Uprooted(71)

But there was nothing else, either. She didn’t look at us, or if she did, that was even worse; her wide staring eyes didn’t see our faces. Marek stood still panting in heaving breaths, staring at her. “Mother,” he said again. “Mother, it’s Marek. I’ve come to take you home.”

Her face didn’t change. The first horror had faded out of it. She was staring and empty now, hollowed out. “Once we’re out of the Wood … ,” I said, but my voice died in my throat. I felt odd and sick. Did you ever get out of the Wood, if you’d been in it for twenty years?

But Marek seized on the suggestion. “Which way?” he demanded, sliding his sword back into its sheath.

I rubbed ash away with a sleeve over my face. I looked down at my blistered and cracked hands, stained with blood. The whole from a part. “Loytalal,” I whispered to my blood. “Take me home.”

I led them out of the Wood as best I could. I didn’t know what we’d do if we met another walker, much less another mantis. We were a far distance from that shining company that had ridden into the Wood that morning. In my mind, I imagined us a gleaning-party creeping through the forest on our way home before nightfall, trying not to startle so much as a bird. I picked our way carefully through the trees. We didn’t have any hope of breaking a trail, so we had to keep to the deer tracks and the thinner brush.

We crept out of the Wood half an hour before nightfall. I stumbled out from under the trees still following the glimmer of my spell: home, home, over and over again in my head, singsong. The glowing line ran curving towards the west and south, towards Dvernik. My feet kept carrying me after it, across the barren strip of razed dirt and into a wall of tall grass that finally became thick enough to halt me. Above the top edge of the grass, when I slowly raised my head, forested slopes rose up like a wall in the distance, hazy brown with the setting sun thrown along them.

The northern mountains. We’d come out not far from the mountain pass from Rosya. That made a certain sense, if the queen and Prince Vasily had been fleeing towards Rosya, and had been caught and taken into the Wood from there. But it meant we were miles and miles away from Zatochek.

Prince Marek came out of the Wood behind me with his head bent, his shoulders stooped as if he were dragging a heavy weight behind him. The two soldiers followed him raggedly. They’d pulled off their mail shirts and abandoned them somewhere along the way inside the Wood; their sword-belts, too. He alone was still in armor, and his sword was still in his hand, but when he reached the grass he sank in on himself, to his knees, and stayed there without moving. The soldiers came up to him and fell to either side of him, flat on their faces, as though they’d only been pulled along in his wake.

Kasia laid the Dragon down on the ground next to me, trampling the grass flat with her feet to make room. He was limp and still, his eyes closed. His right side was scorched and blistered everywhere, red and deadly glistening, his clothes torn away and burned off his skin. I’d never seen burns so dreadful.

The Falcon sagged to the ground on his other side. He held one end of a chain that reached to the yoke on the queen’s neck; he tugged on it, and she halted, too, standing still and alone in the razed barren strip around the Wood. Her face had the same inhuman stillness as Kasia’s, only worse, because no one was looking out of her eyes. It was like being followed by a marionette. When we tugged the chain forward, she walked, with a stiff, swinging puppet-stride as if she didn’t entirely know how to use her arms and legs anymore, as if they wouldn’t bend properly.

Kasia said, “We have to get farther from the Wood.” None of us answered her, or moved; it seemed to me she was speaking from very far away. She carefully gripped me by the shoulder and shook me. “Nieshka,” she said. I didn’t answer. The sky was deepening to twilight, and the early spring mosquitoes were busy around us, whining in my ear. I couldn’t even lift my hand to slap away a big one sitting right on my arm.

She straightened up and looked at us all, irresolute. I don’t think she wanted to leave us there alone, in the condition we were in, but there wasn’t much choice. Kasia bit her lip, then knelt in front of me and looked me in the face. “I’m going to Kamik,” she said. “I think it’s closer than Zatochek. I’ll run all the way. Hold on, Nieshka, I’ll be back as soon as I can find anyone.”

I only stared at her. She hesitated, and then she reached into my skirt pocket and brought out Jaga’s book. She pressed it into my hands. I closed my fingers around it, but I didn’t move. She turned and plunged into the grass, hacking and pushing her way through, following the last light to the west.

I sat in the grass like a field mouse, thinking of nothing. The sound of Kasia fighting her way through the tall grass faded away. I was tracing the stitches of Jaga’s book, feeling the soft ridges in the leather, mindlessly, staring at it. The Dragon lay inert beside me. His burns were getting worse, blisters rising translucent all over his skin. Slowly I opened the book and turned pages. Good for burns, better with morning cobwebs and a little milk, said the laconic page for one of her simpler remedies.

I didn’t have cobwebs or milk, but after a little sluggish thought I put out my hand to one of the broken stems of grass around us and squeezed a few milky green drops out onto my finger. I rubbed them between my thumb and finger and hummed, “Iruch, iruch,” up and down, like singing a child down to sleep, and began to lightly touch the worst of his blisters one after another with my fingertip. Each one twitched and slowly began to shrink instead of swell, the angriest red fading.