They left their swords on the ground. They didn’t need any weapons. They didn’t try to hurt the soldiers, just reached out their empty hands and took hold of them, two and three to a man, grasping. There were already more dead men than living ones in the trenches, and all the dead served the Dragon’s spell. Marek’s soldiers slashed and cut at them in a frenzy, but the dead didn’t bleed. Their faces were sagging and blank, uninterested.
Some of them plodded down the trench to grasp at the knights, at the queen’s arms and legs, taking hold of her. But she flung them off, and the knights in their armor hacked them with their broadswords. The baron’s men were as horrified by the spell as Marek’s; they were scrambling back from the dead as much as from the implacable queen. And she moved forward against them. The dead were holding back the rest of the army, and the baron’s men were hacking down the knights all around her, but she didn’t stop.
There wasn’t any white left in her shift. It was bloody from the ground to the knee; her mail shirt was dyed red. Her arms and hands were red, her face was spattered. I looked down the arrow and touched Alosha’s magic: I felt the arrow’s eagerness to fly again, to seek warm living flesh. There was a nick in the arrow-head; I smoothed it out with my fingers, pressing the steel flat the way I’d seen Alosha work her sword. I pushed a little more magic into it, and felt it grow heavy in my hand, full of death. “In the thigh,” I told it, quailing at murder. Surely it would be enough just to stop the queen. I pointed it at her, and threw.
The arrow dived down, flying straight, whistling joyfully. It struck the queen’s leg high up on the thigh, and tore through the mail shirt. And then it stuck there, hanging half through the mail. There wasn’t any blood. The queen pulled the arrow out, tossed it aside. She looked up towards the window, a brief glance. I stumbled back. She returned to the slaughter.
My face ached as if she’d struck me, with a sharp hollow pressure above the bridge of my nose, familiar. “The Wood,” I said out loud.
“What?” Sarkan said.
“The Wood,” I said. “The Wood is in her.” Every spell we’d cast on the queen, every purging, the holy relics, every trial: none of them mattered. I was suddenly sure. That had been the Wood looking back at me. The Wood had found a way to hide.
I turned to him. “The Summoning,” I said. “Sarkan, we have to show them. Marek and Solya, all their men. If they see that she’s been taken by the Wood—”
“And you think he’ll believe it?” he said. He looked out the window, though, and after a moment said, “All right. We’ve lost the walls in any case. We’ll bring the survivors inside the tower. And hope the doors hold long enough for us to cast the spell.”
Chapter 28
We ran down to the great hall and flung the doors open. The baron’s men came pouring in: so horribly few of them left. A hundred maybe. They crowded into the hall and down the stairs into the cellars, all of them smudged and exhausted, faces wrung with one horror after another. They were glad to come inside, but they flinched from Sarkan and from me. Even the baron himself looked at us askance. “That wasn’t them,” he said, as he came to stand before Sarkan in the hall, his men eddying to either side of us, leaving a circle around us. “The dead men.”
“No, and if you would have preferred to have lost the rest of the living ones, do tell me, and I’ll be sure and keep your tender sensibilities in mind next time.” Sarkan was drawn tight, and I felt just as spent. I wondered how long it was until morning, and didn’t want to ask. “Let them get what rest they can, and share out all the stores you can find.”
Soon Kasia pushed up the stairs, through the crowding soldiers; the baron had sent the wounded and the worst-exhausted men downstairs; only his best remained with him. “They’re breaking into the wine and the beer casks,” she said to me in an undertone. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for the children. Nieshka, what’s happening?”
Sarkan had climbed the dais: he was laying out the Summoning across the arms of his high seat. He swore under his breath. “That’s the last thing we need now. Go down there and turn it all into cider,” he told me. I ran down with Kasia. The soldiers were drinking out of cupped hands and helmets, or just jabbing holes in the casks and putting their heads underneath, or tipping back bottles; some of them were quarreling already. Shouting over wine must have felt safer than shouting over horrors, over dead men and slaughter.
Kasia pushed them out of my way, and they didn’t fight her when they saw me there; I got up to the biggest barrel and put my hands on it. “Lirintalem,” I said, with a tired shove of magic, and sagged as it ran away from me and shivered through all the bottles and casks. The soldiers kept on pushing and shoving to get a drink; it would be a while before they realized they weren’t getting any drunker.
Kasia touched my shoulder, carefully, and I turned and hugged her tight for one moment, glad of her strength. “I have to go back up,” I said. “Keep the children safe.”
“Should I come stand with you?” she said quietly.
