. I joined him on the dais. He had reshaped the grand throne-like chair into a simple bench of two seats, with a flat desk on the shared arm between them. The heavy volume of the Summoning lay upon it, waiting, familiar and still strange. I let myself down slowly into the seat and spread my fingers over the cover: the golden vining letters, the faint hum beneath like distant honeybees. I was so tired even my fingers felt dull.

We opened the cover and began to read. Sarkan’s voice recited clear and steady, marching on precisely, and slowly the fog over my mind blew away. I hummed and sang and murmured all around him. The soldiers around us grew quiet; they settled down in corners and against the walls, listening the way you would listen in a tavern to a good singer and a sad song, late at night. Their faces were vaguely puzzled with trying to follow the story, trying to remember it, even while they were being towed onward by the spell.

The spell towed me along with them, and I was glad to lose myself inside it. All the horrors of the day didn’t vanish, but the Summoning made them only one part of the story, and not the most important part. The power was building, running bright and clean. I felt the spell rising up like a second tower. We’d open the doors, when we were ready, and spill the irresistible light into the courtyard before the gates. Outside the windows, the sky was growing lighter: the sun was coming up.