He sets the box in the grass and opens it.
He eases something out,
a tall thing, coming nearly to his shoulder.
He says: “It’s called a cello—it used to belong to my mother. Shall I play it for you?”
I say: “Yes,” though I am not quite sure what he means.
The cello fascinates me.
Its body is made of a shiny wood
that seems to honor the tree
it once was.
It is curved and beveled, taut with strings.
He takes a stick from the box,
then perches on top of it,
puts the cello between his knees.
He draws the stick across the strings.
Music blooms on the hill.
I am transfixed.
He plays
the heart of the wood.
He plays
my heart.
Dew
runs
down
my
cheeks.
I feel the music inside of me,
engrained in sap and bark.
It swells like thunder,
whispers like leaves in a stream.
It is rich as honey, as earth.
He sways with the music.
The cello is
his voice
his heart
his soul.
He halts the movement of the stick.
He lays the instrument in the grass.
He kneels beside me,
close
enough
to
touch.
“Seren. You’re crying.”
“I am not human. I cannot cry.”
“And yet.” His gentle fingers touch the dew on my face. “What’s wrong?”
I cannot tell him
that my sister killed them.
I cannot tell him
that I did not stop her,
that I sang them to their deaths.
I cannot.
I cannot.
I wish the music of the cello
dwelt inside of me
instead
of my mother’s
monstrous song.
He takes my hands in his.
He smooths the knobby bark on my knuckles.
I say: “I do not want to be a monster. But that is all I’ll ever be.”
He says: “A monster wouldn’t have spared me, or my sister. A monster wouldn’t look at the stars in wonder and be moved by a badly played cello.”
A crack splinters my heart.
He is so very close now.
He smells of ink,
of cinnamon.
I want
to trace his eyes with my fingers.
I want
him closer.
But. “I cannot be what you wish me to be, just because you wish it.”
“What do you wish to be?”
He stares at me
and I stare at him
and it feels as if
all the world
holds its breath
waiting
for my answer.
He is beautiful and fragile.
His soul is so strong.
I say: “Something new.”
He smiles. “Then that’s what you will be.”
He lets go of my hand.
He picks up the cello.
He plays and he plays
and I try
to wind his music up inside of me,
enough to fill the hollow place
where the soul I do not have
ought to dwell.
I want to keep him here forever
in my fortress of trees.
But when dawn touches the sky
with rosy fingers,
I sing a gap between the branches,
a tunnel of safety
all the way to his wall.
I
let
him
go.
Chapter Twenty-Five
OWEN
THE JOB AT THE TELEGRAPH STATION TAKES MORE BRAIN POWER than I anticipated. I’m made to memorize a code comprised of long and short clicks and to learn how to translate it into actual words—that’s for the telegraphs coming in. The ones going out are the reverse. I’m no stranger to detailed work, but the demanding monotony of my new duties mixed with the scarce hours of sleep I get every night has me longing to chase a muddy Awela through the garden and wash dishes while she sleeps.
The telegraph office is a narrow, windowless building near the inn, jammed with two small wooden desks—imported from Saeth or elsewhere, I imagine—and two sets of telegraph equipment. There’s always one other operator working at the same time as me. I’m surprised to find that Mairwen Griffith works the evening shift, and comes in just before I leave every day.
“Owen Merrick!” she exclaims the first time she sees me. “I thought for sure you’d been eaten by the wood. You never come to the village anymore.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Her dark eyes and shiny hair have my insides sliding all over themselves, and I can’t help but notice her daring outfit of trousers and high-collared blouse. Rumor has it she wears them when she rides her newfangled bicycle.
“Not eaten,” I tell her in a stroke of brilliance.
She raises a laughing eyebrow at me and settles into her desk.
I finish my shift in an awkward puddle of sweat, but the instant I step from the telegraph office, I forget all about her.
Because there’s only a handful of hours dividing me from Seren.
I have it down to a science now. Dinner with Father and Awela. Putting Awela to bed. Charting the stars. Waiting in my room until midnight, sneaking through my window with whatever I’ve put aside to show Seren tucked into my satchel or strapped to my back—I was wary, after losing the telescope, but I’m much more careful now. Crawling past the garden, climbing over the wall to where Seren waits in her tunnel of branches. Walking with her to our hill, where her trees shelter us from the wrath of the wood, from the watching eyes of her mother and sisters. Showing her the things I brought her, happy with her joy. Forgetting and forgetting and forgetting that she was ever a monster. That she ever could be.
One night I bring her fresh strawberries from the garden. “To eat,” I explain, pulling the top off one of the berries and popping it into my mouth. I wonder belatedly if it’s indecent to offer a girl who is at least half tree part of a plant to eat.
But she mimics me, chewing slowly. “It is very sweet.” She smiles, and grabs another one.
After that, I try to bring her strawberries every night.
