I backed away, and when her roots had sunk deep into the earth, I turned and ran to Sarkan through the mud of the emptied pool. The bark had stopped climbing up over him. Together we broke him the rest of the way loose, peeling it away from his skin, until his legs came free. I pulled him up from the stump and we sat together, sagged together, on the bank of the stream.
I was too spent to think of anything. He was scowling down at his own hands, almost resentfully. Abruptly he lurched forward and leaned over the streambed and dug into the soft wet earth. I watched him blankly for a while, and then I realized he was trying to restore the course of the stream. I pulled myself up and reached in to help. I could feel it, as soon as I started, the same feeling he hadn’t wanted to have: the sure sense that this was the right thing to do. The river wanted to run this way, wanted to feed into the pool.
It only took moving a few handfuls of dirt, and then the stream was running over our fingers, clearing the rest of the bed for itself. The pool began to fill once more. We sat back again, wearily. Next to me he was trying to get the dirt and water off his hands, wiping them on a corner of his ruined shirt, on the grass, on his trousers, mostly just spreading the mud around. Black half-circles were crusted deep under the fingernails. He finally heaved an exasperated noise and let his hands fall into his lap; he was too tired to use magic.
I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace. The ash had sunk into the muddy bottom of the pool, and been swallowed up. The trees were letting their scorched leaves fall into the water, and moss crept over the torn bare patches of earth, new blades of grass unfurling. At the head of the pool, the new heart-tree tangled with the old one, bracing it up, sealing over the jagged scar. They were putting out small white flowers, like stars.
Chapter 32
I fell asleep in the grove, empty-headed and spent. I didn’t notice Sarkan lifting me in his arms, or taking me back to the tower; I roused only long enough to mutter a complaint to him after the unpleasant stomach-twist of his jumping spell, and then I sank down again.
When I woke up, tucked under a blanket in my narrow bed in my narrow room, I kicked the blanket off my legs and got up without thinking about clothes. There was a rip all the way across the valley painting where a jagged chip of rock had torn it: the canvas hung down in flaps, all the magic gone out of it. I went out into the hallway, picking my way over bits of broken stone and cannon-balls littering the floor and rubbing at my gritty eyes. When I came down the stairs, I found Sarkan packing to leave.
“Someone has to clear out the corruption from the capital before it spreads any farther,” he said. “Alosha will be a long time recovering, and the court will have to return south by the end of the summer.”
He was in riding clothes, and boots of red-dyed leather tooled in silver. I was still a shambling mess of soot and mud, ragged enough to be a ghost but too mucky.
He barely looked me in the face, stuffing flasks and vials into a padded case, another sack full of books already waiting on the laboratory table between us. The floor slanted askew beneath our feet. The walls gaped here and there where cannon-balls had struck or stones had fallen, and the summer-warm wind whistled cheerfully between the cracks and blew papers and powders all over the floor, leaving faint smeared drifts of red and blue on the stone.
“I’ve propped the tower up for the moment,” he added as he laid down a corked, well-sealed flask of violet smoke. “I’ll take the fire-heart with me. You might start the repairs in the—”
“I won’t be here,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m going back to the Wood.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Do you think the death of a witch turns all her works to dust, or that her change of heart can repair them all at once? The Wood is still full of monstrosities and corruption, and will be for a long time to come.”
He wasn’t wrong, and the Wood-queen wasn’t dead anyway; she was only dreaming. But he wasn’t going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he’d drunk Spindle-water, and he’d held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He’d keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn’t feel the lack of them anymore.
“It won’t get any less full of them for my sitting in a heap of stones,” I said. I turned and left him with his bottles and his books.
Above my head, the Wood was aflame with red and gold and orange, but a few confused spring flowers in white poked up through the forest floor. A last wave of summer heat had struck this week, just at harvest-time. In the fields, the threshers labored under fierce sun, but it was cooler here in the dim light beneath the heavy canopy, alongside the running gurgle of the Spindle. I walked barefoot on crackling fallen leaves with my basket full of golden fruit, and stopped at a curving in the river. A walker was crouched by the water, putting its stick-head down to drink.
It saw me and held still, wary, but it didn’t run away. I held out one of the fruits from my basket. The walker crept towards me little by little on its stiff legs. It stopped just out of arm’s reach. I didn’t move. Finally it stretched out two forelegs and took the fruit and ate it, turning it around and around in its hands, nibbling until it had cleaned it down to the seed. Afterwards it looked at me, and then tentatively took a few steps into the forest. I nodded.
The walker led me a long way into the forest, into the trees. At last it held aside a heavy mat of vines from what looked like a sheer stone cliff face, and showed me a narrow cut in the rock, a thick sweet rotten stench rolling out. We climbed through the passage into a sheltered narrow vale. At one end stood an old, twisted heart-tree, grey with corruption, the trunk bulging unnaturally. Its boughs hung forward over the grass of the vale, so laden with fruit that the tips brushed the ground.
The walker stood anxiously aside. They’d learned that I would cleanse the sickened heart-trees if I could, and a few of them had even begun to help me. They had a gardener’s instinct, it seemed to me, now that they were free of the Wood-queen’s driving rage; or maybe they only liked the uncorrupted fruit better.
There were still nightmare things in the Wood, nursing too much rage of their own. They mostly avoided me, but now and then I stumbled over the torn and spoiled body of a rabbit or a squirrel, killed as far as I could see just for cruelty; and sometimes one of the walkers who had helped me would reappear torn and limping, a limb snapped off as by mantis-jaws, or its sides scored deeply by claws. Once in a dim part of the Wood, I fell into a pit trap, cleverly covered over with leaves and moss to blend into the forest floor, and full of broken sticks and a hideous glistening ooze that clung and burned my skin until I went to the grove and washed it off in the pool. I still had a slow-healing scab on my leg where one of the sticks had cut me. It might have been just an ordinary animal’s trap, set for prey, but I didn’t think so. I thought it had been meant for me.