Page 41 of Uprooted
When Prince Marek raised his fist towards the water, the violet gleam shone bright, beckoning us across to the other side, but the water was moving swiftly, and we couldn’t tell how deep it was.
Janos tossed in a small twig from one of the trees: it was dragged away downstream at once and vanished almost immediately under a little glossy swell.
“We’ll look for a ford,” Prince Marek said.
We turned and went on riding single-file along the river, the soldiers hacking away at the vegetation to give the horses a foothold on the bank.
There was never any sign of an animal track leading down to the edge, and the Spindle ran on, never narrowing.
It was a different river here than in the valley, running fast and silent beneath the trees; as shadowed by the Wood as we were.
I knew that the river never came out on the other side in Rosya; it vanished somewhere in the deep part of the Wood, swallowed up in some dark place.
That seemed almost impossible to believe here, looking at the wide dark stretch of it.
Somewhere behind me, one of the men sighed deeply—a relieved noise, as though he were setting down a heavy weight.
It was loud in the Wood’s silence. I looked around.
His scarf had sagged down from his face: it was the friendly young soldier with the broken nose who’d led my horse to water.
He reached out with a knife drawn, sharp and bright silver, and he caught the head of the man riding in front of him and cut his throat in one deep red gash from side to side.
The other soldier died without a sound. The blood sprayed out over the animal’s neck and onto the leaves.
It reared wildly, crying out, and as the man sagged down off its back, it floundered into the brush and disappeared.
The young soldier with the knife was still smiling.
He threw himself off his own horse, into the water.
We were frozen by the suddenness of it. Up ahead of me, Prince Marek gave a shout and flung himself off his own mount and down the slope, dirt furrowing away from his boots as he slid to the water’s edge.
He tried to reach out and catch the soldier’s hand, but the man didn’t reach back.
He went past the prince on his back, floating like driftwood, the ends of his scarf and cloak trailing away in the water behind him.
His legs were already being dragged down as his boots filled with water, then his whole body was sinking.
We had one last pale flash of his round face staring upwards in the sun.
The water closed in over his head, over the broken nose; the cloak went down with a last green billowing. He was gone.
Prince Marek had climbed back up to his feet.
He stood down on the bank watching, gripping the trunk of one narrow sapling for balance, until the soldier went under.
Then he turned and clambered up the slope.
Janos had slid down from his own mount, catching Marek’s reins; he reached down an arm to help him up.
Another one of the soldiers had caught the reins of the other now-riderless horse; it was trembling, its nostrils flaring, but it stood still.
Everything settled back into quiet again.
The river ran on, the branches hung still, the sun shone on the water.
We didn’t even hear any noise from the horse that had run away. It was as though nothing had happened.
The Dragon pushed his horse down the line and looked down at Prince Marek. “The rest of them will go by nightfall,” he said bluntly. “If not you as well.”
Marek looked up at him, his face for the first time open and uncertain; as though he’d just seen something beyond his understanding.
I saw the Falcon beside them looking back along the line of the men with unblinking eyes, his piercing eyes trying to see something invisible.
Marek looked at him; the Falcon looked back and nodded very slightly, confirming.
The prince hauled himself up into his saddle.
He spoke to the soldiers ahead of him. “Cut us a clearing.” They started to hack at the brush around us; the rest of them joined in, burning and salting it as they went, until we had cleared enough room to crowd in together.
The horses were eager to push their heads in and butt up closely against one another.
“All right,” Marek said to the soldiers, their gazes fixed on him.
“You all know why you’re here. Every one of you is hand-picked.
You’re men of the north, the best I have.
You’ve followed me into Rosyan sorcery and made a wall beside me against their cavalry charges; there’s not a one of you who doesn’t wear the scars of battle.
I asked every one of you, before we left, if you’d ride into this benighted place with me; every one of you said yes.
“Well, I won’t swear to you now I’ll bring you out alive; but you have my oath that every man who does come out with me will have every honor I can bestow, and every one of you made a landed knight.
And we’ll ford the river here, now, however best we can, and we will ride on together: to death or worse perhaps, but like men and not like frightened voles. ”
They must have known, by then, that Marek himself didn’t know what would happen; that he hadn’t been ready for the shadow of the Wood.
But I could see his words lift some of that shadow from all of their faces: a brightness came into them, a deep breath.