I bring star charts and books. The astrolabe from the observatory. A pair of my mother’s shoes I find stuffed in the back of a closet. She doesn’t even try the shoes, just shudders and hands them back to me. “How would I feel the earth?” she demands, as if I really should have thought about that before offering her something so offensive.
But the charts and books and trinkets fascinate her. She wants to learn to read. I teach her the alphabet and leave her newspapers and a few books. Within a week she can read simple sentences; in another week, complex ones.
Every day before dawn I sneak back into the house to sleep a few hours before dragging myself up in time to go to the telegraph office. The schedule is grueling and unsustainable, but I can’t give up my nights with Seren. I’m terrified every one will be my last—that the Gwydden will tear a hole in Seren’s guarding trees and devour us both, that my father will catch me sneaking over the wall. But I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop.
It’s been nearly three weeks since Seren raised her screen of trees around her hill and I played my mother’s cello. Not even Mairwen Griffith can distract me anymore. She makes a point to talk to me every afternoon when she arrives for her shift, her dark hair pinned up in a bun, or sometimes loose and curly about her shoulders. She comes in on her day off and asks me to have dinner with her at the inn. Once, I would hav
e leapt at the chance, wishing I’d been brave enough to ask her myself. But now I give her request hardly a thought before I politely decline and walk home.
Because Seren is waiting.
I’ve almost begun to think that it will always be this way, that I will spend every night for the rest of my life amidst trees and stars.
Tonight I lug Mother’s phonograph out of the garden shed, where I hid it before Father got home. I heft it carefully over the wall, then through the tunnel of branches and up the hill. I’m breathing hard by the time I lay it down in the grass, unlatch the top of the case and remove it. Sweat runs into my eyes and prickles between my shoulder blades. Seren watches as she always does, expectant and curious.
I fit the horn into the phonograph, then carefully slide a hollow, wax-covered cylinder onto the mandrel, a cylindrical component of the phonograph that’s made of solid metal. I turn the crank on the side of the box, winding the device up, then set the stylus onto the wax cylinder. Music blooms from the phonograph’s horn.
Seren leaps back in shock, and I straighten up, pleased with myself. It’s a partial recording of a symphony Mother brought with her from her university days. Violins and cellos swell into the night, chased by a lone clarinet and the kettledrums’ pulsing heartbeat.
Seren is transfixed. “Magic,” she whispers at last. “This is magic.”
I glance at the screen of trees around us, and shake my head. “Not magic. It’s music and science.”
“It’s beautiful.”
I smile, forcibly ignoring my jittering nerves. I hold out my hand. “Will you dance with me, Seren of the wood?”
She tilts her head. “I do not understand.”
“I’ll show you.”
She takes my hand, her skin rough-smooth-sharp against mine. I pull her near me, gingerly resting my other hand on her waist. Leaves whisper over my fingers, soft as rose petals, soft as Awela’s ruined hair ribbon. Beneath, smooth silver skin. I hardly dare speak. “To the time of the music, see?” It’s a waltz, the lilting rhythm easy to feel, a weighty downbeat, two lighter upbeats, again and again.
She seems almost instinctually to understand. She moves as easily as the wind coiling round us, a part of the wood, a part of the waltz. The hand not folded in mine finds my chest, her knobby fingers splayed out, tiny leaves sprouting up from her knuckles.
“Your heart beats,” she says. “Just as mine does.”
I take my hand from her waist and brush my fingertips over her heart. I feel her pulse, erratic, quick.
Her eyes search mine as we dance on the hilltop, and I wonder what questions burn inside of her, in the hollow of the soul she claims she does not have. I move my hand back to the safer residence of her shoulder, but my eyes never leave her face.
The phonograph scratches and screeches as it comes to the end of the cylinder—it’s only able to play for four minutes. For a moment more we keep dancing, to the music of the wood, the grass, the sky. We stop abruptly, mid-stride. We break apart. I feel strange and small, less than myself. Does she feel this way, too?
Mutely, I kneel beside the phonograph, move the stylus back to the beginning of the cylinder, turn the crank. The symphony starts over, crackly and beautiful in the summer night.
I rejoin Seren, and this time it’s her who reaches out her hand to me, her asking if I want to dance.
We do, again and again. I restart the symphony five times, six, and then it doesn’t matter anymore, and we don’t need music to dance.
We’re still dancing when dawn comes, and the rosy flush of it is reflected in her silver face.
Chapter Twenty-Six
SEREN
HIS HEART BEATS
beneath my fingers
as the music spins into the night
like spider silk
and I
never
want
it
to
stop.
I live for these nights:
for stars on a hill,
for Owen’s gentle heart.
I hate the days:
my sisters’ shrieking music,
blood and death and soul upon soul
taken for my mother,
power for her war against the Eater.
But I cannot have the nights
without the days.
Dawn comes.
He slips away.
I wonder
if this will be the day
that
I
lose
him,
or if we will have another night
under the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
OWEN
FATHER IS WAITING WHEN I CLIMB OVER THE WALL.
