Then Sarkan brought out the last of his vial of fire-heart instead: the red-gold hunger of it leaping with eagerness inside the glass.I looked down at it and was silent.We’d come here to make an ending.We’d come to burn the Wood; this was the heart of it.Shewas the heart of it.But when I imagined pouring fire-heart on her body, watching her limbs thrashing—
Sarkan looked at my face and said, “Go back to the falls,” offering to spare me.
But I shook my head.It wasn’t that I felt squeamish about killingher.The Wood-queen deserved death and horror: she’d sowed it and tended it and harvested it by the bushel, and wanted more.Kasia’s soundless cry beneath the heart-tree’s bark; Marek’s face, shining, as his own mother killed him.My mother’s terror when her small daughter brought home an apron full of blackberries, because the Wood didn’t spare even children.The hollow gutted walls of Porosna, with the heart-tree squatting over the village, and Father Ballo twisted out of his own body into a slaughtering beast.Marisha’s small voice, saying, “Mama,” over her mother’s stabbed corpse.
I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she’d put her hold on them.But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain.The people of the tower had walled her up, then she’d struck them all down.She’d raised up the Wood to devour us; now we’d give her to the fire-heart, and choke all this shining clear water with ash.None of that seemed right.But I didn’t see anything else we could do.
I waded across the pool with Sarkan.The water didn’t come higher than our knees.Small round stones were smooth beneath our feet.Close, the Wood-queen seemed even more strange, not quite alive; her lips were parted, but her breast didn’t seem to rise and fall.She might have been carved from wood.Her skin had the faint banded pattern of wood split lengthwise and smoothed, waves of light and dark.Sarkan opened the vial, and with one quick tip he poured the fire-heart directly between her lips, and then spilled the final dregs over her body.
Her eyes flew open.The dress caught, the roots of the heart-tree caught, her hair caught, fire roaring up around her like a cloud as Sarkan pulled me back.She screamed a hoarse, furious cry.Smoke and flame gouted out of her mouth, and bursts of fire were going off beneath her skin like orange stars flaring, in one part of her and another.She thrashed on the mound beneath the roots, the green grass charring swiftly away.Clouds of smoke billowed around her, over her.Within her I saw lungs, heart, liver, like shadows inside aburning house.The long tree roots crisped up, curling away, and she burst up from the mound.
She faced us, burning like a log that had been on the fire a long time: her skin charred to black charcoal, cracking to show the orange flames beneath, pale ash blowing off her skin.Her hair was a torrent of flames wreathing her head.She screamed again, a red glow of fire in her throat, her tongue a black coal, and she didn’t stop burning.Fire spurted from her in places, but skin like new bark closed over it, and even as the endless heat blackened the fresh skin once more, it healed again.She staggered forward towards the pool.Watching in horror, I remembered theSummoning-vision and her bewilderment, her terror when she’d known she was trapped in stone.It wasn’t simply that she was immortal unless slain.She hadn’t known how to die at all.
Sarkan seized a handful of sand and pebbles from the floor of the stream and threw them at her, calling out a spell of increase; they swelled as they flew through the air, became boulders.They smashed into her, billows of sparks going up from her body like a fire jabbed with a poker, but even then she didn’t collapse into ashes.She kept burning, unconsumed.She kept coming.She plunged to her hands and knees in the pool, steam hissing up in clouds around her.
The narrow stream came running in suddenly quicker over the rocks, as if it knew the pool needed replenishing.Even beneath the clear rippling water, she still glowed; the fire-heart gleamed deep in her, refusing to be doused.She cupped water to her mouth with both hands.Most of the water boiled away from her charred skin.Then she seized one of the boulders Sarkan had flung at her, and with a strange twisting jerk of magic she scooped the middle of it out, to give herself a bowl to drink from.
“With me, together,” Sarkan shouted to me.“Keep the fire on her!”I startled; I’d been mesmerized, watching her live and burn at the same time.I took his hand.“Polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,”he chanted, and I sang about the burning hearth, about blowinggently on a flame.The burning roots crackled up again behind the Wood-queen, and within her the fire glowed fresh.She lifted her head from the bowl with a cry of rage.Her eyes were black hollowed pits glowing with fire.
Vining plants sprouted from the riverbed and wrapped themselves tangling around our legs.Barefoot, I managed to pull away from them, but they caught the laces of Sarkan’s boots, and he fell into the water.Other vines at once launched themselves up his arms, reaching for his throat.I plunged my hands down and gripped them and said,“Arakra,”and a green fierce sparking ran along their lengths and made them dart away, my own fingers stinging.He spoke a quick charm and pulled free, leaving his boots still imprisoned in the water, and we scrambled out onto the bank.
All around us, the heart-trees had roused; they trembled and waved in shared distress, a rustling whisper.The Wood-queen had turned away from us.She was still using the bowl, to drink but also to throw water onto the burning roots of the towering heart-tree, trying to put the fire out.The Spindle-water was quenching the flames in her, little by little; already her feet deep in the pool were solid blackened cinders, no longer burning.
“The tree,” Sarkan said, hoarsely, pushing himself up from the bank: there were stinging red tracks around his throat like a necklace of thorn-prickles.“She’s trying to protect it.”
