Page 89 of Uprooted

The sapling sank away with the grove; the broken tree rose with us.

The second woodcutter struggled up onto the bank, clinging to the shuddering ground.

He swung his axe at the Wood-queen as she came towards him; it struck against her flesh and sprang away, ringing, jumping out of his hands.

She paid no attention. Her face was blank and lost. She took hold of the woodcutter and carried him over to the wounded heart-tree.

He struggled against her, uselessly, as she pushed him against the trunk, and vines sprouted from the ground to hold him in place.

His body arched, horror in his face. The Wood-queen stepped back.

His feet and ankles were bound against the chipped gap where the axes had bitten into the tree, and they were already changing, grafting onto the trunk, boots splitting open and falling away as his toes were stretched out into new roots.

His struggling arms were stiffening into branches, the fingers melting into one another.

His wide agonized eyes were disappearing beneath a skin of silver bark.

I ran to him, in pity and horror. My hands couldn’t get hold of the bark, and magic wouldn’t answer me in this place.

But I couldn’t bear to just stand and watch.

Then he managed to lean forward. He whispered, “Agnieszka,” in Sarkan’s voice, and then he vanished; his face disappeared into a large dark hollow opening up in the trunk.

I caught the edges and pulled myself into the hollow after him, into the dark.

The tree-roots were close and tight; the damp warm smell of freshly turned earth choked my nose, and also the lingering smell of fire and smoke.

I wanted to pull back out; I didn’t want to be here.

But I knew that going back was wrong. I was here, inside the tree.

I pushed and shoved and forced my way forward, against every instinct and terror.

I forced myself to reach out and feel the blasted, scorched wood around me, splinters piercing my skin, the slick of sap clogging my eyes and my nose, the air I couldn’t get.

My nostrils were full of wood and rot and burning. “Alamak,” I whispered hoarsely, for walking through walls, and then I pushed my way out through bark and blasted wood, and back into the smoking wreck of the heart-grove.

—

I came out on the mound, my dress soaked green with sap, the shattered tree behind me.

The light of the Summoning still blazed across the water, and the last shallow remnants of the pool shone beneath it like a full moon just up over the horizon, so bright it hurt to look at it.

Sarkan was on the other side of the pool, on his knees.

His mouth was wet, his hand dripping, the only parts of him not blackened with soot and dirt and smoke: he’d cupped water to his mouth.

He’d drunk from the Spindle, water and power both, to gather enough strength to cast the Summoning alone.

But now the Wood-queen was standing over him with her long fingers wrapped choking around his neck: silver bark was climbing up from the bank over his knees and his legs as he struggled to pry her grip from around his throat.

She let him go and whirled with a cry of protest at my escape, too late.

With a long groaning above me, the great broken branch of the heart-tree cracked away from the trunk and finally fell, thundering, leaving a gaping hollow wound.

I stepped down from the mound to meet her on the wet stones as she came furious towards me.

“Agnieszka!” Sarkan shouted hoarsely, reaching an arm out, struggling half-rooted in the earth.

But even as she reached me, the Wood-queen slowed and halted.

The Summoning -light illuminated her from behind: the terrible corruption in her, the sour black cloud of long despair.

But it shone on me also, on me and through me, and I knew that in my face she saw someone else, looking out at her.

I could see in her where she’d gone from the grove: how she’d hunted them down, all the people of the tower, wizards and farmers and woodcutters all alike.

How she’d planted one corrupt heart-tree after another in the roots of her own misery, and fed that misery onward.

Mingled with my horror, I felt Linaya’s pity moving in me, deep and slow: pity and sorrow and regret.

The Wood-queen saw it, too, and it held her still before me, trembling.

“I stopped them,” she said, her voice the scrape of a branch against the window-pane at night, when you imagine some dark thing is outside the house scratching to get in. “I had to stop them.”

She wasn’t speaking to me. Her eyes were looking past me, deep towards her sister’s face.

“They burned the trees,” she said, pleading for understanding from someone long gone.

“They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.”

