Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  and it seems

  all the world

  rages because of them.

  They stare at each other.

  For long heartbeats, they only stare.

  My mother seems to tremble before him,

  a leaf in a storm.

  Surely she does not fear the Eater.

  And yet—

  her power in me weakens.

  Owen gasps for breath in the grass. He lies near the body of a girl hardly older than he is. The trees killed her. Killed all of them.

  I did not stop it.

  On the hill, the Eater still stares at my mother. “I had forgotten what a hideous monster you are.”

  My mother bares her teeth. She pulses with rage, and something else I do not understand: sorrow. “You did not think so, once. There was a time when you were not ashamed to kiss a monster in the dark.”

  The Eater laughs at her. “You are wrong, witch. You have never been anything to me but a thorn in my heel. I have only been finding a sharp enough knife to cut you out.”

  My mother stands tall and cold in the rain.

  I do not know

  how the Eater

  does not quake before her.

  Her voice is deep with danger,

  with the promise of his death.

  “I wished for you to come with repentance in your eyes. Even after all this time, we could have mended what was torn. We could have been so powerful, together. No one could have stood against us.”

  The Eater sneers. “Do not think I come powerless to meet you.”

  He calls down a piece of star. It dances in his hand. It flashes white.

  He hurls it to the ground, and

  it bursts in a blaze of fire,

  scorching the grass at my mother’s feet.

  “Do not think I fear your pathetic show of magic, fool. You say I am a thorn. So I will be a thorn.” My mother waves her hand.

  The heartless lion leaps at the Eater,

  knocks him to the ground.

  “And do not think I have forgotten you, daughter.” My mother’s attention fixes suddenly on me.

  I cower under her gaze.

  “I told you. To kill him.” She snaps a word at the sky.

  Her power sears through me, forces me to turn, to go back to Owen.

  Beyond him, beyond the bodies and the burning trees, my brothers battle the wood. Everything screams.

  The rain

  falls

  on

  and

  on.

  My mother roars: “KILL HIM!”

  I am hurled toward Owen. Branches shoot from my arms, my hands. They pierce him through. Wrap around his throat. Squeeze.

  I fight her control with everything that is in me.

  But I am helpless against her.

  I cannot save him.

  I am undone by his eyes.

  They are clear, bright.

  He looks at me as if he trusts me.

  As if I am not choking the life out of him.

  I weep

  as

  I

  kill

  him.

  But I do not shut my eyes.

  I will not look away

  in the moment

  of his death.

  It is all I can give him.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  OWEN

  I WANT TO TELL HER SO MANY THINGS, BUT I DON’T HAVE THE breath to say them. So I just look at her. I look at her, and will her to understand.

  That I don’t blame her.

  That I’m glad we had all those nights together under the stars: in the wood, on the wall.

  That I hope she will remember me, when I am gone.

  Pain swallows me.

  I can’t breathe, can’t—

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  SEREN

  HIS SOUL DIMS.

  His heart quiets.

  Rain and tears blind me.

  My mother’s focus wanders from me

  enough that I

  retract the branches piercing him through.

  He gasps and chokes.

  Blood seeps from his wounds.

  But he lives, he lives.

  Behind us, the Soul Eater slides in the mud. The heartless lion lunges at him.

  The Eater shouts a word to the sky and a slice of star jolts through the heartless lion, ripping it in half.

  My mother screams

  in anguish,

  in rage.

  She calls branches up from the earth, sharp as blades.

  She hurls them at the Eater,

  one

  by

  one.

  He shrieks: “You cannot win! I will eat your heart like I ate your soul, and I will live, and you will die, and no one will remember you.”

  My mother spits: “You FOOL. When I have killed you, I will grind your bones to powder and drive them into the earth with my heel. You are nothing before me. You are a worm.”

  The Eater rages against my mother.

  My mother rages back.

  There comes the noise of thundering hoofbeats:

  another army, coming across the plain to meet the ragged

  remnants of the Eater’s forces.

  They collide with the wood and my snarling sisters. They wield torches and swords.

  The trees ignite.

  Despite the rain, they burn.

  All is smoke and fire and screaming.

  All is blood and stars.

  My mother’s power still holds me.

  Owen lives. But she will not let me release him.

  He dangles before me.

  His blood mingles with the rain. It runs a watery red into the

  grass.

  Through storm and heat and trees I see Pren’s face: his piercing eyes, his mossy beard.

  His voice echoes in my mind: To become wholly as you are, you must give up the thing you hold most dear.

  I stare at Owen,

  alive

  but

  dying

  in my arms.

  My heart beats within my chest.

  But it is too late.

  My human form is gone.

  I cannot get it back again.

  You must give up the thing you hold most dear.

  “Owen.” His name chokes out of me. The Eater’s spell is waning.

  His eyes focus on mine.

  Somehow he has the strength

  to raise his hand

  to cup my cheek,

  to smooth his fingers along the ridges of my skin.

