Into the Heartless Wood
Page 12
My sister bows. “Yes, my queen.”
My mother eyes me with contempt.
The rain has washed the blood
from her antlers. “You are fortunate I have a whole wood to waken, an army to raise to stand behind me when I go to face the Soul Eater. Otherwise, I would not be so merciful.”
She sweeps away.
The ash trees bow behind her.
Chapter Thirty-One
OWEN
THE HEARTLESS TREE GROWS ON THE BANK OF A SMALL, SWIFT river, just as Seren said it did. I’d imagined it would be strange or terrifying, but it is just a tree, dark and old and thick, with rattling leaves and great humps of roots stretching out below the earth.
At the base of the tree, a woman crouches, digging in the dirt with her bare hands. I know her, even in the rainy half-dark. Even though she looks like the ghost of herself.
A cry rips out of me. I run toward her, stumbling on slick leaves and mud. She lifts her head as I reach her, as I kneel beside her and tug her into my arms. Ragged, guttural sobs wrack my body.
She pulls back from me, peers into my face. “I know you.” Her voice is not what I remember. It is hollow, empty. Her eyes are, too. Her hair, once pale and bright, hangs limp and matted at her shoulders. She’s dressed in rags.
“It’s Owen, Mother.” I grip her shoulders, gently, for I fear she might break. “I’m going to take you home to Father and Awela. Awela’s grown so big! You’ll be so proud of her.”
I will her to remember, but her eyes remain vacant. She blinks at me. “Owen,” I beg. “I’m Owen, and you’re Eira, and you’re married to Calon Merrick. You play the cello and you love to garden and you have the sweetest singing voice in all the world. Please, Mother. Please remember.”
She digs her fingers into the sides of her head, agony writing itself in lines across her face. “I remember I was not always as I am now. I remember I was once something more than her slave. I had a will of my own. But all she’s left me is my heart, and it no longer beats for anyone but her.”
“Please. Please.” Tears pour down my face. “Irises are your favorite flower. You always said you fell in love with Father because his head was in the sky and yours was in the earth and together you made a horizon. Please.” My heels grind deep into the mud. The rain is cold, and a chill shivers into my bones.
“The stars fell,” she says. “They fell and they fell, and the sky is changed. The Gwydden’s time has come. Soon, it will all end.” Her eyes focus suddenly on mine, a spark of her old self. “I protected you all as long as I could,” she whispers. “The Gwydden took my soul. She bound me to herself, bound me to this tree. Bid me watch over it and the souls that it contains. It is glutted with them, but it is never satisfied. I draw blood from its body. I make orbs for her daughters to hang around their necks. Blood to draw the souls, the souls.” She grips my shoulders with a fierceness that should not come from her frail body. “I am bound to the tree, and so I could use its power. I used it to remember, and when I could remember no more, I used it to protect the souls that once were dear to me.”
Realization slams through me. “You kept me safe on the train tracks while Father was searching for me. You kept Father out of the wood when Awela and I were safe with Seren.”
“I’ve been watching over you,” she whispers. “And it’s over now. The stars are changed. She will swallow the world. Stop her, if you can. And remember me.”
“I’m here to save you,” I choke out.
Her eyes go vacant again, and she crouches back on her heels. “I followed the tree siren into the wood.” Her voice has a singsong quality to it, like she’s repeating a nursery rhyme. “The siren with violets in her hair.”
“No.”
“Violets, violets, violets!”
Numbness steals over me, swallowing me whole.
“She said my soul was strong. She brought me to her mother. Her mother stole my soul, my soul, my soul. She bound me to the tree.”
Rage rises inside of me, a monster I cannot control.
“Mother—”
“She stole my soul, but she cannot have my heart. It is finished now. You don’t need me to protect you anymore.” Her face changes, that last spark of herself coming once more into her eyes. She touches my face, smoothing her thumb over the stubble on my cheek. “When did my little boy become a man?”
I choke back a sob.
“I am glad I got to see you once last time.”
“I’m going to save you.”
Pain sparks in her face. “I am long past saving. But there is yet one last thing I can do for you.”
“Mother—”
She presses her hand against my chest, and I gasp as pain flashes through me, as it sinks fiery into the core of my being. It pulses once, twice, and then it’s gone. I stare at her. “What was that?”
“One last spark of power. To guard you from her. So she can never take your soul, the way she took mine.” She kisses my temple, then crouches back on her heels. “My soul is gone forever, but she cannot have my heart anymore.”
She claws suddenly at her chest, screaming in pain as her nails meet skin and dig deeper. Blood blooms in my vision.
“My heart belongs to you,” comes her voice, thin and distant. “To Awela. To Calon. Tell him—Owen, tell him I’ll always be burning in his sky. Goodbye, brave one. I will love you, always.” She gives one last piercing, inhuman screech, and then in the haze of blood and rain, I see what she’s done.
She’s torn out her own heart. She holds it in her hands as her body goes still on the forest floor.