His arms are folded across his chest, the muscles jumping in his jaw. The sunrise touches his features with red light.
Mother’s phonograph is strapped awkwardly to my back, and Father’s eyes light on it briefly before fixing on my face. “Give it to me.” His words are cold, short, sharp.
I shrug out of the strap and hand him the phonograph, my sudden, wild fear hardly dimming my lingering elation.
My father hurls the phonograph at the wall. It splinters apart, the pieces falling limp to the grass. It’s all the warning I have before he seizes my arm and drags me back to the house.
I have never, in all my seventeen years, seen my father this angry. He yanks me through the kitchen, past a confused Awela, who’s eating porridge, and up the stairs to my room. He flings me inside, shaking with fury.
“How many nights, Owen?” He speaks quietly, every word edged with iron.
It would be better if he shouted.
“I—”
He punches the doorframe and the wood splinters. “HOW MANY NIGHTS?”
Shouting is not better. I gulp and stare at him, clenching my hands into fists. “I—”
He takes a breath. Swipes his hand across his forehead. There’s blood on his knuckles and moisture in his eyes.
“All of them, sir,” I say.
“You’ve been climbing out of your window.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sags against the doorframe. “The wood took her. It took her away from us. And you—why? Why do you go there every night, Owen? What could possibly be worth lying to me? What could be worth spitting on your mother’s memory and endangering yourself, over and over again?” His voice is raw and wild.
“I’m not spitting on Mother’s memory. I would never—”
“TELL ME WHY!” Father roars.
I suck in a jagged breath. “There’s a—there’s a—” How can I tell him? How can I tell him I danced with a tree siren until dawn, when Mother was slaughtered by one? I’ve spoken about my mother to Seren many times, but I’ve never asked her if she had anything to do with my mother’s death. I’ve never dared.
“Tell me,” Father repeats, quiet again.
“There’s a girl. In the wood. She—she can’t leave or the Gwydden will kill her and—and she’s the one who found Awela. She protected her. Protected both of us.”
He studies me. I wonder if he’s parsing the truth from my lies.
“Do you fancy yourself in love with this girl?”
The question is like a punch to the gut. “What? No. No. She’s a—” I clamp my lips shut on the word ‘monster’. “She’s just a friend.” I blink and see her smiling in the starlight, feel her smooth-rough hand in mine, smell the sweet, strong scent of her. Fear of a different kind wakes up inside of me. Makes me shake. Because she’s not just a friend. She’s—I don’t know what she is.
Father’s jaw works. “Then she isn’t worth risking everything for.”
There’s a clatter from downstairs that makes both of us jump—Awela has been left to her own devices for far too long. I make a move to the door but Father bars my way. “You’re staying up here until I decide what to do with you.”
The disappointment in his voice hurts. “I’m sorry, Father.”
“If you climb
out that window again, you will be.” He shuts the door in my face and drags something heavy against it to block me in. His chest of books from his university days, probably.
I sag onto my bed, my traitorous eyes looking out the window, down to the wood. Wind stirs through the verdant leaves, and I wonder, as I have very often, where Seren goes during the day. She’s never told me. For half a moment, I entertain the notion of climbing out the window and going to find her, but I dismiss it at once. That wouldn’t help anything, and I’m not about to abandon Awela.
I’m exhausted. Without my meaning it to, my head finds my pillow. I sleep.
It’s late afternoon when I wake again. Father has left me a plate of food on my nightstand: a slab of cold ham and a slice of bara brith. I inhale both and step over to my window, where I find Father has been busy while I was sleeping: He’s cut away the ivy that used to wind up the stone, successfully eliminating my path down to the garden. My stomach clenches: He really means to keep me from the wood. From Seren.
I pace the length of my room, three strides between the window and the door and back again. I could probably batter my way through the door—I suspect I’m stronger than Father gives me credit for—but that wouldn’t accomplish anything. Better to wait until he forgives me, or at least relents enough to let me out.
I dig a few dusty books out from under my bed: one of Father’s scientific journals, and a collection of poems Mother loved. I started reading the poems a while back, planning to memorize a few to impress Mairwen Griffith.
Do you fancy yourself in love with this girl?
Father’s question sparks unbidden in my mind. I’ve been trying not to think about it. Because of course I’m not in love with Seren. Of course.
But then what exactly am I doing? Why have I risked so much for her?
She’s lonely, I tell myself. I feel sorry for her. And I’m just trying to repay my debt.
But that’s not it at all.
She’s fascinating, my mind whispers back. As fascinating as the stars—more. She’s brilliant. She’s beautiful. I want to be near her.
My heart throbs uncomfortably. I go back to pacing.
There’s noise downstairs as Father and Awela come in. I wonder if I’m to be allowed down to supper.
I’m not. The sun sets. The first stars come out. The house grows quiet again—Awela must be in bed.
Into the Heartless Wood Page 9