I stood on the bank and looked up: it was late afternoon, and the air was heavy and moist.“Kalmoz,”I said to the sky, calling; clouds began to gather and mass together.“Kalmoz.”A drizzle began, pattering in drops on the water, and Sarkan said sharply, “We’re not trying to put itout—”
“Kalmoz!”I shouted, and put my hands up, and pulled the lightning out of the sky.
This time I knew what was going to happen, but that didn’t mean I was ready for it: there wasn’t a way to be ready for it.The lightning took away the world again, that single terrible moment of blind white silence everywhere around me, and then it jumpedaway from me roaring with thunder and struck the massive heart-tree, a shattering blow down the middle.
The force hurled me wildly back, spinning; I fell dazed half into the running streambed, my cheek pressed to pebbles and grass, gold-leaf-laden branches waving above me.I was dim and dazed and blank.The world was queerly silenced, but even through that cottony muffling I could hear a rising dreadful shriek of horror and rage.I managed with trembling arms to push my head up.The heart-tree was burning, all its leaves in flames, the whole trunk blackened; the lightning-bolt had struck at one of the great branchings lower on the trunk, and nearly a quarter of the tree was cracking away.
The Wood-queen was screaming.As if by instinct she put her hands on the tree, trying to push the cracked limb back, but she was still burning; where she touched the bark it caught again.She pulled her hands back.Ivy tendrils erupted from the ground and climbed the heart-tree’s trunk, weaving around it, trying to hold it together in one piece.She turned and came at me through the pool, her face twisting in fury.I tried to scramble back on hands and feet, shaking, knowing that it hadn’t worked.She wasn’t mortally wounded herself, even though the tree was.The heart-tree wasn’t a channel to her life.
The lightning had flung Sarkan back among the trees; he staggered out of them, his own clothes singed and blackened with smoke, and pointed at the stream.“Kerdul foringan,”he said, his voice rasping like hornets and faint in my ears, and the stream quivered.“Tual, kerdul—”and the riverbank crumbled away.The stream turned uncertainly, slowly, and ran into the new bed: diverting from the pool and from the burning tree.The water left standing in the pool began rising up in hot gouts of steam.
The Wood-queen whirled on him.She held out her hands and more plants came bursting up out of the water.She gripped the vine-tops in her fists and pulled them up, and then she flung them at him.The vines grew and swelled as they flew through the air, andthey lashed themselves around him, arms and legs, thickening; they toppled him to the ground.I tried to push myself up.My hands were stinging, my nose was full of smoke.But she came towards me too quickly, a living coal, tangled threads of smoke and mist still thick about her body.She seized me and I screamed.I smelled my own flesh crisping, blackening where she gripped me by the arms.
She dragged me off my feet.I couldn’t see or think for pain.My shift was smoldering, the sleeves burning and falling off my arms below the curl of her branding fingers.The air around her was oven-hot, rippling like water.I turned my face away from her to fight for breath.She dragged me with her through the pond and up onto the blackened ruin of her resting-mound, towards the shattered tree.
I guessed what she meant to do to me then, and even through pain I screamed and fought her.Her grip was implacable.I kicked at her with my bare feet, scorching them; I reached blindly for magic and cried out half a spell, but she shook me so furiously my teeth clacked on it in my mouth.She was a burning ember around me, fire everywhere.I tried to grab her, to pull myself against her.I would rather have burned to death.I didn’t want to know what corruption she would make out of me, what she would do with my strength poured into that vast heart-tree, here in the center of the Wood.
But she kept her arms rigid.She thrust me through crisping wood and ash into the hollow my lightning had left in the shattered heart of the tree.The wrapping vines tightened.The heart-tree closed around me like a coffin-lid.
Chapter 31
Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin.I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open.I clawed wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes.Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out—and I realized everything was different.
There was no trace of fire or fighting.I didn’t see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere.Even the vast heart-tree was gone.So were most of the others.The glade was more than half-empty.I stood on the shore of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world.It was bright morning instead of afternoon.Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.
I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn’t feel like the Wood.It wasn’t the terrible twisted shadow-place where I’dseen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree.It didn’t even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence.The pool lapped gently at my ankles.I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle.Sarkan couldn’t cast theSummoningalone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.
Yet even the Spindle was different here.The stream grew wider, gently, and began to deepen, but no cloud of mist rose to meet me; I didn’t hear the roaring of the waterfall.I stopped finally at a curving that felt a little familiar, and stared at a sapling on the bank: a slender heart-tree sapling, maybe ten years old, growing over that enormous grey old-man boulder we’d seen at the base of the cliff.It was the first heart-tree, the one we’d landed beneath in our mad slide down the cliff, half-lost in fog at the base of the waterfall.
But here there was no waterfall, no cliff; the ancient tree was small and young.Another heart-tree stood opposite it on the other bank of the Spindle, and beyond those two sentinels the river gradually widened, going away dark and deep into the distance.I didn’t see any more heart-trees farther along, only the ordinary oaks and tall pines.
Then I realized I wasn’t alone.A woman was standing on the opposite bank, beneath the older heart-tree.