  I tell him: “I am sorry about your mother. I am sorry about everything. I wanted to be more than a monster. I tried to choose. But I was not strong enough to fight her. I was not strong enough—”

  “You have always been strong.” His voice is thin and weak. His bright soul fades bit by bit.

  He is dying and dying, and

  it

  is

  all

  my

  fault.

  My tears drown me.

  I wonder if the roaring I hear is outside of me,

  or if it merely

  rages

  inside my own head.

  He smiles. Blood and rain run down his lips.

  The flaming trees paint him in orange light.

  He says: “You’re not a monster.”

  Pain blooms through me as my mother forces another branch to push out from my hands, to pierce his shoulder.

  He cries out in

  agony.

  I cannot bear

  his eyes.

  I cannot bear

  his touch.

  I cannot bear

  him dying

  in my arms

  because

  I

  am

  killing

  him

  even now.

  You must carve out your heart, and bury it in the green earth.

  I push through my tears,

  through the yawning horror

  that engulfs me.
>
  “Owen.”

  He whispers: “Seren. I—I love you.”

  The light dims in his eyes.

  It might already be

  too late.

  I say: “You have my heart.”

  I thrust him away from me

  and plunge my hand

  into my chest.

  His voice is far away as

  he screams

  my name.

  I hardly hear him.

  My life is beating in my hands,

  warm

  soft

  wet.

  I count the pulses:

  one

  two

  three

  four.

  And then I tear it out.

  I crumple to the ground,

  my heart

  in

  my

  hand.

  For one single moment more, I am aware.

  There is the rain,

  the grass,

  the burning wood.

  Then

  there

  is

  nothing.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  OWEN

  A ROAR TEARS OUT OF ME AS SHE SLIDES TO THE GROUND, HER bloody heart in her hand. The rain falls on and on. For a heartbeat she stares up into the sky. Then a horrible stillness steals over her face, and her eyes grow dim.

  Too late I am beside her, my knees digging into the mud. I take her hand, thread her fingers through mine. But already she is stiff and cold. Her skin peels up, more like tree bark than I have ever seen it. The violets and leaves in her hair are brittle, dead. Her heart is still cradled in her other hand, rain and blood stirring into the ground.

  “Seren. Seren, please.” Ragged sobs wrack my whole body as my own blood leaks from the places she pierced me. I’ve lost too much. I’m lightheaded, weak. She ripped out her heart to free herself from the Gwydden’s will. She ripped out her heart to save me.

  I loved her.

  And now she’s gone.

  She’s gone.

  My head wheels. I can’t think, can’t feel.

  How can she be gone?

  She’s just a body now. Dead in the mud.

  I can’t bear it.

  I can’t see through my tears.

  “Please.” I rub her cold hand, desperate for it to warm, for her to stir. “Seren, please.”

  But she just lies there.

  Dead

  Dead

  Dead.

  Behind me, the wood burns. Another army has come to join the fight—an army wearing violet and white. Dimly, I know those colors belong to Gwaed, the country across the mountain. I don’t know how or why they’re here. But without them, Tarian would already be lost to the Gwydden’s trees.

  Before me, the Gwydden is locked in mortal combat with King Elynion.

  I understand now, as I did not before, what it will mean if the king is triumphant, if he kills the Gwydden in the mud. There will be no more check upon his power. No need for him to hide behind his walls and pay a man like my father to read the stars to warn him of his impending death. He will burn the wood to the ground. He will conquer Gwaed, and Saeth too. He will cross the sea when he is done, and all the realms of the world will fall to him. He is no better than the Gwydden. He does not bear the form of a monster—only the heart of one.

  I see my father, bloody and dead in his prison cell, his chest riddled with holes from Elynion’s machine. His voice echoes through my mind: There is a way to save her. There is a way to stop all of this. It’s what the stars have been telling us, all this time.

  My heart constricts as I stare down at Seren. She deserved so much more than this. She was so much more. She tore out her heart to save me, and I refuse to let her die in vain.

  You must only give back what he stole, and what she sacrificed.

  I shake as I bend to kiss Seren’s forehead, cold and rough against my lips. I weep as I bid her farewell.

  But when I pick myself up off the ground and limp the muddy steps to where the Gwydden and the king battle with trees and stars, the tears have gone. My spine is straight. Not even my fingers tremble.

  Then her curse will be broken, and all will be as it was.

  The Gwydden has beaten the king back, her face and arms seared with angry welts. The stars do not come so easily at his call anymore. He stumbles, falls into the mud.

  She hisses as she causes vines to curl up out of the earth, to wrap around his wrists, his waist, his ankles. His face is blanched of color, but he presses his thin lips hard together. He will not grovel before her when she kills him. He will not bend to her anger. He will not admit to his guilt.

  “Gwydden.”

  The wood witch turns to look at me, and I’m nearly undone by her brutal stare.

