Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  Owen! Where is he? I reach for him as the Eater hauls me through the palace corridor, past a rigid row of captive elms, into an antechamber with one tiny window looking into the north sky. He flings me to the ground. I land hard on one arm. It twists wrong beneath me. Pain flares, swift and sharp.

  “I’ve something to attend to,” says the Eater. “I’ll be back soon.” There is sincerity in his words. Danger. The promise of pain.

  I catch the thread of Owen’s soul. He is far from the Eater. He is safe.

  The Eater steps into the hall, barring the door behind him. Sealing me inside.

  “Wait!”

  I leap at the door, pound against it with my useless human hands.

  But the Eater has trapped me.

  I am a girl in a cage.

  A tree in a pot.

  No way out.

  I reach again for Owen’s soul. He is no longer safe inside the earth. He burns with rage. And I know where he is going.

  To face the Eater.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  OWEN

  THE PALACE IS QUIET, TOO QUIET. THE CORRIDORS ARE EMPTY, the long rows of potted trees casting eerie shadows in the light of the oil lamps. I hide around every corner, listen cautiously before ascending every stair, but I needn’t have. I meet no one. Maybe all the courtiers are still in the ballroom. Maybe the king is, too.

  Rage burns me from the inside. I can’t think about my grief right now. If I do, it will break me. All that’s left is anger.

  The winding stair to the king’s private tower is narrow and dim—no one has come to light the lamps here, which means it may very well be unoccupied. That’s fine with me. I’ll wait for him. I tighten my grip on my knife hilt. I wonder what it will feel like to drive it into his heart.

  The spiral stair seems to go on forever, then ends all at once at a tall iron door that creaks open when I push it.

  I’m not prepared for what is waiting on the other side: a large, domed room, the ceiling made all of glass. It’s an observatory, of a sort. It lacks only a telescope. The walls are plastered with my and my father’s star charts. A desk on one end of the chamber overflows with books and pages upon pages of handwritten notes. The whole place reeks of rot and earth and leaves, and sizzles with eerie electricity, though there are no electric lamps that I can see. In the center of the room stands an iron table, empty except for a scattering of glass vials and a knife. It looks out of place with everything else.

  I pace around the room, my bewildered curiosity momentarily dulling my rage. I peer at the charts as I go; there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, dating back to when the king first hired my father as an astronomer and gifted him the house on the edge of the wood. Someone—I can only assume the king—has scrawled indecipherable notes on nearly every chart in a shimmery silver ink.

  I’m halfway round the room before I pick up the pattern. Almost all of the notes seem to center around the constellations that shifted in the impossible meteor shower: the Twysog Mileinig, the Spiteful Prince, and the Morwyn, the Maiden. He stole her crown, the stories go, and she’s been chasing him to get it back, grasping for his heel but never quite catching hold of him.

  I watch the progression of those two constellations from chart to chart and year to year. They slide off of the visible half of the ecliptic during the autumn and winter months, and come back into view in the spring. They hardly change at all, even after a decade of charting, which of course they wouldn’t. I finish my circuit of the room on the opposite side of the door from where I started, and find the final charts, the ones marking the new positions of the constellations after the meteor shower. Here the Morwyn has all but swallowed the Spiteful Prince, the bright star that represented her crown burning now in the midst of her. Eight other bright stars are grouped at her right shoulder, with countless others on her left side and even more scattered at her feet. I remember how there were too many to mark them all down.

  Understanding begins to take root inside of me. I pace around the room again, studying the charts until they lead me once more to the final ones.

  I walk over to the desk, rifle through the pages of notes—more of that silver writing I can’t read. The books are ancient, their spines cracked and their pages brittle. I open a few. They’re written in the same language as the silver notes, but it’s the pictures that startle me. They’re faded now from their once-bright colors, but they seem to be illustrations of children’s fairy tales. There’s a picture of mermaids, bathing on rocks with a waterfall behind them, their long hair barely covering their breasts. I flush and turn the page. A dragon breathes fire across an ocean, transforming it into a barren desert. There’s pictures of men who appear to be made of rocks, of a royal family riding out on a hunt. There’s a picture of a beautiful wood nymph, her green hair tangled with bluebells, her body clothed in a garment of bark and leaves. I open another of the books, and find similar illustrations.

  Underneath all the pages and books is a sheet of crackly parchment, so brittle the edges crumble away when I touch it. It’s hard to make out in the dim light, but I finally realize it’s an ancient star chart. It seems to be of the same patch of sky where the Morwyn chases after the Spiteful Prince, but their constellations are missing.

  What if, I think, peering at the ancient chart. What if.

  I tell myself a story.

  Once, long ago, a spiteful prince stole the crown of a maiden. But not just any maiden. A wood nymph powerful enough to make children from trees. Powerful enough to write the threat of her revenge in the heavens. The spiteful prince became a king. He built his fortress up around him, and he hired centuries of astronomers to watch the sky, to read the stars, so he would know when the wood nymph was about to take her revenge. So he could prepare himself to face her.

  And then one day he receives a telegram: The impossible has happened. The stars have changed. There is no longer a spiteful prince hanging in the heavens, because the maiden has devoured him, and taken back her crown.

