Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  The rushing of my soul back into my body, filling up the yawning void.

  And I am not dead.

  My eyes fly open.

  The Gwydden is crouched on her heels, screaming and weeping, her hands pressed against her ears. She shimmers with silver light, but there is blood on her feet and her hands, blood on the bones of her horrible dress.

  And I know with perfect certainty that it is Seren’s blood. That somehow it has saved me.

  That wisp of smoke that came out of the king materializes once again, shrinking to a single kernel of light. It slips into the Gwydden.

  She shrieks, clawing at her hair and her face. The last bit of her soul, returned to her.

  But how?

  Elynion’s corpse shrivels up and turns to dust before my eyes. The rain washes what’s left of him away.

  The Gwydden has grown silent again. She kneels in the mud, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. She rocks back and forth, back and forth. She whimpers like a small child, a frightened puppy.

  Her antlers shrink away into her head until they’re gone. Her skin shifts to a deeper green, mottled with gray. The bones of her dress turn to ash, and she’s left wearing a garment made all of leaves. Flowers grow from the crown of her head. Violets.

  My hand goes to my mouth as I choke back a sob.

  The Gwydden raises her head. She looks young. Fragile. “What’s wrong, boy?”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I’m not dead. Why—”

  “Why your soul came back to you?” says a voice behind me.

  I turn to find one of the tree-like creatures gazing down at me. He has a beard that seems to be made of moss, and his eyes look very sad. “My mother touched my sister’s heartblood, and when that heartblood was tangled up with the powerful protection woven around your soul—”

  “It would not stay within me,” says the Gwydden, with marked bitterness. “It could not. And so all I am left with is the seed of the soul that once belonged to me. A burnt-out, useless husk.”

  “Not altogether useless,” the mossy-bearded creature says. “It has made you into what you once were. The thing you were born as, before the Soul Eater cursed you.”

  Once more, my father’s words echo inside of me. 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. You must only give back what he stole, and what she sacrificed.

  This is what he meant: a heart, a soul. It’s all it took to free the Gwydden. Seren’s heart. My soul.

  But it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. We both of us sacrificed ourselves, but Seren died, and I lived. And here I am. Without her.

  “I am powerless,” whispers the Gwydden. “I am nothing.”

  “You are not nothing,” says the tree creature.

  She looks miserably at the wood, which stands still and silent now, wreathed with smoke in the falling rain. Lifeless, without her power to feed it. The remains of Gwaed’s army stand in a daze, blinking and bewildered. Through the trees come Seren’s six remaining sisters. They are weeping. Begging.

  They turn, one by one, back into the trees they were made from. I blink, and six birches stand all in a line, the rain drenching their dappled leaves.

  The other two tree creatures join the one with the mossy beard, solemn and sad. Slowly, their features freeze, bark creeping up their bodies, faces smoothing away, arms growing longer and splitting off into others. And then they are nothing but three stately pines, all indistinguishable.

  Grief claws up my throat.

  “So pass my daughters,” says the Gwydden, “and so my sons.”

  She looks to me with clear eyes, and I see in her a glimpse of what she must have been, once, when she was young and lost her heart to a boy hardly older than myself.

  “There is only me now, fixed into this life that I no longer desire.”

  “Gwydden—”

  “That is not my name, you know.”

  My heart pulses painfully. “What is your name?”

  “Enaid,” she says.

  It is a bitter name, but a true one. It means soul.

  Enaid lifts her arms to the sky, tilts her head back so the rain washes over her. She has little power left, but enough, it seems, that she can will her own life away. One moment she is there, smiling into the sky.

  The next she is smoke, dissolved on the wind.

  Then I am alone in a field of corpses and wounded soldiers, the Gwaed army and the leaves of the smoldering forest my only company.

  I kneel beside Seren’s body, brushing my fingers across her cold face. It is cruel that I am here and she is not. She was not even afforded the honor of her brothers and sisters. She does not even get to become again the tree she once was. Her body shimmers. It turns to ash. The rain washes it away.

