Uprooted(128)

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


We 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.