Page 144 of Into the Heartless Wood
I just stare at him, the blood loss making my head wheel.
He frowns at the cut in my arm, as if forgetting he was the one who made it. He touches me with one searing finger. Heat blazes agonizingly through my skin, sealing the wound.
“I said get up.”
I obey. The tree siren stands there, silent and seething. But there is an awful fear in her eyes. She is so like Seren—and yet so unlike her, too. Needles of iron pierce her skin, and I read something else in her glance: pain.
“Come,” says Elynion.
Her body goes rigid. She steps up behind him.
Both of us follow him from the wood, back to where his guards and Luned are waiting.
The army is coming over the plain. They swell against the rising sun. I don’t know what the king plans on doing with the tree siren, or with me. But in this moment I fear him more than the Gwydden herself.
I hope to God Seren is far, far away from this place.
Chapter Fifty-Six
SEREN
THE WOOD AROUND ME
teems,
breathes,
moves.
The trees are marching. They pluck their roots from the ground and sink them down again. They ooze across the earth. Slow. Steady. Sure.
They are not quite alive—my mother did not give them hearts.
But they are more than they were.
Their anger pulses through the earth.
It frightens me.
This is my mother’s army,
the one she fed with blood and souls.
She rides in the midst of the trees, on a giant creature that is something like a tree and something like a lion, and yet is neither. No natural beast would bear her.
So she ripped the heartless tree from the earth, and made it into a creature that would.
It creaks as it walks, its wood-skin dark with silver veins.
Its claws are hand-length thorns. Its fur is thousands of prickling pine needles. Its mane is bright golden leaves.
If I had not watched my mother twist it into its monstrous form, I would not believe it.
But she did.
My mother’s antlers are dipped in fresh blood. Her green hair is woven with the same briars that bound me. They bloom with roses.
She wears a gown of bones. Human bones. They rattle and clack.