  It’s Seren’s sacrifice that gives me the strength to stand unshaken before her. That gives me the boldness to stare straight into her horrible eyes and not blanch, the courage or the stupidity to kneel in the mud and say what I say to her.

  “You cannot take back what he stole from you.” I nod at the king, who writhes on the ground, all the color gone from his face. “He’s used up your soul, every piece of it.”

  “As I have used up my heart,” the Gwydden sneers. “My worthless daughter wasted her life on you.”

  I am not deterred. “Take my soul instead. Take it freely. Let it burn inside of you in place of your own. Let it fill you up, make you whole again.”

  She turns all her focus on me, and the fear is back, crawling up my spine and tingling in my fingers. But I force myself not to quail.

  “I have taken many souls. I will take many more, before my wood has grown over all the earth.”

  “Yes, but you have taken none for your own. You have fed them into the wood, given it the power to grow and grow and grow. You did not want those souls. You wanted yours. You wanted the one that was stolen from you—it was the only one that would suit you. But now you see not even that will satisfy you anymore.”

  Her glance shifts to the king, dying in agony on the ground as rain runs off his worthless plate armor.

  “Take my soul,” I say. “Take it freely.” I know now why my mother protected my soul against the king. She was protecting it for this moment. For this reason.

  I see the Gwydden consider it, the hardness on her strange face, the astuteness in her dark eyes. “Why would you give me your soul?”

  “Because what he did to you was wrong. Because everyone deserves a chance to make it right. Because I suspect that a soul freely given will burn stronger inside you than one ripped away. And because Seren is gone, and I could not give my soul to her.”

  The Gwydden frowns. “Seren? Who is Seren?”

  My shoulders stiffen. My heart constricts. “Your youngest daughter.”

  She looks past me to Seren’s form, still and cold in the muddy grass, and if the Gwydden feels anything for her, it doesn’t show. “My daughter has no name save Fool.”

  The king whimpers and gurgles, his eyes rolling back into his head. He was so mighty, and now he is nothing.

  Impassively, the Gwydden watches Elynion die, one last sharpened branch thrust through his heart. When his body goes limp, her branches release him, and he crumples to the ground. She crosses the short distance between them, and crouches beside him. She smooths the hair on his brow, closes his eyes with gentle fingers.

  I don’t understand how the Gwydden can be gentle.

  She puts his hands on his chest and begins to sing, a simple melody that twists into the air. A wisp rises out of him, a simple coil of smoke that is there and then gone in an instant, washed away by the rain.

  The Gwydden turns back to me, and the sorrow on her face nearly unravels me. How can she feel sorrow for the man she killed? The man she’s hated for centuries?

  And yet clearly, she does.

  “You are right,” she says. “There is nothing left of his soul.” She looks to the battle that rages on between the burning wood and the Gwaed army. Thre
e strange tree-like creatures are fighting, too. Not with the wood—against it.

  “Then will you take mine?” I ask her.

  “It would kill you.”

  I shrug. “I would not want to live without a soul.” I wince at my words—that is what the Gwydden has done. That is what Seren has done. What my mother did, for over a year. Grief wrenches me.

  The Gwydden looks suddenly smaller, like all the fight and the anger has gone out of her with the death of the king. “I will take your soul,” she says. “If you will give it to me.”

  I nod. My throat is dry, my body chilled through. I pace to where Seren lies, and kneel beside her in the blood that has spilled out from her heart. It is dark around her, almost indistinguishable from the mud. A single shredded violet trembles in her hair.

  The Gwydden follows. She looks down at me with something like pity and something like sorrow. And yet there is hunger in her eyes. “Farewell, boy.”

  A thousand needle-like branches shoot up from the ground, and between one breath and the next, they pierce through me. For an instant, the shock of it numbs the pain, but then it’s there, raging and roaring. I am skewered like an insect on a board. I cannot breathe or see or hear—there are thorns in my nose, my mouth, my eyes. Panic seizes me. There is blood in my mouth, blood pouring from my eyes and down my face. I choke on it.

  Through the haze I sense the Gwydden. I hear her voice in my head: You did not think when you offered your soul. You did not think how much it would hurt.

  I cannot hurt more. I know I cannot.

  And yet I feel her pulling my soul from me, like an arrowhead from a wound. It snags and tears; I don’t know if it’s the protection my mother wove around it, or if my soul simply does not want to leave me. But I tell it to go. I let it go.

  It listens.

  I do not know what shape my soul is. I do not know its essence or its color.

  But when she rips it out of me in one final burst of agonizing, devouring pain, I feel the lack of it. The place it should have been.

  I am empty of everything but pain.

  My heart echoes inside of me like a stone dropped in an empty room.

  You have my heart, whispers the memory of Seren’s voice.

  And you have my soul, I answer her.

  Blackness folds over me.

  I step into the welcoming arms of death.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  OWEN

  A BURST OF PAIN.

  The cold touch of rain on my skin.