Her sister didn’t have a voice to speak with anymore, but the sap of the heart-tree clung to my skin, and its roots went deep beneath my feet. “We’re meant to go,” I said softly, answering for both of us. “We’re not meant to stay forever.”

The Wood-queen finally looked at me then, instead of through me.

“I couldn’t go,” she said, and I knew she’d tried.

She’d killed the tower-lord and his soldiers, she’d planted all the fields with new trees, and she’d come here with her hands bloody, to sleep with her people at last. But she hadn’t been able to take root.

She’d remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much.

She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow.

All she’d been able to do in the end was lie down beside her sister: not quite dreaming, not quite dead.

I reached out, and from the one low-hanging bough of the broken tree, I took the single waiting fruit, glowing and golden. I held it out to her. “I’ll help you,” I told her. “If you want to save her, you can.”

She looked up at the shattered, dying tree.

Mud-tears were leaking from her eyes, thick brown rivulets sliding over her cheeks, dirt and ash and water mingled.

She put her hands slowly up to take the fruit from me, her long gnarled twiggy fingers curling carefully around it, gently.

They brushed against mine, and we looked at one another.

For a moment, through the winding smoke between us, I might have been the daughter she’d hoped for, the child halfway between the tower-people and her own; she might have been my teacher and my guide, like Jaga’s book showing me the way.

We might never have been enemies at all.

I bent down, and in one curled-up leaf I drew a little water for her, the last clear water left in the pool.

We stepped together up onto the mound. She lifted the fruit to her mouth and bit, juices running down her chin in pale golden dripping lines.

She shut her eyes and stood there. I put my hand on her, felt hate and agony like a strangler vine tangled deep through her.

I put my other hand on the sister-tree, though, and reached for the deep well in her; the stillness and the calm.

Being struck by lightning hadn’t changed her; the stillness would remain, even when the whole tree had fallen, even while the years crumbled it back into the earth.

The Wood-queen leaned against the tree’s gaping wound and put her arms around the blackened trunk. I gave her the last drops of the pool’s water, tipped them into her mouth, and then I touched her skin and said softly, very simply, “Vanalem.”

And she was changing. The last remnants of her white gown blew away, and the charred surface of her scorched skin peeled off in huge black flakes, fresh new bark whirling up from the ground around her like a wide silver skirt, meeting and merging into the old tree’s broken trunk.

She opened her eyes one last time and looked at me, with sudden relief, and then she was gone, she was growing, her feet plunging new roots over the old.

I backed away, and when her roots had sunk deep into the earth, I turned and ran to Sarkan through the mud of the emptied pool.

The bark had stopped climbing up over him.

Together we broke him the rest of the way loose, peeling it away from his skin, until his legs came free.

I pulled him up from the stump and we sat together, sagged together, on the bank of the stream.

I was too spent to think of anything. He was scowling down at his own hands, almost resentfully.

Abruptly he lurched forward and leaned over the streambed and dug into the soft wet earth.

I watched him blankly for a while, and then I realized he was trying to restore the course of the stream.

I pulled myself up and reached in to help.

I could feel it, as soon as I started, the same feeling he hadn’t wanted to have: the sure sense that this was the right thing to do.

The river wanted to run this way, wanted to feed into the pool.

It only took moving a few handfuls of dirt, and then the stream was running over our fingers, clearing the rest of the bed for itself.

The pool began to fill once more. We sat back again, wearily.

Next to me he was trying to get the dirt and water off his hands, wiping them on a corner of his ruined shirt, on the grass, on his trousers, mostly just spreading the mud around.

Black half-circles were crusted deep under the fingernails.

He finally heaved an exasperated noise and let his hands fall into his lap; he was too tired to use magic.

I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting.

After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me.

The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace.

The ash had sunk into the muddy bottom of the pool, and been swallowed up.

The trees were letting their scorched leaves fall into the water, and moss crept over the torn bare patches of earth, new blades of grass unfurling.

At the head of the pool, the new heart-tree tangled with the old one, bracing it up, sealing over the jagged scar.

They were putting out small white flowers, like stars.