Page 123 of Into the Heartless Wood
If my true form has not wholly consumed me by then.
I should go now, while the Eater is dancing. While I am still free.
But something keeps me standing here, staring up at the stars.
The wind is blowing so wild I do not hear him come. I do not know he is here until his blade is pressed sharp against my throat and the stink of him is choking me.
“I’m still not sure what you are,” the Eater hisses. “But I’m going to find out. Did you think I’d forget you so easily?”
Leaves blow into his face, and he spits them out. “You’re hers. Somehow, you’re hers, and if you’re what Ithinkyou are—” He laughs as he traces one cold finger down the curve of my cheek.
If I had my true form, he would already be dead.
But in this form, I am weak. Fragile.
I writhe in his grasp as he drags me through the courtyard and into the kitchens. I cannot get free. His fingers bite deep into my arm. His blade presses harder into my neck. Something warm and wet trickles down into my collar. I think of cutting myself peeling potatoes and nearly fainting in Owen’s arms.
Owen! Where is he? I reach for him as the Eater hauls me through the palace corridor, past a rigid row of captive elms, into an antechamber with one tiny window looking into the north sky. He flings me to the ground. I land hard on one arm. It twists wrong beneath me. Pain flares, swift and sharp.
“I’ve something to attend to,” says the Eater. “I’ll be back soon.” There is sincerity in his words. Danger. The promise of pain.
I catch the thread of Owen’s soul. He is far from the Eater. He is safe.
The Eater steps into the hall, barring the door behind him. Sealing me inside.
“Wait!”
I leap at the door, pound against it with my useless human hands.
But the Eater has trapped me.
I am a girl in a cage.
A tree in a pot.
No way out.
I reach again for Owen’s soul. He is no longer safe inside the earth. He burns with rage. And I know where he is going.
To face the Eater.
Chapter Forty-Seven
OWEN
THE PALACE IS QUIET,TOO QUIET. THE CORRIDORS ARE EMPTY, the long rows of potted trees casting eerie shadows in the light of the oil lamps. I hide around every corner, listen cautiously before ascending every stair, but I needn’t have. I meet no one. Maybe all the courtiers are still in the ballroom. Maybe the king is, too.
Rage burns me from the inside. I can’t think about my grief right now. If I do, it will break me. All that’s left is anger.
The winding stair to the king’s private tower is narrow and dim—no one has come to light the lamps here, which means it may very well be unoccupied. That’s fine with me. I’ll wait for him. I tighten my grip on my knife hilt. I wonder what it will feel like to drive it into his heart.
The spiral stair seems to go on forever, then ends all at once at a tall iron door that creaks open when I push it.
I’m not prepared for what is waiting on the other side: a large, domed room, the ceiling made all of glass. It’s an observatory, of a sort. It lacks only a telescope. The walls are plastered with my and my father’s star charts. A desk on one end of the chamber overflows with books and pages upon pages of handwritten notes. The whole place reeks of rot and earth and leaves, and sizzles with eerie electricity, though there are no electric lamps that I can see. In the center of the room stands an iron table, empty except for a scattering of glass vials and a knife. It looks out of place with everything else.
I pace around the room, my bewildered curiosity momentarily dulling my rage. I peer at the charts as I go; there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, dating back to when the king first hired my father as an astronomer and gifted him the house on the edge of the wood. Someone—I can only assume the king—has scrawled indecipherable notes on nearly every chart in a shimmery silver ink.
I’m halfway round the room before I pick up the pattern. Almost all of the notes seem to center around the constellations that shifted in the impossible meteor shower: the Twysog Mileinig, the Spiteful Prince, and the Morwyn, the Maiden. He stole her crown, the stories go, and she’s been chasing him to get it back, grasping for his heel but never quite catching hold of him.
