Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  I bow before her.

  “Forgive me, my queen.”

  She paces round me.

  The grass bends under her feet.

  “You are different from your sisters. You are more like your brothers. Reckless. Willful. Wild. You will not defy your queen without penalty, as they did not.”

  She banished my brothers

  from her court forever.

  I fear

  what she will do

  to me.

  Her claws pierce my back.

  She rips away a piece of my skin

  and I fall to the ground

  in agony.

  My bark is a curl of silver-white on the grass.

  Sap wells from the wound.

  Pain burns me.

  Dew leaks from my eyes.

  My mother’s voice: “It will grow back. The quicker for each soul you claim for me.”

  She unfolds her hand.

  An orb lies there.

  Empty.

  Hungry.

  Cold.

  I do not want it.

  “The men come to lay their iron in the north. Find them. Slay them. Send their souls into the heartless tree.”

  I

  do

  not

  want

  the

  orb.

  I do not take it.

  Claws, under my chin.

  Forcing me to look up at her.

  “If you do not obey me, I will strip away every other part of you. I will leave you for the beasts to devour in the dark.”

  She does not know about the boy.

  She does not know.

  He is safe.

  Safe.

  Pain pulses through me.

  But there is also

  relief.

  I take the orb.

  I hang it around my neck.

  I go north.

  Every step is pain.

  I press cool moss against the raw place.

  I bathe in an icy stream.

  It hardly cools the fire.

  The wood is wide. I go very far from the boy’s house.

  I miss one night of watching him.

  I miss two.

  Now there is the clang of hammers. The grunts of men.

  Lines of iron, crossed with wood. A track to replace the one I wrenched apart.

  I hide in the trees.

  I watch them.

  My mother’s command trembles through me:

  Slay them.

  Send their souls to the heartless tree.

  But I feel

  the pulse of the boy’s life in my hands.

  I see

  him shake as he tries to fight my sisters’ music.

  I hear

  his voice echoing through me.

  I would call you

  Seren.

  Star.

  I cannot kill these men.

  I do not want to.

  I slip away,

  leave them

  to their clamor

  and their noise.

  I

  do

  not

  want

  to

  be

  her

  monster.

  I

  will

  not

  be.

  Chapter Sixteen

  OWEN

  I’VE FORGOTTEN SOMETHING IMPORTANT.

  At least, I think I have.

  In the light of day, when I’m cooking or gardening or minding Awela, I don’t remember. In the dark of night, when I’m peering into the telescope and charting the stars with my father, I don’t remember either.

  But in the space between waking and dreaming, between dark and dawn, I smell violets, and the memories flood back.

  A silver face. A bower of branches, woven with magic. The brush of cool fingers across my forehead. A resonant voice, sometimes deep like a cello, sometimes high like a violin. The spark of fireflies.

  Even in daylight, when I think of the train wreck, of the passengers being slaughtered in the wood, the memory feels strange. Like it’s not complete.

  Three weeks have passed since Awela wandered into the forest; summer has turned the trees a deeper green, and I’m forever trying to chase the rabbits—the only creatures who don’t seem to care that we live on the border of the wood—from the garden.

  I make griddlecakes for breakfast, the batter stark white against the cast-iron pan. Awela is busy eating the strawberries we picked yesterday, dipping them in fresh cream.

  “Vi-wets,” she says, repeating it in her singsong voice. “Vi-wets, vi-wets, vi-wets.”

  “Be patient, little one,” I tell her, my own impatience with her sharpening.

  “Vi-wets!” she insists, pointing.

  I look up from the griddlecakes. A sprig of purple flowers rests on the open windowsill.

  I start. Is that a shadow, moving in the trees?

  “Don’t touch the stove, Awela!” I shout, and bolt from the house, the door banging noisily behind me.

  I jerk to a stop at my father’s wall, breathing hard. “Who’s there? Who’s there?”

  There’s no answer, just the wind in the trees, branches scraping the stone. I stand still, listening, peering across the wall and into the wood.

  The smell of burning griddlecakes wafting from the kitchen window shakes me from my reverie. I race back to the house, hoping nothing’s on fire.

  Later, when Awela is napping and I’m sipping tea on the back stoop, I examine the violets, running the petals through my fingers, letting their scent wrap around me.

  I shut my eyes and force myself to concentrate, to think past the needle of silver pain in my head.

  I remember the grip of rough fingers, choking the life out of me. A song, coiling out of the wood. A strange hand on my wrist. A silver face in the starlight. Fireflies. A dreamless sleep.

  Do you fear the dark? Or only the monster who lurks here?

  I open my eyes.

  I’ve crushed the flowers in my hand. Their scent has seeped into my skin. I think perhaps as long as I smell violets, I will remember her. The tree siren. The Gwydden’s daughter.

  She was here. Why?

  I leave my half-drunk tea on the stoop and pace up to my father’s wall, the wood stirring just beyond. For a moment, two, I pause, deliberating. The memories are slippery around the edges, hard to hold onto. Already they slide away. I don’t want them to. I want to know why I can’t remember, why she left me violets on the windowsill.