  “NO!” I scramble to grasp the remains of her, but it is impossible to hold onto dust in a rainstorm.

  She is gone and gone and gone.

  I sob, broken, undone. I whisper the name she took for herself. “Seren, Seren, Seren.”

  It does not bring her back.

  But when a pair of Gwaed soldiers take me by my good arm and help me to my feet, I see what she left me: her heart, washed clean by the rain.

  For one breath, two, I think I hear it beating.

  But by the time I scramble to cradle it in my hands, it has gone irrevocably still.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  OWEN

  I BURY SEREN’S HEART ON THE HILL IN THE MIDST OF THE WOOD, where we danced four minutes at a time to the music of my mother’s phonograph. I dig the hole as the sun sets, awkward with my one good arm, and wait until the stars glimmer into being to lay this last piece of her to rest. I made a wooden box for her heart. I carved it with leaves and stars.

  “I still don’t believe you,” I tell her conversationally as I smooth the dirt overtop of her. “I still think you have a soul.”

  I sit with her as the moon rises cold above the tree line. I play my mother’s cello for her. I weep.

  When dawn glimmers silver, I tell her that I have to go away for a little while, because I have to go and fetch my sister. “You remember Awela,” I say. “You watched over her, that day in the woods, instead of killing her. And then when I came, you watched over me, too.” I touch the patch of earth where her heart lies with gentle fingers. My throat constricts. “When I’ve brought her home again, I will come and visit you every single day. I won’t miss even one.” Fresh tears burn my eyes. “Not even in midwinter.”

  Light floods the hill, and my shadow skews stark against the grass. “The wood is quieter, you know.” I swallow. “Without you.”

  I get reluctantly to my feet, and follow the path back through the wood to my parents’ cottage, which is exactly how I left it, save for a layer of dust I’ll attack with soap and rags when I get back with Awela.

  It’s painful to leave the house and the wood, to buy a ticket from Mairwen Griffith and board the train to Breindal City. If I didn’t yearn for Awela, I couldn’t have made myself leave at all.

  The miles blur past the train window, but not as swiftly as I wish. I am still stiff and sore, bandages wound about every inch of my chest. My broken arm hangs useless in a sling. All of me is starting to itch, which the nurse who tended me—the same nurse who once bandaged my lash marks—said would be a good sign. It’s a miracle I survived, she said. I’d lost far too much blood. By rights I should be dead.

  But I’m not. I’m still here.

  God knows there was more work for gravediggers than physicians after the battle with the wood.

  When Rheinallt found me in the medical tent, I was in a bad way. Frantic about Seren’s heart. Frantic about Awela. I explained to Rheinallt that my sister was missing, that I didn’t know where she was, but I thought she must be hidden somewhere near the palace.

  I was desperate to find her, desperate to know she was all right.

  But Rheinallt didn’t miss the way my eyes
refused to stray from the box I held tight in my hands, the box that contained Seren’s heart.

  “I’ll find your sister,” he told me. “I’ll send you a telegram the moment I do. You go and bury your dead.”

  So I’d gone.

  I felt easier when I’d arrived in Blodyn Village to find the telegram already waiting for me. I felt easier still when Seren’s heart lay quiet in the earth.

  And now?

  Now I’m ready to take Awela home.

  The train stops at a village a ways outside of the city—Breindal’s station is in ruins, torn to pieces by the Gwydden’s trees. I hire a horse, hardly dipping into my heavy purse of silver, and ride on toward Breindal.

  Whatever it was that happened that day, when I lost Seren to the wood, the Gwaed army that appeared so unexpectedly saw me as the boy who stood against the Gwydden, and destroyed her. That isn’t the whole truth—it’s hardly even a piece of it. But it was enough to make the Gwaed soldiers—or rather, their leader—give me everything I asked for.

