at the bank with the rest of its long stick-limbs, thrashing silently, throwing up sprays of water, but the earth had closed up around the middle of its body, and it couldn’t pull itself out.
But I folded in on myself and swallowed a cry of pain. It felt like someone had hit me with a stick across my shoulders: the Wood had felt my working. I was sure of it. The Wood was looking for me now. It was looking, and soon it would find me. I had to force myself to move. I sprang over the stream and ran after my faint cloudy spell, which still drifted on ahead of me. The walker tried to catch at me with its long cracked-wood fingers as I skirted around it, but I ran past. I came through a ring of larger trunks and found myself in an open space around a smaller tree, the ground here heavy with snow.
There was a fallen tree stretching across the space, a giant, its trunk taller across than I was. Its fall had opened up this clearing, and in the middle of it, a new tree had sprung up to take its place. But not the same kind of tree. All the other trees I’d seen in the Wood had been familiar kinds, despite their stained bark and the twisted unnatural angles of their branches: oaks and black birch, and tall pines. But this was no kind of tree I had ever seen.
It was already larger around than the circle my arms could make, even though the giant tree couldn’t have fallen very long ago. It had smooth grey bark over a strangely knotted trunk, with long branches in even circles around it, starting high up the trunk like a larch. Its branches weren’t bare with winter, but carried a host of dried-up silvery leaves that rustled in the wind, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere else, as though there were people just out of sight speaking softly together.
The trail of my breath had dissolved into the air. Looking down at the deep snow, I could see the marks where the walkers’ legs had poked through and the lines their bellies had drawn, all going to the tree. I took a wary step through the snow towards it, and then another, and then I stopped. Kasia was bound to the tree. Her back was against the trunk and her arms drawn backwards around it.
I hadn’t seen her at first because the bark had already grown over her.
Her face was turned up a little, and beneath the skim of the covering bark I could see her mouth had been open, screaming while the bark closed over her. I made a choked cry, helplessly, and staggered forward and put out my hands to touch her. The bark was hard beneath my fingers already, the grey skin smooth and hard, as though she had been swallowed into the trunk whole, all of her made a part of the tree, of the Wood.
I couldn’t get a hold on the bark, though I tried frantically to claw and peel it away. But I managed at last to scrape off a little thin piece over her cheek, and beneath I found her own soft skin—still warm, still alive. But even as I touched it with my fingertip, the bark crept quickly over it, and I had to draw back my hand, not to be caught myself. I covered my mouth with my hands, even more desperate. I still knew so little: no spell came to my mind, nothing that could get Kasia out, nothing that would even put an axe in my hands, a knife, even if there had been time to carve her free.
The Wood knew I was here: even now its creatures were moving towards me, stealthy padding feet through the forest, walkers and wolves and worse things still. I suddenly was sure that there were things that never left the Wood at all, things so dreadful no one had ever seen them. And they were coming.
With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga’s book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower. I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn’t believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots. But now I fell to the