Animal cries rip raw from my throat. I don’t understand. She can’t be gone, not like this. She can’t be lying there dead, her own heart in her hands.
And yet.
Her heart turns to ash as I watch. The rain washes it away. It cleans the blood from my mother’s hands, cleans the dirt from her face. I take her hand.
I feel like a stranger in my own body. I weep and I scream and I’m scarcely aware that I’m doing it.
She shouldn’t have died like this. She shouldn’t have died here. She shouldn’t have—
“Owen, come away.” Knobby fingers jab under my armpits. Hands lift me to my feet. I’m fighting the hands, the arms, the viselike grip that won’t let me go.
My mother’s body turns to ash, like her heart did.
She’s wholly gone, the rain grinding her into the earth.
“Owen, come away.”
I’m dragged from the river and the heartless tree. I stop resisting after a little while, exhausted and hollow, all the strength sapped from me.
I’m released then. I crumple to the ground like a broken toy.
I look up into Seren’s face.
I followed the tree siren into the wood.
The siren with violets in her hair.
I lunge at her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
SEREN
I CATCH OWEN’S WRISTS.
I hold him back from me.
He howls in the rain and the dark.
He struggles in my grasp. He shouts: “LET ME GO!”
I release him,
and he falls
into the mud.
The rain is driving, cold. The wood drinks it up, roots stretching down into damp earth.
Owen convulses on the ground.
He weeps.
I crouch beside him
but there is nothing I can do.
He is broken
and I
am the one
who has broken him.
I should never
have brought him here.
Should never
have told him his mother was alive.
And now—
“Owen.”
He roars: “GET AWAY FROM ME!”
I jerk back.
Somewhere close by my sister is waiting, watching to see what I will do.
It is all a game to her, his soul like any other.
But it i
s not.
It
is
not.
I say: “She was already dead. She was just a shell. My mother took her soul long ago, and when your mother plucked out her own heart, there was nothing left to bind the husk of her together. So she faded. But she was already dead.”
He wheels on me. His eyes flash. “You would know, wouldn’t you? You’re the one who killed her!”
“Owen, come with me. Let me take you home to your father and sister. Let me get you warm. Please.”
Rain runs in rivulets down my cheeks; my bark soaks it in.
Pain screams through the raw places in my back, the gouges in my face.
But it does not hurt as much
as the hatred in his eyes.
He screams: “How could you spend all those nights with me? How could you, knowing you did that to my mother? How could you look up at the stars and dance with me and kiss me when YOU KNEW WHAT YOU HAD DONE?”
He scrabbles for something on his belt as he lunges to his feet.
A metal blade gleams in the rain.
He holds it out toward me and
the point quavers.
I say: “The heartless tree must always be bound to someone, someone to channel the power, to fashion the orbs. But humans do not endure, and every so often, my mother sends me or my sisters to take a new one, someone whose soul is strong enough to bear it. Your mother was strong. The strongest I have ever seen. That is why, when my mother sent me to find someone new, I chose her.”
“You’re a trickster. A monster. A demon from Hell. I never should have believed your lies.”
“I have never lied to you, Owen Merrick. I am my mother’s creature. Her monster. Her slave. I always have been.”
My words are
molded leaves
in my throat. They choke me.
Fresh tears pour down his face. “But that’s just it, Seren. You’re not her slave. She doesn’t control you—your will is your own. You are only a monster because you choose to be.”
His words slice through me
like an axe through wood.
“I never knew I had a choice until you.”
He says: “Then choose, but I want no part of it.”
“Owen—”
He is suddenly beside me, his blade at my throat. “I will never forgive you for what you did to my mother. If I ever see you again, I will kill you.”
He is so close
I feel
the heat of him.
And yet he is further away than he ever has been.
Grief is a river.
It
engulfs
me.
He curses and jerks away, hurling the blade at the ground.
It lands with a thunk in the soggy dirt, buried to the hilt.
For one moment more, his eyes meet mine. He says: “Don’t follow me.”
He turns and tugs the blade from the earth.
Then he’s gone.
I sink to my knees. The scents of moss and leaves and blood overwhelm me.
But my sister
does not let me mourn in peace.
She grabs my hands, yanks me to my feet.
There is scorn still in her face, but there is something softer, too.
I think it is pity.
“You are the greatest of fools, little sister. You cannot love one who is not your own kind. You should not love at all. That is not why our mother gave you a heart.”
Dew mingles with the rain on my face. “Why did she?”
“Perhaps because that is where her own power came from, in the time before she lost her soul.”
“Are you going to take me to her? Or will you kill me here in the mud?”
Her lip curls. “You are not worth killing. Go. Go far and fast away from here, for our mother will not have pity on you.”
She yanks the amber orb from my neck. “I will fill it for you. I will tell her you are dead. Your death will come soon enough, when the Eater is gone and the wood has swallowed the world.”
“Sister—”
She spits at me: “I am not your sister. I could never share blood with such an unworthy creature. Now go.”
