Naomi Novik: Uprooted

The heart-tree rustled its branches softly, and one low branch dipped gently towards her. A flower was budding on the branch, despite winter. It bloomed, and petals fell away, and a small green fruit swelled and ripened gold. It hung off the bough towards her, a gentle invitation.

The Wood-queen took the fruit. She stood with it cupped in her hands, and in the silence of the grove a hard familiar thunk came down the river: an axe biting into wood.

The Wood-queen halted, the fruit nearly to her lips. We both stood, caught, listening. The thunk came again. Her hands dropped. The fruit fell to the ground, disappearing into the snow. She caught up her tangled skirts away from her feet and ran back down the mound and into the river.

I ran after her, my heart beating in time with the regular axe-thumps. They led us on to the end of the grove. The sapling had grown into a sturdy tall tree now, its branches spreading wide. One of the carved boats was tied up to the shore, and two men were cutting down the other heart-tree. They were working cheerfully together, taking turns with their heavy axes, each one biting deep into the wood. Silver-grey chips flew into the air.

The Wood-queen gave a cry of horror that howled through the trees. The woodcutters halted, shocked, clutching their axes and looking around; then she was on them. She caught them up by the throats with her long-fingered hands and threw them away from her, into the river; they thrashed up coughing. She dropped to her knees beside the sagging tree. She pressed all her fingers over the oozing cut, as if she could close it up. But the tree was too wounded to save. It was already leaning deeply over the water. In an hour, in a day, it would come down.

She stood up. She was still trembling, not with cold but rage, and the ground was trembling with her. In front of her feet, a crack opened suddenly and ran away in both directions along the edge of the grove. She stepped over the widening split, and I followed her just in time. The boat toppled into the opening chasm, vanishing, as the river began to roar wildly down the waterfall, as the grove sank down the new sheltering cliff into the clouds of mist. One of the woodcutters slipped in the water and was dragged over the edge with a scream, the other one crying out, trying to catch his hand too late.

The sapling sank away with the grove; the broken tree rose with us. The second woodcutter struggled up onto the bank, clinging to the shuddering ground. He swung his axe at the Wood-queen as she came towards him; it struck against her flesh and sprang away, ringing, jumping out of his hands. She paid no attention. Her face was blank and lost. She took hold of the woodcutter and carried him over to the wounded heart-tree. He struggled against her, uselessly, as she pushed him against the trunk, and vines sprouted from the ground to hold him in place.

His body arched, horror in his face. The Wood-queen stepped back. His feet and ankles were bound against the chipped gap where the axes had bitten into the tree, and they were already changing, grafting onto the trunk, boots splitting open and falling away as his toes were stretched out into new roots. His struggling arms were stiffening into branches, the fingers melting into one another. His wide agonized eyes were disappearing beneath a skin of silver bark. I ran to him, in pity and horror. My hands couldn’t get hold of the bark, and magic wouldn’t answer me in this place. But I couldn’t bear to just stand and watch.

Then he managed to lean forward. He whispered, “Agnieszka,” in Sarkan’s voice, and then he vanished; his face disappeared into a large dark hollow opening up in the trunk. I caught the edges and pulled myself into the hollow after him, into the dark. The tree-roots were close and tight; the damp warm smell of freshly turned earth choked my nose, and also the lingering smell of fire and smoke. I wanted to pull back out; I didn’t want to be here. But I knew that going back was wrong. I was here, inside the tree. I pushed and shoved and forced my way forward, against every instinct and terror. I forced myself to reach out and feel the blasted, scorched wood around me, splinters piercing my skin, the slick of sap clogging my eyes and my nose, the air I couldn’t get.

My nostrils were full of wood and rot and burning. “Alamak,” I whispered hoarsely, for walking through walls, and then I pushed my way out through bark and blasted wood, and back into the smoking wreck of the heart-grove.

—

I came out on the mound, my dress soaked green with sap, the shattered tree behind me. The light of the Summoning still blazed across the water, and the last shallow remnants of the pool shone beneath it like a full moon just up over the horizon, so bright it hurt to look at it. Sarkan was on the other side of the pool, on his knees. His mouth was wet, his hand dripping, the only parts of him not blackened with soot and dirt and smoke: he’d cupped water to his mouth. He’d drunk from the Spindle, water and power both, to gather enough strength to cast the Summoning alone.

But now the Wood-queen was standing over him with her long fingers wrapped choking around his neck: silver bark was climbing up from the bank over his knees and his legs as he struggled to pry her grip from around his throat. She let him go and whirled with a cry of protest at my escape, too late. With a long groaning above me, the great broken branch of the heart-tree cracked away from the trunk and finally fell, thundering, leaving a gaping hollow wound.

I stepped down from the mound to meet her on the wet stones as she came furious towards me. “Agnieszka!” Sarkan shouted hoarsely, reaching an arm out, struggling half-rooted in the earth. But even as she reached me, the Wood-queen slowed and halted. The Summoning -light illuminated her from behind: the terrible corruption in her, the sour black cloud of long despair. But it shone on me also, on me and through me, and I knew that in my face she saw someone else, looking out at her.

I could see in her where she’d gone from the grove: how she’d hunted them down, all the people of the tower, wizards and farmers and woodcutters all alike. How she’d planted one corrupt heart-tree after another in the roots of her own misery, and fed that misery onward. Mingled with my horror, I felt Linaya’s pity moving in me, deep and slow: pity and sorrow and regret. The Wood-queen saw it, too, and it held her still before me, trembling.

“I stopped them,” she said, her voice the scrape of a branch against the window-pane at night, when you imagine some dark thing is outside the house scratching to get in. “I had to stop them.”

She wasn’t speaking to me. Her eyes were looking past me, deep towards her sister’s face. “They burned the trees,” she said, pleading for understanding from someone long gone. “They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.”

Her sister didn’t have a voice to speak with anymore, but the sap of the heart-tree clung to my skin, and its roots went deep beneath my feet. “We’re meant to go,” I said softly, answering for both of us. “We’re not meant to stay forever.”

The Wood-queen finally looked at me then, instead of through me. “I couldn’t go,” she said, and I knew she’d tried. She’d killed the tower-lord and his soldiers, she’d planted all the fields with new trees, and she’d come here with her hands bloody, to sleep with her people at last. But she hadn’t been able to take root. She’d remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow. All she’d been able to do in the end was lie down beside her sister: not quite dreaming, not quite dead.