  Breindal City is destroyed. The Gwydden’s Wood marched very far, and corpses lie tumbled about with the stones. There are hardly enough people to clear them, and it will be a long, horrible job. Everywhere are the remnants of Enaid and Elynion’s quarrel. The death and ruin they left behind them.

  But the world is not gone, I think. There is a chance yet, at life, at peace.

  My heart is heavy as I pick my way through the rubble of the city gates, then up the hill to the palace.

  Gwaed flags fly from the roof, a violet sword on a white field. I’m not surprised, but tension squeezes my throat as I climb from the horse and hand the reins to a scrawny stable boy.

  I’m ushered into the same drawing room where I waited so long for the king. This time, I’m barely there a minute before the door opens, and Rheinallt comes in.

  He looks different than he did all those weeks training with Baines and me and the rest of the soldiers. His pale hair is tied back at the nape of his neck. A pair of sapphire earrings flash in the light pouring in through the windows. He’s dressed simply, in the Gwaed violet and white, but that doesn’t disguise the way he holds himself like a king. I wonder I never saw it before.

  Rheinallt didn’t desert Baines that morning. He’d been sent by his parents to spy on Tarian, to learn if there was any truth to the threat of the wood. He left to meet his army, to lead them into battle and come to Tarian’s aid. Turns out it wasn’t an inn Rheinallt was set to inherit—it was a kingdom.

  “Will Tarian be no more, then?” I ask without preamble.

  “Elynion had no heir,” Rheinallt answers apologetically. “I will not lie to you about my parents’ intent. It makes it easier—”

  “That you didn’t actually have to assassinate him.”

  He grimaces.

  “Tarian will be absorbed into Gwaed, then?”

  Rheinallt nods.

  “And the Tarian nobility?”

  “I will do what I can for them, if they swear oaths of loyalty to the Gwaed crown.”

  He doesn’t have to spell out what will happen to them if they do not swear.

  Rheinallt glances out the window, tension in the set of his shoulders. “I’m sorry you won’t stay. I would have you on my council.”

  “I’ve only come for my sister, Rheinallt.”

  He grins. “I know, idiot. Just wanted you to know the offer still stands, if you ever change your mind. And know you always have a friend in the crown.”

  “I’ve had enough of kings and crowns,” I say softly.

  He sobers. I know he’s thinking of Luned and so many others. Gone forever.

  “How’s Baines?” I ask.

  “Recovering, thank God. I couldn’t be deprived of both my friends at once.”

  “Will he—”

  “Walk again?” Rheinallt shrugs. “The doctors don’t think so, but he’s stubborn enough for anything.”

  I smile. “He is that.”

  “Here.” Rheinallt hands me a roll of paper. “The deeds to your father’s house, as promised. It cannot be ceded to the crown. It belongs to you and your family, as long as it may endure.”

  “Thank you.” My throat tightens. I know there’s more.

  “Your father’s body was found.” Rheinallt’s eyes flick to mine. He doesn’t elaborate; I don’t want him to. “We can bury him here, if you wish. Or—”

  “He wouldn’t want that.” I swallow down the acrid taste of bile. “We’ll take him home.”

  Rheinallt nods. “I’ll arrange it.”

  “Thank you,” I repeat. The words are heavy on my tongue. I ache for my father. My mother, too. But at least—

  “Bring her in!” calls Rheinallt to the door.

  Awela barrels into the room, taller and tanner than I remember her. “WEN!” she shouts, and leaps at me, nearly knocking me off balance.

  I scoop her into my arms and cradle her against my neck, trying and failing not to weep before my friend who will be king.

  “The oddest thing,” Rheinallt says. “We found her and her nurse in a little hut just outside the palace walls. The nurse swore a tree had hidden them.”

  I smile through my tears. Seren helped us, one last time. “Come on, Awela,” I tell my baby sister. I kiss her cheek. “Let’s go home.”

  I visit the hill where I buried Seren’s heart every day for a year.

