Uprooted(134)

“The tree,” Sarkan said, hoarsely, pushing himself up from the bank: there were stinging red tracks around his throat like a necklace of thorn-prickles. “She’s trying to protect it.”

I stood on the bank and looked up: it was late afternoon, and the air was heavy and moist. “Kalmoz,” I said to the sky, calling; clouds began to gather and mass together. “Kalmoz.” A drizzle began, pattering in drops on the water, and Sarkan said sharply, “We’re not trying to put it out—”

“Kalmoz!” I shouted, and put my hands up, and pulled the lightning out of the sky.

This time I knew what was going to happen, but that didn’t mean I was ready for it: there wasn’t a way to be ready for it. The lightning took away the world again, that single terrible moment of blind white silence everywhere around me, and then it jumped away from me roaring with thunder and struck the massive heart-tree, a shattering blow down the middle.

The force hurled me wildly back, spinning; I fell dazed half into the running streambed, my cheek pressed to pebbles and grass, gold-leaf-laden branches waving above me. I was dim and dazed and blank. The world was queerly silenced, but even through that cottony muffling I could hear a rising dreadful shriek of horror and rage. I managed with trembling arms to push my head up. The heart-tree was burning, all its leaves in flames, the whole trunk blackened; the lightning-bolt had struck at one of the great branchings lower on the trunk, and nearly a quarter of the tree was cracking away.

The Wood-queen was screaming. As if by instinct she put her hands on the tree, trying to push the cracked limb back, but she was still burning; where she touched the bark it caught again. She pulled her hands back. Ivy tendrils erupted from the ground and climbed the heart-tree’s trunk, weaving around it, trying to hold it together in one piece. She turned and came at me through the pool, her face twisting in fury. I tried to scramble back on hands and feet, shaking, knowing that it hadn’t worked. She wasn’t mortally wounded herself, even though the tree was. The heart-tree wasn’t a channel to her life.

The lightning had flung Sarkan back among the trees; he staggered out of them, his own clothes singed and blackened with smoke, and pointed at the stream. “Kerdul foringan,” he said, his voice rasping like hornets and faint in my ears, and the stream quivered. “Tual, kerdul—” and the riverbank crumbled away. The stream turned uncertainly, slowly, and ran into the new bed: diverting from the pool and from the burning tree. The water left standing in the pool began rising up in hot gouts of steam.

The Wood-queen whirled on him. She held out her hands and more plants came bursting up out of the water. She gripped the vine-tops in her fists and pulled them up, and then she flung them at him. The vines grew and swelled as they flew through the air, and they lashed themselves around him, arms and legs, thickening; they toppled him to the ground. I tried to push myself up. My hands were stinging, my nose was full of smoke. But she came towards me too quickly, a living coal, tangled threads of smoke and mist still thick about her body. She seized me and I screamed. I smelled my own flesh crisping, blackening where she gripped me by the arms.

She dragged me off my feet. I couldn’t see or think for pain. My shift was smoldering, the sleeves burning and falling off my arms below the curl of her branding fingers. The air around her was oven-hot, rippling like water. I turned my face away from her to fight for breath. She dragged me with her through the pond and up onto the blackened ruin of her resting-mound, towards the shattered tree.

I guessed what she meant to do to me then, and even through pain I screamed and fought her. Her grip was implacable. I kicked at her with my bare feet, scorching them; I reached blindly for magic and cried out half a spell, but she shook me so furiously my teeth clacked on it in my mouth. She was a burning ember around me, fire everywhere. I tried to grab her, to pull myself against her. I would rather have burned to death. I didn’t want to know what corruption she would make out of me, what she would do with my strength poured into that vast heart-tree, here in the center of the Wood.

But she kept her arms rigid. She thrust me through crisping wood and ash into the hollow my lightning had left in the shattered heart of the tree. The wrapping vines tightened. The heart-tree closed around me like a coffin-lid.





Chapter 31


Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin. I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open. I clawed wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes. Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out—and I realized everything was different.

There was no trace of fire or fighting. I didn’t see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere. Even the vast heart-tree was gone. So were most of the others. The glade was more than half-empty. I stood on the shore of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world. It was bright morning instead of afternoon. Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.

I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn’t feel like the Wood. It wasn’t the terrible twisted shadow-place where I’d seen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree. It didn’t even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence. The pool lapped gently at my ankles. I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle. Sarkan couldn’t cast the Summoning alone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.