Page 10 of Into the Heartless Wood
Alerted by my shout, Father joined me on the stairs, and the two of us burst outside just as the hem of my mother’s dress vanished among the trees.
“Eira!” my father cried. He ran after her.
“Father! Father,wait!”
“Stay with Awela!” he called back to me. “Keep her safe.”
And then the forest swallowed him, too.
I paced in front of the house, more shocked than frightened. I trusted my father to bring my mother back. I didn’t fear the Gwydden then, not any more than a child fears a monster from a story.
But when Awela woke and there was still no sign of either of our parents, I was afraid.
And when the sun set and clouds rolled in and Awela cried for her dinner and they hadn’t come back, dread gripped me in its lion’s jaws. I fed Awela leftover birthday cake and lumpy porridge, because it was the only thing I knew how to cook. I ran outside to save Mother’s cello when it started to rain. I shoveled coal into the stove when the early spring night grew swiftly cold.
I put Awela to bed, trying to remember all the songs my mother usually sang to her. I swept the cake crumbs off the floor. And then I collapsed in front of the fire and wondered if I was an orphan.
I must have dozed, because when the door banged open sometime during the night, I jerked awake to find my father stumbling into the house.
He looked like he had been to Hell and back again. His clothes ragged and torn, dried blood caking both his arms, his neck and face covered in scratches. There were leaves caught in his dark hair.
“Father?” I whispered.
He collapsed to the floor and wept, his whole body shaking. “She’s gone,” he choked out, over and over. “She’s gone.”
The next day he started building the wall, working feverishly from sunrise to sunset, hardly sleeping, hardly eating. He worked until his hands were scraped raw, until his skin was gray with mortar. He didn’t stop until he’d finished it: a mile long and five feet high. It was meant to protect us from the Gwydden, but I saw what it really was: a memorial to my mother. The evidence of my father’s guilt and shame, because if he’d built it earlier, like he’d always meant to, he might not have lost her at all.
I never asked him what he saw in the Gwydden’s Wood, how he managed to escape, if he’d found my mother, if he’d seen the Gwydden or her daughters.
A part of me had always wanted to believe that my mother was alive, that she’d escaped somehow.
Now, I have no such illusions.
My father saved me.
But he couldn’t save her.
Father stays home with Awela and me the rest of the day and all of the next. I’m glad he’s here. I don’t know how to give Awela the attention she needs when my head is splitting apart trying to forget yellow eyes and silver-white skin. Trying to block out the screams of the train passengers, the snap of their bones, the tree siren’s song, pinning me helpless to the ground.
At least in the light of day, there’s the garden to weed and the meals to cook and the futile task of attempting to keep Awela out of mischief. When night falls, there are the stars to chart with my father, a pot of cinnamon tea to drain down to dregs. But after that, when I crawl into bed and try to sleep—there is nothing to keep that day in the wood from playing itself over and over behind my eyes, an endless parade of blood and leaves ringed with a violet-flower crown.
It is impossible to distinguish the moment my thoughts morph into nightmares, for my sleep is the same as my waking: yellow eyes and silver skin, blood dripping red onto the ground.
But in my dreams the tree siren doesn’t let me go. In my dreams she never stops singing, not even when she rips my heart from my body, not even when she breaks all my bones and leaves me gasping up at the wheeling sky, the lifeblood pouring out of me. Even in death, I hear her song.
She kills me again and again, her teeth sinking into my throat, her branches impaling my chest. I drown in dirt and leaves and blood.
I wake up screaming, my heart racing like a wild hare, my body slick with sweat.
I don’t try to go back to sleep. I pull on a robe and climb up to the observatory, opening the dome and adjusting the telescope. I take comfort in the planets and stars, in telling myself the old stories of the constellations.
Astronomers speculate that the constellations as we see them now didn’t always look the same—that they have shifted, little by little, over time. In a few thousand years, I might not even recognize the Twysog Mileinig—the Spiteful Prince—or the Morwyn, the Maiden. Maybe future astronomers will rename these constellations, create new myths to go with them. But I can’t imagine the Spiteful Prince being anything other than the thief who betrayed the Morwyn and stole her crown. He escaped up into the heavens, where he made himself into a constellation to hide from her. She wasn’t deceived; she followed him there, and now every year she chases him around the ecliptic, stretching out her hand for the crown, never quite catching it.
Nonsense, of course. But it was one of my mother’s favorite stories.
It hurts to think of her. I shift the telescope to a different part of the sky, and doze off in the chair trying to forget anything ever existed apart from the stars.
Father goes back to his work at Brennan’s Farm, and I go back to minding Awela and the house every day, trying to regather the pieces of myself that fractured apart in the Gwydden’s Wood.
