Page 15 of Into the Heartless Wood
“I see why our mother despises you. You are foolish. Weak.” The siren with roses in her hair rakes her claws down the other’s bare arm. Dark liquid bubbles up from the wounds. Then the rose-crowned siren turns away, and vanishes into the wood.
The root around my leg releases me. I scramble to my feet. I bolt toward my sister.
The siren with the violet crown wheels on me, swift as a snake, and grabs me by the throat. She holds me choking and writhing, my feet hanging in empty air. I claw at her hands, try to pull them off, but they squeeze tighter and tighter. I can’t breathe, can’t breathe.Oh God.Spots blink bright behind my eyes. Blackness crowds the edges of my vision. I’m choking. I can’t even scream.
She releases me without warning, and I slam onto the ground, sobbing for breath.
She looms over me, silhouetted against the wood, a monster in her truest form. The violets tremble in her hair. Dark liquid drips from the sores in her arm.
I gasp, shaking. I gulp air but it’s not enough. The pain in my throat is unbearable. I shake and shake. Tears pour from my eyes. She’s going to kill me. She’s going to kill Awela. And when our father comes looking for us, she’ll kill him, too. We’ll all be nothing but bones, scattered and swallowed beneath the forest floor.
“Why have you come?” she hisses at me. “Who are you to rob me of my prize?”
“Please.” The word scrapes raw past my bruised throat. “Please spare her. Do what you like to me, but don’t hurt my sister.Please.”
“Sister?” The tree siren kneels beside me, the wind stirring through her long hair.
In the sky above the clearing, the stars appear, one by one. They cast her in a luminous silver light, and it softens her. Makes her look less monstrous. But that frightens me even more.
“She’s just a child,” I rasp, “hardly more than a babe. Please let her go.”
The siren tilts her head. Her eyes glitter. “What do you offer me in exchange for her life?”
My heart wrenches. I shove up to a sitting position, forcing myself not to recoil from her proximity. She smells of deep earth and new growth. She smells of violets. “My own life.”
She sneers, a curl of her lip. “You cannot give a soul for a soul.”
“It’s all I have.” My eyes fix on Awela’s small form, the steady rise and fall of her chest. Somehow she’s sleeping in the horror and the dark of the Gwydden’s Wood.
“Who are you?” the siren demands again. “Why did you follow me here?”
I stare at her, still feeling the echo of her hands squeezing the life out of me. “I didn’t follow you. I followed Awela.”
Her eyes narrow, the wind rising wild. It whips her hair about her face, sends a gust of dead leaves rattling past us. “You were there before. In the wood. The last soul from the iron machine.” Her face hardens in the silvery light. “I let you go, and I should not have. I will not let you go again.”
It’s so hard to breathe, with the fear slamming through me. “I’m not asking you to. Let my sister go. Let me take her home to our father. Then you can do anything you wish with my soul.”
She regards me coolly. “You should not have come here.”
From the depths of the wood comes a sudden thread of music, a song that coils up my spine and pulls me ramrod straight—the other siren. I’m climbing to my feet without realizing it, turning toward the song.
The tree siren hisses, and snatches my wrist in her rough, unyielding fingers. “You areweak,” she scoffs. “As weak as the rest of them. Easy prey formysisters.”
I try to jerk out of her grasp, but she catches my other arm and wrenches me close. She’s taller than me by nearly a foot, and clothed in leaves that are sewn together with translucent thread.
“I thought you were stronger than the others,” she hisses into my hair. “But you would go to my sisters like a moth to a flame, no matter it will burn you.”
My heart beats erratic and wild; it pulses in my neck, in the places her rough fingers press into my wrists.
“Should I let you go to them?” She tilts her face down, exposing the curve of her strange silver cheek, the glint of her eyelashes, the harsh line of her mouth. “They would not hesitate to rip your soul from your body, or the child’s either.”
I try to shove down my terror but it roars through me, ravenous. “Why do you hesitate?” My voice shakes.
Her face hardens. “I have not yet received a new orb from my mother. There is nothing to put your souls into. I must drag you both to her court instead, and it is far, and I am tired.”
Something in the cadence of her voice belies her. It startles me into speech. “That is not what you said to your sister.”
She hisses again, flings me bodily to the ground. I land hard on my right shoulder.
