We lay there stunned out of our breath, lying on our backs staring upwards. The grey boulder frowned down at us, like nothing more than an old big-nosed man with bushy-eyebrow roots. Even bruised and scraped, I felt an immense instinctive relief; as if for a moment I’d come to rest in a pocket of safety. The Wood’s wrath didn’t reach here. The fog rolled in thick gusts off the water and drifted back and forth, and through it I watched the leaves gently bobbing up and down, pale yellow on silver branches, desperately glad to rest, and then Sarkan muttered half a curse and heaved himself back up, grabbing me by the arm. He dragged me almost protesting up and away, ankle-deep into the water. He stopped there, just beyond the branches, and I looked back through the fog. We’d been lying beneath an ancient gnarled heart-tree, growing on the bank.

We fled away from it down the narrow track of the river. The Spindle was barely more than a stream here, just wide enough for us to run together splashing, the bottom of grey and amber sand. The fog thinned, the last of the mist-cover blowing away, and a final gust cleared it completely. We stopped, frozen. We were in a wide glade thick with heart-trees, and they were standing in a host around us.

Chapter 30

We stood with our hands clenched tight, barely breathing, as if we could keep the trees from noticing us if only we didn’t move. The Spindle continued onward away from us through the trees, murmuring gently. It was so clear I could see the grains of sand in the bottom, black and silver-grey and brown, tumbled with polished drops of amber and quartz. The sun was shining again.

The heart-trees weren’t monstrous silent pillars like the trees above the hill. They were vast, but only oak-tall; they spread wide instead, full of entwining branches and pale white spring flowers. Dried golden leaves carpeted the ground beneath them, last autumn’s fall, and beneath them rose a faint drifting wine-scent of old fallen fruit, not unpleasant. My shoulders kept trying to unknot themselves.

There should have been endless birds singing in those branches, and small animals gathering fruits. Instead there was a deep strange stillness. The river sang on quietly, but nothing else moved here; nothing else lived. Even the heart-trees didn’t seem to stir. A breeze stirred the branches a little, but the leaves only whispered drowsily a moment and fell silent. The water was running over my feet, and the sun was shining through the leaves.

Finally I took a step. Nothing came leaping from the trees; no bird shrilled the alarm. I took another step, and another. The water was warm, and the sun dappling through the trees was strong enough to begin drying my linen clothes on my back. We walked through the hush. The Spindle led us in a gently curving path between and among the trees, until it spilled at last into a small still pool.

On the far side of the pool there stood one last heart-tree: broad and towering above all the others, and in front of it a green mound rose, heaped over with fallen white flowers. On it lay the body of the Wood-queen. I recognized the white mourning-gown she’d worn in the tower: she was still wearing it, or what was left of it. The long straight skirt was ragged, torn along the sides; the sleeves had mostly rotted. The cuffs woven of pearls around her wrists were brown with old bloodstains. Her green-black hair spilled down the sides of the mound and tangled with the roots of the tree; the roots had climbed over the mound and wrapped long brown fingers gently over her body, curled around her ankles and her thighs, and her shoulders and her throat; they combed through her hair. Her eyes were closed, dreaming.

If we’d still had Alosha’s sword, we might have put it down into her, through her heart, and pinned her to the earth. Maybe that might have killed her, here at the source of her power, in her own flesh. But the sword was gone.

Then Sarkan brought out the last of his vial of fire-heart instead: the red-gold hunger of it leaping with eagerness inside the glass. I looked down at it and was silent. We’d come here to make an ending. We’d come to burn the Wood; this was the heart of it. She was the heart of it. But when I imagined pouring fire-heart on her body, watching her limbs thrashing—

Sarkan looked at my face and said, “Go back to the falls,” offering to spare me.

But I shook my head. It wasn’t that I felt squeamish about killing her. The Wood-queen deserved death and horror: she’d sowed it and tended it and harvested it by the bushel, and wanted more. Kasia’s soundless cry beneath the heart-tree’s bark; Marek’s face, shining, as his own mother killed him. My mother’s terror when her small daughter brought home an apron full of blackberries, because the Wood didn’t spare even children. The hollow gutted walls of Porosna, with the heart-tree squatting over the village, and Father Ballo twisted out of his own body into a slaughtering beast. Marisha’s small voice, saying, “Mama,” over her mother’s stabbed corpse.

I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she’d put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain. The people of the tower had walled her up, then she’d struck them all down. She’d raised up the Wood to devour us; now we’d give her to the fire-heart, and choke all this shining clear water with ash. None of that seemed right. But I didn’t see anything else we could do.

I waded across the pool with Sarkan. The water didn’t come higher than our knees. Small round stones were smooth beneath our feet. Close, the Wood-queen seemed even more strange, not quite alive; her lips were parted, but her breast didn’t seem to rise and fall. She might have been carved from wood. Her skin had the faint banded pattern of wood split lengthwise and smoothed, waves of light and dark. Sarkan opened the vial, and with one quick tip he poured the fire-heart directly between her lips, and then spilled the final dregs over her body.

Her eyes flew open. The dress caught, the roots of the heart-tree caught, her hair caught, fire roaring up around her like a cloud as Sarkan pulled me back. She screamed a hoarse, furious cry. Smoke and flame gouted out of her mouth, and bursts of fire were going off beneath her skin like orange stars flaring, in one part of her and another. She thrashed on the mound beneath the roots, the green grass charring swiftly away. Clouds of smoke billowed around her, over her. Within her I saw lungs, heart, liver, like shadows inside a burning house. The long tree roots crisped up, curling away, and she burst up from the mound.

She faced us, burning like a log that had been on the fire a long time: her skin charred to black charcoal, cracking to show the orange flames beneath, pale ash blowing off her skin. Her hair was a torrent of flames wreathing her head. She screamed again, a red glow of fire in her throat, her tongue a black coal, and she didn’t stop burning. Fire spurted from her in places, but skin like new bark closed over it, and even as the endless heat blackened the fresh skin once more, it healed again. She staggered forward towards the pool. Watching in horror, I remembered the Summoning-vision and her bewilderment, her terror when she’d known she was trapped in stone. It wasn’t simply that she was immortal unless slain. She hadn’t known how to die at all.