Page 124 of Into the Heartless Wood
I watch the progression of those two constellations from chart to chart and year to year. They slide off of the visible half of the ecliptic during the autumn and winter months, and come back into view in the spring. They hardly change at all, even after a decade of charting, which of course they wouldn’t. I finish my circuit of the room on the opposite side of the door from where I started, and find the final charts, the ones marking the new positions of the constellations after the meteor shower. Here the Morwyn has all but swallowed the Spiteful Prince, the bright star that represented her crown burning now in the midst of her. Eight other bright stars are grouped at her right shoulder, with countless others on her left side and even more scattered at her feet. I remember how there were too many to mark them all down.
Understanding begins to take root inside of me. I pace around the room again, studying the charts until they lead me once more to the final ones.
I walk over to the desk, rifle through the pages of notes—more of that silver writing I can’t read. The books are ancient, their spines cracked and their pages brittle. I open a few. They’re written in the same language as the silver notes, but it’s the pictures that startle me. They’re faded now from their once-bright colors, but they seem to be illustrations of children’s fairy tales. There’s a picture of mermaids, bathing on rocks with a waterfall behind them, their long hair barely covering their breasts. I flush and turn the page. A dragon breathes fire across an ocean, transforming it into a barren desert. There’s pictures of men who appear to be made of rocks, of a royal family riding out on a hunt. There’s a picture of a beautiful wood nymph, her green hair tangled with bluebells, her body clothed in a garment of bark and leaves. I open another of the books, and find similar illustrations.
Underneath all the pages and books is a sheet of crackly parchment, so brittle the edges crumble away when I touch it. It’s hard to make out in the dim light, but I finally realize it’s an ancient star chart. It seems to be of the same patch of sky where the Morwyn chases after the Spiteful Prince, but their constellations are missing.
What if,I think, peering at the ancient chart.What if.
I tell myself a story.
Once, long ago, a spiteful prince stole the crown of a maiden. But not just any maiden. A wood nymph powerful enough to make children from trees. Powerful enough to write the threat of her revenge in the heavens. The spiteful prince became a king. He built his fortress up around him, and he hired centuries of astronomers to watch the sky, to read the stars, so he would know when the wood nymph was about to take her revenge. So he could prepare himself to face her.
And then one day he receives a telegram: The impossible has happened. The stars havechanged.There is no longer a spiteful prince hanging in the heavens, because the maiden has devoured him, and taken back her crown.
But what if it wasn’t a crown at all?
What if it was her soul?
I go back to the final star chart my father filled in. The truth is spelled out before me, a truth my father knew, or guessed.
A truth that cost him his life.
Rage takes hold of me, stronger than before. The king is a liar. He’s centuries old, steeped in the magic he claims to abhor. If the people of Tarian knew that not only is he no better than the Gwydden,he created her,they would riot.
Thatis my father’s treason.Thatis what the king didn’t want me to know.
The sudden creak of the door makes me jump, and I have only a heartbeat to reach for my knife before the king’s hands close around my throat.
Chapter Forty-Eight
SEREN
ITUG GENTLY AT THE SOULS IN THE PALACE,CLEARINGOWEN Apath. He does not need anyone barring his way. He will not find the Soul Eater. Not yet. The Eater is on his way to the nursery. He will find Awela gone. He will want Owen instead.
And I am trapped here.
Powerless.
I step up to the window in the antechamber, peer out at a circle of stars. They seem so unreachable here, so far from their nearness on the hill where we danced.
It was my mother who taught me the stories in the sky. I was hardly two winters old when she pointed into the heavens, and told me the name of every star. There was a star for her, and a star for me, and a star for each of my brothers and sisters.
Once,she said,there lived a foolish wood nymph in a wide green forest. Her sisters married mermen and went away to sea. Her brothers married rock maidens and went to live in the mountains. She was the only one left. She did not care for rocks, nor the sea. She loved only a boy, with dark hair and eyes that gleamed like stars. He was a prince of his people, and he would make her his queen.
But in the dead of night, when first they lay together in the darkness, he carved her soul from her body, and left her with only her heart. He swallowed her soul and gained immortality and power beyond reckoning.
She bled into the earth. She wanted to die, but the wood did not let her. It fed into her, and she drank it in, and from the trees she gathered power equal to the boy’s, but hers was a power of growing. She grew the heartless tree. She grew her sons and daughters. And she grew her wood, more and more, up around her like the boy’s castle. There she waited, banishing all the boy’s kind from her fortress, waiting for the day when her power reached its height, when the stars and the trees obeyed her, when she could wield them like soldiers. When that happened, she would at last go to the boy again, and slaughter him for what he had done.
Once, she’d wanted her soul back, but she realized she had no need of it. She had her heart, and she had her power, and she had the souls of countless others to drink and drink and drink. That was enough.
My mother taught me my killing song. Taught me how to break the bodies of the men who came into the wood. They were the children of the Soul Eater, and they must die and die and die.
I know the truth now, as I did not then. The king may have swallowed my mother’s soul, but she has swallowed far more. If anyone is a Soul Eater, it is her.
My heart beats hot within me. Leaves rattle down from my hair.
My time in this form grows very short.