  Sometimes Awela comes with me, but more often I go alone. I play my mother’s cello for her. I play the phonograph—a new one, that I sent for from Saeth. I sing to her. Sometimes, I peer up at the stars and tell her about the constellation that burns in the sky in place of the one her mother put there: Astronomers have named it Gleddyf, Sword, but I know better. I know it’s a tree. Her tree.

  I always feel at peace when I’m with Seren on the hill, though my grief is never far. There is a void inside of me where she was meant to dwell. I tell her that, too.

  I buried my father in a patch of earth beyond the garden, with the pieces of my mother’s smashed phonograph. I know they’re together now. I know they’re at peace. They, too, are gaps in my heart that will never be filled.

  On the first anniversary of the night I laid Seren’s heart to rest, I find a green shoot pushing its way out of the earth. It grows rapidly, taller every day. It becomes a tender plant. Then a sapling, fierce and strong. It’s white and silver, like she used to be. The tree unfolds shining leaves, and a patch of violets grows at its base.

  After six months, the birch tree is as tall as me. Now every night I sit beneath it, mesmerized by the dappled moonlight filtering through its leaves.

  On the second anniversary of the night I buried Seren’s heart, her tree stands strong against the stars, a memorial in white and silver. But it isn’t enough. It isn’t her. It never will be. I feel somehow as if I’ve lost her all over again, or if I’ve realized at the last that she is truly, wholly gone. Grief is an ocean, and I am drowning in it. I weep beneath her tree.

  The wind whispers through the leaves, grazing past my cheek. My tears dry. I comfort myself with the memory of her. With the quiet night and the sweet scent of violets.

  EPILOGUE

  I DREAM

  of wind in my leaves,

  of roots drinking deep of the earth,

  of sunlight warm on bark,

  of rain soothing and sweet.

  I dream

  of a voice

  speaking to me in the moonlight,

  of a boy

  pressed up against my trunk.

  Sometimes, there is music.

  Sometimes, there is weeping.

  I think perhaps the boy was precious to me, once.

  I think perhaps I knew his name.

  He touches me with soft fingers.

  He sleeps beneath my boughs.

  Perhaps he dreams.

  Perhaps

  of

  me.

  I remember little things

  in the darkness of my dreaming:

  I r
emember that the world has color and light.

  That it bursts with joy and beauty.

  But I remember pain, too.

  The slick feel of blood.

  The dark rush of dying.

  And I remember the sensation

  of a heart beating inside me,

  measuring out

  the

  moments

  of

  my

  life.

  I have no heart now.

  I think I gave it up.

  Outside of myself I feel the change of the seasons.

  The brisk spice of autumn,

  when my leaves fall

  from my branches

  to carpet the ground.

  The sharp cold of winter,

  the wet cling of snow,

  the bitter glass encasement of ice.

  The heady rush of springtime,

  new leaves unfurling free from my branches,

  flowers pushing up from the earth at my roots.

  The suffocating heat of summer,

  when I live for the cool wind of evenings

  that wash me clean

  in the starlight.

  There is a longing inside of me.

  A sorrow I cannot comprehend.

  I want to sleep deeper.

  I

  no

  longer

  wish

  to

  dream.

  A cool wind whispers past my cheek. It smells of violets.

  I am gradually aware of my body pressed into the grass, of a root beneath my arm and twigs scratching at my bare feet.

  But it is the weeping that brings me to myself. That makes me realize I am more than what I have been for so long.

  I open my eyes.

  I stare up into the deep green leaves of a birch tree in high summer, their edges dipped in starlit silver. The smooth gray trunk shines against the hill and the dark line of the woods just beyond.

  I touch my body, my face, my hair. I am human, and that surprises me.

  I dreamed I was a monster.

  I push up onto my elbows—it is only then I remember the weeping.

  A boy is curled up a pace away, hugging his arms around his chest, his dark head bent, his body shaking.

  Joy sears through me at the sight of him, but I don’t understand why.