Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  “I’ve come to see Awela. Where is she?”

  “Awela’s not here. The king’s soldiers took her away with your father to the capital.”

  “WHAT?”

  She shrinks back from me.

  I force myself to breathe. “Forgive me, Efa. Why would they take her?”

  “I don’t know. The same reason they arrested your father, perhaps. I wondered what had become of you. Why you weren’t with them.”

  I can’t even begin to explain, even if there were time. “Do you know why he was arrested?”

  She shakes her head. “They’d bound his hands,” she says. “Awela was crying. They wouldn’t let me comfort her. They just took her away.”

  My gut wrenches. “Thanks for looking after her, Efa.”

  Tears slip down her cheeks. “If I’d known they would take her, I would have hidden her. I would have—”

  “You did all you could,” I say gently. “Thank you.” I pull her into a swift hug.

  She pats my arm and wipes her eyes. “Hurry. You don’t want to miss the train.”

  I walk to the village in the sucking mud. Rain slips under my collar and drips from the brim of my hat. I blink and see vacant eyes and clawing fingers, blood and ashes.

  I try to remember Mother as she was in life: full of laughter and music. Playing her cello in the garden, cursing when she realized she’d set her stool in the cabbage bed and mangled several of the plants. Baking bread in the kitchen, her belly round with Awela, her nose streaked with flour. Dancing with my father in the observatory to the music of the phonograph, their elbows bumping against the bookcase because it was far too small up there to dance. The wonder in her eyes when she first held Awela, though her face was pale and streaked with tears.

  She shouldn’t have ended that way.

  She shouldn’t have.

  I make it to the village before the train, and duck into the inn to buy my ticket. Mairwen Griffith eyes me across the counter, accepting my fare and writing the ticket for me. Wisps of dark hair have come loose from her bun, and I remember how beautiful I used to think she was. How I imagined I might marry her.

  But I don’t think her beautiful now. Or maybe her beauty just doesn’t hold the same charm it once did.

  Silver skin and silver lips. The scent of violets.

  I followed the tree siren into the wood.

  The siren with violets in her hair.

  I shudder.

  “Owen? Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  She offers me the ticket, and I take it.

  She studies me. “When you come back, will you have that dinner with me? I’ve been waiting quite a while.”

  “I’m sorry, Mairwen,” I reply. “But I don’t think I’m coming back.”

  I settle into my seat, tugging my father’s coat tight against my shoulders as the train lurches into motion. I take off my hat and put it on the empty seat beside me. The rainy countryside blurs past my window, and I hurtle toward Breindal City, toward my father and Awela and the king.

  I try not to think about the last time I was on a train.

  Part Two

  STARS

  He looked at his own Soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and showed to be beautiful constellations, and he added to the consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  SEREN

  AFTER MY MOTHER SANG A HALF-LIFE INTO THE HEARTLESS TREE, before she created me and my sisters,

  she made my brothers: the Pine Princes.

  They are the only beings I have ever heard of

  who defied her,

  and lived.

  I do not remember them.

  I was only three winters old when they left our mother’s court forever.

  She had not meant to make them so powerful.

  When she made my sisters and me

  we were only given the powers

  of song,

  strength,

  growth.

  But my brothers were created

  with drops of her own blood.

  Her power took root

  inside of them.

  I have never known what they did to defy her.

  My sisters would not tell me.

  I have never dared ask my mother.

  I do not even know

  if they still dwell within the wood,

  or if they left it long ago.

  But they are my only chance to change what I am.

  My only chance of shedding this form,

  of leaving behind

  the monster

  forever.

  I head east, toward the wild reaches of the forest,

  the only place my brothers could be hiding.

  My back aches

  where my mother stripped away my bark.

  But it is Owen’s words that torment me.

  I will never forgive you for what you did to my mother. If I ever see you again, I will kill you.

  You are only a monster because you choose to be.

  Choose.

  The trees shelter me

  from the rain

  and I am left

  in a roaring green world,

  leaves crackly and dry beneath my feet.

  I kneel on the forest floor,

  plunge my hands into the earth,

  reach out to the heart of the wood,

  to my brothers.

  Neither answers.

  The wood turns its back on me,

  rejecting me.

  I feel it, waking at my mother’s call.

  It is strong.

  Angry.

  Ready to do her will.

  I go on.

  The forest hisses and mutters.

  Branches reach, roots writhe.

  I sing to the wood and

  it listens,

  lets me pass.

  Here, the trees grow so close together

  their trunks are tangled up, so that I cannot tell one apart from another.

  Moss thrives on exposed roots and worn stones,

  russet brown, daffodil yellow.

  The air is dense and still.

  There are no birds,

  no deer,

  no creatures of any kind.

  I have strayed into a part of the wood

  that does not wholly answer to my mother.

  Beyond the trees

  the rain stops,

  the clouds break,

  the day brightens.

  Light filters through the leaves,

  casting dappled shadows on the ground.

