Page 111 of Into the Heartless Wood
I nod. It’s as good a plan as any. “Thank you,” I tell her again.
She flashes a smile at me.
I’m shocked I make it back to the dormitory without being seen. There’s no time for sleep. The morning trumpet sounds just as I’m crawling into my bunk, so I make it seem like I’m crawling out of it instead. I dress with the other soldiers, and drag myself to the training grounds.
Days pass. Weeks pass. My back heals and my body grows stronger and stronger, until it’s nothing to me to run ten miles in the full glare of the sun, to perform hours of sword drills, to load and fire my musket again and again, and hit the target almost every time.
I learn the names of my bunkmates, and even befriend two of them. Baines immigrated from Saeth with his family when he was a baby. He has a bunch of older brothers and is determined to distinguish himself in the army—get his parents to notice him for the first time in his life. Baines has dark brown skin, and is built like a bear, ridiculously strong from a lifetime working his parents’ farm. I’m certain he’s never fainted in hislife.
Rheinallt, on the other hand, hails from northern Tarian, and he’s trying to getawayfrom his parents. He’s the exact opposite of Baines, tall and thin and so pale he must have some Gwaed blood in him somewhere. When he gets old, he’ll look exactly the same as he does now—his hair is already white. Although Rheinallt joined the army to be a field physician, he’s required to have the same military training as the rest of us. He doesn’t have to be either a soldierora doctor, really—he’s the heir to his family’s lucrative inn, but he didn’t want to inherit, and enlisted instead. Baines and I tease him about it relentlessly, especially at mealtimes.
“I bet you had roast pork and bara brith for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day—and you traded it forthis,” Baines will say. The “this” he refers to is always some sort of sloppy thing it’s best not to look at while you’re eating.
“And my whole life plotted out for me,” Rheinallt grumbles.
“Plus if we ever go to war, you coulddie!” Baines adds. “Couldn’t have that excitement at the inn.”
“Hey, one of the patrons might have murdered him,” I put in. “It really is safer here.”
Rheinallt punches Baines in the arm and flicks slop in my face, and then we’re all friends again.
I never tell them where I’m from or why I’m here, but they must have found out from someone—maybe Captain Taliesin—because one evening in the mess tent, it’s me being teased instead of Rheinallt.
“Ran away from the wood, did you?” says Baines. “Afraid of the witch and her daughters? They’re not even real.” He stabs a piece of questionable-looking meat with his table knife, and eats it off the point, chewing slowly.
“Afraid of a fairy-tale monster,” Rheinallt adds, waggling his pale eyebrows. “Is that why you’re here, Merrick? To learn how to fight so you can go back and kill her?”
I jerk up from my seat and leave the tent without a word, pacing out to one of the training fields and climbing onto the fence. The sun is already down, the last red glow of it faint in the sky.
They come after me.
Baines pokes my arm. “We’re just having a bit of fun.”
“Lighten up, will you?” Rheinallt pushes me off the fence and into the dirt.
I lunge at him, my fist connecting with his jaw.
Rheinallt curses. He wipes blood off his chin. “God, Merrick. What’s wrong with you?”
Baines just stares at me, clearly shocked at my outburst.
I flex my fingers. I shouldn’t have done that—brawling’s against the rules, and if Baines or Rheinallt rat me out, I’ll be assigned to stable duty or spend another night in the medical tent nursing fresh lash marks. “I lost my mother to the wood,” I tell them. “I saw a tree siren wreck a whole train and slaughter all of the passengers. Don’t tell me they’re not real.”
Rheinallt touches his jaw with gingerly fingers. “You never told us that.”
I shrug.
There’s a respect in Baines’s eyes that wasn’t there before. “What was she like? The tree siren?”
I blink and see Seren laughing on the hill, dancing with me to the phonograph, four minutes at a time. “She’s a monster,” I say. “That’s all I remember.”
They don’t press me.
In the morning, when the three of us have reported to drills in one of the training fields, something’s changed between us. Rheinallt is sporting a deep purple bruise on his jaw, but somehow, I haven’t gotten in trouble for it. They clearly haven’t said anything.
“Clumsy idiot,” says Baines, clapping Rheinallt on the back with his huge bear hand. “Ran his face into the bunk in the middle of the night.”
Rheinallt winks at me, and I can’t help but quirk a smile in return. It seems that slamming my fist into his jaw has firmly cemented our friendship.
