Uprooted(63)

The last of the needles crumbled into ash. The fire went out. I climbed a little unsteadily up to my feet, coughing from the smoke, and rubbed my tearing eyes. When I blinked them clear again, I flinched: the Falcon was watching me, hungry and intent, even as he drew a fold of his own cloak up over his mouth and nose. I turned quickly away and went to get a drink from the river myself, and wash the smoke from my hands and face. I didn’t like the way his eyes tried to pierce my skin.

Kasia and I shared a loaf of bread ourselves: the endlessly familiar daily loaf from Dvernik’s baker, crusty and grey-brown and a little bit sour, the taste of every morning at home. The soldiers were putting away their flasks and wiping off crumbs and getting back on their horses. The sun had broken over the trees.

“All right, Falcon,” Prince Marek said, when we were all back on our horses. He drew off his gauntlet. He had a ring sitting above the first joint of his smallest finger, a delicate round band of gold set with small blue jewels; a woman’s ring. “Show us the way.”

“Hold your thumb above the band,” the Falcon said, and leaning over from his own horse, he pricked Marek’s finger with a jeweled pin and squeezed it. A fat drop of blood fell onto the ring, painting the gold red while the Falcon murmured a finding spell.

The blue stones turned dark purple. A violet light gathered around Marek’s hand, and even when he pulled his gauntlet back on, the light still limned it. He raised his fist up before him and moved it from side to side: it brightened when he held it towards the Wood. He led us forward, and one after another our horses crossed over the ash and went into the dark trees.

The Wood was a different place in spring than in winter. There was a sense of quickening and wakefulness. My skin shivered with the sense of watching eyes all around as soon as the first bough-shadows touched me. The horses’ hooves fell with muffled blows on the ground, picking over moss and underbrush, edging past brambles that reached for us with long pricking thorns. Silent dark birds darted almost invisible from tree to tree, pacing us. I was sure suddenly that if I had come alone, in spring, I wouldn’t have reached Kasia at all; not without a fight.

But today, we rode with thirty men around us, all of them armored and armed. The soldiers carried long heavy blades and torches and sacks of salt, as the Dragon had ordered. The ones riding in the lead hacked at the brush, widening the trails as we pushed our way along them. The rest burned back the brambles to either side, and salted the earth of the path behind us so we’d be able to retreat the way we’d come.

But their laughter died. We rode silently but for the muffled jingle of harness, the soft thuds of hooves on the bare track, a murmur of a word to one another here and there. The horses didn’t even whicker anymore. They watched the trees with large eyes rimmed with white. We all felt that we were hunted.

Kasia rode next to me, and her head was bowed deeply over her horse’s neck. I managed to reach out and catch her fingers with mine. “What is it?” I said softly.

She looked away from our path and pointed towards a tree in the distance, an old blackened oak struck years before by lightning; moss hung from its dead branches, like a bent old woman spreading wide her skirts to curtsy. “I remember that tree,” she said. She dropped her hand and stared straight ahead through her horse’s ears. “And that red rock we passed, and the grey bramble—all of them. It’s as though I didn’t leave.” She was whispering, too. “It’s as though I never left at all. I don’t know if you’re even real, Nieshka. What if I’ve only been having another dream?”

I squeezed her hand, helplessly. I didn’t know how to comfort her.

“There’s something nearby,” she said. “Something up ahead.”

The captain heard her and glanced back. “Something dangerous?”

“Something dead,” Kasia said, and dropped her eyes to her saddle, her hands clenched on the reins.

The light was brightening around us, and the track widened beneath the horses’ feet. Their shoes clopped hollowly. I looked down and saw cobblestones half-buried beneath moss, broken. When I looked back up, I flinched: in the distance, through the trees, a ghostly grey face stared back at me, with a huge hollow eye above a wide square mouth: a gutted barn.

“Get off the track,” the Dragon said sharply. “Go around: north or south, it doesn’t matter. But don’t ride through the square, and keep moving.”

“What is this place?” Marek said.

“Porosna,” the Dragon said. “Or what’s left of it.”

We turned our horses and went north, picking our way through brambles and the ruins of small poor houses, sagging on their beams, thatched roofs fallen in. I tried not to look at the ground. Moss and fine grass covered it thickly, and tall young trees were stretching up for sun, already spreading out overhead and breaking the sunlight into moving, shifting dapples. But there were shapes still half-buried beneath the moss, here and there a hand of bones breaking the sod, white fingertips poking through the soft carpeting green that caught the light and gleamed cold. Above the houses, if I looked towards where the village square would have stood, a vast shining silver canopy spread, and I could hear the far-off rustling whisper of the leaves of a heart-tree.

“Couldn’t we stop and burn it?” I whispered to the Dragon, as softly as I could.

“Certainly,” he said. “If we used fire-heart, and retreated the way we came at once. It would be the wise thing to do.”