The lightning had flung Sarkan back among the trees; he staggered out of them, his own clothes singed and blackened with smoke, and pointed at the stream. “Kerdul foringan,” he said, his voice rasping like hornets and faint in my ears, and the stream quivered. “Tual, kerdul—” and the riverbank crumbled away. The stream turned uncertainly, slowly, and ran into the new bed: diverting from the pool and from the burning tree. The water left standing in the pool began rising up in hot gouts of steam.
The Wood-queen whirled on him. She held out her hands and more plants came bursting up out of the water. She gripped the vine-tops in her fists and pulled them up, and then she flung them at him. The vines grew and swelled as they flew through the air, and they lashed themselves around him, arms and legs, thickening; they toppled him to the ground. I tried to push myself up. My hands were stinging, my nose was full of smoke. But she came towards me too quickly, a living coal, tangled threads of smoke and mist still thick about her body. She seized me and I screamed. I smelled my own flesh crisping, blackening where she gripped me by the arms.
She dragged me off my feet. I couldn’t see or think for pain. My shift was smoldering, the sleeves burning and falling off my arms below the curl of her branding fingers. The air around her was oven-hot, rippling like water. I turned my face away from her to fight for breath. She dragged me with her through the pond and up onto the blackened ruin of her resting-mound, towards the shattered tree.
I guessed what she meant to do to me then, and even through pain I screamed and fought her. Her grip was implacable. I kicked at her with my bare feet, scorching them; I reached blindly for magic and cried out half a spell, but she shook me so furiously my teeth clacked on it in my mouth. She was a burning ember around me, fire everywhere. I tried to grab her, to pull myself against her. I would rather have burned to death. I didn’t want to know what corruption she would make out of me, what she would do with my strength poured into that vast heart-tree, here in the center of the Wood.
But she kept her arms rigid. She thrust me through crisping wood and ash into the hollow my lightning had left in the shattered heart of the tree. The wrapping vines tightened. The heart-tree closed around me like a coffin-lid.
Chapter 31
Cool wet sap slid over me, green and sticky, drenching my hair, my skin. I pushed against the wood, frantic, choking out a spell of strength, and the tree cracked back open. I clawed wildly for the edges of the bark and got my bare foot into the bottom of the crack and heaved myself scrambling back out into the glade, sharp splinters of bark driving into my fingers and toes. Blind with terror I crawled, ran, flung myself away from the tree, until I fell into the cold water thrashing, and lifted myself out—and I realized everything was different.
There was no trace of fire or fighting. I didn’t see Sarkan or the Wood-queen anywhere. Even the vast heart-tree was gone. So were most of the others. The glade was more than half-empty. I stood on the shore of the lapping quiet pool alone, in what might have been another world. It was bright morning instead of afternoon. Birds flitted between branches, talking, and the frogs sang by the rippling water.
I understood at once that I was trapped, but this place didn’t feel like the Wood. It wasn’t the terrible twisted shadow-place where I’d seen Kasia wandering, where Jerzy had slumped against a tree. It didn’t even feel like the real glade, full of its unnatural silence. The pool lapped gently at my ankles. I turned and ran splashing down the streambed, back along the Spindle. Sarkan couldn’t cast the Summoning alone to show me the way to escape, but the Spindle had been our way in: maybe it could be the way out.
Yet even the Spindle was different here. The stream grew wider, gently, and began to deepen, but no cloud of mist rose to meet me; I didn’t hear the roaring of the waterfall. I stopped finally at a curving that felt a little familiar, and stared at a sapling on the bank: a slender heart-tree sapling, maybe ten years old, growing over that enormous grey old-man boulder we’d seen at the base of the cliff. It was the first heart-tree, the one we’d landed beneath in our mad slide down the cliff, half-lost in fog at the base of the waterfall.
But here there was no waterfall, no cliff; the ancient tree was small and young. Another heart-tree stood opposite it on the other bank of the Spindle, and beyond those two sentinels the river gradually widened, going away dark and deep into the distance. I didn’t see any more heart-trees farther along, only the ordinary oaks and tall pines.
Then I realized I wasn’t alone. A woman was standing on the opposite bank, beneath the older heart-tree.
For one moment I thought she was the Wood-queen. She looked so much like her that they might have been kin. She had the same look of alder and tree-bark, the same tangled hair, but her face was longer, and her eyes were green. Where the Wood-queen was gold and russet, she was simpler browns and silver-greys. She was looking down the river, just as I was, and before I could say anything a distant creaking came drifting down the river. A boat came into view, riding gently; a long wooden boat elaborately carved, beautiful, and the Wood-queen stood in it.
She didn’t seem to see me. She stood in the prow smiling, flowers wreathing her hair, with a man beside her, and it took me time to recognize his face. I’d only ever seen it dead: the king in the tower. He looked far younger and taller, his face unworn. But the Wood-queen looked much the same as she had in the tomb, the day they’d bricked her in. Behind them sat a young man with a tight look, not much more than a boy, but I could see the man he’d grow up to be in his bones: the hard-faced man from the tower. More of the tower-people were in the boat with them, rowing: men in silver armor, who glanced around themselves warily at the massive trees as they stroked their oars through the water.
Behind them came more boats, dozens of them: but these were makeshift-looking things more like overgrown leaves than real boats. They were crowded full of a kind of people I’d never seen before, all with a look of tree to them, a little like the Wood-queen herself: dark walnut and bright cherry, pale ash and warm beech. There were a few children among them, but no one old.
The carved boat bumped gently against the bank, and the king helped the Wood-queen down. She went to the wood-woman smiling, her hands outstretched. “Linaya,” she said, a word that I somehow knew was and wasn’t magic, was and wasn’t a name; a word that meant sister, and friend, and fellow-traveler. The name echoed strangely away from her through the trees. The leaves seemed to whisper it back; the ripple of the stream picked it up, as if it were written into everything around me.