“Keep the children safe,” I said. “If you have to—” I caught her arm and took her back to the far wall of the cellar. Stashek and Marisha were sitting up there, awake and watching the soldiers, wary; Marisha was rubbing her eyes. I put my hands on the wall and found the edges of the passageway. I put Kasia’s hand on the crack, showed her where it was, and then I pulled a thin line woven of magic out of it, as a handle. “Push the door open and take them inside, and close it behind you,” I said. Then I put my hand into the air and said, “Hatol,” pulling, and drew Alosha’s sword out of the air back to me. I held it out to her. “Keep this, too.”
She nodded, and slung the sword over her shoulder. I kissed her one last time and ran back upstairs.
The baron’s men had all come inside. The walls still did us this much good: Marek’s cannon couldn’t be turned on the doors. A few of the baron’s men had climbed up to the arrow-slit window seats to either side of them and were shooting down at the soldiers outside. Heavy thumps landed against the door, and once a bright flare of magic; shouts and noise came. “They’re laying a fire against the doors,” one of the men called from the window as I came back up into the great hall.
“Let them,” Sarkan said, without looking up. I joined him on the dais. He had reshaped the grand throne-like chair into a simple bench of two seats, with a flat desk on the shared arm between them. The heavy volume of the Summoning lay upon it, waiting, familiar and still strange. I let myself down slowly into the seat and spread my fingers over the cover: the golden vining letters, the faint hum beneath like distant honeybees. I was so tired even my fingers felt dull.
We opened the cover and began to read. Sarkan’s voice recited clear and steady, marching on precisely, and slowly the fog over my mind blew away. I hummed and sang and murmured all around him. The soldiers around us grew quiet; they settled down in corners and against the walls, listening the way you would listen in a tavern to a good singer and a sad song, late at night. Their faces were vaguely puzzled with trying to follow the story, trying to remember it, even while they were being towed onward by the spell.
The spell towed me along with them, and I was glad to lose myself inside it. All the horrors of the day didn’t vanish, but the Summoning made them only one part of the story, and not the most important part. The power was building, running bright and clean. I felt the spell rising up like a second tower. We’d open the doors, when we were ready, and spill the irresistible light into the courtyard before the gates. Outside the windows, the sky was growing lighter: the sun was coming up.
The doors creaked. Something was coming in underneath them, over the tops, through the barely there gap between the two doors. The men nearest them shouted warning. Thin wriggling shadows were climbing through every tiny crack, narrow and quick as snakes: the squirming tendrils of vines and roots, crumbling wood and stone as they found ways inside. They spread across the wood like frost climbing a pane, gripping and grasping, and a familiar, too-sweet smell came rolling off them.
It was the Wood. Striking openly now, as if it knew what we were doing, that we were about to expose the deception. The soldiers of the Yellow Marshes were hacking at the tendrils with their swords and knives, afraid: they knew enough of the Wood to recognize it, too. But more of the vines kept coming in, through cracks and holes the first ones opened for them. Outside, Marek’s battering ram struck again, and the doors shook from top to bottom. The vines caught at the iron brackets of the hinges and the bar and tore at them. Rust spread in an orange-red pool as quickly as spilling blood, the work of a century in moments. The tendrils pushed inside them, coiled around the bolts and shook them ferociously back and forth. The brackets rattled noisily.
Sarkan and I couldn’t stop. We kept reading, tongues stumbling in haste, turning pages as quickly as we could. But the Summoning demanded its own pace. The story couldn’t be rushed. The edifice of power we’d already built was wavering beneath our speed, like a storyteller about to lose the thread of her own tale. The Summoning had us.
With a loud splintering crack, a larger corner broke off at the bottom of the right door. More vines came spilling through, thicker ones, uncoiling long. Some of them seized the arms of the soldiers, ripped swords out of their hands, flung them bodily aside. Others found the heavy bar and curled around it and dragged it slowly aside, grating inch by inch, until it slid free of the first bracket entirely. The battering ram outside struck against the doors again, and they burst wide open, knocking men out of their way sprawling.
Marek was on the other side still on his horse, standing in his stirrups and blowing his horn. His face was bright with blood-lust and fury, so eager he didn’t even look to see why the doors had opened so suddenly. The vines were rooted in the earth around the stairs, thick dark nests of woody roots hiding in the corners and in the crevices of the broken steps, barely visible in the early light of morning. Marek leaped his horse straight over them without a glance, charging up the stairs and through the broken doorway, and all his remaining knights came pouring in behind him. Their swords rose and fell in a bloody rain, and the baron’s soldiers were stabbing up at them with spears. Horses screamed and fell, kicking in their death-throes as men died around them.