  The sound of rushing water reaches my ears.

  I come into a clearing, where a waterfall crashes into a shining pool.

  Colored rocks gleam

  beneath the surface.

  I kneel on the bank,

  drink my fill.

  When I straighten again, one of my brothers is there,

  watching me across the pool.

  He is tall and thin,

  his brown skin raised with ridges and whorls.

  Dark green hair spills past his shoulders.

  His silver robe looks to be spun from spider silk,

  and is girded with a strand of rowan berries.

  “You seek us.” His voice is deep and rich as the earth itself. “I will take you to our dwelling place. Come.”

  He turns and strides into the wood.

  I follow, crossing the pool. Cold water laps over my knees.

  He leads me up a slight incline,

  to a place where pines grow thick and strong,

  scattered with copses of birch trees and elms.

  We break through the tree line. A cliff rises sheer and straight before us, blocking out the sky.

  Butted up against the cliff is a stone structure thatched with pine needles. Beside it march plants in neat rows.

  I realize the structure is a house, the rows of plants a gard
en.

  I ask: “Who lives here?”

  My brother turns to me, a smile touching his face. “We do.”

  Ducking out of the low doorway come my other two brothers.

  One has a beard of knotted moss,

  the other a tangle of rowan berries growing out of his hair.

  The one who led me here joins them.

  I fall to my knees at their feet.

  All three of them crouch down where I kneel.

  The brother with the moss beard

  touches my chin with his rough finger,

  raises my face to his. “Little one. What is your name?”

  “Our mother did not give me a name.”

  “Our mother does not like names. Names are power, you know.” He smiles. “I am Pren. He is Cangen.” Pren nods to the brother who met me at the pool. “And he is Criafol.” Pren nods to the brother with the rowan berries in his hair. “We named ourselves. Not very cleverly, but the names belong to us and not to her. That gives us power for ourselves, do you see?” Pren takes my hands and raises me to my feet. Cangen and Criafol stand as well.

  I say: “Perhaps.”

  Cangen says: “None of our other sisters sought us out. None of them found their names. But you have. That is why we heard you calling to us.”

  I draw myself up very straight. “I am Seren.”

  Cangen smiles. “And so you are. What request would you make of us, Seren?”

  Fear twists through me,

  but I have not come

  all this way

  for nothing.

  “I met a boy in the wood. I spared his life. He told me I had a choice—that I choose to be our mother’s monster. That I do not have to be. Do I? Do I have a choice?”

  Rowan berries gleam in Criafol’s green hair. “If you did not have a choice, you would not be here.”

  He gestures with one hand.

  A branch grows up from the ground,

  twists and flattens into a chair.

  “Sit, little sister. Tell us everything.” He waves his hand again, and three more chairs sprout up. My brothers sink comfortably into them.

  I sit, too.

  I tell my brothers about Owen,

  about sparing him and his sister,

  watching his house,

  leaving him violets.

  I even tell them

  about dancing on the hill.

  I do not tell them

  that our mother stripped the skin from my back.

  That my sister forced me to sing the railroad workers to their deaths.

  That I am the reason his mother is dead.

  Cangen, the brother who met me at the pool, says: “But what is it you wish from us?”

  A sweet-smelling wind

  blows down from the cliff,

  wraps around me,

  rustles the leaves in my hair. “I want to choose not to be her monster.”

  Pren says: “It sounds as if you already have.” A yellow finch lands on his beard. He strokes its head with one finger. “What do you really want?”

  I am not ready to answer.

  I ask them a question instead. “What did you do to defy our mother? Why did she send you away?”

  Criafol says: “She could not control us.”

  Cangen nods. “We could not overpower her.”

  The finch flits away. Pren says: “She wanted death. Wanted us to help her cover all the world with her trees, choke out all life that did not belong to the wood. But we had no wish to entangle ourselves in her petty quarrel with the Soul Eater.”

  “We tried to kill her.” Cangen’s eyes burn deep and sad. “We tried to take her heart, but we failed. We did not know it was protected.”

  I say: “Protected?”

  Pren nods. “As long as her soul endures, her heart cannot be killed. Our power is great, but it is not that great.”

  “And so you came here.” I gesture around the clearing. “To … garden?”

  Criafol laughs. “We came to wait, until the end of her time, when we can roam freely through the wood again.”

  Their answers do not satisfy me.

  I think perhaps they are cowards.

  Their power is greater than mine,

  yet they do not stand up against our mother,

  do not help the humans.

  They only hide.

  “But you still have not answered my question.” Pren peers at me, his beard bobbing against his chest. “What is it that you want from us?”

  I say: “To wholly forsake the thing my mother made me. To become human.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  OWEN

  THE TRAIN RIDE IS LONG AND UNEVENTFUL, AND I ARRIVE IN Breindal just as the sun is setting. I disembark from the train, and step up to the ticket counter inside the station, where a white-haired old steward is yawning as he pulls down a metal grate to lock up for the evening.

