Page 23 of Uprooted

It was already larger around than the circle my arms could make, even though the giant tree couldn’t have fallen very long ago.

It had smooth grey bark over a strangely knotted trunk, with long branches in even circles around it, starting high up the trunk like a larch.

Its branches weren’t bare with winter, but carried a host of dried-up silvery leaves that rustled in the wind, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere else, as though there were people just out of sight speaking softly together.

The trail of my breath had dissolved into the air.

Looking down at the deep snow, I could see the marks where the walkers’ legs had poked through and the lines their bellies had drawn, all going to the tree.

I took a wary step through the snow towards it, and then another, and then I stopped.

Kasia was bound to the tree. Her back was against the trunk and her arms drawn backwards around it.

I hadn’t seen her at first because the bark had already grown over her.

Her face was turned up a little, and beneath the skim of the covering bark I could see her mouth had been open, screaming while the bark closed over her.

I made a choked cry, helplessly, and staggered forward and put out my hands to touch her.

The bark was hard beneath my fingers already, the grey skin smooth and hard, as though she had been swallowed into the trunk whole, all of her made a part of the tree, of the Wood.

I couldn’t get a hold on the bark, though I tried frantically to claw and peel it away.

But I managed at last to scrape off a little thin piece over her cheek, and beneath I found her own soft skin—still warm, still alive.

But even as I touched it with my fingertip, the bark crept quickly over it, and I had to draw back my hand, not to be caught myself.

I covered my mouth with my hands, even more desperate.

I still knew so little: no spell came to my mind, nothing that could get Kasia out, nothing that would even put an axe in my hands, a knife, even if there had been time to carve her free.

The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still.

I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.

With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga’s book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower.

I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn’t believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots.

But now I fell to the ground and dug away the snow and the fallen leaves and rot and moss until I came to the hard-frozen dirt.

I pried up a large stone and began to smash at the earth, again and again, breaking up the dirt and breathing on it to make it softer, pounding in the snow that melted around my hands, pounding in the hot tears that dripped from my eyes as I worked.

Kasia was above me with her head flung up, her mouth open in its soundless cry like a statue in a church.

“Fulmia,” I said, my fingers deep in the dirt, crushing the solid clods between my fingers.

“Fulmia, fulmia,” I chanted over and over, bleeding from broken nails, and I felt the earth hear me, uneasily.

Even the earth was tainted here, poisoned, but I spat on the dirt and screamed, “Fulmia,” and imagined my magic running into the ground like water, finding cracks and weaknesses, spreading out beneath my hands, beneath my cold wet knees: and the earth shuddered and turned over.

A low trembling began where my hands drove into the ground, and it followed me as I started prying at the roots of the tree.

The frozen dirt began to break up into small chunks all around them, the tremors going on and on like waves.

The branches above me were waving wildly as if in alarm, the whispering of the leaves becoming a muted roaring.

I straightened up on my knees. “Let her out!” I screamed at the tree: I beat on its trunk with my muddy fists.

“Let her out, or I’ll bring you down! Fulmia!

” I cried out in rage, and threw myself back down at the ground, and where my fists hit, the ground rose and swelled like a river rising with the rain.

Magic was pouring out of me, a torrent: every warning the Dragon had ever given me forgotten and ignored.

I would have spent every drop of myself and died there, just to bring that horrible tree down: I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, where I left this behind me, Kasia’s life and heart feeding this corrupt monstrous thing.

I would rather have died, crushed in my own earthquake, and brought it down with me.

I tore at the ground ready to break open a pit to swallow us all.

And then with a sound like ice breaking in the spring, the bark cracked open, running up and down the length of Kasia’s body.

I lunged up from the dirt at once and dug my fingers into the crack, prying the sides wide and reaching in for her.

I caught her wrist, her arm limp and heavy, and pulled.

She fell out of the horrible dark gap bending at the waist like a rag doll, and I backed away dragging her deadweight free into the snow, both my hands wrapped around her wrist. Her skin was fish-pale, sickly, like all the sun had been drunk out of her.

Sap smelling like spring rain ran over her in thin green rivulets, and she didn’t move.

I fell to my knees beside her. “Kasia,” I said, sobbing.

“Kasia.” The bark had already closed itself up like a seam around the hole where she had been.

I caught Kasia’s hands in my wet dirty ones and pressed them to my cheeks, to my lips.

They were cold, but not as cold as my own: there was a trace of life in them.

I bent down and heaved her onto my shoulders.