I pulled myself up the wall. He blazed with determination, with longing. His armor was washed with blood and smoke, his face smeared with one bright red streak, but he looked for a moment like a child, or maybe a saint, pure with want. And the queen looked at him, and put her hand on his chest, and killed him. Her fingers turned into thorns and twigs and vines; she sank them through his armor, and closed her hand like a fist.

If there was anything left of Queen Hanna, any thin scraping of will, maybe she spent it then, on one small mercy: he died without knowing he’d failed. His face didn’t change. His body slid easily off her hand, not much altered; only the hole in his breastplate where her wrist had gone in. He fell to the floor on his back, his armor ringing on the flagstones, still clear-eyed and certain, certain he would be heard, certain he would be victorious. He looked like a king.

He’d caught us all in his own certainty. For a moment we were all shocked into stillness. Solya inhaled once, stricken. Then Kasia sprang forward, swinging her sword. The queen caught it on her own blade. They stood fixed, pressed against each other, a few sparks glittering away from the grinding blades, and the queen leaned in and forced her slowly down.

Sarkan was speaking, an incantation of heat and flame rolling off his tongue, and fire came gouting out of the ground around the queen’s legs, yellow-red and searing. The flames blackened Kasia’s skin where they licked against her; it ate up both the swords. Kasia had to roll away. The queen’s silver mail melted and ran off her in streams of shining liquid that puddled on the floor and covered over with blackened crust; her shift billowed into hot smoky flames. But the fire didn’t touch her body; the queen’s pale limbs stayed straight and unmarred. Solya was throwing his white lash against her as well, the flames crackling to blue where his fire and the Dragon’s met; that mingled blue fire ran twisting all over her body, trying to seek out a weakness, find a way in.

I gripped Sarkan’s hand; I fed him magic and strength, so he could keep beating her back with flame. His fires were crisping up the vines. The soldiers who hadn’t been strangled were dragging themselves staggering away, back up the stairs—at least they were escaping. Other spells, one after another, came to me, but I knew without beginning that they wouldn’t work. Fire wouldn’t burn her; blade wouldn’t cut her, no matter how long we hacked away. I wondered in horror if we shouldn’t have let the Summoning fail; if that great nothingness could have taken her. But I didn’t think even that would have done it. There was too much of her. She could have filled in any holes we made in the world and still had more of herself left over. She was the Wood, or the Wood was her. Her roots went too deep.

Sarkan’s breath was coming in long drags, whenever he could get it. Solya sank down onto the stairs, spent, and his white fire died. I gave Sarkan more strength, but soon he’d fall, too. The queen turned towards us. She didn’t smile. There wasn’t triumph in her face, only an unending wrath and the awareness of victory.

Behind her, Kasia stood up. She drew Alosha’s sword from over her shoulder. She swung.

The sword-blade sliced into the queen’s throat and stuck there, halfway through. A hollow roaring noise began, my ear bones crackling and the whole room darkening. The queen’s face stilled. The sword began to drink and drink and drink, endlessly thirsty, wanting more. The noise climbed higher.

It felt like a war between two endless things, between a bottomless chasm and a running river. We all stood, frozen, watching, hoping. The queen’s expression didn’t change. Where the sword stuck in her throat, a black glossy sheen was trying to take hold of her flesh, spreading from the wound like ink clouding through a glass of clean water. She put a hand slowly up and touched the wound with her fingers, and a little of the same gloss came away on her fingertips. She looked down at it.

And then she looked back up at us with sudden contempt, almost a shake of her head, as if to tell us we’d been foolish.

She sank down suddenly onto her knees, her head and body and limbs all jerking—like a marionette whose puppeteer had dropped the strings. And all at once Sarkan’s flames caught in Queen Hanna’s body. Her short golden hair went up in a smoky cloud, her skin blackened and split. Pale gleams showed through beneath the charred skin. For a moment I thought maybe it had worked, maybe the sword had broken the Wood-queen’s immortality.

But pale white smoke came billowing out of those cracks, torrents of it, and roared away past us—escaping, just like the Wood-queen had escaped her prison once before. Alosha’s sword kept trying to drink her up, to catch at the streams of smoke, but they boiled away too quickly, rushing past even the sword’s hungry grasp. Solya covered his head as they fled over him and up the stairs; others twisted out through the air-channel; still more dived into the burial-chamber and up and vanished through a tiny chink in the roof I couldn’t have noticed, the thinnest crack. Kasia had flung herself atop the children; Sarkan and I huddled against the wall, covering our mouths. The Wood-queen’s essence dragged over our skin with the oily horror of corruption, the warm stink of old leaves and mold.

And then it was gone—she was gone.

Uninhabited now, Queen Hanna’s body crumbled away all at once, like a used-up log falling into ashes. Alosha’s sword fell to the floor clattering. We were alone, our rasping breaths the only sound. All the living soldiers had fled; the dead had been swallowed by the vines and the fire, leaving nothing but smoky ghosts on the white marble walls. Kasia sat up slowly, the children gathered against her. I sank to the floor on my knees, shaking with horror and despair. Marek’s hand lay open near me. His face gazed up sightless from the middle of the room, surrounded by charred stone and melted steel.

The dark blade was dissolving into the air. In a moment nothing remained but the empty hilt. Alosha’s sword was spent. And the Wood-queen had survived.

Chapter 29

We carried the children out of the tower into morning sun, pouring down bright and improbable on the silent wreckage of six thousand men. There were flies already buzzing thickly, and the crows had come in flocks; when we came out they burst up from the ground and perched on the walls to wait for us to get out of their way.

We had passed the baron in the cellar, leaning against the wall of the hearth, his eyes blank and unseeing, blood puddled beneath him. Kasia had found one of the sleep-potions still unbroken in its flask, gripped in the hand of the man-at-arms slumped dead beside him. She opened it and gave the children each a swallow, down there, before we brought them out. They’d seen more than enough already.