Page 133 of Into the Heartless Wood
Their softness.
The scratch of the stubble on his chin.
My mother yanks another briar from her dress. She lashes me across the stomach. Thorns tear through the maid’s uniform and into the tender bark of my belly.
A scream tears out of me.
Amber and red.
Sap and blood.
Screaming.
All mine.
She hisses at me. “You DARE, you DARE to love a HUMAN, and then become LIKE him? You DARE?”
She binds my ankles with yet another briar.
She slings me across her shoulder
like the flour sacks the kitchen boys
haul in every morning.
My face and body fall
against her thorny dress,
and I cannot tell the night air apart
from the raging, fiery pain.
Each step she takes
is another brittle agony.
I whisper to the briars: “Where are you taking me?”
“To the wood, daughter.”
“That is where you will kill me?”
Dew mingles
with the blood on my face.
The fear
is eating
me.
She carries me on through the darkness. “That is where you will feel every ounce of your betrayal. That is where you will die.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
OWEN