  I scramble up the wall and drop heavily on the other side.

  I don’t dare stray very far, not with Awela sleeping alone in the house, but I walk a little farther than perhaps I should. All the while I strain my eyes for violets, stubbornly fighting to remember why.

  I find a single purple flower, crumpled amongst fallen leaves. Triumph sears through me.

  “Are you there?” I call. “Gwydden’s daughter, are you there?”

  There is no answer, but it feels as if the wood holds its breath, waiting for me to say more. The pain in my head sharpens as the memories fight to leave me.

  “Who are you? Why did you leave me the violets?”

  Wind coils past my ears. The scent of wildflowers is suddenly strong.

  “A mistake.” The voice is like a violin, rich and throaty with vibrato. “Forget me. Do not come again.”

  The scent vanishes. The trees grow still. I know I am once more alone.

  In the deep part of the night, when my father and I have laid aside our star charts, he goes to bed and I do not.

  Violets, I tell myself, as I have all day. Violets and fireflies. Everything else has slipped away again. I want to remember. I need to. The desire consumes me and I let it, even though I know what it means—if I want answers, I have to go back to the wood.

  It’s foolish. Reckless.

  But I take a lantern and a knife. I pace up to the wall and stare at it, my terror warring with my desperate compulsion to know. Somehow it’s eno
ugh to dull my fear. I scramble over the wall and pace under the trees. My heart is overloud in my ears. I grip the knife and lantern so hard my hands ache.

  A cloud of moths swarms around me, attracted to my light. I watch them for a while as I walk, flitting shadows, leaves with wings. They dart away as suddenly as they appeared.

  The wood is wakeful. Watchful. Roots buck and dip under the ground like living creatures. The trees whisper, writhe. Chinks of moonlight cast wavering patterns on the forest floor. My lantern chases them away.

  Fear is a second heartbeat, resounding in my bones.

  Violets and fireflies.

  I have to know who left me the flowers. Who spoke to me from the trees. I have to know what really happened that day Awela wandered into the wood. So I walk on into the dark.

  I have no warning beyond a flash of silver.

  A hand presses over my mouth, silencing my scream. Fingers seize my arm, pulling me into the trees. I struggle, thrash. I drop the lantern.

  Terror claws up my throat.

  Leaves trail past my cheek.

  All is horror. Shadow.

  There comes a note of song. It catches at my soul.

  I writhe in the siren’s grasp, but she doesn’t let me go.

  Oh God.

  Ahead of me looms the form of a giant oak. It splits open with a creak and a sigh, and my captor shoves me toward it, her hand falling from my mouth.

  I try to wheel on her; I try to scream.

  The tree swallows me whole.

  Chapter Seventeen

  OWEN

  BLACKNESS ENGULFS ME, PRESSES ALL AROUND. I CAN’T MOVE OR breathe. I can’t see. I wonder in a panic what death will feel like, or if there can even be a greater horror than this immobilizing, choking dark.

  Sap drips somewhere near; branches rustle in the muffled distance.

  The tree seems almost to hum, examining me with invisible fingers, trying to see what I am made of. The silver pain in my head works itself free, like a splinter drawn out with tweezers. Memories take the place of it, everything flooding back at once: the tree siren’s hands around my throat. The bower of living branches. Awela tucked safe and slumbering in my arms. The siren’s voice, punctuated with fireflies.

  Do you fear the dark? Or only the monster who lurks here?

  What have you done?

  Saved you from my sisters and the wood.

  I did not want my sister to kill the child.

  A deep, dreamless sleep. A dawn I thought I would never see.

  What would you call me then, Owen Merrick?

  I would call you Seren. Star.

  The brief touch of her fingers as she stole the memories away. The violets on the windowsill to remind me I had forgotten.

  Searching the wood for her, without really understanding why.

  Her hands, one viselike on my arm, one pressed brambly against my mouth, shoving me into the oak. Letting it eat me.

  I don’t understand.

  I try to count the seconds I am frozen like sap in the heart of the tree. But terror claws behind my eyes and I feel myself sliding away.

  Then comes a wrenching crack.

  I tumble onto sweet grass, into the gray light of the burgeoning dawn. I sob for breath, choking and gasping, convulsing on the ground until my head has convinced my body that all is well. I live. I breathe.

  Her silver feet are a handbreadth away. I look up to find her watching me, her eyes impassive. They are not quite the yellow I remember—they are the color of amber, of honey. There are dark marks on her arms, like someone took a knife to her. Violets bloom bright in her hair.

  “My sister,” she says. “Just ahead of you on the path. I could not let her see you. She would have devoured you whole.”

  I blink at her, still gulping air.

  “I did not mean to leave you so long. I had to be sure she was far from here before I let you out again. You are a fool, to wander the wood alone.”

  I try to stop my hands from shaking as I push myself to a sitting position. I’m too winded yet to stand. “Thank you,” I manage. “For hiding me.”

  She tilts her head to one side like a curious bird. “I am glad the oak did not kill you.”

  My staggering relief evaporates. “Could it have?”

