Nothing at all was inside her. The light of the Summoning shone straight through. She was rotted out from the inside, her body just the skin of bark around an empty space. There wasn’t anything left of her to corrupt. I understood too late: we’d gone in to save Queen Hanna, so the Wood had let us find what we were looking for. But what we’d found had only ever been a hollow remnant, a fragment of a heart-tree’s core. A puppet, empty and waiting until we’d finished all our trials, convinced ourselves there was nothing wrong, and the Wood could reach out and take up the strings.

The light kept pouring over her, and slowly I made out the Wood at last, as if I’d looked again at a cloud-shape and seen a tree instead of a woman’s face. The Wood was there—it was the only thing there. The golden strands of her hair were the pale veins of leaves, and her limbs were branches, and her toes were long roots crawling out over the floor, roots going deep into the ground.

She was looking at the wall behind us, at the broken opening going through to the tomb with its blue flame, and for the first time her face changed, a change like the twisting of a slim willow bending in a high wind, the rage of a storm in the treetops. That animating power in the Wood—whatever it was, it had been here before.

Queen Hanna’s milk-pale face was slipping away under the Summoning’s light, like paint washed away by running water. There was another queen beneath, all brown and green and golden, her skin patterned like alder wood and her hair a deep green nearly black, threaded with red and gold and autumn brown. Someone had picked the gold strands of her hair out and braided them into a circlet for her head, white ribbons threaded through, and she wore a white dress that sat on her wrongly; she’d put it on, though it meant nothing to her.

I saw the buried king’s body take shape between her and us. He was carried by six men on a sheet of white linen, his face still and unmoving, the eyes filmed over with milk. They carried him into the tomb; they lowered him gently into the great stone coffin; they folded in the linen over his body.

In the Summoning-light, that other queen followed the men into the tomb-chamber. She bent over the coffin. There was no sorrow in her face, only a bewildered confusion, as if she didn’t understand. She touched the king’s face, touched the lids of his eyes with strangely long fingers knobbled like twigs. He didn’t stir. She startled and drew her hand back, out of the way of the men. They put the lid upon the coffin, and the blue flame erupted atop it. She watched them, still baffled.

One of the attending men spoke to her, ghostly, telling her I think to stay as long as she wished; he bowed and, stooping, left the tomb through the opening, leaving her. There was something in his face as he turned away from her that the Summoning caught even from so long ago, something cold and determined.

The Wood-queen didn’t see it. She was standing at the stone coffin, her hands spread over the top of it, uncomprehending as Marisha had been. She didn’t understand death. She stared at the blue flame, watching it leap; she turned all around in the bare stone room, looking around it with a wounded, appalled face. And then she stopped and looked again. Bricks were being laid in the small opening of the wall. She was being closed up inside the tomb.

She stared for a moment, and then rushed forward and knelt before the remaining opening. The men had already pushed blocks into most of the space, working quickly; the cold-faced man was speaking sorcery while they worked, blue-silver light crackling out of his hands, over the blocks, mortaring them together. She reached a hand through in protest. He didn’t answer her; he didn’t look at her face. None of them looked at her. They closed up the wall with one last block, pushing her hand back into the room with it.

She stood up, alone. She was startled, angry, full of confusion; but she wasn’t yet afraid. She raised a hand; she meant to do something. But behind her, the blue flame was leaping on the stone tomb. The letters around the sides were catching the light, shining out, completing the long sentence from the stairs. She whirled, and I could read them with her: REMAIN ETERNAL, REST ETERNAL, NEVER MOVING, NEVER LEAVING, and they weren’t just a poem for the king’s rest. This wasn’t a tomb; this was a prison. A prison meant to hold her. She turned and beat against the wall, she tried vainly to push against it, to work her fingers into the cracks. Terror was climbing in her. Stone shut her in, cold and still. They had quarried this room out of the roots of the mountains. She couldn’t get out. She couldn’t—

Abruptly the Wood-queen heaved the memories away. The light of the Summoning broke and ran away over the stones of the tomb like water. Sarkan staggered back; I nearly fell against the wall. We were back in the round room, but the queen’s fear rattled against the inside of my ribs like a bird beating itself against walls. Shut away from the sun, shut away from water, shut away from air. And she still couldn’t die. She hadn’t died.

She stood among us, only half-hidden behind Queen Hanna’s face, and she wasn’t the queen in that vision anymore, either. She’d fought her way out, somehow. She’d won free, and then she’d—killed them? She’d killed them, and not only them, but their lovers and children and all their people; she’d devoured them, become as monstrous as they had been. She’d made the Wood.

She hissed softly in the dark, not a snake’s hiss but the rustling of leaves, the scrape of tree-branches rubbing in the wind, and as she stepped forward vines came boiling down the stairs behind her, grabbing all the remaining men by ankle and wrist and throat, dragging them up against the walls and ceiling, out of her way.

Sarkan and I were still struggling to our feet. Kasia put herself before us like a shield and chopped the vines away from us, keeping us free, but others snaked around behind her and into the tomb. They lashed around the children and started to drag them forward, Marisha screaming as Stashek hacked at the vines uselessly, until they seized his arm, too. Kasia took a step away from us towards the children, her face in agony, unable to protect us all.

And then Marek sprang forward. He slashed the vines apart, his own sword gleaming around the edges. He put himself between the queen and the children, and thrust them with his shield-arm back into the safety of the burial-chamber. He stood before the queen. She halted before him, and he said, “Mother,” fiercely, and dropped his sword to seize her by the wrists. He looked down into her face as she turned it slowly up towards him. “Mother,” he said. “Fight free of her. It’s Marek—it’s Marechek. Come back to me.”