Uprooted

All the courtiers cried out and jerked back against the walls, but even as they did, they were fading away, disappearing. The walls all around us were gone, too, falling away into forest and the ringing clash of steel. Marek turned in sudden startled alarm, raising his sword: the silver mantis was there, lunging towards him. When its claws struck against his shoulders, they scraped against the steel of his brilliant armor. Corpses were staring up from the grass around his feet.

A haze of smoke was drifting across my eyes, the sudden crackle of fire. I turned towards the trunk, and Sarkan was there, too, caught in the tree with silver bark trying to devour him, saying, “Now, Agnieszka,” while fire-heart glowed red between his fingers. Instinctively, I half-reached my hand towards him, remembering dread and anguish, and for a moment—for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.

I put my hands on the tree trunk as the bark curled and split apart like the skin of a too-ripe tomato. Kasia was beside me, real; the trunk was splintering open beneath her pounding hands. She was breaking open the wood of the trunk, and the queen came staggering forward out of it, her hands reaching out to meet ours, groping for help, her face suddenly alive and full of horror. We caught her and pulled her out. I heard the Falcon shouting a spell of fire—and then I realized, he was calling real fire, and we weren’t really in the Wood. We were in the king’s castle—

As soon as I let myself remember that, the illusion spell went slithering straight out of my grasp. The tree burned away into the air; the fire at its roots swept up along the trunk and took all the rest of the Wood along with it. The corpses sank down through the ground, one last glimpse of their faces, all their faces, before the white marble floor closed over them. I watched them with tears running down my face. I hadn’t known I remembered the soldiers well enough to make so many of them. And then the last leaf-shadows cleared, and we were in the palace again, before the throne, with the king standing shocked upon his dais.

The Falcon whirled staring around himself, panting, fire still crackling in his hands and skittering over the marble floors; Marek also swung back looking for an enemy that wasn’t there anymore. His sword was unstained again, his armor bright and undented. The queen stood in the middle of the floor trembling, her eyes wide. All the court was pressed up against the walls and one another, as far from us and the center of the room as they could go. And I, I sank to my knees shaking, my arms wrapped around my stomach, feeling sick. I had never wanted to be back there again, in the Wood.

Marek recovered first. He stepped towards the throne, his chest still heaving. “That is what we reft her from!” he shouted up at his father. “That is the evil we overcame to bring her out, that is what we paid to save her! That is the evil you serve, if you—I won’t see it done! I will—”

“Enough!” the king roared back at him: he was pale beneath his beard.

Marek’s face was flushed and bright with violence, battle-lust. He was still holding his sword. He took a step towards the throne. The king’s eyes widened; red anger flushed into his cheeks, and he beckoned to his guards; there were six of them beside the dais.

Queen Hanna cried out suddenly, “No!”

Marek whirled back to look at her. She took a clumsy lurching step forward, her feet dragging as if she had to make an effort to move them. Marek was staring at her. She took another step and seized his arm. “No,” she repeated. She pulled his arm down, when he would have kept it up. He resisted, but she had turned her eyes up at him, and his face was suddenly a boy’s, looking down at her. “You saved me,” she said to him. “Marechek. You already saved me.”

His arm sank, and still clinging to it she turned slowly to the king. He was staring down at her. Her face was pale and beautiful framed in the cloud of her short hair. “I wanted to die,” she said. “I wanted so to die.” She took another dragging step and knelt on the wide dais stairs, and pulled Marek down with her; he bowed his head, staring at the floor. But she kept looking up. “Forgive him,” she said to the king. “I know the law. I am ready to die.” Her hand held tight when Marek would have jerked. “I am the queen of Polnya!” she said, loudly. “I am ready to die for my country. But not as a traitor.

“I am not a traitor, Kasimir,” she said, stretching her other arm out. “He took me. He took me!”

A murmuring started through the room, rising fast as a river in flood. I lifted my weary head and stared around, not understanding. Alosha’s face when I looked at her was drawing into a frown. The queen’s voice was trembling but loud enough to rise above the noise. “Let me be put to death for corruption,” she said. “But God above witness me! I did not leave my husband and my children. The traitor Vasily took me from the courtyard with his soldiers, and carried me to the Wood, and there he bound me to the tree himself.”

Chapter 22

I warned you,” Alosha said, without looking up from her steady ringing thumps of hammer-strokes. I hugged my knees in the corner of her forge, just beyond the scorched circle of ground where the sparks fell, and didn’t say anything. I didn’t have an answer: she had warned me.

No one cared that Prince Vasily must have been corrupted himself, to do such a mad thing; no one cared that he’d died in the Wood, a lonely corpse feeding the roots of the heart-tree. No one cared that it was the fault of the bestiary. Prince Vasily had kidnapped the queen and given her to the Wood. Everyone was as angry as if he’d done it yesterday, and instead of marching on the Wood, they wanted to march on Rosya.

I’d tried to speak to Marek already: a waste of time. Not two hours after the queen had been pardoned, he was in the barracks courtyard exercising horses, already choosing which ones he’d take to the front. “You’ll come with us,” he said as though it was unquestioned, without even taking his eyes off the flashing legs as he sent a tall bay gelding around him in a circle, one hand on the lead and the other on the long-tailed whip. “Solya says you can double the strength of his workings, perhaps more.”

“No!” I said. “I’m not going to help you kill Rosyans! It’s the Wood we need to fight, not them.”

“And so we will,” Marek said easily. “After we take the eastern bank of the Rydva, we’ll come south over their side of the Jaral Mountains and surround the Wood from both sides. All right, we’ll take this one,” he said to his groom, tossing over the lead; he caught up the dangling tail of the whip with an expert flick of his wrist and turned to me. “Listen, Nieshka—” I glared at him speechlessly; how dare he put a pet name on me? But only he put an arm around my shoulders, too, and sailed straight onward. “If we take half the army south to your valley, they’ll come pouring over the Rydva themselves while our backs are turned, and sack Kralia itself. That’s probably why they leagued with the Wood in the first place. They wanted us to do just that. The Wood doesn’t have an army. It’ll stay where it is until we’ve dealt with Rosya.”