Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

With every step, I’m shedding leaves.

  There is a door at the top of the tower, an iron door. It’s locked. I beat against it with my human fists. I rage and rail, but it isn’t enough, isn’t enough.

  And on the other side of the door, he’s screaming.

  I feel the change inside of me; I call it from within the core of my being: the power of the wood. My power.

  The living branches burst from my fingers, grasp hold of the door, and rip it from its hinges with a horrific screeeeech.

  Then all is stars and pain and blood and there is an iron branch in Owen and he’s screaming.

  The Soul Eater leans over him, and he does not frighten me anymore.

  He is intent on stealing Owen’s soul. He does not look up when I tear through the door. I do not think he even sees me.

  The glass ceiling is alive with stars, blazing and flashing, fearful of the dark magic the Soul Eater has called on.

  But it does not work. Owen’s soul does not come.

  His body shakes and flops on the table. His blood seeps red. He sweats and strains against the bonds that hold him.

  “Stop this.”

  The Soul Eater jerks his head up. “Witch!” he seethes. “You cannot be here! I’ve woven protections, grown trees of my own to guard my palace. You cannot be here.”

  I grab the iron embedded in Owen’s chest and pull it out in one swift movement. “I am not her.”

  Owen screams again. All the breath goes out of him.

  His eyes are wandering, wild. He convulses. I rip the collar off of him, then the wrist straps, the ankle straps. He shakes and moans. His leg is bleeding, his face is too. But the wound in his chest is the deepest, the worst. It leaks red onto the iron table.

  The Soul Eater grabs my arm, jerks me away from Owen. I wrench free and turn to face him.

  “You!” he cries. “How did you get free? Who are you?”

  “I am the Gwydden’s youngest daughter. And you cannot have his soul.”

  Lightning flashes above our heads, an impossibility in a sky full of stars.

  The last of my human form falls away from me.

  Twiggy growth pushes up from my knuckles.

  Bark unfolds on my face.

  Leaves and violets whisper in my hair.

  My heart does not change, from one moment to the next,

  but suddenly,

  I

  am

  different.

  No.

  Suddenly

  I

  am

  the

  same

  as I ever was.

  Owen has pushed himself up on one elbow on the table. He stares at me.

  “I am sorry.” I have wanted to tell him this every day since his mother ripped out her heart. “Forgive me, if you can.”

  But I do not say the words that burn deep inside of me.

  I cannot speak to him of love.

  Because I am

  a monster

  and he

  is not.

  “Seren.” His voice is a whisper. A plea. “I—”

  There’s a raging whirl of wind,

  the scent of trees.

  Branches reach

  from nowhere,

  writhing and twisting and studded with thorns.

  They grow up around me. They block Owen from sight. They pin my arms to my sides.

  Vines crawl down my throat and cinch tight around my ears. There’s a rushing darkness.

  A roaring sense of cold and rot.

  Then the vines retreat and the branches fall away.

  I lie on the grass

  under a sky strewn with stars.

  I stare up

  into the wrathful eyes

  of

  my

  mother.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  OWEN

  LEAVES IN HER HAIR. SAPLINGS AT HER FEET. THE SCENT OF VIOLETS. It can’t be.

  And yet it is. She found me in another form, to betray me all over again.

  But I cannot see her betrayal in anything other than her shape. Because she told me the truth, didn’t she? I should have known from the beginning, from the moment she told me her name.

  Bedwyn.

  Birch tree.

  I stare at her. “Seren. I—”

  A cold wind blows through the tower, raging and wild. It smells of the wood. Brambles twist out of nothing, coiling around her, pulling tight.

  “Seren!”

  I blink, and the wind and brambles are gone, and she’s gone with them.

  My life leaks red from my chest. I’m not strong enough to haul myself from the iron table without crumpling to the floor. So I lie here, propped up on my elbow, gasping for air like a fish.

  She saved me. I don’t know how or why. But she saved me.

  And now she’s gone.

  The king radiates anger like pulsing heat. He paces between the iron table and the place the branches wrapped around her and spirited her away. Leaves swirl on some invisible wind. Leaves and violets.

  She is all I can think about.

  Peeling potatoes in the kitchen. A tray of food in the stables when I could barely move. Hiding under the couch waiting for the nobleman to leave, the feel of her hand caught fast in mine. Dancing in the courtyard to the distant strain of the orchestra.

  Kissing her like the world was ending, like there would never be another moment to truly live.

  I didn’t know there really wouldn’t be.

  I press my hands against the gaping wound in my chest, trying to staunch the blood. It leaks through my fingers, slippery and hot.

  Too much, too much.

  My head wheels.

  This is what it is, to die.

  Oh God.

  My father’s words whisper through my mind. Do not mourn me, Owen. I am happy. I am with her.

  I will go to them. Father. Mother. But I’ll leave Awela behind. I’ll leave Seren behind.

  I can’t bear it.

  The king crouches in the place where she stood just a moment before, leaves still whirling in the air. Leaves and violets. They settle, slowly, to the floor, and he grabs a fistful, crushing them in his palm. I catch the scent of her: wild, intoxicating power. “I only needed a piece of one,” he says, laughing as he opens his hand. “I should have known what she was. A gift. A sign.” He pours the crushed leaves into an empty glass vial, and corks it.

