Uprooted(105)
Author: Naomi Novik

She nodded, and slung the sword over her shoulder. I kissed her one last time and ran back upstairs.

The baron’s men had all come inside. The walls still did us this much good: Marek’s cannon couldn’t be turned on the doors. A few of the baron’s men had climbed up to the arrow-slit window seats to either side of them and were shooting down at the soldiers outside. Heavy thumps landed against the door, and once a bright flare of magic; shouts and noise came. “They’re laying a fire against the doors,” one of the men called from the window as I came back up into the great hall.

“Let them,” Sarkan said, without looking up. I joined him on the dais. He had reshaped the grand throne-like chair into a simple bench of two seats, with a flat desk on the shared arm between them. The heavy volume of the Summoning lay upon it, waiting, familiar and still strange. I let myself down slowly into the seat and spread my fingers over the cover: the golden vining letters, the faint hum beneath like distant honeybees. I was so tired even my fingers felt dull.

We opened the cover and began to read. Sarkan’s voice recited clear and steady, marching on precisely, and slowly the fog over my mind blew away. I hummed and sang and murmured all around him. The soldiers around us grew quiet; they settled down in corners and against the walls, listening the way you would listen in a tavern to a good singer and a sad song, late at night. Their faces were vaguely puzzled with trying to follow the story, trying to remember it, even while they were being towed onward by the spell.

The spell towed me along with them, and I was glad to lose myself inside it. All the horrors of the day didn’t vanish, but the Summoning made them only one part of the story, and not the most important part. The power was building, running bright and clean. I felt the spell rising up like a second tower. We’d open the doors, when we were ready, and spill the irresistible light into the courtyard before the gates. Outside the windows, the sky was growing lighter: the sun was coming up.

The doors creaked. Something was coming in underneath them, over the tops, through the barely there gap between the two doors. The men nearest them shouted warning. Thin wriggling shadows were climbing through every tiny crack, narrow and quick as snakes: the squirming tendrils of vines and roots, crumbling wood and stone as they found ways inside. They spread across the wood like frost climbing a pane, gripping and grasping, and a familiar, too-sweet smell came rolling off them.

It was the Wood. Striking openly now, as if it knew what we were doing, that we were about to expose the deception. The soldiers of the Yellow Marshes were hacking at the tendrils with their swords and knives, afraid: they knew enough of the Wood to recognize it, too. But more of the vines kept coming in, through cracks and holes the first ones opened for them. Outside, Marek’s battering ram struck again, and the doors shook from top to bottom. The vines caught at the iron brackets of the hinges and the bar and tore at them. Rust spread in an orange-red pool as quickly as spilling blood, the work of a century in moments. The tendrils pushed inside them, coiled around the bolts and shook them ferociously back and forth. The brackets rattled noisily.

Sarkan and I couldn’t stop. We kept reading, tongues stumbling in haste, turning pages as quickly as we could. But the Summoning demanded its own pace. The story couldn’t be rushed. The edifice of power we’d already built was wavering beneath our speed, like a storyteller about to lose the thread of her own tale. The Summoning had us.

With a loud splintering crack, a larger corner broke off at the bottom of the right door. More vines came spilling through, thicker ones, uncoiling long. Some of them seized the arms of the soldiers, ripped swords out of their hands, flung them bodily aside. Others found the heavy bar and curled around it and dragged it slowly aside, grating inch by inch, until it slid free of the first bracket entirely. The battering ram outside struck against the doors again, and they burst wide open, knocking men out of their way sprawling.

Marek was on the other side still on his horse, standing in his stirrups and blowing his horn. His face was bright with blood-lust and fury, so eager he didn’t even look to see why the doors had opened so suddenly. The vines were rooted in the earth around the stairs, thick dark nests of woody roots hiding in the corners and in the crevices of the broken steps, barely visible in the early light of morning. Marek leaped his horse straight over them without a glance, charging up the stairs and through the broken doorway, and all his remaining knights came pouring in behind him. Their swords rose and fell in a bloody rain, and the baron’s soldiers were stabbing up at them with spears. Horses screamed and fell, kicking in their death-throes as men died around them.

Tears were falling off my face onto the pages of the book. But I couldn’t stop reading. Then something struck me, a hard blow that knocked out all my breath. The spell slid off my tongue. Perfect silence in my ears at first, then a hollow roaring everywhere around me and Sarkan, drowning out all other sound without touching us; like being directly in the narrow eye of a thunderstorm in the middle of a wide field, seeing the grey furious rain on every side not touching you, but knowing that in a moment—

Cracks began to open up running away from us, going through the book, through the chair, through the dais, through the floors and walls. They weren’t cracks in wood and stone; they were cracks in the world. Inside them was nothing but flat dark absence. The beautiful golden volume of the Summoning folded up on itself and sank like a stone vanishing into deep water. Sarkan had me by the arm and out of the chair and was leading me down from the dais. The chair was falling in, too, then the whole dais, all of it collapsing into emptiness.

Sarkan was still continuing the spell, or rather holding it in place, repeating his last line over and over. I tried to join in with him again, just humming, but my breath kept disappearing. I felt so strange. My shoulder throbbed, but when I looked down at it, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. Then I looked farther down, slowly. There was an arrow-shaft jutting out of me, just below my breast. I stared at it, puzzled. I couldn’t feel it at all.

The high beautiful stained-glass windows shattered outwards with faint muffled pops as the cracks reached them, showers of colored glass falling. The cracks were spreading. Men fell into them with cries that vanished as they did, swallowed up into silence. Chunks of the stone walls and floors were disappearing, too. The walls of the tower groaned.

Sarkan was holding the rest of the spell by the edge, barely, like a man trying to control a maddened horse. I tried to push him magic to do it with. He was supporting all my weight, his arm like iron around me. My legs stumbled over one another, almost dragging. My chest was beginning to hurt now, a sharp shocking pain as though my body had finally woken up and noticed something was very badly wrong. I couldn’t breathe without wanting to scream, and I couldn’t get enough air to scream. The soldiers were still fighting in a few places, others just fleeing the tower, trying to get away from the crumbling world. I glimpsed Marek kicking free of his dead horse, jumping over another crack that ran down the floor towards him.