Uprooted(109)
Author: Naomi Novik

And then it was gone—she was gone.

Uninhabited now, Queen Hanna’s body crumbled away all at once, like a used-up log falling into ashes. Alosha’s sword fell to the floor clattering. We were alone, our rasping breaths the only sound. All the living soldiers had fled; the dead had been swallowed by the vines and the fire, leaving nothing but smoky ghosts on the white marble walls. Kasia sat up slowly, the children gathered against her. I sank to the floor on my knees, shaking with horror and despair. Marek’s hand lay open near me. His face gazed up sightless from the middle of the room, surrounded by charred stone and melted steel.

The dark blade was dissolving into the air. In a moment nothing remained but the empty hilt. Alosha’s sword was spent. And the Wood-queen had survived.

Chapter 29

We carried the children out of the tower into morning sun, pouring down bright and improbable on the silent wreckage of six thousand men. There were flies already buzzing thickly, and the crows had come in flocks; when we came out they burst up from the ground and perched on the walls to wait for us to get out of their way.

We had passed the baron in the cellar, leaning against the wall of the hearth, his eyes blank and unseeing, blood puddled beneath him. Kasia had found one of the sleep-potions still unbroken in its flask, gripped in the hand of the man-at-arms slumped dead beside him. She opened it and gave the children each a swallow, down there, before we brought them out. They’d seen more than enough already.

Now Stashek hung limp over her shoulder, and Sarkan carried a huddled Marisha in his arms. I struggled on behind them, too hollow to be sick anymore, too dry for tears. My breath was still short and painful in my chest. Solya walked with me, giving me a hand occasionally over a particularly high mound of armored corpses. We hadn’t taken him prisoner; he’d just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn’t dreaming, but felt he should have been. Down in the cellar, he’d given Sarkan what was left of his cloak to wrap around the little princess.

The tower was still standing, barely. The floor of the great hall was a maze of broken flagstones, dead roots and withered vines sprawled over them, charred up like the queen’s body below. Several of the columns had collapsed entirely. There was a hole in the ceiling into the library above, and a chair had fallen partway into it. Sarkan looked up at it as we left, climbing over blocks and rubble.

We had to walk the full length of the walls we’d built to try and keep Marek out. The voices of the old stone whispered sadly to me as we came through the archways. We saw no one living until we came out into the abandoned camp. At least there were a few soldiers there, rummaging through the supplies; a couple of them burst out of the pavilion running away from us, carrying silver cups. I would have gladly paid a dozen silver cups just to hear another mortal voice, to be able to believe that not everyone was dead. But they all fled, or hid from us behind tents or supply-heaps, peering out. We stood in the silent field and after a moment I said, “The cannon-crew,” remembering.

They were still there, a stone company, pushed out of the way, blank grey eyes fixed on the tower. Most of them hadn’t been badly broken. We stood around them, silently. None of us had enough strength to undo the spell. Finally I reached out to Sarkan. He shifted Marisha to his other arm and let me take his hand.

We managed to pool enough magic to undo the spell. The soldiers writhed and jerked as they came loose from the stone, shaking with the sudden return of time and breath. Some of them had lost fingers, or had new pitted scars where their bodies had been chipped, but these were trained men, who managed cannon that roared as terribly as any spell. They edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least. “Orders, sir?” one of them asked him, uncertainly.

He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly.

We walked down to Olshanka together, the road still dusty from so much use yesterday. Yesterday. I tried not to think about it: yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone. They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down. I saw their faces in the dust while we walked. Someone in Olshanka saw us coming, and Borys came out with a wagon to carry us the rest of the way. In the back we swayed with the wheels like sacks of grain. The creaking was every song I’d ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

Borys’s wife Natalya put me to sleep in Marta’s old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt. She’d gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her, a warm welcoming place ready to receive me, and Natalya’s hand on my forehead was my mother, telling me to sleep, sleep; the monsters wouldn’t come. I shut my eyes and pretended to believe her.

I didn’t wake again until evening, a warm summer evening with the gentle twilight falling blue. There was a familiar comfortable rising bustle in the house, someone getting supper, others coming in from the day’s work. I sat at the window without moving for a long time more. They were much richer than my family: they had an upstairs part in their house just for the bedrooms. Marisha was running in the big garden with a dog and four other children, most of them older than her; she was in a fresh cotton dress marked up with grass stains, and her hair slipping out of tidy braids. But Stashek was sitting near the door watching them, though one of the others was a boy his age. Even in simple clothes he didn’t look anything like an ordinary child, with his shoulders very straight and his face solemn as church.

“We have to take them back to Kralia,” Solya said. Given time to rest, he’d gathered back up some of his outrageous self-assurance, sitting himself down in our company as though he’d been with us all along.

It was dark; the children had been put to bed. We were sitting in the garden with glasses of cool plum brandy, and I felt as though I were pretending to be grown-up. It was too much like my parents taking visitors to sit in the chairs and the shady swinging bench just inside the forest, talking of crops and families, and meanwhile all of us children ran cheerfully amok, finding berries or chestnuts, or just having games of tag.

I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn’t have been able to just sneak up on me. It didn’t seem real even to be sitting here at all, much less talking of thrones and murder, quite seriously, as if those were themselves real things and not just bits out of songs.