None of them asked to turn back. Marek took his hunting horn from his saddle.
It was a long thing made all of brass, bright-polished and circled on itself.
He put it to his mouth and blew with all his voice, an enormous martial noise that shouldn’t have made my heart leap but did: brash and ringing.
The horses stamped and flicked their ears back and forth, and the soldiers drew their swords and roared along with that note.
Marek wheeled his horse and led us in a single headlong rush down the slope and into the cold dark water, and all the other horses followed.
The river hit my legs like a shock as we plunged into it, foaming away from my horse’s broad chest. We kept going.
The water climbed up over my knees, over my thighs.
My horse had its head held up high, nostrils flaring as its legs beat at the riverbed, surging forward and trying to keep purchase on the bottom.
Somewhere behind me, one of the horses stumbled and lost its footing.
It was tumbled over at once and carried into another soldier’s horse.
The river swept them away and swallowed them whole.
We didn’t stop: there was no way to stop.
I groped for a spell, but I couldn’t think of anything: the water was roaring at me, and then they were gone.
Prince Marek sounded another blast from his horn: he and his horse were lurching up on the other side of the river, and he was kicking it onward into the trees.
One by one we came up out of the river, dripping wet, and kept going without a pause: all of us crashing through the brush, following the purple blaze of Marek’s light up ahead, following the sound of his calling horn.
The trees were whipping by us. The underbrush was lighter on this side of the river, the trunks larger and farther apart.
We weren’t riding in a single line anymore: I could see some of the other horses weaving through the trees beside me as we flew, as we fled, running away as much as running towards.
I had given up all hope of the reins and just clung to my own horse with my fingers woven into the mane, bent over its neck away from lashing branches.
I could see Kasia near me, and the bright flash of the Falcon’s white cloak ahead.
The mare was panting beneath me, shuddering, and I knew she couldn’t last; even strong, trained warhorses would founder, ridden like this after swimming a cold river.
“Nen elshayon,” I whispered to her ears, “nen elshayon,” and let her have a little strength, a little warmth.
She stretched out her fine head and tossed it, gratefully, and I closed my eyes and tried to widen it to all of them, saying, “Nen elshayine,” pushing out my hand towards Kasia’s horse as though throwing it a line.
I felt that imagined line catch; I flung more of them out, and the horses drew closer together, running more easily again.
The Dragon threw a brief look back at me over his shoulder.
We kept on, riding behind the blowing horn, and now I started to see something moving through the trees at last. Walkers, many walkers, and they were coming towards us rapidly, all their long stick-legs moving in unison.
One of them stretched out a long arm and caught one of the soldiers off his horse, but they were falling behind us, as if they hadn’t expected our pell-mell speed.
We burst together through a wall of pines into a vast clearing, the horses leaping to clear a stand of brush, and before us stood a monstrous heart-tree.
The trunk of it was broader than the side of a horse, towering up into an immensity of spreading branches.
Its boughs were laden with pale silver-green leaves and small golden fruits with a horrible stink, and beneath the bark looking at us was a human face, overgrown and smoothed out into a mere suggestion, with two hands crossed across the breast like a corpse.
Two great roots forked at its feet, and in the hollow between them lay a skeleton, almost swallowed by moss and rotting leaves.
A smaller root twisted out through one open eye socket, and grass poked through ribs and scraps of rusted mail.
The remains of a shield lay across the body, barely marked with a black double-headed eagle: the royal crest of Rosya.
We pulled up our snorting, heaving horses just short of its branches.
Behind me I heard a sudden snapping noise like the door of an oven slamming shut, and at the same moment I was struck by a heavy weight out of nowhere, thrown out of my saddle.
I hit the bare ground painfully, the air knocked out of my lungs, my elbow scraped and legs bruised.
I twisted. Kasia was on top of me: she’d knocked me off my horse.
I stared up past her. My horse was in the air above us, headless.
A monstrous thing like a praying mantis was holding it up in two forelegs.
The mantis blended against the heart-tree: narrow golden eyes the same shape as the fruits, and a body of the same silvery green as the leaves.
It had bitten the horse’s head off with a single snap, in the same lunging movement.
Behind us, another of the soldiers had fallen headless, and a third was screaming, his leg gone, thrashing in the grip of another mantis: there were a dozen of the creatures, coming out of the trees.