Page 126 of Into the Heartless Wood
“It isn’t my fault your father happened to be the astronomer in my employ when the witch put her signs in the sky. I’ve had quite a lot of them, you know.”
My jaw is swelling and the glass in my leghurts.If I don’t dig it out soon, I might never walk properly again. But that doesn’t matter when I’m about to die. When my mother ripped her heart out and my father died in my arms. At least Awela is safe. Bedwyn got her out.
Bedwyn.
I feel again the hot press of her mouth against mine, the pounding of her heart. Her hair, whipping cool about my neck.
There’s a clank of metal, the sudden sear of pain in my chest.
My eyes fly open. The king is twisting the metal claw under my skin. He stops before he hits my ribs.
I gulp shallow breaths.
“I’ll be so glad when this is all over,” the king says conversationally. He adjusts the lens. “Do you know how tiresome it is to reinvent oneself every sixty years or so? Paying off servants, staging my own death again and again to pass the crown onto my ‘son’ or my ‘nephew.’ I even tried to conquer Gwaed a few centuries back, just for some variety, but that ended in disaster. I’m thoroughly sick of this wretched palace and this wretched kingdom. When the witch is dead, I can go where I please. I won’t be bound here any longer, waiting for her to try and kill me.” He frowns at the lens and makes another adjustment. “But I haven’t been idle. I can wield as much magic as she does now. There’s just one thing holding me back—I need a new soul. Mine is wasting away.”
“Do you mean her soul?” I whisper. “Do you mean the Gwydden’s soul?”
He laughs. “It hasn’t belonged to her in centuries. She’s stronger without it. Don’t you think?”
“You made her what she is.”
“And I will unmake her, too.”
He flicks a switch on the side of his device.
Blinding, earth-shattering pain tears through me.
Then there’s nothing but light and heat and the sound of my own screaming.
Chapter Fifty
SEREN
IPOUND ON THE DOOR OF THE ANTECHAMBER. IPOUND ANDI scream. I do not stop when my throat is hoarse and my hands are bloody. I pound and pound.
Until footsteps sound on the other side. Until the door creaks open and Heledd is there, her face creased in alarm, in confusion. “Bedwyn! What—”
But there is no time.
I push past her.
I run.
Toward the feel of his soul.
Toward the reek of the Eater’s power.
I run and I run, but this human body is not fast enough. I wish I were a bird, so I could wing up to the tower, so I could reach him faster, faster.
But I am slow. These lungs burn and this heart beats and all the while I run up the winding stair I hear him screaming. It tears at me like my mother’s claws, until all of me is raw and bleeding.
With every step, I’m shedding leaves.
There is a door at the top of the tower, an iron door. It’s locked. I beat against it with my human fists. I rage and rail, but it isn’t enough, isn’t enough.
And on the other side of the door, he’s screaming.
I feel the change inside of me; I call it from within the core of my being: the power of the wood.Mypower.
