Uprooted(115)
Author: Naomi Novik

The Wood-queen didn’t seem to notice. She kissed her sister on both cheeks. Then she took the king’s hand and led him on through the heart-trees, going towards the grove. The men from the tower tied their boat up and followed the two of them.

Linaya waited silently on the bank and watched the rest of the boats unload, one after another. As each one emptied, she touched it, and the boat dwindled into a leaf floating on the water; the stream carried it tidily into a small pocket by the bank. Soon the river was empty. The last of the wood-people were already walking onward towards the glade. Then Linaya turned to me and said, in a low deep resonating voice, like drumming on a hollow log, “Come.”

I stared at her. But she only turned and walked away from me through the stream, and after a moment I followed. I was afraid, but somehow instinctively not afraid of her. My feet splashed in the water. Hers didn’t. The water where it landed on her skin soaked in.

Time seemed to flow around us strangely. By the time we reached the grove, the wedding was over. The Wood-queen and her king were standing on the green mound with their hands clasped, a chain of braided flowers wrapped over their arms. The wood-people were gathered around them, scattered loosely through the trees, watching and silent. There was a quiet in all of them, a deep inhuman stillness. The handful of men from the tower eyed them warily, and flinched from the rustling murmurs of the heart-trees. The young hard-faced man was standing just to one side of the couple, looking with a twist of distaste at the Wood-queen’s strange, long, gnarled fingers where they wrapped around the king’s hands.

Linaya moved into the scene to join them. Her eyes were wet, glistening like green leaves after rain. The Wood-queen turned to her, smiling, and held out her hands. “Don’t weep,” she said, and her voice was laughing as a stream. “I’m not going far. The tower is only at the end of the valley.”

The sister didn’t answer. She only kissed her cheek, and let her hands go.

The king and the Wood-queen left together, with the men from the tower. The people drifted away quietly through the trees. Linaya sighed, softly, and it was the sighing of wind in the boughs. We were alone again, standing together on the green mound. She turned to me.

“Our people were alone here a long time,” she said, and I wondered, what was long to a tree? A thousand years, two thousand, ten? Endless generations, the roots growing deeper every one. “We began to forget how to be people. We dwindled away little by little.

“When the sorcerer-king came with his people, my sister let them come into the valley. She thought they could teach us to remember. She thought we could be renewed, and teach them in turn; we could give each other life. But they were afraid. They wanted to live, they wanted to grow stronger, but they didn’t want to change. They learned the wrong things.” Years were slipping past us as she spoke, blurred like rain, grey and soft and piling on one another. And then it was summer again, a different summer a long time later, and the wood-people were coming back through the trees.

Many of them moved slowly, somehow wearily. Some were hurt: they nursed blackened arms, and one man limped on a leg that looked like a log clumsily chopped apart. Two others were helping him. At the end of the stump, I think the leg was growing back. A few parents led children, and a woman carried a baby in her arms. In the distance, far to the west, a thin black pillar of smoke rose into the air.

As the wood-people came, they gathered fruit from the heart-trees and made cups out of fallen bark and leaves, the way Kasia and I had done as children for tea-parties in the forest. They dipped up the bright clear water of the pool and spread out through the grove, wandering apart in ones and twos, sometimes three. I stood watching them, and my eyes were full of tears, without knowing why. Some of them were stopping in open places, where the sun came down. They were eating the fruit, drinking the water. The mother chewed a piece of fruit and put it in her baby’s mouth, and gave it a sip from her cup.

They were changing. Their feet were growing, toes stretching long, plunging into the earth. Their bodies were stretching, and they put their arms up towards the sun. Their clothing fell away into blown leaves, dry grass. The children changed quickest; they rose suddenly into great beautiful grey pillars, branches bursting wide and filling with white flowers, silver leaves coming out everywhere, as if all the life that might have been in them went rushing out in one furious gasp.

Linaya left the mound and moved out among them. A few of the people, the wounded, the old, were struggling: they were caught half-changed. The baby had changed, a beautiful shining tree crowned with flowers. But the mother knelt crouched and shivering by the trunk, her hands upon it, her cup spilled, her face blind agony. Linaya touched her shoulder gently. She helped the mother stand, stumble a little way from the baby’s tree. She stroked the mother’s head and gave her the fruit to eat, and a drink from her own cup; she sang to her in that strange deep voice. The mother stood there with her head bent, tears dripping, and then all at once her face lifted to the sun and she was growing, she was gone.

Linaya helped the last few trapped ones, gave them a drink from her own cup, held another piece of fruit to their mouth. She stroked their bark and sang magic into them until they slipped the rest of the way over. Some made small gnarled trees; the oldest ones dwindled down into narrow saplings. The grove was full of heart-trees. She was the only one left.

She came back to the pool. “Why?” I asked her, helplessly. I had to know, but I almost felt I didn’t want the answer; I didn’t want to know what had driven them to this.

She pointed away, down the river. “They are coming,” she said in her deep voice. “Look,” and I looked down at the river. Instead of the reflection of the sky I saw men coming in carved boats; they carried lanterns, burning torches, and great axes. A flag streamed at the head of the first boat, and in the prow stood the young man from the wedding-party, older and settled into his hard face; the one who’d bricked up the Wood-queen. He wore a crown of his own now.

“They are coming,” Linaya said again. “They betrayed my sister, and imprisoned her where she could not grow. Now they are coming for us.”

“Can’t you fight them?” I asked. I could feel the magic deep and still in her, not a stream but a well that went down and down. “Can’t you run away—”

“No,” she said.

I stopped. There were forest depths in her eyes, green and unending. The longer I looked at her, the less like a woman she seemed. The part of her I saw was only half: the crowning trunk, the wide-spread branches, the leaves and flowers and fruit; below there was a vast network of roots that went long and spreading, deep into the valley floor. I had roots, too, but not like that. I could be carefully dug up, and shaken loose, and transplanted into a king’s castle, or a tower built of marble—unhappily, perhaps, but I could survive. There was no way to dig her up.