  “Excuse me,” I say hastily. “Can you give me directions up to the palace?”

  He scowls. “Just follow the road, boy. A babe could find it. But they won’t let you in until morning. Gates shut strictly at seven.” He slams his grate closed, effectively ending our conversation.

  I don’t have time to wait. I have to find my father and Awela now—I don’t care about the gates being shut. The king is going to let me in.

  Stars appear as I climb up the twisting city streets, toward the palace on its distant hill. They look dimmer here. Too much light and smoke from the city factories. I understand why the king sent my father to our house by the wood, to dark skies and clean air.

  On the plains below the palace are the army barracks and training grounds. It’s where I would have gone, if I’d listened to my father’s advice and enlisted. I look south, toward Gwaed. According to the history books, there was a Tarian king some centuries back who took an army across the mountains and attempted to conquer Gwaed with no provocation. The Tarian army was defeated, and slunk back home. Gwaed suffered heavy enough losses that they made no pursuit, but relations between our two nations never quite recovered. If Gwaed decides to pick up the threads of old grievances and declare war, Tarian would be caught between an enemy army and the Gwydden’s Wood. I don’t think even King Elynion’s army could survive that.

  A pair of guards stand watch at the city’s southern gates—beyond them is the only road up to the palace. Torchlight gleams on the rows of brass buttons marching down their uniform jackets, the brims of their caps shadowing their eyes. Both guards are armed with swords and muskets.

  “Gates are shut,” says the left guard gruffly. “Come back in the morning.”

  I fish my father’s arrest warrant from my pocket, and hand it over. “I need to see the king.”

  The guard peruses it, then hands it to his fellow. “Come with me,” says the right guard. He relieves me of the knife I put to Seren’s throat just last night, then unlatches the gate and waves me through. He starts up the hill. I follow.

  It’s a steep climb. I’m panting and sweating by the time we reach the palace gates: tall arched doors made of stone, carved and painted in a green and gold pattern that is not immediately familiar to me. As the guard explains my presence to another pair of guards stationed here, my eyes make sense of the pattern: The green and gold are leaves and stars, intertwined with each other in an unending sequence. I wonder why our king, who has been at war with the Gwydden for longer than I’ve been alive, would adorn his palace with the symbols of her wood.

  The city guard passes me off to one of the gate guards, who unlocks a small door inside of the gate and unceremoniously shoves me through.

  I’m left alone in the palace courtyard, the gates at my back, high stone walls on either side thick with ivy. The palace itself looms ahead of me, an imposing structure that’s all angles and arches, silhouetted against the rising moon. I shift the pack on my aching shoulders, and march up to the front door, where I show my father’s arrest warrant to yet another pair of guards. They’re both female and are youn
g and old versions of each other, clearly related. The younger guard’s hair is cropped to her chin; the older one wears hers in a long braid draped over one shoulder.

  The older guard beckons me across the courtyard, and brings me through a door cut into the ivy-covered wall. We walk a few minutes down a stone corridor, lit by oil lamps, until she deposits me into a room that is clearly someone’s office. A desk at the back is mounded with paper. A dilapidated bookshelf bows under the weight of far more books than it was meant to hold. A red ottoman boasts a tea tray mounded with dirty teacups and a smattering of half-eaten biscuits. From one corner, a brown and yellow cat peers at me suspiciously.

  “Merrick’s son,” says the guard to the man sitting at the desk. He’s thirty, perhaps, with dark hair and eyes, and what looks like a king’s ransom in medals pinned to his cobalt blue uniform.

  “Owen,” I supply, as the guard salutes her captain and retreats.

  “Owen. Yes. Sit down.” He waves vaguely at the ottoman. “I’m Taliesin, captain of His Majesty’s guard.”

  After an awkward moment and more gesturing from Taliesin, I relieve the ottoman of the tea tray, and take a seat. I hand the arrest warrant over. “There’s been some mistake,” I explain. “My father works for King Elynion. He would never do anything to betray our country. And I need to know what’s happened to my sister. Is she safe? Is she here? I need to see her.”

  The captain puts his elbows on the desk, or rather on the thick stack of papers covering the desk, which he doesn’t seem to notice. “Your sister is perfectly safe. But there’s no mistake. Calon Merrick is in prison, awaiting his trial. I’m afraid his guilt is unmistakable, and he will face either execution or lifetime imprisonment, depending on the leniency of our king.”

  I try to shove down my flash of wild panic. “I don’t understand. What is he charged with?”

  Taliesin graces me with a condescending smile. “The details are known only to King Elynion himself, and your father, of course.”

  “Then how is his guilt ‘unmistakable’?” I’m having a hard time not shouting.

  Taliesin raises an eyebrow. “Do you accuse our king of lying?”

  “Of course not! But my father’s life is at stake. At least bring me to him. Let me talk to him. Let him explain it to me.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. Your father is to see no one, lest he pass along his treasonous ideas.”