Page 125 of Into the Heartless Wood
I should have made Owen understand. I should have pulled him with me, away from the palace and the Eater, while I had the chance. I should have told him that I am no longer the monster I used to be. That I regret with every ounce of my being what happened to his mother in the forest.
I want him here with me, looking at the stars.
I want to tell him that I will save him, if I can.
That I love him, even though I do not have a soul.
I love him.
The words beat fragile and strong inside of me, butterflies with glass wings.
Awareness sears through me with the heat of a wildfire, and I grab for the tendrils of Owen’s soul.
He is no longer alone.
The Eater has found him.
Chapter Forty-Nine
OWEN
THE KING DRAGS ME FARTHER INTO THE ROOM,HIS HANDSclamped around my throat, choking me. I thrash and gulp for air. There’s a humming in my ears, spots dancing black in front of my eyes.
He hurls me to the floor and I crumple like paper. I lie there gasping for breath, fighting to come back to myself.
It’s almost laughable, that I thought I could kill him.
He crouches beside me, relieves me of my knife. “Do you have any idea,” he says, his voice low and cold, “what has happened to your sister?”
I blink up at him. “Youmurderedmyfather.”
Without warning, he slams his fist into the side of my face, sending me skidding along the floor. I scramble to a sitting position and press my back against the wall by the desk. My heart skitters and jumps. A slick red warmth drips down my jaw.
“Yoursister,” he spits at me. He comes over to me, crouches back down, his piercing green eyes on level with mine. He reeks of earth and rot and molding leaves. His beard is still neatly trimmed, but bits of his skin seem to be peeling away from his face, exposing patches of pulpy muscle I don’t want to look at very closely. He hisses at me through his teeth and grabs my shoulder, hauling me to my feet. “The nursery is empty. Your sister has vanished, and nowyouare here. I know you had something to do with it. WHERE IS SHE?”
“I don’t know.” Somewhere inside my terror, relief throbs. Awela is safe from him. Bedwyn got her out and she’ssafe.Safer than I am, at the moment. I glance around the room. There’s no way out but the iron door, and the king is barring my way. “I know your secret,” I tell him. “I know you’re not what you claim to be.”
“Are you trying to blackmail me, boy?” He laughs as he drags me to the center of the room where the iron table waits.
I fight him, trying to jerk out of his grasp, but he’s strong, unnaturally so. His fingers dig into my arms, down to bone. He throws me onto the table, and my leg smashes one of the vials. Broken glass slices through my trousers, embedding into my thigh.
He binds me to the table with leather straps cinched tight at my wrists and my ankles, and locks a collar around my neck. I twist and heave against the straps. They hold.
The king paces round me, stopping every few seconds to peer up through the glass ceiling at the dim stars. There’s a medallion around his neck that whirs with gears and buzzes with electricity. It stinks of rot—or is that the king?
“I wanted your sister. Ineededher. Her soul is strong—there’s magic in it. She was born on the edge of the witch’s wood, you know. The power wound itself into her soul. She burns with it. But you—” He prods my arms and legs, wipes a smear of blood off my cheek, and presses his medallion against my chest. A sharp pain sears through me for a fraction of an instant as the medallion flashes with a white light, then grows dark again. The king looks on with interest. He nods in satisfaction. “As I suspected, you are strong, too. You weren’t born there, but you’ve lived there nearly all your life. I wanted you close, in case I was unsuccessful taking your sister’s soul. So I would have another chance at yours.”
I shudder where I’m bound, forced to stare up into the sky, the king a leering silhouette in my peripheral. “Mysoul? What do you mean? Whatareyou?”
“What am I?” He stops above my head and looks down at me with a smile, as if he’s humoring a child. “I’m as human as you are, or I was, once. But the witch is coming for me, and when she does, I mean to have the power to drive her deep into Hell where she belongs.” He resumes his pacing, then drags something out from underneath the table.
From my sideways view, I watch him assemble some kind of metal device. He attaches it to the table, and shifts it over me: a long metal arm, a glass lens, a sort of gear-claw thing that makes my insides roil. He takes the medallion from around his neck and clicks it into the device.
“Why did you torture my father?” I screw my eyes shut. I can’t look at the device, which is clearly about to inflict some excruciating pain. “Why did you murder him? No one would have had any idea what he was talking about, even if hedidever tell them about the stars. About what he guessed. You are Tarian’s beloved king. You’refightingthe Gwydden. That’s all anyone would have believed.”
“I needed to test my machine on someone,” the king says dismissively. “Unlucky for him, there was nothing in his soul of any use to me. No power there. I checked. Repeatedly. But all that practice makes it more or less certain I’ll be successful extractingyoursoul. I had to be sure I could do it, before I risked your sister. Or you, as it turns out.”
Tears leak from my eyes without my consent. The wounds in my father’s chest—the king wasn’t torturing him. He wasexperimentingon him. “You’re a monster,” I spit.
