Uprooted

The baron’s men retreat into the tower as Marek’s soldiers overrun the outer wall. Agnieszka checks on Kasia and the children and gives Alosha’s magic sword to Kasia for protection. Then, in the main receiving room of the tower, Agnieszka and Sarkan begin to read Luthe’s Summoning.

Soldiers pound on the great doors, and shadows and vines wriggle in through cracks. When the doors crack, larger vines break through to grab at the baron’s remaining men. Solya and Marek burst charge in, and an arrow strikes Agnieszka below her ribs. Sarkan drags Agnieszka away just before the ground collapses and the spellbook falls into the black pit. Sarkan repeats the last line he read, trying to keep the spell from collapsing. Marek’s men pour through the broken doors, followed by the queen, her white dress soaked red with blood. Sarkan grabs Agnieszka and they flee down the stairs.

Agnieszka wakes sometime later in the cellar, where the survivors have barricaded themselves. Sarkan is still muttering the same line of the spell repeatedly as his voice grows faint. Kasia pulls the arrow out of Agnieszka’s side, and Sarkan pours his healing potion over the wound without stopping his incantation. Then Sarkan gestures for Agnieszka to go. He wants her to take Kasia and the children and run; his strength will fail soon, and the spell will collapse, taking the tower with it. Agnieszka refuses and starts singing to bolster his power.

The magic builds again while men shout, and the barricade begins to fall. Still speaking the spell, Sarkan and Agnieszka lead the survivors below the cellar to the king’s tomb. The Summoning shows the room as it once was, with inscriptions glowing on the walls. Solya, Marek, and the queen descend the stairs into the room. The spell light shines through the queen and they see that she is not filled with corruption but entirely hollowed out. There was never anything of the queen left inside her: What they took out of the Wood was an empty husk waiting until the tests were over before the Wood began to move it like a puppet.

Beneath the queen’s face, Agnieszka sees a face made of brown and gold with skin-like bark and deep green hair. The spell shows this Wood-queen in the past, standing in the king’s tomb. She turns to a man standing on the stairs, who closes the chamber with bricks to bury her inside. Agnieszka realizes the chamber was a prison for this woman. She was meant to die, but instead, she broke free, killed all the people who betrayed her, and made the Wood.

The light fades and Marek grabs the queen’s arms, calling for his mother. The Wood-queen pushes vines and thorns into his chest, killing him. Kasia rushes forward with Alosha’s magic sword and swings while Sarkan speaks a fire spell. The fire does not harm the queen, and Agnieszka thinks, “[T]here [is] 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” (386).

Alosha’s sword cuts into the queen’s neck. The sword spreads blackness across her body, and the Wood-queen falls to her knees. Then smoke billows out of her body and seeps through the cracks in the brick around them. The Wood-queen’s essence abandons the body, leaving the queen an empty husk again. When the smoke is gone, the body crumbles like ash, and Agnieszka knows the Wood-queen escaped. Alosha’s sword dissolves.

The survivors exit the tower. Kasia and Sarkan carry the children. Solya comes with them. Marek’s remaining men ask Solya for orders. Finally, they walk to the nearby village of Olshanka, where several villagers give them shelter. Agnieszka sleeps.

The next evening, they argue about what to do with the children. Solya wishes to take Stashek to the capital to be crowned king and establish a regency. Sarkan does not believe it is safe. Kasia says that Stashek asked her to take them to their grandparents in Gidna and explains that she intends to do so no matter what anyone else says. Sarkan agrees that Gidna is far enough away to be safe. Suddenly angry and afraid, Agnieszka shouts that nowhere is safe. The Wood will reach them anywhere. They cannot keep holding the Wood back; they must stop the Wood-queen now. She does not know how, but she asks Sarkan to go with her to the Wood.

The next morning, Solya, Kasia, and the remaining soldiers leave, traveling toward Gidna with the children. Then Sarkan and Agnieszka borrow a boat and take the Spindle into the Wood. They use spells to keep their presence hidden, but eventually the Wood senses them and attacks. Walkers smash their boat, but they escape in the water and float away. They crawl onto a riverbank covered in fog. When the fog clears, they see the river has become a small stream spiraling into a wide glade filled with heart-trees.

The trees are massive and ancient. The river spills into a small pool, on the far side of which is a heart-tree with a green mound in front of it; the body of the Wood-queen lies on this mound. Sarkan reveals his last vial of fire-heart, but Agnieszka feels torn. She hates the Wood-queen but fears that killing her is “another wrong answer in an endless chain” of violence (403). With no other options, however, she nods to Sarkan. He pours the fire-heart into the Wood-queen’s mouth. She wakes screaming and thrashing. Agnieszka and Sarkan try to keep the fire on her as she runs to the pool. To their surprise, she uses magic to pour water over the roots of the heart-tree, more interested in saving the tree than herself.