  “My mother’s trees are powerful. It could have squeezed your heart and eaten your soul, as easily as I could.”

  I’m still struggling a little to breathe. I gulp air, not foolish enough to think I’m even remotely safe with her. “And will you? Eat my soul?”

  Her face goes blank, cold, more tree-like than I have ever seen it. “I should have killed you when first I saw you.”

  “But you didn’t. You saved me. You saved Awela, too—you didn’t let your sister take her. Why?”

  I remember the answer she gave me before. I try to reconcile it with the brutal monster who slaughtered all the passengers on the train: I heard her laughing in the wood. I did not want my sister to silence it.

  To my utter shock, the siren crouches beside me, so we are eye level with one another. Her leafy hair is tangled, messy, and the wounds on her arms are deep, barely clotted.

  “You offered your soul for hers.”

  “Awela is my sister. I love her. Anyone would have done the same.”

  The siren shakes her head. “They would not. Humans beg for their own lives. Not for others. I have seen it. Again and again.”

  Memory flashes through my mind: the sound of screams and breaking bones; blood on silver hands. I remember what she is, and am suddenly aware of her nearness. She could crush me like a gnat. I push myself to my feet, put distance between us. I stand well clear of the oak.

  She rises, too, steps past me. I draw a sharp breath: A large patch of her silver-white skin has been stripped from her left shoulder, halfway down her back, exposing raw, pulpy flesh the color of sap.

  She jerks the wound out of my sight when she realizes I’m staring. Anger vibrates off of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly.

  Suddenly she is in front of me again, lowering her head to my eye level, close enough I can see the ridges and whorls in her bark-like skin, close enough that the scent of violets and sap makes my head wheel. “Why are you sorry?”

  My heart beats erratic, quick. “Why did you save me?” It’s a question, but it’s an answer, too.

  Her eyelashes shimmer in the early morning light. A violet petal falls from her hair. “You have broken me, boy. You have changed me. Now my mother and my sisters—despise me.”

  “Did … did they do that to you? Because—because you saved me?”

  She draws back. Cold, once more. Untouchable. “It does not matter,” she says. “It cannot. Now go. You are not safe in the wood.”

  “Siren—”

  But she turns and sweeps away without another word. The trees and the underbrush part to make a path for her. I blink once, twice, and then she’s gone.

  Gooseflesh rises on the back of my neck. I don’t know how deep in the wood I am; I don’t know quite how to get back. But I understand I’m on my own, that she’s done saving me. Exhaustion and hunger nag at me. Father and Awela will wake soon—if they discover me gone, they’ll panic.

  I stumble my way back through the forest, miraculously coming upon my lantern, and my father’s wall not long after, the stones muddy from last night’s climb. I shimmy across to the welcome sight of the garden, beans ready for picking on their sturdy, coiling vines.

  I needn’t have worried. The house is quiet, Father and Awela still asleep.

  A nuthatch perches on the garden fence, flashing his yellow belly and cheeping to his mate somewhere in the wood.

  I stare at the little bird, battling the sense of loss that feels as if it will crush me. Trying to understand what I have lost.

  Because I have what I wanted. I have my memories back. I know what the tree siren did for Awela and me, the debt we owe her. The debt I owe her three times over, for all the times she let me live. I
can’t ever repay her.

  You don’t need to, I tell myself. Whatever she did for you, she’s a monster. You don’t owe her anything.

  And yet.

  Is she still a monster?

  I heard her laughing in the wood. I did not want my sister to silence it.

  You have broken me. You have changed me.

  The wind stirs through the trees across the wall. The nuthatch wings away. I hunch my shoulders and go inside, just in time to greet Awela, who barrels happy and hungry from her bedroom and into my arms.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MONSTER

  HE WAS WALKING IN THE DARK OF THE WOOD.

  My sister—so near him.

  He did not know.

  He did not see her.

  She would have killed him.

  Swallowed his bright soul.

  So I hid him

  in

  the

  oak.

  He is safe.

  But he is gone.

  I want him to come back.

  I do not know why

  but I do.

  I want him to look at me.

  I want him to look into my eyes

  and not

  be

  afraid.

  I want him to see me

  as something more

  than

  a

  monster.

  Chapter Nineteen

  OWEN

  THE DAY PASSES SLOWLY, AND I AM IMPOSSIBLY RESTLESS.

  I studiously avoid looking out the kitchen window as I start tonight’s cawl, chopping leeks and cabbage and potatoes and dumping them all into a pot to cook slowly over the stove. I don’t want to see the wood, beckoning me from across the wall. I don’t want to think about the tree siren. I don’t want to think about how when she released me from the oak, I looked up into her face and realized she was beautiful.

  And what does that matter? I think. Monsters can be beautiful.

  I force myself to remember the train wreck, all the death and horror she caused. But those images slide too soon away, and all I can see is her silver face in the light of dawn, violets trembling in her hair. All I can see is her protecting Awela from her sister, weaving a bower of branches around us, guarding us from the malice of the wood.

  You have broken me. You have changed me.

  Has she changed? Is that even possible?