Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  I see a flash of yellow eyes. Of bodies snapped in two with silver hands.

  “The king wouldn’t march without a plan,” I say. “He wouldn’t march unless he thought he could win.”

  Stars and souls. My fingers go to my chest, where the king healed a mortal wound with a simple touch.

  “I hope you’re right, Merrick,” says Rheinallt. “And I hope you’ll get out of there in time to march with us.”

  I give him a grimace that’s meant to be a smile, and then Drystan escorts Rheinallt out of the prison, up into the freedom of night air.

  I lean against the cell wall and shut my eyes, but I can’t find the haze of pain anymore. I can’t feel the insistent pull of death.

  I can’t shut out the memory of my father’s last breath, of the life winking out of him, of his body going limp in my arms.

  I bow my head into my knees, and sob.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  SEREN

  MY MOTHER BINDS ME WITH BRIARS TO THE HEARTLESS tree.

  I am pierced, every part of me,

  a thousand small agonies.

  I bleed and I bleed,

  until all the human blood has run out

  and only sap pours from my veins.

  Even then, she does not let me go.

  Even then, she does not kill me.

  Around me

  the world darkens and lightens

  again and again.

  I do not know how many times.

  I cannot think clearly.

  All is pain

  and sticky sap.

  Once, it rains.

  For a few precious moments

  I am washed clean

  and the pain ebbs away.

  But my mother comes hissing with displeasure.

  She commands the tree to grow a wide branch over me

  so I cannot feel the rain.

  She commands the briars to pull tighter and tighter until I scream.

  She pulls them tighter still.

  The rain stops. Night comes.

  Then dawn, blurred and silver.

  My mother returns, singing a command to the briars.

  They loosen enough to let me breathe a little easier.

  She smiles. Her teeth spark

  with the power

  of a newly consumed soul.

  She commands: “Sing, daughter. There is a village a league off, brimming with souls. Draw them to me. Sing.”

  I say: “No,” and even this simple word

  scrapes against my throat

  like broken ice.

  She squeezes her hand into a fist. She laughs. “It was not a request, little fool. Now sing.”

  My heart does not belong to her any longer,

  but my will is still wholly hers.

  She drags my song from me with her power.

  It rips my mouth open,

  tears the music from deep inside of me.

  I can do nothing to stop it.

  I cannot twist my head, cannot press my bound hands over my mouth.

  I fight against her

  with every heartbeat,

  but it is not enough.

  I sing

  and sing

  and sing.

  After a time, the villagers come. They have walked very far. They are young and old and in between.

  My mother slaughters them

  one

  by

  one.

  She forces my eyes to stay open,

  forces me to watch

  as she feeds their souls

  into the heartless tree.

  I cannot stop her.

  I cannot do anything.

  The earth swallows the bodies,

  choked

  with

  bones.

  At last my mother opens her fist,

  and my song is cut off.

  She leaves me pinned to the heartless tree.

  Dew pours down my cheeks.

  If Owen were here,

  he would be ashamed of me.

  If he were here,

  I would ask him

  to drive a knife

  into

  my

  heart.

  My sisters come to laugh at me.

  I have rarely seen them all together.

  They are a copse of monsters,

  a strange garden blooming in their hair:

  foxglove and aster and thistle,

  nettles and celandine and daisies.

  Last of all, my sister with roses in her hair.

  She waits. She watches.

  My other sisters spit in my face.

  They order the briars to squeeze tighter.

  They shove berries down my throat that are poisonous to humans.

  They make me drink brackish water.

  They laugh and laugh.

  Because none of these things can kill me in this monstrous form.

  And our mother will not let me die.

  Not yet.

  The sister with thistles in her hair says: “You are weak, little sister. You are foolish and reckless and weak.”

  The sister with celandine adds: “A human boy! All this, for a human boy!”

  They run out of ways to torment me. They grow tired of their fun. They fade back into the wood.

  All but the sister with roses in her hair. She says: “I told you to run. I told you to run far and fast away, but you lingered. For a worthless boy.”

  Dust motes dance

  in a shaft of sunlight.

  Bees drink nectar from her roses.

  I say: “He is not worthless.”

  She sneers: “Do you think he will come and save you?”

  My heart beats

  sluggish,

  slow,

  heavy with emptiness,

  glutted with pain. “No. But you could.”

  She blinks at me. “I helped you once before. I will not degrade myself that way again.”

  “Then why are you still standing here?”

  The wood shivers around us, every leaf listening.

  I say: “Let me loose. Come away with me. Help me find a way to defeat our mother.”

  “There is no defeating her.”

  “You know she is evil. You know she is cruel. We can stop her together. We can become something more.”

  “Human?” she mocks me.

  “Perhaps.” It is hard to breathe and hard to speak; my sisters bound the briars too tight.

  There is pity in her face.

  I say: “Please. Please help me.”

  For a moment I think she will.

  I feel her heart,

  reaching out to mine.