Agnieszka uses the lightning spell, flinging it to strike the tree. The force throws Sarkan across the glade, and vines hold him down. Then the Wood-queen grabs Agnieszka and thrusts her into the burning heart-tree.

Agnieska realizes she is inside the heart-tree, seeing something in the shadow space. A tree-woman who looks like the Wood-queen stands on the riverbank. A boat comes down the river, carrying the Wood-queen and the king from the tomb. More boats follow, some carrying humans and others carrying tree-people. The Wood-queen steps off the boat to greet the woman as her sister, Linaya.

Linaya turns and speaks directly to Agnieszka. She explains that her people lived in the area alone for a long time, becoming increasingly tree-like and forgetting how to be people. When the king’s people arrived in the valley, Linaya’s sister believed that uniting the groups would benefit both. The tree-people would remember things and the humans would learn things. However, the humans were afraid and hateful. Time moves in the vision. One by one, tree-people return to the glade injured and weary. Each gathers fruit from a heart-tree and eats it, becoming a heart-tree. Finally, only Linaya remains.

She tells Agnieszka that the humans betrayed her sister and buried her where she could not see sunlight or grow. Agnieszka asks why they did not fight, and Linaya replies, “[I]f we stay, if we fight, we will remember the wrong things” (414). She adds that she cannot help Agnieszka escape the heart-tree but that she can help her forget and grow with the tree, finding peace. Then Linaya turns into a tree, leaving Agnieszka alone. The Wood-queen appears and stares at her sister’s heart-tree. Then she hears men chopping down a heart-tree. She kills them both and feeds their bodies to the tree they injured, healing and corrupting it at the same time.

The Summoning light pours in, and Agnieszka hears Sarkan calling for her. She wakes on the green mound, the heart-tree split around her. Sarkan kneels by the pool; he is covered in water, having drunk from the Spindle to gain the power to free her. The Wood-queen comes up behind him and encases him in roots. With the Summoning light still filling the glade, Agnieszka can see how the Wood-queen hunted down and killed every person in the valley, planting corrupted heart-trees with their bodies until the entire Wood filled with her hatred and misery. Afterward, she tried to become a tree and join her sister, but she had forgotten how to root and grow.

Agnieszka offers to help her. She takes fruit from a nearby tree and gives it to the Wood-queen, who eats it. The Wood-queen leans against the damaged wood of her sister’s tree, wrapping her arms around the trunk. Then Agnieszka speaks the vanastalem spell, and the Wood-queen’s body changes, her clothes becoming bark and her feet sinking into the dirt. Finally, Agnieszka helps free Sarkan from the ground, and they collapse together on the riverbank. As they watch, the new tree wraps around the old one, holding it up.

Agnieszka wakes in her room in the tower. Downstairs, she finds Sarkan packing. He must clean out the corruption in Kralia and help restore order. He has used magic to keep the tower standing for now. Agnieszka says she intends to return to the Wood. Sarkan tells her that is dangerous. The Wood-queen may be dead, but the Wood is still filled with danger and corruption. Agnieszka says she will do what she can to help it. She leaves him to pack, feeling that he is running away from her to “find himself some new stone walls to hide behind […] until he wither[s] his own roots, and [doesn’t] feel the lack of them anymore” (423).

Later, as summer turns to fall, Agnieszka walks through the Wood. She has healed many heart-trees, and the walkers have begun to trust her. One follows her as she works, and she feeds it an uncorrupted fruit. Through trial and error, she has learned which heart-trees can be saved and which must be burned to clean out the corruption. She wanders close to the Rosyan border of the Wood and encounters a young girl who has lost her yellow cow. The girl says the cow wanders away often but that she always finds it. Agnieszka senses the magic in her and tells the girl to come find her when she is older. Then she returns to her home, a small cottage she has built by the river just beyond the Wood’s border.

During this time, Kasia has written to her from Gidna. Stashek was crowned and named Kasia his champion. She has become captain of the guard. To her dismay, Solya asked her to marry him. Alosha, who is still healing, finds the situation amusing.

Sarkan has not returned since leaving months ago and does not write. With him gone, Agnieska now offers her services as a witch to the villagers and often visits her family. That evening, she walks to Zatochek to attend a festival with her mother, dancing with village men and sharing the uncorrupted heart-tree fruits. Suddenly, Sarkan appears. He glares at the fruit in her hand, warning that it might still turn her into a tree. She laughs at him. He claims he has arrived to collect taxes, but she knows he is lying. She takes his hand and drags him away to meet her mother.