Page 130 of Into the Heartless Wood
“Worthless,” he snarls. “You areworthlessto me!” He paces over to the desk, grabs one of the ancient star charts, drags his fingers over the crumbly parchment. “I can wait for a new soul. I’ll find a way to undo whatever it is she did to you. Wood magic, that’s all I need. But until then, I’ll make do without one. I will defeat her with a power older than souls. I will devour her, and burn her wood, and see all that she ever loved turn toash.”
I convulse on the floor. Darkness presses in.
The king stalks to the table where he bound me, climbs up onto it himself.
I try to breathe. I try to cling to consciousness. I don’t want to bleed out on the floor. Not when she was here. Not when shesavedme. Again.
Dancing in the courtyard, the wind in her hair.
Kissing her under the stars, her heat wending through me.
Now she’s gone and gone and gone.
I struggle for my last breaths. They fill my ragged lungs, sharp as knives.
The king cries out, and I glance up to see him driving the metal claw into his own chest. He shouts a word to the sky, and the ceilingexplodes.
Glass and light rain down. Heat sizzles and sears.
Somehow, through the blur of pain and confusion, I understand.
King Elynion has given up the remains of the Gwydden’s soul for the power she wielded when she changed the stars.
Now the stars rush into him, light blazing into his chest and under his skin. He burns with it. I think he cannot possibly contain it all.
The light comes and comes. It will consume him. It will be the last thing I ever see.
But it stops, as suddenly as it started. The floor is a desert of broken glass.
The king lives.
He rips the iron from his chest, and laughs with pleasure as the wound heals itself, pulsing with light. He teems with impossible power.
He climbs from the table, hauls me to my feet. I can’t stand on my own and I sag in his grip.
His hand is hot enough to burn through the ragged remains of my sleeves. But I can’t jerk away. He smiles, and there are stars inside of him, light slipping through the cracks in his teeth. The rough patches of his flesh are smoothed over now. He seems to grow younger before my eyes.
“I have been a fool for far too long,” he says. “I should not have held so tight to the witch’s soul.”
“I thought that was what gave you your power. Your long life.”
“At first,” he agrees. His voice sounds as if it’s coming from a great distance away. “But I have long since learned my own useful bits of sorcery.”
My vision blurs. My heart slows. I’m slipping away, and I’ll never see her again.
Heat sears through my chest, tearing a scream from my throat. I open my eyes to see the king has touched my wound, commanded my flesh to knit itself back together.
“My dear Owen,” he says. “I can’t let you die here. I still mean to have your soul, you know. And now I have everything I need.”
I shudder as I come back to myself. He didn’t heal my broken rib or the wounds in my leg and my face. My whole body is embedded with shards of glass from the exploded ceiling. The pain seems almost more acute, now that the mortal wound is gone.
“Everything you need to take my soul?” I ask.
He smiles. “Everything I need to catch a tree siren. A piece of one—” He taps the vial of crushed leaves. “And something to use as bait.” He smiles at me with everything but his horrible, horrible eyes. “I have both.”
The king drags me to the prison himself—for all his healing of me, I can barely walk. Every breath sends pain stabbing through my broken rib, and if I don’t dig the glass out of my leg soon—
I stumble along the same path I took barely a few hours ago to see my father. Through the prison courtyard, where Drystan regards me with shock and horror, down the long flight of stairs. All the while the king doesn’t let go of my arm. The heat of him has lessened now, but I can sense it lurking, a beast ready to rear its head at his word.
