Uprooted(133)

Then Sarkan brought out the last of his vial of fire-heart instead: the red-gold hunger of it leaping with eagerness inside the glass. I looked down at it and was silent. We’d come here to make an ending. We’d come to burn the Wood; this was the heart of it. She was the heart of it. But when I imagined pouring fire-heart on her body, watching her limbs thrashing—

Sarkan looked at my face and said, “Go back to the falls,” offering to spare me.

But I shook my head. It wasn’t that I felt squeamish about killing her. The Wood-queen deserved death and horror: she’d sowed it and tended it and harvested it by the bushel, and wanted more. Kasia’s soundless cry beneath the heart-tree’s bark; Marek’s face, shining, as his own mother killed him. My mother’s terror when her small daughter brought home an apron full of blackberries, because the Wood didn’t spare even children. The hollow gutted walls of Porosna, with the heart-tree squatting over the village, and Father Ballo twisted out of his own body into a slaughtering beast. Marisha’s small voice, saying, “Mama,” over her mother’s stabbed corpse.

I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she’d put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain. The people of the tower had walled her up, then she’d struck them all down. She’d raised up the Wood to devour us; now we’d give her to the fire-heart, and choke all this shining clear water with ash. None of that seemed right. But I didn’t see anything else we could do.

I waded across the pool with Sarkan. The water didn’t come higher than our knees. Small round stones were smooth beneath our feet. Close, the Wood-queen seemed even more strange, not quite alive; her lips were parted, but her breast didn’t seem to rise and fall. She might have been carved from wood. Her skin had the faint banded pattern of wood split lengthwise and smoothed, waves of light and dark. Sarkan opened the vial, and with one quick tip he poured the fire-heart directly between her lips, and then spilled the final dregs over her body.

Her eyes flew open. The dress caught, the roots of the heart-tree caught, her hair caught, fire roaring up around her like a cloud as Sarkan pulled me back. She screamed a hoarse, furious cry. Smoke and flame gouted out of her mouth, and bursts of fire were going off beneath her skin like orange stars flaring, in one part of her and another. She thrashed on the mound beneath the roots, the green grass charring swiftly away. Clouds of smoke billowed around her, over her. Within her I saw lungs, heart, liver, like shadows inside a burning house. The long tree roots crisped up, curling away, and she burst up from the mound.

She faced us, burning like a log that had been on the fire a long time: her skin charred to black charcoal, cracking to show the orange flames beneath, pale ash blowing off her skin. Her hair was a torrent of flames wreathing her head. She screamed again, a red glow of fire in her throat, her tongue a black coal, and she didn’t stop burning. Fire spurted from her in places, but skin like new bark closed over it, and even as the endless heat blackened the fresh skin once more, it healed again. She staggered forward towards the pool. Watching in horror, I remembered the Summoning-vision and her bewilderment, her terror when she’d known she was trapped in stone. It wasn’t simply that she was immortal unless slain. She hadn’t known how to die at all.

Sarkan seized a handful of sand and pebbles from the floor of the stream and threw them at her, calling out a spell of increase; they swelled as they flew through the air, became boulders. They smashed into her, billows of sparks going up from her body like a fire jabbed with a poker, but even then she didn’t collapse into ashes. She kept burning, unconsumed. She kept coming. She plunged to her hands and knees in the pool, steam hissing up in clouds around her.

The narrow stream came running in suddenly quicker over the rocks, as if it knew the pool needed replenishing. Even beneath the clear rippling water, she still glowed; the fire-heart gleamed deep in her, refusing to be doused. She cupped water to her mouth with both hands. Most of the water boiled away from her charred skin. Then she seized one of the boulders Sarkan had flung at her, and with a strange twisting jerk of magic she scooped the middle of it out, to give herself a bowl to drink from.

“With me, together,” Sarkan shouted to me. “Keep the fire on her!” I startled; I’d been mesmerized, watching her live and burn at the same time. I took his hand. “Polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,” he chanted, and I sang about the burning hearth, about blowing gently on a flame. The burning roots crackled up again behind the Wood-queen, and within her the fire glowed fresh. She lifted her head from the bowl with a cry of rage. Her eyes were black hollowed pits glowing with fire.

Vining plants sprouted from the riverbed and wrapped themselves tangling around our legs. Barefoot, I managed to pull away from them, but they caught the laces of Sarkan’s boots, and he fell into the water. Other vines at once launched themselves up his arms, reaching for his throat. I plunged my hands down and gripped them and said, “Arakra,” and a green fierce sparking ran along their lengths and made them dart away, my own fingers stinging. He spoke a quick charm and pulled free, leaving his boots still imprisoned in the water, and we scrambled out onto the bank.

All around us, the heart-trees had roused; they trembled and waved in shared distress, a rustling whisper. The Wood-queen had turned away from us. She was still using the bowl, to drink but also to throw water onto the burning roots of the towering heart-tree, trying to put the fire out. The Spindle-water was quenching the flames in her, little by little; already her feet deep in the pool were solid blackened cinders, no longer burning.