We stared at each other across the narrow running thread of the river. “Fulmedesh,” I said, my voice shaking, and a crack in the ground opened beneath the walker and swallowed up its back legs. It scrabbled at the bank with the rest of its long stick-limbs, thrashing silently, throwing up sprays of water, but the earth had closed up around the middle of its body, and it couldn’t pull itself out.
But I folded in on myself and swallowed a cry of pain. It felt like someone had hit me with a stick across my shoulders: the Wood had felt my working. I was sure of it. The Wood was looking for me now. It was looking, and soon it would find me. I had to force myself to move. I sprang over the stream and ran after my faint cloudy spell, which still drifted on ahead of me. The walker tried to catch at me with its long cracked-wood fingers as I skirted around it, but I ran past. I came through a ring of larger trunks and found myself in an open space around a smaller tree, the ground here heavy with snow.
There was a fallen tree stretching across the space, a giant, its trunk taller across than I was. Its fall had opened up this clearing, and in the middle of it, a new tree had sprung up to take its place. But not the same kind of tree. All the other trees I’d seen in the Wood had been familiar kinds, despite their stained bark and the twisted unnatural angles of their branches: oaks and black birch, and tall pines. But this was no kind of tree I had ever seen.
It was already larger around than the circle my arms could make, even though the giant tree couldn’t have fallen very long ago. It had smooth grey bark over a strangely knotted trunk, with long branches in even circles around it, starting high up the trunk like a larch. Its branches weren’t bare with winter, but carried a host of dried-up silvery leaves that rustled in the wind, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere else, as though there were people just out of sight speaking softly together.
The trail of my breath had dissolved into the air. Looking down at the deep snow, I could see the marks where the walkers’ legs had poked through and the lines their bellies had drawn, all going to the tree. I took a wary step through the snow towards it, and then another, and then I stopped. Kasia was bound to the tree. Her back was against the trunk and her arms drawn backwards around it.
I hadn’t seen her at first because the bark had already grown over her.
Her face was turned up a little, and beneath the skim of the covering bark I could see her mouth had been open, screaming while the bark closed over her. I made a choked cry, helplessly, and staggered forward and put out my hands to touch her. The bark was hard beneath my fingers already, the grey skin smooth and hard, as though she had been swallowed into the trunk whole, all of her made a part of the tree, of the Wood.
I couldn’t get a hold on the bark, though I tried frantically to claw and peel it away. But I managed at last to scrape off a little thin piece over her cheek, and beneath I found her own soft skin—still warm, still alive. But even as I touched it with my fingertip, the bark crept quickly over it, and I had to draw back my hand, not to be caught myself. I covered my mouth with my hands, even more desperate. I still knew so little: no spell came to my mind, nothing that could get Kasia out, nothing that would even put an axe in my hands, a knife, even if there had been time to carve her free.
The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still. I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.
With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga’s book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower. I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn’t believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots. But now I fell to the ground and dug away the snow and the fallen leaves and rot and moss until I came to the hard-frozen dirt. I pried up a large stone and began to smash at the earth, again and again, breaking up the dirt and breathing on it to make it softer, pounding in the snow that melted around my hands, pounding in the hot tears that dripped from my eyes as I worked. Kasia was above me with her head flung up, her mouth open in its soundless cry like a statue in a church.
“Fulmia,” I said, my fingers deep in the dirt, crushing the solid clods between my fingers. “Fulmia, fulmia,” I chanted over and over, bleeding from broken nails, and I felt the earth hear me, uneasily. Even the earth was tainted here, poisoned, but I spat on the dirt and screamed, “Fulmia,” and imagined my magic running into the ground like water, finding cracks and weaknesses, spreading out beneath my hands, beneath my cold wet knees: and the earth shuddered and turned over. A low trembling began where my hands drove into the ground, and it followed me as I started prying at the roots of the tree. The frozen dirt began to break up into small chunks all around them, the tremors going on and on like waves.
The branches above me were waving wildly as if in alarm, the whispering of the leaves becoming a muted roaring. I straightened up on my knees. “Let her out!” I screamed at the tree: I beat on its trunk with my muddy fists. “Let her out, or I’ll bring you down! Fulmia!” I cried out in rage, and threw myself back down at the ground, and where my fists hit, the ground rose and swelled like a river rising with the rain. Magic was pouring out of me, a torrent: every warning the Dragon had ever given me forgotten and ignored. I would have spent every drop of myself and died there, just to bring that horrible tree down: I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, where I left this behind me, Kasia’s life and heart feeding this corrupt monstrous thing. I would rather have died, crushed in my own earthquake, and brought it down with me. I tore at the ground ready to break open a pit to swallow us all.
