Page 161 of Into the Heartless Wood
away.
But I just stand here.
Rooted.
I will not leave him
bleeding in the mud.
I cannot.
There is an undulation in the ground.
Past Owen and the slaughtered soldiers,
something new fights the wood.
Dark creatures, fierce and tall.
Their bellows fill the sky:
Cangen, Criafol, Pren, drenched in rain.
They wield stone swords that look as if they were hewn from their mountain. They drive the trees back. Drive our sisters back.
If my mother sees them, I cannot tell.
She faces the Soul Eater in the lashing rain. Wind rattles the bones of her dress.
He is gold, and she is silver,
and it seems
all the world
rages because of them.
They stare at each other.
For long heartbeats, they only stare.
My mother seems to tremble before him,
a leaf in a storm.
Surely she does not fear the Eater.
And yet—
her power in me weakens.
Owen gasps for breath in the grass. He lies near the body of a girl hardly older than he is. The trees killed her. Killed all of them.
I did not stop it.
On the hill, the Eater still stares at my mother. “I had forgotten what a hideous monster you are.”
My mother bares her teeth. She pulses with rage, and something else I do not understand: sorrow. “You did not think so, once. There was a time when you were not ashamed to kiss a monster in the dark.”