  But what if it wasn’t a crown at all?

  What if it was her soul?

  I go back to the final star chart my father filled in. The truth is spelled out before me, a truth my father knew, or guessed.

  A truth that cost him his life.

  Rage takes hold of me, stronger than before. The king is a liar. He’s centuries old, steeped in the magic he claims to abhor. If the people of Tarian knew that not only is he no better than the Gwydden, he created her, they would riot.

  That is my father’s treason. That is what the king didn’t want me to know.

  The sudden creak of the door makes me jump, and I have only a heartbeat to reach for my knife before the king’s hands close around my throat.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  SEREN

  I TUG GENTLY AT THE SOULS IN THE PALACE, CLEARING OWEN A path. He does not need anyone barring his way. He will not find the Soul Eater. Not yet. The Eater is on his way to the nursery. He will find Awela gone. He will want Owen instead.

  And I am trapped here.

  Powerless.

  I step up to the window in the antechamber, peer out at a circle of stars. They seem so unreachable here, so far from their nearness on the hill where we danced.

  It was my mother who taught me the stories in the sky. I was hardly two winters old when she pointed into the heavens, and told me the name of every star. There was a star for her, and a star for me, and a star for each of my brothers and sisters.

  Once, she said, there lived a foolish wood nymph in a wide green forest. Her sisters married mermen and went away to sea. Her brothers married rock maidens and went to live in the mountains. She was the only one left. She did not care for rocks, nor the sea. She loved only a boy, with dark hair and eyes that gleamed like stars. He was a prince of his people, and he would make her his queen.

  But in the dead of night, when first they lay together in the darkness, he carved her soul from her body, and left her with only her heart. He swallowed her soul an
d gained immortality and power beyond reckoning.

  She bled into the earth. She wanted to die, but the wood did not let her. It fed into her, and she drank it in, and from the trees she gathered power equal to the boy’s, but hers was a power of growing. She grew the heartless tree. She grew her sons and daughters. And she grew her wood, more and more, up around her like the boy’s castle. There she waited, banishing all the boy’s kind from her fortress, waiting for the day when her power reached its height, when the stars and the trees obeyed her, when she could wield them like soldiers. When that happened, she would at last go to the boy again, and slaughter him for what he had done.

  Once, she’d wanted her soul back, but she realized she had no need of it. She had her heart, and she had her power, and she had the souls of countless others to drink and drink and drink. That was enough.

  My mother taught me my killing song. Taught me how to break the bodies of the men who came into the wood. They were the children of the Soul Eater, and they must die and die and die.

  I know the truth now, as I did not then. The king may have swallowed my mother’s soul, but she has swallowed far more. If anyone is a Soul Eater, it is her.

  My heart beats hot within me. Leaves rattle down from my hair.

  My time in this form grows very short.

  I should have made Owen understand. I should have pulled him with me, away from the palace and the Eater, while I had the chance. I should have told him that I am no longer the monster I used to be. That I regret with every ounce of my being what happened to his mother in the forest.

  I want him here with me, looking at the stars.

  I want to tell him that I will save him, if I can.

  That I love him, even though I do not have a soul.

  I love him.

  The words beat fragile and strong inside of me, butterflies with glass wings.

  Awareness sears through me with the heat of a wildfire, and I grab for the tendrils of Owen’s soul.

  He is no longer alone.

  The Eater has found him.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  OWEN

  THE KING DRAGS ME FARTHER INTO THE ROOM, HIS HANDS clamped around my throat, choking me. I thrash and gulp for air. There’s a humming in my ears, spots dancing black in front of my eyes.

  He hurls me to the floor and I crumple like paper. I lie there gasping for breath, fighting to come back to myself.

  It’s almost laughable, that I thought I could kill him.

  He crouches beside me, relieves me of my knife. “Do you have any idea,” he says, his voice low and cold, “what has happened to your sister?”

  I blink up at him. “You murdered my father.”

  Without warning, he slams his fist into the side of my face, sending me skidding along the floor. I scramble to a sitting position and press my back against the wall by the desk. My heart skitters and jumps. A slick red warmth drips down my jaw.

  “Your sister,” he spits at me. He comes over to me, crouches back down, his piercing green eyes on level with mine. He reeks of earth and rot and molding leaves. His beard is still neatly trimmed, but bits of his skin seem to be peeling away from his face, exposing patches of pulpy muscle I don’t want to look at very closely. He hisses at me through his teeth and grabs my shoulder, hauling me to my feet. “The nursery is empty. Your sister has vanished, and now you are here. I know you had something to do with it. WHERE IS SHE?”

  “I don’t know.” Somewhere inside my terror, relief throbs. Awela is safe from him. Bedwyn got her out and she’s safe. Safer than I am, at the moment. I glance around the room. There’s no way out but the iron door, and the king is barring my way. “I know your secret,” I tell him. “I know you’re not what you claim to be.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me, boy?” He laughs as he drags me to the center of the room where the iron table waits.

