heart strained to beat. I couldn’t see: the fighting went on somewhere behind me, a distant clamoring only: shouts, the eerie clatter of the walkers, the hollow ring of swords. It was coming closer and closer still. I felt Kasia’s back pressed to mine; she was making herself a final shield. The fire-heart was singing cheerful and hungry in the vial she held, hoping to be let out, hoping to devour us all, almost comforting.
I held the working as long as I could, until the Dragon’s voice failed, and then I opened my eyes again. The bark had climbed over his neck, up his cheek. It had sealed over his mouth, it was creeping around his eye. He squeezed my hand once, and then I poured the power through him, down the half-formed channel to the devouring tree.
He stiffened, his eyes going wide and unseeing. His hand clenched on mine in silent agony. Then the bark over his mouth withered away, flaking like the shed skin of some monstrous snake, and he was screaming aloud. I clutched his hand with both of mine, biting my lip against the pain of his brutal grip while he cried out, the tree blackening and charring away around him, leaves above us crackling into flames. They were falling, stinging bits of ash, the hideous smell of the fruit cooking and liquefying. Juice ran down the limbs, and sap came bursting in boiling-hot gouts from the trunks and the bark.
The roots caught as quickly as well-seasoned firewood: we’d pulled so much water out of them. The bark was loosening and peeling off in great strips. Kasia grabbed the Dragon’s arm and wrestled his limp body away from the tree, blistered and seared. I helped her pull him away through the gathering smoke, and then she turned and plunged through the haze again. Dimly I saw her gripping a slab of bark, pulling it away in a thick sheet; she hacked at the tree with her sword and pried at it, and more of the sides broke away. I laid the Dragon down and stumbled to help her: the tree was too hot to touch, but I put my hands over it anyway and after a groping moment I blurted, “Ilmeyon!” Come out, come out, as if I were Jaga calling a rabbit out of a burrow for dinner.
Kasia hacked at it again, and then the wood split with a crack, and I saw through it a sliver of a woman’s face, blank, a staring blue eye. Kasia reached into the edges of the broken gap and started pulling away more of the wood, breaking it away, and suddenly the queen came falling out, her whole body bending limply forward out of a hollow of wood and leaving a woman’s shape behind, scraps of desiccated cloth falling away from her body and catching fire even as she tipped through the broken opening. She stopped, hanging: her head wouldn’t come free, held by a net of golden hair, impossibly long and embedded in the wood all around her. Kasia slashed the sword down through the cloud, and the queen came loose and fell into our arms.
She was as heavy and inert as a log. Smoke and fire wreathed us, and above us the moaning and thrashing of the branches: the tree had become a pillar of fire. The fire-heart was clamoring so loudly in its vial it seemed to me I could hear it with my ears, eager to come out and join the blaze.
We staggered forward, Kasia all but dragging the three of us: me, Queen Hanna, and the Dragon. We fell out from beneath the branches into the clearing. The Falcon and Prince Marek alone of the soldiers remained, fighting back-to-back with ferocious skill, Marek’s sword lit with the same white fire the Falcon held. The last four walkers crowded close. They made a sudden rush; the Falcon whipped them back with a circling lash of fire, and Marek chose one and leapt for it through the blaze: he caught its neck in one mailed fist and wrapped his boots about the body, one foot hooked underneath one of the forelimbs. He drove his sword down hard between the base of the neck and the body and twisted himself: almost exactly the motion of pulling a twig away from a living branch, and the long narrow head of the walker splintered and cracked.
He let its twitching body drop, then dived back through the dying ring