Uprooted(57)
Author: Naomi Novik

I twisted. Kasia was on top of me: she’d knocked me off my horse. I stared up past her. My horse was in the air above us, headless. A monstrous thing like a praying mantis was holding it up in two forelegs. The mantis blended against the heart-tree: narrow golden eyes the same shape as the fruits, and a body of the same silvery green as the leaves. It had bitten the horse’s head off with a single snap, in the same lunging movement. Behind us, another of the soldiers had fallen headless, and a third was screaming, his leg gone, thrashing in the grip of another mantis: there were a dozen of the creatures, coming out of the trees.

Chapter 15

The silver mantis dropped my horse to the ground and spat out the head. Kasia was scrambling up, dragging me away. We were all caught in horror for a moment, and then Prince Marek shouted wordlessly and flung his horn at the head of the silver mantis. He dragged out his sword. “Fall in! Get the wizards behind us!” he roared, and spurred his horse onward, getting between us and the thing, slashing at it. His sword skidded down the carapace, peeling up a long translucent strip as though he’d been paring a carrot.

The warhorses showed they really were worth their weight in silver: they weren’t panicking now, as any ordinary beast would have done, but rearing and lashing out, their voices shrilling. Their hooves struck with hollow thumps against the mantis shells. The soldiers made a loose circle around me and Kasia, the Dragon and the Falcon pulling their horses in on either side of us. All the soldiers were putting their reins in their teeth; half of them had already drawn swords, making a bristling wall of points to protect us, while the others settled their shields on their arms first.

The mantis creatures were coming out of the trees to surround us. They were still hard to see in the dappled light with the trees moving, but no longer invisible. They didn’t move like the walkers, slow and stiff; they ran lightly forward on four legs, the wide spiked jaws of their front legs quivering. “Suitah liekin, suitah lang!” the Falcon was shouting, summoning that blazing white fire he’d used in the tower. He flung it out like a lash to curl around the forelegs of the nearest mantis as it reared up to snatch for another man. He jerked on the line like a man pulling in a resisting calf, and dragged the mantis forward: there was a crackling bitter smell of burning oil where the fire pressed against its shell, thin plumes of white smoke curling away. Off-balance, the mantis snapped its terrible mandibles on thin air. The Falcon pulled its head into the line, and one of the soldiers hacked at its neck.

I didn’t have much hope: in the valley, our ordinary axes and swords and scythes barely scraped the skin of the walkers. But this sword somehow bit deep. Chips of chitin flew into the air, and the man on the other side worked the point of his sword into the joint where the neck met the head. He put his weight against the hilt and shoved it through. The mantis’s shell cracked loudly like a crab’s leg, and its head sagged, the jaws going limp. Ichor oozed out of its body over the sword-blade, steaming, and I briefly saw letters gleam golden through the haze before they faded again into the steel.

But even as the mantis died, its whole body lurched forward, pushing through the ring and nearly knocking into the Falcon’s horse. Another mantis leaned in through the opened space, reaching for him, but he seized the reins in a fist and controlled his mount as it tried to rear, then pulled his lash of fire back and cracked it into the second mantis’s face.

On the ground with Kasia, I could barely see anything else of the fighting. I heard Prince Marek and Janos shouting encouragement to the soldiers, and the harsh scraping noise of metal meeting shell. Everything was confusion and noise, happening so quickly I almost couldn’t breathe, much less think. I looked up wildly at the Dragon, who was fighting his own alarmed horse; I saw him snarl something under his breath and kick his feet loose from the stirrups. He threw the reins to one of the soldiers, a man whose horse was sagging with a terrible gaping cut to its chest, and slid down to the ground beside us.

“What should I do?” I cried to him. I groped helplessly for a spell. “Murzhetor—?”

“No!” he shouted at me, over the cacophony, and seizing my arm turned me around, facing the heart-tree. “We’re here for the queen. If we spend ourselves fighting a useless battle, all of this has been for nothing.”

We had stayed back from the tree, but the mantises were herding us towards it little by little, forcing us all beneath the boughs, and the smell of the fruit was burning in my nostrils. The trunk was hideously vast. I had never seen a tree so large, even in the deepest forest, and there was something grotesque about its size, like a swollen tick full of blood.

This time a threat alone wouldn’t work, even if I could have summoned up the rage to call fulmia: the Wood wasn’t going to hand over the queen to save even so large a heart-tree, not now that it knew we could kill the tree afterwards, purging her. I couldn’t imagine what we could do to this tree: the smooth bark shone with a hard luster like metal. The Dragon was staring at it narrowly, muttering as he worked his hands, but even before the leaping current of flame splashed against the bark, I knew instinctively it would do no good; and I didn’t believe even the soldiers’ enchanted swords could bite into that wood at all.

The Dragon kept trying: spells of breaking, spells of opening, spells of cold and lightning, systematic even while the fighting raged around us. He was looking for some weakness, some crack in the armor. But the tree withstood everything, and the smell of the fruit grew stronger. Two more of the mantis creatures had been killed; four more soldiers were dead. Kasia made a muffled cry as something rolled to a thump against my foot, and I looked down at Janos’s head, his clear blue eyes still fixed in an intent frown. I jerked away from it in horror and tripped to my knees, sickened all at once and helplessly: I vomited on the grass. “Not now!” the Dragon shouted at me, as though I could help it. I had never seen fighting before, not like this, this slaughter of men. They were being killed like cattle. I sobbed on my hands and knees, tears falling in the dirt, and then I put out my hands and gripped the widest roots near me, and said, “Kisara, kisara, vizh,” like a chant.

The roots twitched. “Kisara,” I said again, over and over, and droplets of water slowly collected on the surface of the roots, oozing out of them and rolling down to join the tiny damp spots, one after another after another. The dampness spread, became a circle between my hands. The thinnest branching rootlets in the open air were shriveling in on themselves. “Tulejon vizh,” I said, whispering, coaxing. “Kisara.” The roots began to writhe and squirm in the ground like fat earthworms as the water squeezed out of them, thin rivulets running. There was mud between my hands now, spreading and running away from the bigger roots, exposing more of them.