Page 115 of Into the Heartless Wood
Her eyes peer into the growing darkness. “I am afraid that one day my mother will come looking for me. Take me home.”
“Can’t you just run away again?”
She shakes her head. “This is the only chance I will ever have.”
Every evening I stay with Bedwyn on the wall a little longer than I should, and am always scrambling down to my bunk late into the night.
It’s these meetings I look forward to every day, through the grueling hours of training and awful meals in the mess tent. It’s because of her I haven’t stormed the prison, or nabbed Awela from her nurse, and damn the consequences.
It’s because of her I have a measure of contentment in this strange new life. That I almost don’t want it to ever end.
Our drills grow more and more taxing. There is no longer any question that they are meant to prepare us to face the wood. We fight with fire and swords. We’re made to trudge through mud blindfolded with wax sealing our ears, to put axes into dummies, musket rounds into potted trees. It seemed almost like a game, at first. It doesn’t now.
Baines and Rheinallt are grim and despairing in turns.
“I just wish Captain Taliesin or Commander Carys wouldtellus when we’re meant to be sent against the wood,” groans Rheinallt one evening, lounging in his chair in the mess hall. His pale skin is red and cracked with sunburn, his eyes bleary with smoke from our afternoon drills. Baines’s eyes look just the same, and I suspect mine do too. They’re certainly hot and itchy and give me a slightly blurred view of my dinner, which, as usual, is not necessarily a bad thing.
“Bad for morale,” Baines grumbles. “Want your soldiers to think they’ve got a fighting chance, after all. None of us would train so hard if we were explicitly told we’re being prepared for slaughter.”
Rheinallt shrugs. He seems increasingly restless these days. I wonder if he’ll ever get up the guts to tell Luned he admires her. I want to be there if he does—I’m sure she’d reject him, and then Baines and I would have further fuel for mockery. “Merrick’s the only one who’s ever been in the wood.”
“That’s right!” Baines wraps his huge hands around his beer tankard. “Tell us what we’re up against, Merrick.”
I don’t know why, but I do tell them. About the attack on the train. The blood and the bodies. About a tree siren with violets in her hair. I tell them more than I should, more than I mean to: that she saved me, again and again, even though she was a monster. I even tell them, haltingly, of our meetings in the wood night after night. I don’t tell them about the meteor shower or the shifting constellations. I don’t tell them about my mother clawing out her own heart. Both feel too personal, though the former was spread across the world for all to see.
“It sounds to me,” says Rheinallt, when I’ve lapsed into silence, “that your tree siren is something new. Not a monster anymore, not quite a woman.”
Baines waggles his eyebrows and makes a rude gesture.
“Something new,” Rheinallt repeats firmly, ignoring him. “But she clearly cares for you.” His eyes go of their own accord to Luned, eating with the other officers a few tables away.
“She sounds human enough,” says Baines. “No reason you can’t bed her and be done with it.”
“It isn’t like that.”
Baines laughs.
Rheinallt snorts. “Like hell it isn’t.”
Heat floods my body, and I kick at the table leg. The memory of kissing her in the wood overwhelms my senses—her chest against mine, her hands pressed over my ears, blocking out her sisters’ music. I push it away with an effort. “It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to see her again. And anyway mypointis, the wood is dangerous. No one can step into the trees and live, unless the trees themselves will it. No one can stand against the Gwydden and her daughters. We can train all we want—it’s useless.”
Rheinallt has sobered again. His eyes fix on mine. “What will you do if the king’s war leads us to your siren? Will you fight her?”
“My duty is to Tarian.”
Baines shakes his head. “I’m not sure you know where your duties lie.”
Thinking about Seren doesn’t trouble me like it used to. I ponder that as I make another useless attempt to see my father, and as I climb around the hill to the kitchen courtyard.
The moment I see Bedwyn’s face, the reason becomes clear. Bedwyn is so much more than Seren ever could be. There is a kinship with her I could never have had with Seren.
She is human. She is kind.
She is not a monster.
I forget all about the tree siren as I perch on the wall with Bedwyn, imagining what it might be like to kiss her as we laugh and talk under the stars.
Chapter Forty-Four
