Uprooted(60)
Author: Naomi Novik

The queen was standing in front of us, unmoving, lit golden in the light of the blazing tree. She stood like a statue where Kasia had propped her onto her feet, and her arms dangled by her sides. Her cropped hair was as yellow as Marek’s, thin and fine; it floated around her head like a cloud. He stared at her, his face open as the beak of a hungry bird. He let go of me and reached out a hand.

“Don’t touch her!” the Falcon said sharply, hoarse with smoke. “Get the chains.”

Marek halted. He didn’t take his eyes off her. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t listen; then he turned and stumbled across the ruin of the battlefield to the corpse of his horse. The chains the Falcon had put on Kasia, while he’d examined her, were bundled up in cloth on the back of his saddle. Marek dragged them down and brought them back to us. The Falcon took the yoke from him with the cloth and cautiously, as wary as if he’d been approaching a mad dog, went towards the queen.

She didn’t stir, her eyes didn’t blink; it was as though she didn’t even see him. He hesitated even so, and then he spoke the protection spell over himself again, and he put the yoke over her neck in one swift movement and backed away. She still didn’t move. He reached out again, still with the cloth, and clasped the manacles onto her wrists one after another; then he draped the cloth over her shoulders.

There was a loud terrible crack behind us. We all jumped like rabbits. The heart-tree had split down its trunk, one whole massive half leaning away. It came down with a roaring crash, smashing through the hundred-year oaks on the edge of the clearing; a cloud of orange sparks roared up out of the heart of the trunk. The second half suddenly burst entirely into flames: consumed and roaring, and the branches thrashed once more and were still.

The queen’s body came alive with one jerky, clenched motion; the chains scraped and clanked as she moved within them, a whine of metal, and she staggered away from us, putting her hands up in front of her. The cloth slid off her shoulders; she didn’t notice it. She was groping at her own face with her curling, too-long nails, clawing at herself, with a low incoherent moan.

Marek sprang forward and caught her by the manacled wrists; she convulsively flung him off her with unnatural strength. Then she stopped and fixed a stare on him. He staggered back and caught his balance, straightened. Bloodstained, smeared with soot and sweat, he still looked a warrior and a prince; the green crest was still visible on his chest, the crown above the hydra. She looked at it and then at his face. She didn’t speak, but her eyes didn’t leave him.

He drew one quick harsh breath and said, “Mother.”

Chapter 16

She didn’t answer him. Marek stood with his hands clenched, waiting, his eyes fixed on her face. But she didn’t answer.

We stood silent and oppressed, still breathing the smoke of the heart-tree, the burning corpses of men and the Wood’s creatures. Finally the Falcon gathered himself and limped forward. He raised his hands towards her face, hesitating a moment, but she didn’t flinch from him. He put his hands on her cheeks and turned her towards him. He looked into her, his pupils widening and narrowing, changing shape; the color of his irises went from green to yellow to black. Hoarsely he said, “There’s nothing. I can’t find any corruption in her at all,” and let his hands drop.

But there was nothing else, either. She didn’t look at us, or if she did, that was even worse; her wide staring eyes didn’t see our faces. Marek stood still panting in heaving breaths, staring at her. “Mother,” he said again. “Mother, it’s Marek. I’ve come to take you home.”

Her face didn’t change. The first horror had faded out of it. She was staring and empty now, hollowed out. “Once we’re out of the Wood … ,” I said, but my voice died in my throat. I felt odd and sick. Did you ever get out of the Wood, if you’d been in it for twenty years?

But Marek seized on the suggestion. “Which way?” he demanded, sliding his sword back into its sheath.

I rubbed ash away with a sleeve over my face. I looked down at my blistered and cracked hands, stained with blood. The whole from a part. “Loytalal,” I whispered to my blood. “Take me home.”

I led them out of the Wood as best I could. I didn’t know what we’d do if we met another walker, much less another mantis. We were a far distance from that shining company that had ridden into the Wood that morning. In my mind, I imagined us a gleaning-party creeping through the forest on our way home before nightfall, trying not to startle so much as a bird. I picked our way carefully through the trees. We didn’t have any hope of breaking a trail, so we had to keep to the deer tracks and the thinner brush.

We crept out of the Wood half an hour before nightfall. I stumbled out from under the trees still following the glimmer of my spell: home, home, over and over again in my head, singsong. The glowing line ran curving towards the west and south, towards Dvernik. My feet kept carrying me after it, across the barren strip of razed dirt and into a wall of tall grass that finally became thick enough to halt me. Above the top edge of the grass, when I slowly raised my head, forested slopes rose up like a wall in the distance, hazy brown with the setting sun thrown along them.

The northern mountains. We’d come out not far from the mountain pass from Rosya. That made a certain sense, if the queen and Prince Vasily had been fleeing towards Rosya, and had been caught and taken into the Wood from there. But it meant we were miles and miles away from Zatochek.

Prince Marek came out of the Wood behind me with his head bent, his shoulders stooped as if he were dragging a heavy weight behind him. The two soldiers followed him raggedly. They’d pulled off their mail shirts and abandoned them somewhere along the way inside the Wood; their sword-belts, too. He alone was still in armor, and his sword was still in his hand, but when he reached the grass he sank in on himself, to his knees, and stayed there without moving. The soldiers came up to him and fell to either side of him, flat on their faces, as though they’d only been pulled along in his wake.

Kasia laid the Dragon down on the ground next to me, trampling the grass flat with her feet to make room. He was limp and still, his eyes closed. His right side was scorched and blistered everywhere, red and deadly glistening, his clothes torn away and burned off his skin. I’d never seen burns so dreadful.

The Falcon sagged to the ground on his other side. He held one end of a chain that reached to the yoke on the queen’s neck; he tugged on it, and she halted, too, standing still and alone in the razed barren strip around the Wood. Her face had the same inhuman stillness as Kasia’s, only worse, because no one was looking out of her eyes. It was like being followed by a marionette. When we tugged the chain forward, she walked, with a stiff, swinging puppet-stride as if she didn’t entirely know how to use her arms and legs anymore, as if they wouldn’t bend properly.