And then with a sound like ice breaking in the spring, the bark cracked open, running up and down the length of Kasia’s body. I lunged up from the dirt at once and dug my fingers into the crack, prying the sides wide and reaching in for her. I caught her wrist, her arm limp and heavy, and pulled. She fell out of the horrible dark gap bending at the waist like a rag doll, and I backed away dragging her deadweight free into the snow, both my hands wrapped around her wrist. Her skin was fish-pale, sickly, like all the sun had been drunk out of her. Sap smelling like spring rain ran over her in thin green rivulets, and she didn’t move.
I fell to my knees beside her. “Kasia,” I said, sobbing. “Kasia.” The bark had already closed itself up like a seam around the hole where she had been. I caught Kasia’s hands in my wet dirty ones and pressed them to my cheeks, to my lips. They were cold, but not as cold as my own: there was a trace of life in them. I bent down and heaved her onto my shoulders.
Chapter 8
I came staggering out of the Wood at dawn, with Kasia slung across my shoulders like a bundle of firewood. The Wood had drawn back from me as I went, as if it feared driving me back to the spell. Fulmia rang in my head like a deep bell sounding with every heavy step I took, Kasia’s weight on top of mine, dirt still covering my hands on her pale arm and leg. Finally I floundered out of the trees into the deep snow at the border and fell. I crawled out from under Kasia and pushed her over. Her eyes were still closed. Her hair was matted and sticky around her face where sap had soaked it. I heaved her head up against my shoulder and closed my eyes, and spoke the spell.
The Dragon was waiting for us in the high tower room. His face was hard and grim as ever I had seen it, and he gripped me by the chin and jerked my head up. I looked back at him, exhausted and empty, while he studied my face and searched my eyes. He was holding a bottle of some cordial in his hands; after he’d looked at me a long while he jerked out the stopper and thrust it at me. “Drink it,” he said. “The whole thing.”
He went over to where Kasia sprawled on the floor, still unmoving: he held his hands out over her and glared down at me when I made a note of protest and reached out. “Now,” he snapped, “unless you want to force me to incinerate her at once, so I can deal with you.” He waited until I began drinking, then murmured a quick spell, sprinkling some crushed dust over her body: a shining amber-golden net sprang out over her, like a birdcage, and he turned to watch me drink.
The first taste was inexpressibly good: like a swallow of warm honey with lemon down a sore throat. But as I kept drinking, my stomach began to turn from too much sweetness. I had to halt halfway through. “I can’t,” I said, choking.
“All of it,” he said. “And then a second one, if I think it necessary. Drink,” and I forced down another swallow, and another, and another, until I drained the glass. Then he seized me by the wrists and said, “Ulozishtus sovjenta, megiot kozhor, ulozishtus megiot,” and I screamed: it felt like he’d set fire to me from the inside. I could see light shining through my own skin, making a blazing lantern of my body, and when I held up my hands, I saw to my horror faint shadows moving there beneath the surface. Forgetting the feverish pain, I caught at my dress and dragged it off over my head. He knelt down on the floor with me. I was shining like a sun, the thin shadows moving through me like fish swimming beneath the ice in winter.
“Get them out,” I said. Now that I saw them, I suddenly felt them, also, leaving a trail inside me like slime. I’d thought, stupidly, that I was safe because I hadn’t been scratched, or cut, or bitten. I’d thought he was only taking precautions. Now I understood: I’d breathed in corruption with the very air, under the boughs of the Wood, and I hadn’t noticed the creeping feeling of them because they’d slipped in, small and subtle. “Get them out—”
“Yes, I’m trying,” he bit out, gripping me by the wrists. He shut his eyes and began to speak again, a long slow chanting that went on and on, feeding the fire. I fixed my eyes on the window, on the sunlight coming in, and tried to breathe while I burned. Tears ran down my face in rivulets, scorching hot against my cheeks. His grip on my arms felt cool by comparison, for once.
The shadows beneath my skin were growing smaller, their edges burning away in the light, sand wearing away in water. They darted around, trying to find places to hide, but he didn’t let the light fade anywhere. I could see my bones and my organs as glowing shapes inside me, one of them my very heart thumping in my breast. It was slowing, each beat heavier. I understood dimly that the question was whether he could burn the corruption out of me quicker than my body could bear. I swayed in his hands. He shook me abruptly and I opened my eyes to find him glaring at me: he didn’t break the course of his spell even for a moment, but he didn’t need to say a word: Don’t you dare waste my time, you outrageous idiot, his furious eyes said, and I set my teeth in my lip and held on a little longer.