I stumble into the wood.
Misery and numbness come in waves.
It is not a mercy, for her to let me live.
Perhaps she knows that.
Perhaps that is why she did.
His voice repeats in my mind,
over
and
over
again,
like the recording on his magical phonograph.
You’re not her slave. She doesn’t control you—your will is your own.
You are only a monster because you choose to be.
Choose.
Choose.
The night grows very dark.
The rain clings
like ice
to my hair,
my skin,
my gown.
You are only a monster because you choose to be.
I never knew I had a choice until you.
Choose.
But how do I choose not to be a monster?
I cannot atone for the souls I slew,
for the blood I shed on the forest floor.
I cannot undo what I did to Owen’s mother.
Choose.
I am what my mother made me to be.
I cannot shed the form she gave me
like a snake sheds its skin.
Can I?
Chapter Thirty-Three
OWEN
I RUN BLINDLY THROUGH THE DARK, SOAKED THROUGH WITH RAIN, branches clawing at my shoulders.
I followed the tree siren into the wood.
The siren with violets in her hair.
I burn with anger. It propels me on and on, makes the trees shrink back from me.
She said my soul was strong. She brought me to her mother.
I want to claw my eyes out, but even if I did I would remember Seren, gleaming silver in the rain while my mother’s blood poured red onto the earth.
She bound me to the tree.
All the nights I spent with her on the hill. Every time I looked at her and forgot she was a monster. Every time I wished her to be more than she was, that I thought she was more—
She as good as murdered my mother, and I’d thought—I’d thought—
Do you fancy yourself in love with this girl?
Her mouth on mine, her body on mine. Her smooth-sharp hands pressed against my ears, blocking out the horror of her sisters’ song.
The same song that she sang when she lured my mother to her death.
Her betrayal cuts deeper than any knife.
And yet it gutted me to leave her alone in the dark.
I loved a monster.
Now I must pay the price.
I’m not sure how I make it to the edge of the wood and Father’s wall, just as dawn lightens the world around me. Maybe it’s the lingering remnants of the magic Mother wielded to keep us safe. Maybe it’s Seren, commanding the wood to leave me be. Or maybe I am simply not important enough for the wood to bother with.
I scramble over the wall. The lantern is lost somewhere among the trees—it would be just if the oil spilled and caught fire, if the wood burned all to ash. But I don’t think there is any justice to be had in the Gwydden’s Wood.
I drag myself past the garden, up the steps to the door.
A paper notice stares me in the face, nailed into the wood and stamped with King Elynion’s seal. I tear it free, shaking so hard the words swim before my eyes. I force myself to be still.
A warrant for the arrest of Calon Merrick, on the charge of high treason, signed and witnessed on this day by His Royal Majesty Elynion, King of Tarian.
It’s signed with an illegible scrawl, and dated yesterday afternoon. I read it three times, disbelieving. Father arrested for treason? Why? How? The king must have sent soldiers by train. They must have arrived around the same time my mother—
A new terror grips me. If Father was arrested, he would have been taken to the palace in Breindal City by now. But what about Awela?
I fling the door open and tear through the downstairs rooms, then race upstairs to search those as well. My little sister is nowhere to be found.
I pace the kitchen, telling myself to be calm, to think. Awela spends most days with Efa at the farm. She’s probably there. I’ll stop and check on my way to Breindal City. Because of course I’m going after my father. This all has to be some horrible mistake. Father could no more commit treason than Awela—he hasn’t got it in him.
I’ll take the train. Go straight to the king. Bring Father home.
A clap of thunder rattles the house, and I jerk my eyes to the kitchen window. Rain breaks anew from heavy clouds.
Breath rushes out of me. Suddenly, all I can see is a bloody heart in a rainy wood. All I can hear is my mother screaming.
I press my hands against my ears. “STOP IT!” I cry. “STOP IT! LEAVE ME ALONE!”
I collapse onto the kitchen floor as the horror of my mother’s death repeats itself behind my eyes, over and over again.
And I weep for her. Because I am the only one who knows she’s truly gone.
It doesn’t take long to get ready—I shove food and a few changes of clothing into my pack, along with last month’s payment from the king, and the star charts that document the sky before and after the impossible meteor shower. I pull on a clean pair of trousers and a fresh shirt, fumbling with the buttons. I jam my top hat onto my head and then shrug into Father’s old oilskin coat. It’s overlarge on me, and smells like him: ink, cinnamon, woodsmoke. My brain works at the knot of his arrest, trying to understand the incomprehensible.
It’s midmorning, and still raining as I trudge to Brennan’s Farm. I’m eager to see Awela, eager to promise her that all will be well very soon, that we’ll be together again. We never have to go back to the house by the wood. I never want to.
I knock on the farmhouse door as rain cascades from the eave of the roof, and damp chickens cluck in annoyance from their pen beside the house.
Efa opens the door, but she’s alone. Her eyes widen at the sight of me. “Owen! What are you doing here?”