  He wheels on me, any hint of laughter gone. “What deal did you make with her? What has she done to you?”

  “Nothing,” I rasp. “Nothing.” The world is going hazy at the edges.

  He grabs my shoulders, shakes me hard. “There is wood magic in you. Your soul is protected. WHAT DEAL DID YOU MAKE WITH HER?”

  He shoves me off the table, and I land with a jolt on the floor. Pain rushes up to swallow me. Blood slides between my fingers.

  He kicks me in the side and I scream as a rib snaps.

  “Worthless,” he snarls. “You are worthless to me!” He paces over to the desk, grabs one of the ancient star charts, drags his fingers over the crumbly parchment. “I can wait for a new soul. I’ll find a way to undo whatever it is she did to you. Wood magic, that’s all I need. But until then, I’ll make do without one. I will defeat her with a power older than souls. I will devour her, and burn her wood, and see all that she ever loved turn to ash.”

  I convulse on the floor. Darkness presses in.

  The king stalks to the table where he bound me, climbs up onto it himself.

  I try to breathe. I try to cling to consciousness. I don’t want to bleed out on the floor. Not when she was here. Not when she saved me. Again.

  Dancing in the courtyard, the wind in her hair.

  Kissing her under the stars, her heat wending through me.

  Now she’s gone and gone and gone.

  I struggle for my last breaths. They fill my ragged lungs, sharp as knives.

  The king cries out, and I glance up to see him driving the metal claw into his own chest.
He shouts a word to the sky, and the ceiling explodes.

  Glass and light rain down. Heat sizzles and sears.

  Somehow, through the blur of pain and confusion, I understand.

  King Elynion has given up the remains of the Gwydden’s soul for the power she wielded when she changed the stars.

  Now the stars rush into him, light blazing into his chest and under his skin. He burns with it. I think he cannot possibly contain it all.

  The light comes and comes. It will consume him. It will be the last thing I ever see.

  But it stops, as suddenly as it started. The floor is a desert of broken glass.

  The king lives.

  He rips the iron from his chest, and laughs with pleasure as the wound heals itself, pulsing with light. He teems with impossible power.

  He climbs from the table, hauls me to my feet. I can’t stand on my own and I sag in his grip.

  His hand is hot enough to burn through the ragged remains of my sleeves. But I can’t jerk away. He smiles, and there are stars inside of him, light slipping through the cracks in his teeth. The rough patches of his flesh are smoothed over now. He seems to grow younger before my eyes.

  “I have been a fool for far too long,” he says. “I should not have held so tight to the witch’s soul.”

  “I thought that was what gave you your power. Your long life.”

  “At first,” he agrees. His voice sounds as if it’s coming from a great distance away. “But I have long since learned my own useful bits of sorcery.”

  My vision blurs. My heart slows. I’m slipping away, and I’ll never see her again.

  Heat sears through my chest, tearing a scream from my throat. I open my eyes to see the king has touched my wound, commanded my flesh to knit itself back together.

  “My dear Owen,” he says. “I can’t let you die here. I still mean to have your soul, you know. And now I have everything I need.”

  I shudder as I come back to myself. He didn’t heal my broken rib or the wounds in my leg and my face. My whole body is embedded with shards of glass from the exploded ceiling. The pain seems almost more acute, now that the mortal wound is gone.

  “Everything you need to take my soul?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Everything I need to catch a tree siren. A piece of one—” He taps the vial of crushed leaves. “And something to use as bait.” He smiles at me with everything but his horrible, horrible eyes. “I have both.”

  The king drags me to the prison himself—for all his healing of me, I can barely walk. Every breath sends pain stabbing through my broken rib, and if I don’t dig the glass out of my leg soon—

  I stumble along the same path I took barely a few hours ago to see my father. Through the prison courtyard, where Drystan regards me with shock and horror, down the long flight of stairs. All the while the king doesn’t let go of my arm. The heat of him has lessened now, but I can sense it lurking, a beast ready to rear its head at his word.

  He hauls me down the row of cells, to the place where my father drew his last breaths. His body is gone. No trace of him left.

  The king opens the door to the cell across from my father’s. He throws me in, and I collapse with a grunt. Tears leak from my eyes. I don’t attempt to lift my head. “How long?” I ask, and hate myself for it. I don’t even know what I’m asking, exactly. How long will he keep me here? How long do I have to live?

  He smiles at me in the flickering torchlight. “Until I have need of you, Owen Merrick.”

  I shut my eyes. I turn away.

  The cell rattles as he shuts the door. The key grates in the lock.

  His footsteps fade down the corridor.

  I am alone in the dark.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  SEREN

  BLOOD DRIPS

  from my mother’s horns.

  Her face is peeling, caught in the midst of

  shedding her skin.

  She is clothed in briars,

  wrapped about her like shiny, lethal snakes.

  She used her power to pull me down from the tower,

  away from Owen and the Soul Eater.

