Uprooted(104)
Author: Naomi Novik

I turned and pulled one of the black-fletched arrows out of the bookcase where it had sunk in, one of the arrows Solya had fired at me, Alosha’s make. I took it to the window and stopped. My hands were shaking. I didn’t see what else to do. None of them could stop her. But—if I killed the queen, Marek would never listen to us, never; I might as well kill him now, too. If I killed her—I felt strange and sick at the thought. She was small and far away on the ground, a doll and not a person, her arm rising and falling.

“A moment,” Sarkan said. I backed away, reprieved and glad of it, although I had to cover my ears while he recited the long shivering words of his spell. A wind breathed out through the window, brushing against my skin like a damp, oily palm, smelling of rot and iron. It kept blowing, steady and awful, and down in the trenches the endless corpses stirred, and slowly began to rise.

They left their swords on the ground. They didn’t need any weapons. They didn’t try to hurt the soldiers, just reached out their empty hands and took hold of them, two and three to a man, grasping. There were already more dead men than living ones in the trenches, and all the dead served the Dragon’s spell. Marek’s soldiers slashed and cut at them in a frenzy, but the dead didn’t bleed. Their faces were sagging and blank, uninterested.

Some of them plodded down the trench to grasp at the knights, at the queen’s arms and legs, taking hold of her. But she flung them off, and the knights in their armor hacked them with their broadswords. The baron’s men were as horrified by the spell as Marek’s; they were scrambling back from the dead as much as from the implacable queen. And she moved forward against them. The dead were holding back the rest of the army, and the baron’s men were hacking down the knights all around her, but she didn’t stop.

There wasn’t any white left in her shift. It was bloody from the ground to the knee; her mail shirt was dyed red. Her arms and hands were red, her face was spattered. I looked down the arrow and touched Alosha’s magic: I felt the arrow’s eagerness to fly again, to seek warm living flesh. There was a nick in the arrow-head; I smoothed it out with my fingers, pressing the steel flat the way I’d seen Alosha work her sword. I pushed a little more magic into it, and felt it grow heavy in my hand, full of death. “In the thigh,” I told it, quailing at murder. Surely it would be enough just to stop the queen. I pointed it at her, and threw.

The arrow dived down, flying straight, whistling joyfully. It struck the queen’s leg high up on the thigh, and tore through the mail shirt. And then it stuck there, hanging half through the mail. There wasn’t any blood. The queen pulled the arrow out, tossed it aside. She looked up towards the window, a brief glance. I stumbled back. She returned to the slaughter.

My face ached as if she’d struck me, with a sharp hollow pressure above the bridge of my nose, familiar. “The Wood,” I said out loud.

“What?” Sarkan said.

“The Wood,” I said. “The Wood is in her.” Every spell we’d cast on the queen, every purging, the holy relics, every trial: none of them mattered. I was suddenly sure. That had been the Wood looking back at me. The Wood had found a way to hide.

I turned to him. “The Summoning,” I said. “Sarkan, we have to show them. Marek and Solya, all their men. If they see that she’s been taken by the Wood—”

“And you think he’ll believe it?” he said. He looked out the window, though, and after a moment said, “All right. We’ve lost the walls in any case. We’ll bring the survivors inside the tower. And hope the doors hold long enough for us to cast the spell.”

Chapter 28

We ran down to the great hall and flung the doors open. The baron’s men came pouring in: so horribly few of them left. A hundred maybe. They crowded into the hall and down the stairs into the cellars, all of them smudged and exhausted, faces wrung with one horror after another. They were glad to come inside, but they flinched from Sarkan and from me. Even the baron himself looked at us askance. “That wasn’t them,” he said, as he came to stand before Sarkan in the hall, his men eddying to either side of us, leaving a circle around us. “The dead men.”

“No, and if you would have preferred to have lost the rest of the living ones, do tell me, and I’ll be sure and keep your tender sensibilities in mind next time.” Sarkan was drawn tight, and I felt just as spent. I wondered how long it was until morning, and didn’t want to ask. “Let them get what rest they can, and share out all the stores you can find.”

Soon Kasia pushed up the stairs, through the crowding soldiers; the baron had sent the wounded and the worst-exhausted men downstairs; only his best remained with him. “They’re breaking into the wine and the beer casks,” she said to me in an undertone. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for the children. Nieshka, what’s happening?”

Sarkan had climbed the dais: he was laying out the Summoning across the arms of his high seat. He swore under his breath. “That’s the last thing we need now. Go down there and turn it all into cider,” he told me. I ran down with Kasia. The soldiers were drinking out of cupped hands and helmets, or just jabbing holes in the casks and putting their heads underneath, or tipping back bottles; some of them were quarreling already. Shouting over wine must have felt safer than shouting over horrors, over dead men and slaughter.

Kasia pushed them out of my way, and they didn’t fight her when they saw me there; I got up to the biggest barrel and put my hands on it. “Lirintalem,” I said, with a tired shove of magic, and sagged as it ran away from me and shivered through all the bottles and casks. The soldiers kept on pushing and shoving to get a drink; it would be a while before they realized they weren’t getting any drunker.

Kasia touched my shoulder, carefully, and I turned and hugged her tight for one moment, glad of her strength. “I have to go back up,” I said. “Keep the children safe.”

“Should I come stand with you?” she said quietly.

“Keep the children safe,” I said. “If you have to—” I caught her arm and took her back to the far wall of the cellar. Stashek and Marisha were sitting up there, awake and watching the soldiers, wary; Marisha was rubbing her eyes. I put my hands on the wall and found the edges of the passageway. I put Kasia’s hand on the crack, showed her where it was, and then I pulled a thin line woven of magic out of it, as a handle. “Push the door open and take them inside, and close it behind you,” I said. Then I put my hand into the air and said, “Hatol,” pulling, and drew Alosha’s sword out of the air back to me. I held it out to her. “Keep this, too.”