  I fight him, trying to jerk out of his grasp, but he’s strong, unnaturally so. His fingers dig into my arms, down to bone. He throws me onto the table, and my leg smashes one of the vials. Broken glass slices through my trousers, embedding into my thigh.

  He binds me to the table with leather straps cinched tight at my wrists and my ankles, and locks a collar around my neck. I twist and heave against the straps. They hold.

  The king paces round me, stopping every few seconds to peer up through the glass ceiling at the dim stars. There’s a medallion around his neck that whirs with gears and buzzes with electricity. It stinks of rot—or is that the king?

  “I wanted your sister. I needed her. Her soul is strong—there’s magic in it. She was born on the edge of the witch’s wood, you know. The power wound itself into her soul. She burns with it. But you—” He prods my arms and legs, wipes a smear of blood off my cheek, and presses his medallion against my chest. A sharp pain sears through me for a fraction of an instant as the medallion flashes with a white light, then grows dark again. The king looks on with interest. He nods in satisfaction. “As I suspected, you are strong, too. You weren’t born there, but you’ve lived there nearly all your life. I wanted you close, in case I was unsuccessful taking your sister’s soul. So I would have another chance at yours.”

  I shudder where I’m bound, forced to stare up into the sky, the king a leering silhouette in my peripheral. “My soul? What do you mean? What are you?”

  “What am I?” He stops above my head and looks down at me with a smile, as if he’s humoring a child. “I’m as human as you are, or I was, once. But the witch is coming for me, and when she does, I mean to have the power to drive her deep into Hell where she belongs.” He resumes his pacing, then drags something out from underneath the table.

  From my sideways view, I watch him assemble some kind of metal device. He attaches it to the table, and shifts it over me: a long metal arm, a glass lens, a sort of gear-claw thing that makes my insides roil. He takes the medallion from around his neck and clicks it into the device.

  “Why did you torture my father?” I screw my eyes shut. I can’t look at the device, which is clearly about to inflict some excruciating pain. “Why did you murder him? No one would have had any idea what he was talking about, even if he did ever tell them about the stars. About what he guessed. You are Tarian’s beloved king. You’re fighting the Gwydden. That’s all anyone would have believed.”

  “I needed to test my machine on someone,” the king says dismissively. “Unlucky for him, there was nothing in his soul of any use to me. No power there. I checked. Repeatedly. But all that practice makes it more or less certain I’ll be successful extracting your soul. I had to be sure I could do it, before I risked your sister. Or you, as it turns out.”

  Tears leak from my eyes without my consent. The wounds in my father’s chest—the king wasn’t torturing him. He was experimenting on him. “You’re a monster,” I spit.

  “It isn’t my fault your father happened to be the astronomer in my employ when the witch put her signs in the sky. I’ve had quite a lot of them, you know.”

  My jaw is swelling and the glass in my leg hurts. If I don’t dig it out soon, I might never walk properly again. But that doesn’t matter when I’m about to die. When my mother ripped her heart out and my father died in my arms. At least Awela is safe. Bedwyn got her out.

  Bedwyn.

  I feel again the hot press of her mouth against mine, the pounding of her heart. Her hair, whipping cool about my neck.

  There’s a clank of metal, the sudden sear of pain in my chest.

  My eyes fly open. The king is twisting the metal claw under my skin. He stops before he hits my ribs.

  I gulp shallow breaths.

  “I’ll be so glad when this is all over,” the king says conversationally. He adjusts the lens. “Do you know how tiresome it is to reinvent oneself every sixty years or so? Paying off servants, staging my own death again and again to pass the crown onto my ‘son’ or my ‘nephew.’ I even tried to conquer Gwaed a few centuries back, just for some variety, but that ended in disaster.
I’m thoroughly sick of this wretched palace and this wretched kingdom. When the witch is dead, I can go where I please. I won’t be bound here any longer, waiting for her to try and kill me.” He frowns at the lens and makes another adjustment. “But I haven’t been idle. I can wield as much magic as she does now. There’s just one thing holding me back—I need a new soul. Mine is wasting away.”

  “Do you mean her soul?” I whisper. “Do you mean the Gwydden’s soul?”

  He laughs. “It hasn’t belonged to her in centuries. She’s stronger without it. Don’t you think?”

  “You made her what she is.”

  “And I will unmake her, too.”

  He flicks a switch on the side of his device.

  Blinding, earth-shattering pain tears through me.

  Then there’s nothing but light and heat and the sound of my own screaming.

  Chapter Fifty

  SEREN

  I POUND ON THE DOOR OF THE ANTECHAMBER. I POUND AND I scream. I do not stop when my throat is hoarse and my hands are bloody. I pound and pound.

  Until footsteps sound on the other side. Until the door creaks open and Heledd is there, her face creased in alarm, in confusion. “Bedwyn! What—”

  But there is no time.

  I push past her.

  I run.

  Toward the feel of his soul.

  Toward the reek of the Eater’s power.

  I run and I run, but this human body is not fast enough. I wish I were a bird, so I could wing up to the tower, so I could reach him faster, faster.

  But I am slow. These lungs burn and this heart beats and all the while I run up the winding stair I hear him screaming. It tears at me like my mother’s claws, until all of me is raw and bleeding.