  Now,

  she

  will

  kill

  me.

  She grabs my shoulder, her claws digging deep.

  She hauls me upright,

  holds me so my feet dangle helplessly

  while my shoulder tears and

  blood

  pours

  down

  my

  arm.

  She shrieks at me: “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” She drags her other hand across my face, gouging deep cuts on both cheeks.

  She slams me to the ground

  and I cannot breathe.

  Stars wheel

  before my eyes.

  I am afraid.

  I

  have

  never

  been

  so

  afraid.

  “You’ve been to see them.” She tugs a briar from her dress and uses it to roughly bind my wrists. “Your brothers.”

  The thorns pierce my flesh.

  My blood pours

  amber and red into the grass:

  the last drops

  of my humanity.

  “I can smell the stink of them on you, smell the monstrous, blasphemous form you wore, the form that still clings to you like moss. And why? Why? Because you were protecting a human boy!”

  Dew leaks

  from my eyes.

  I gulp

  and gulp for air.

  My mother says: “I know. I KNOW! The trees have been watching you, and they told me when I asked. They told me that not only did you spare his life once, but you spared it again and again and again. That you hid him from your sisters, that you invited him into your bed.”

  I say: “I kissed him. I kissed him twice, and that is all.”

  I can still feel

  the press

  of his lips.

  Their warmth.

  Their softness.

  The scratch of the stubble on his chin.

  My mother yanks another briar from her dress. She lashes me across the stomach. Thorns tear through the maid’s uniform and into the tender bark of my belly.

  A scream tears out of me.

  Amber and red.

  Sap and blood.

  Screaming.

  All mine.

  She hisses at me. “You DARE, you DARE to love a HUMAN, and then become LIKE him? You DARE?”

  She binds my ankles with yet another briar.

  She slings me across her shoulder

  like the flour sacks the kitchen boys

  haul in every morning.

  My face and body fall

  against her thorny dress,

  and I cannot tell the night air apart

  from the raging, fiery pain.

  Each step she takes

  is another brittle agony.

  I whisper to the briars: “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the wood, daughter.”

  “That is where you will kill me?”

  Dew mingles

  with the blood on my face.

  The fear

  is eating

  me.

  She carries me on through the darkness. “That is where you will feel every ounce of your betrayal. That is where you will die.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  OWEN

  I AM CONTENT TO DIE DOWN HERE. I WANT TO. I WELCOME IT. My body grows stiff on the hard floor. A chill seeps into my bones. I let my mind drift away. I think of the wind through the trees, of Awela cuddling close under my chin. I think of violets and fireflies. Of stars and cinnamon tea. It hurts to breathe, to move, to think of anything beyond these brief images.

  But there’s a scrape of boots on stone. A jingle of keys. The cell door swinging smoothly open.

  Someone kneels beside me. Puts an arm under my head.

  “Merrick, I need you to sit up.”

  “Go away.” Th
e words rasp out of me.

  “Merrick.” Arms pull me upright, prop me against the cell wall.

  I open my eyes. Drystan is here, torchlight glancing off the brass buttons on his coat. To my shock, Rheinallt is with him. I stare at my pale-haired friend.

  “His Majesty didn’t leave any instructions against a physician,” explains Drystan.

  “Didn’t order one either,” Rheinallt adds dryly. “But here I am all the same. Where are you hurt?”

  “My leg,” I breathe. “And I think a broken rib.”

  Rheinallt frowns at the bloody hole in the front of my shirt. “What happened there?”

  I start to shake my head and think better of it. “Too hard to explain.”

  “Be quick,” says Drystan. “I’ll come to let you out when you’re done.” He retreats into the corridor, locking the cell behind him. I wonder how many times tonight he’s directly or indirectly disobeyed orders.

  Rheinallt pulls a flask from the physician’s bag he brought with him, and presses it into my hands. “Drink up. This won’t feel great.”

  He digs the glass out of my leg, piece by piece. Every shard is another small agony. But one drink from the flask is enough for me—it burns all the way down into my gut and makes me cough.

  Rheinallt spreads salve on the cuts when he’s finished, and wraps a clean bandage around my leg. He presses gently on my rib cage, and I swallow a scream when his fingers find the broken bones.

  “Not much I can do for the rib, I’m afraid, besides bandage it. Sorry, Merrick.”

  He does that, too, and the bandage at least makes me feel less like I’m going to fall apart at any moment.

  He crouches back on his heels. “What happened?”

  I can’t tell him about the king. No one else needs to die because of what my father saw in the stars. “My father’s dead. I … confronted the king.”

  Rheinallt lets out a colorful oath, clearly impressed. “Bold, Merrick.”

  Drystan appears at the cell door, and unlocks it. “Time to go.”

  Rheinallt gives me an apologetic look, and steps out into the corridor. For a moment, neither man moves.

  “Rumor has it the army is marching soon,” Rheinallt tells me. “The king means to face the Gwydden. Defeat her, once and for all.”

  I shudder at the memory of stars and glass raining down on Elynion.

  “Baines thinks we’ll march to our deaths. No one can stand against the wood. Against the sirens.”