  But she shakes her head, and a cold wind rattles the leaves in her hair. “You brought this upon yourself, little sister. If you cannot bear it, that is not my fault.”

  She slips back into the wood.

  I am once more

  alone.

  But the briars loosen, more than they have since my mother bound me.

  I sag to the ground, dig my hands into the earth.

  I reach out for the wood; I call to the trees. Help me, I plead. Rise against her.

  But the trees

  do not listen.

  They belong wholly,

  irrevocably,

  to her.

  I reach out for my brothers, in their wild dwelling place far away. Cangen, Criafol, Pren. Help me stop her. Please.

  But my brothers do not come.

  I reach out for Owen, but I cannot find him. He is far from the wood.

  The sun rises and sets

  again and again.

  My mother and sisters do not come to me,

  but I do not dare to think

  I have been forgotten.

  The briars yet bind me to the heartless tree,

  choking away my power.

  I cannot get free of them.

  The wood grows day by day.

  I can sense it

  in the spaces

  where t
he pain

  does not reach,

  the glimmerings of light

  between shadows.

  Growing and growing.

  Blazing with souls.

  It creeps toward the king and his palace.

  It devours everything in its path.

  I live,

  I bleed,

  I wait.

  Then one morning, my mother comes to me.

  She strips the briars from my body.

  She tells me

  we are going

  to war.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  OWEN

  DAYS PASS IN THE DARK OF THE KING’S PRISON. I’M NOT SURE how many. Drystan brings me food sometimes. Rheinallt comes once to change the bandage on my leg.

  I grow stronger. I grow restless.

  There is far, far too much time.

  To think. To fear. To rage.

  I pace the cell, over and over until my legs ache. I try to sleep. But nightmares chase sleep away. It’s better to be awake.

  I pray that Awela is safe, and far from here.

  I try not to think about Bedwyn. About Seren.

  I can’t reconcile what she did. What she is. What, somehow, she still means to me.

  Bedwyn wasn’t real, and yet—

  And yet you kissed a monster, says a voice inside my head. You kissed a monster, and you don’t want to let her go.

  Not a monster, I tell myself stubbornly. Not anymore. She saved me. She defied her mother and saved me so many times.

  But now—

  What?

  My mother is dead, ash in the wood.

  My father is gone, buried somewhere in the cold earth.

  Awela is out of my reach.

  And Seren isn’t here.

  She isn’t here.

  I wish she were.

  I wish she would have told me, when there was still time, that she was Seren. That she’d come back to me.

  But would I have listened?

  I pace the cell. I count the stones in the walls. I trace constellations in the spots of rust on the bars.

  I’m afraid for her. I think the Gwydden pulled her back into the wood. I think she’s in danger. But I’m powerless to save her—we are, both of us, on our own.

  I dream one night of the king, sailing through the stars, the Gwydden lashed to the prow of his ship as a living figurehead. Below the stars the wood is burning. Seren is burning. The flames eat the silver-white form of her; her skin and hair pop and crack like peat in a fire. Violets shriek and shrivel. She turns all to ash, and the wind blows her away.

  I wake with a start to the distant pulse of drums. The brassy call of a trumpet.

  And, a little while later, boots on stone, coming toward me.

  I jerk upright, pulse raging.

  But it isn’t the king.

  It’s Baines and Rheinallt, a torch held between them.

  I stare. “What the hell are you two doing here?”

  Baines takes the torch while Rheinallt fumbles with a ring of keys.

  “Came to rescue you, idiot,” says Baines.

  Rheinallt fits a key into the lock, but it’s clearly the wrong one. He curses and tries another one.

  “Where’s the guard?” I ask.

  Rheinallt finds the right key. He unlocks the door. “Drugged him. Come on.”

  I feel a pang of regret for Drystan, if he’s the one on duty. I don’t move. “I’m not getting you in trouble.”

  “It won’t matter,” says Baines grimly. “We’re going to war against the wood. Didn’t you hear the drums? No one will notice if you’re not here.”

  “The king will notice. And if he finds out who let me go—he’ll tear you apart.”

  Rheinallt utters a string of increasingly colorful words until Baines claps a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “You really want to stay there?” Baines says.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t,” says Rheinallt. “Come fight with us. Help us send the witch and her wood back to Hell where she belongs.” There’s an intensity in his pale eyes that startles me.

  Baines is still, solemn, his dark skin melding into the shadows. “Die with us, he means. No one can fight against the wood and live.”

  I sag against the wall. “Thank you for coming to save me. But you have to go now. Before you get caught. Please.”

  For a moment, I think my friends are going to drag me from the cell. But they don’t. They salute me, first Baines, then Rheinallt, right fists to left shoulders.

  “Don’t die,” I tell them.

  Baines grimaces, but Rheinallt smiles. “You either.”

  And then they’re gone, back down the corridor, back up the stairs.

  I slump to the floor. I’m a fool. But I know the king isn’t done with me yet. If I’d gone with them, he would have found us. He would have ripped their souls from their bodies, cast their husks to the ground. I couldn’t do that to them.

