Uprooted(107)
Author: Naomi Novik

We spilled out into the round room at the bottom of the stairs. The air was stifling, not enough for all of us, until Kasia took up one of the old iron candlesticks and used the base of it to smash open the wall to the tomb, bricks tumbling in. Cool air came rushing in as she pushed the children inside, and told them to hide behind the old king’s coffin.

Far above came the sound of breaking stone. The queen was leading Marek and his men in after us. A few dozen soldiers crammed themselves into the room and against the walls, their faces afraid. They wore yellow surcoats, or what was left of them, so they were with us, but I didn’t recognize any of their faces. I didn’t see the baron. Swords rang again distantly: the last of the Yellow Marshes soldiers still pent up on the stairs were fighting. The light of the Summoning was building quickly.

Marek stabbed the last man in the stairwell and kicked the body tumbling in onto the floor. Soldiers jumped forward to meet him, almost eagerly: at least he was an enemy who made sense; someone who could be defeated. But Marek met one swing on his shield, ducked under it, and thrust his sword through the man’s body; he whirled and took off the head of the man on the other side; clubbed one man with his sword-hilt as he finished the swing, and stabbed forward to take another one in the eye. Kasia took a step beside me, a cry of protest, her sword rising: but they were all down before she’d even finished the sound.

But we finished the Summoning. I sang the last three words and Sarkan sang them after, and we sang them together once more. Light dawned blazing through the room, glowing almost from within the marble walls. Marek pushed forward into the space he’d cleared, and the queen came down behind him.

Her sword hung, dripping blood. Her face was calm and still and serene. The light shone on her and through her, steady and deep; there was no trace of corruption. Marek was clear, and Solya behind him also; the light washing over her caught them both at the edges, and there weren’t shadows in them: only a hard glittering kind of selfishness, pride like spiked citadel walls. But there wasn’t even any of that in the queen. I stared at her, panting, baffled. There was no corruption inside her.

Nothing at all was inside her. The light of the Summoning shone straight through. She was rotted out from the inside, her body just the skin of bark around an empty space. There wasn’t anything left of her to corrupt. I understood too late: we’d gone in to save Queen Hanna, so the Wood had let us find what we were looking for. But what we’d found had only ever been a hollow remnant, a fragment of a heart-tree’s core. A puppet, empty and waiting until we’d finished all our trials, convinced ourselves there was nothing wrong, and the Wood could reach out and take up the strings.

The light kept pouring over her, and slowly I made out the Wood at last, as if I’d looked again at a cloud-shape and seen a tree instead of a woman’s face. The Wood was there—it was the only thing there. The golden strands of her hair were the pale veins of leaves, and her limbs were branches, and her toes were long roots crawling out over the floor, roots going deep into the ground.

She was looking at the wall behind us, at the broken opening going through to the tomb with its blue flame, and for the first time her face changed, a change like the twisting of a slim willow bending in a high wind, the rage of a storm in the treetops. That animating power in the Wood—whatever it was, it had been here before.

Queen Hanna’s milk-pale face was slipping away under the Summoning’s light, like paint washed away by running water. There was another queen beneath, all brown and green and golden, her skin patterned like alder wood and her hair a deep green nearly black, threaded with red and gold and autumn brown. Someone had picked the gold strands of her hair out and braided them into a circlet for her head, white ribbons threaded through, and she wore a white dress that sat on her wrongly; she’d put it on, though it meant nothing to her.

I saw the buried king’s body take shape between her and us. He was carried by six men on a sheet of white linen, his face still and unmoving, the eyes filmed over with milk. They carried him into the tomb; they lowered him gently into the great stone coffin; they folded in the linen over his body.

In the Summoning-light, that other queen followed the men into the tomb-chamber. She bent over the coffin. There was no sorrow in her face, only a bewildered confusion, as if she didn’t understand. She touched the king’s face, touched the lids of his eyes with strangely long fingers knobbled like twigs. He didn’t stir. She startled and drew her hand back, out of the way of the men. They put the lid upon the coffin, and the blue flame erupted atop it. She watched them, still baffled.

One of the attending men spoke to her, ghostly, telling her I think to stay as long as she wished; he bowed and, stooping, left the tomb through the opening, leaving her. There was something in his face as he turned away from her that the Summoning caught even from so long ago, something cold and determined.

The Wood-queen didn’t see it. She was standing at the stone coffin, her hands spread over the top of it, uncomprehending as Marisha had been. She didn’t understand death. She stared at the blue flame, watching it leap; she turned all around in the bare stone room, looking around it with a wounded, appalled face. And then she stopped and looked again. Bricks were being laid in the small opening of the wall. She was being closed up inside the tomb.

She stared for a moment, and then rushed forward and knelt before the remaining opening. The men had already pushed blocks into most of the space, working quickly; the cold-faced man was speaking sorcery while they worked, blue-silver light crackling out of his hands, over the blocks, mortaring them together. She reached a hand through in protest. He didn’t answer her; he didn’t look at her face. None of them looked at her. They closed up the wall with one last block, pushing her hand back into the room with it.

She stood up, alone. She was startled, angry, full of confusion; but she wasn’t yet afraid. She raised a hand; she meant to do something. But behind her, the blue flame was leaping on the stone tomb. The letters around the sides were catching the light, shining out, completing the long sentence from the stairs. She whirled, and I could read them with her: REMAIN ETERNAL, REST ETERNAL, NEVER MOVING, NEVER LEAVING, and they weren’t just a poem for the king’s rest. This wasn’t a tomb; this was a prison. A prison meant to hold her. She turned and beat against the wall, she tried vainly to push against it, to work her fingers into the cracks. Terror was climbing in her. Stone shut her in, cold and still. They had quarried this room out of the roots of the mountains. She couldn’t get out. She couldn’t—