to the sea, to lakes or marshland, not to forests. Where does that one go? It’s fed every year by the snows of a thousand mountains. It doesn’t simply sink into the earth. Think,” she added, with a bite, “instead of going on blindly wanting. There is some power deep in your valley, some strangeness beyond mortal magic that draws men in, plants roots in them—and not only men. Whatever thing it is that lives in the Wood, that puts out corruption, it’s come to live there and drink from that power like a cup. It killed the people of the tower, and then it slumbered for a thousand years because no one was fool enough to bother it. Then along we come, with our armies and our axes and our magic, and think that this time we can win.”
She shook her head. “Bad enough we went there at all,” she said. “Worse to keep pressing on, cutting down trees, until we woke the Wood again. Now who knows where it will end? I was glad when Sarkan went to hold it back, but now he’s behaving like a fool.”
“Sarkan’s not a fool,” I snapped out, “and neither am I.” I was angry and more than that, afraid; what she was saying rang too true. I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I’d missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots—yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go. I thought of Maria Olshankina, of Jaga, my sisters in the strange magic that no one else seemed to understand, and I knew, suddenly, why the Dragon took a girl from the valley. I knew why he took one, and why she left after ten years.
We were of the valley. Born in the valley, of families planted too deep to leave even when they knew their daughter might be taken; raised in the valley, drinking of whatever power also fed the Wood. I remembered the painting, suddenly, that strange painting in my room, showing the line of the Spindle and all its little tributaries in silver, and the odd pull of it that had made me cover it up, instinctively. We were a channel. He used us to reach into the valley’s power, and kept each girl in his tower until her roots had withered and the channel closed. And then—she didn’t feel the tie to the valley anymore. She could leave, and so she did, getting away from the Wood like any sensible ordinary person would.
I wanted to speak to Sarkan now more than ever, to shout at him; I wanted him in front of me so I could shake him by his thin shoulders. I shouted at Alosha instead. “Maybe we shouldn’t have gone in,” I said, “but it’s too late for that now. The Wood isn’t going to let us go, even if we could. It doesn’t want to drive us away, it wants to devour us. It wants to devour everything, so no one ever comes back again. We need to stop it, not run away.”
“The Wood isn’t to be defeated by wanting it so,” she said.
“That’s no reason not to try when we have the chance!” I said. “We’ve destroyed three heart-trees already, with the Summoning and the purging spell, and we can destroy more. If only the king would give us enough soldiers, Sarkan and I could start burning the whole thing back—”
“Whatever are you speaking of, child?” Ballo said, bewildered, breaking in. “Do you mean Luthe’s Summoning? No one has cast that spell in fifty years—”
“All right,” Alosha said, contemplating me from under her dark brows. “Tell me exactly how you’ve been destroying these trees, and from the beginning: we shouldn’t have relied on Solya to tell it to us properly.”
I haltingly told them about the first time we’d cast the Summoning, about the long stretch of that brilliant light reaching down to Kasia, the Wood lashing at her and trying to hold her back; about those final dreadful moments with Kasia’s fingers around my throat unlocking one by one, knowing I would have to kill her to save her. I told them about Jerzy, too; and the strange inner Wood the Summoning had shown us, where the two of them had wandered lost.
Ballo looked distressed through my whole recitation, wavering between resistance and unwilling belief, occasionally saying faintly, “But I have never heard…,” and