Page 101 of Into the Heartless Wood
I need forever.
Cangen’s brows bend close together on his craggy face. “Where will you go? You will need food, clothing, shelter.”
“I will go to him. I will go to Owen.”
Pren says: “The boy has gone to the palace of the Soul Eater.”
My human body shakes at the name of the only monster I fear more than my mother.
Wind races down from the cliff, coiling around my ankles, tangling in my hair. “Then that is where I must go.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
OWEN
TALIESIN DEPOSITS ME IN ONE OF THE BARRACK DORMITORIES,Asmall room crammed with two sets of triple bunks and already occupied by five slumbering soldiers. I clamber into the middle bunk on the right wall—the only empty one—and find it’s been stripped of both mattress and pillow. There’s only a hard board between me and the bunk below, with not even a sheet to lie on. I use my pack as a pillow and attempt to sleep, but my mind is too wild with anger to let me.
I’m damned if I’m going to let the king keep me from Awela. Or leave my father to languish in prison for treason he didn’t commit.
I think back to that last night I spent with Father in the observatory, meteors raining down from Heaven like it was the end of days. The shifting constellations. The changing stars.
Father told me he was going to send a telegram to the king to inform him about the anomaly.
And then he’d been arrested.
It can’t be a coincidence, but it doesn’t make any sense. Anyone could look at the night sky now and know it was different than it had been last week. It wasn’t something to get thrown into prison for.
Was it?
Do you know why he does it? the king’s man asked me all those weeks ago. Why he pays your father for these charts every month?
Was this it? Was the impossible transformation of the stars the thing the king had been waiting for? Watching for? That doesn’t make any sense, either. No one could possibly have known that that meteor shower was going to happen. I saw it myself and I still hardly believe it.
I roll onto my side on the hard bunk. I’ll play the king’s game, I’ll be a soldier—I don’t have any choice. But I’m also going to find Awela and uncover the truth about my father. If I can’t convince the king of his innocence, I’ll find a way to break him out of prison, and the three of us will flee to Saeth. We can start a new life there. Away from the king and the war and the wood. Away from all of this.
I jolt awake to the sharp call of a trumpet and the muttered curses of my bunkmates. I can’t have slept more than an hour, and my eyes feel like they’re full of sand.
In the light of a single overhead lantern, the five other soldiers tug on their uniforms, somehow managing to not bump into each other in the limited floorspace. They’re all about my own age, a couple of them maybe even younger, and they take no notice of me.
They all stumble out the door, and I roll over in the awful bunk, deciding I may as well get some more sleep—Taliesin left me with no instructions, and I secretly hope no one knows I’m here.
But half a moment later, the older female guard from last night comes in, and scolds me roundly for still being in bed. She introduces herself as Commander Carys, and makes me turn in my clothes—including the extra sets in my pack—in exchange for an army uniform: blue trousers, white shirt, blue jacket. There’s boots, too, a matching blue cap, and a heavy sword belt. She stands there with her arms crossed the whole time I’m getting dressed, which I do as quickly as possible, flushing hotter and hotter with every moment that passes. The uniform is staggering and stifling; it makes me feel claustrophobic.
Carys orders me outside when I’ve got it on, and I have my first view of the barracks in the daylight: ugly, sprawling buildings made of mud bricks. She points out the four training fields, a gun range, a riding arena, a mess hall, and a bathhouse, which she informs me I won’t be able to use until I get my first paycheck, as each visit costs a whole silver penny. I’ll have to use the pump in the courtyard until then.
Then she tells me to report to one of the training fields, where the commanding officer makes me run laps with a handful of other new recruits.
The uniform is heavy and suffocating, and I’m not used to running. I’m used to sitting in Father’s observatory painstakingly filling in the star charts, or weeding the garden while Awela digs for worms. Not even the smallest part of me belongs here. But I’ve nowhere else to go, and I refuse to give up my proximity to my father and sister.
So I force myself to keep running. I collapse on the field after five laps and am brought directly to the medical tent.
The nurse on duty is a dark-skinned woman with shrewd eyes and a blue cap pinned to her tightly curled hair. She gives me water from a canteen and tells me to drink it slowly.
I do, my eyes flitting about the tent, listening to the shouts and pounding footsteps drifting in from the training fields. It’s a relief to be in here, away from the brutal glare of the sun. I wish I never had to leave, but only moments later, the nurse says I can go.
“Work up to the drills slowly, you hear?” she tells me with a shake of her head. “I’d wager you’ve never run a mile in your life. You shouldn’t try to do ten all at once.”
My cheeks warm. I mumble thanks and duck back outside.