  Somehow I’m expecting the footsteps that approach my cell barely half an hour later.

  I’m not surprised to lift my head and see the king through the bars, dressed for war in old-fashioned gold plate armor that’s maybe as ancient as he is. He wrenches the cell door from its hinges, not bothering with a key. He hauls me up by one arm, pulls me into the corridor. “It’s time,” he says.

  I try not to feel the awful heat of him. I try to tamp down my fear. “For what?”

  “To catch a siren. To raze a wood. To kill a witch.” He grins at me, a flash of white teeth. “To unbind your soul, so I can swallow it.”

  He drags me up the stairs, out into blinding starlight.

  It isn’t yet dawn.

  Torches burn in the darkness, spilling out beyond my sightline, an army of raging stars: Tarian’s army—ready to march.

  King Elynion stands on the hill before them. His armor makes the torchlight writhe and shiver, or perhaps the fire cannot stand the heat of him, and strains to get away. He has not bound me—he doesn’t need to. He crackles with power. With stars. If he snapped his fingers, I think I might burst into flame.

  Four of his own personal guards stand with us, their eyes glittering under their helmets.

  “Soldiers of Tarian!” Elynion shouts down the hill to the waiting army. “This is the day of our triumph! The day we take back what is ours, the day we grind the witch into the dirt under our heels and burn her wicked trees to ashes. She will no longer shadow our land! No longer fill us with fear! She will be a blight upon Tarian no more!”

  The answering shout rolls up the hill like thunder, the whole of the army speaking as one: “NO MORE!”

  “Death to the witch!” cries the king. “Death to her trees!” He thrusts his sword high into the air.

  The army screams back, “DEATH!”

  Then Elynion sheathes his sword, grabs my arm, and drags me down the hill. A huge black horse waits for him there, with other mounts for his guards. There is no horse for me. The king and his guards swing into their saddles, and the king fixes me with his horrible eyes. “Keep up, Merrick.” He kicks his horse into motion; the guards follow suit.

  “Better do as he says.”

  I look back to see the guard Luned on a horse of her own, a pair of unlit torches strapped to her saddle. Commander Carys is with her, and the whole of the army marches at their heels.

  Luned hefts me up behind her, and then we’re hurtling after the king, wind and darkness rushing by.

  All is pain and fear, an eerie bend to the world, like I’m caught in a nightmare I can’t escape from. I don’t have my musket or my sword, not even a knife. I can’t shut out the king’s words, whispering eternally through my mind: To unbind your soul, so I can swallow it. Will I die like my mother, an empty shell? Will I turn to ash for the wind to blow away?

  We’ve been riding less than an hour when the wood looms suddenly ahead of us—the wood I know is supposed to be miles and miles from here. A chill crawls down my spine.

  Luned
reins in her horse just behind Elynion and his guards, who have stopped on the very edge of the trees. Wind shudders through the branches, making the leaves scrape and chatter. The king swings to the ground. He glances back. His eyes meet mine. “Come,” he says.

  I climb from the saddle in a daze, my feet drawing me to the king, though my mind is screaming for me to turn, to run.

  He steps past the border of the trees. I follow like a dog on a lead. The guards stay behind.

  The wood is silent. Eerily so. Stars wink through chinks in the tree canopy. King Elynion carries no torch; he doesn’t need one—light sparks between his fingers.

  We stop at the base of an ash tree, tall and dark and strong. The king lifts his hands, slashes them in a sideways motion, and a shaft of impossibly bright light cleaves the tree in two. For a moment the trunk shudders, unsure, before toppling backward. It lands with a resounding thud that shakes the earth.

  Elynion regards his handiwork with a smile. “Let’s see what kind of fish will bite.” He draws a glass vial from his breast pocket. A vial filled with crushed leaves.

  Suddenly I’m more afraid even than I was in the observatory, with Elynion’s machine boring into my chest and stars and glass raining down.

  Now I have everything I need to catch a tree siren, the king said. A piece of one. And something to use as bait.

  I stare at the newly hewn stump, a yawning pit of horror engulfing me.

  I am numb as the king drags me to the stump, as he binds me with rough cords that cut into my chest and press against my broken rib. I am too afraid to feel the pain. “What are you going to do?” I choke out. “What are you going to do when—”

  “When I catch one?” Elynion laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re sentimental about the witch’s bloodthirsty monsters! I couldn’t very well lead my army against the wood without some means of protecting them, you know. And to do that, I need a siren. What does it matter what happens to it?”

  There’s a fire in my chest and I can’t breathe, can’t breathe.

  I flinch when he draws a knife against my arm, as the skin breaks, as blood drips hot.

  Beyond the wood, the sun is rising. In its first rays of light, I notice from somewhere outside of myself that the leaves are just beginning to turn. Summer is gone. Autumn has crept in without me realizing.

  The trees shiver in a wind I do not feel. Blood runs down my arm and I am numb, so numb. The world goes black around the edges.

  A thread of song cuts through the haze, and I am suddenly, horribly, aware.