Page 169 of Into the Heartless Wood
“Gwydden.”
The wood witch turns to look at me, and I’m nearly undone by her brutal stare.
It’s Seren’s sacrifice that gives me the strength to stand unshaken before her. That gives me the boldness to stare straight into her horrible eyes and not blanch, the courage or the stupidity to kneel in the mud and say what I say to her.
“You cannot take back what he stole from you.” I nod at the king, who writhes on the ground, all the color gone from his face. “He’s used up your soul, every piece of it.”
“As I have used up my heart,” the Gwydden sneers. “My worthless daughter wasted her life on you.”
I am not deterred. “Take my soul instead. Take it freely. Let it burn inside of you in place of your own. Let it fill you up, make you whole again.”
She turns all her focus on me, and the fear is back, crawling up my spine and tingling in my fingers. But I force myself not to quail.
“I have taken many souls. I will take many more, before my wood has grown over all the earth.”
“Yes, but you have taken none for your own. You have fed them into the wood, given it the power to grow and grow and grow. You did not want those souls. You wanted yours. You wanted the one that was stolen from you—it was the only one that would suit you. But now you see not even that will satisfy you anymore.”
Her glance shifts to the king, dying in agony on the ground as rain runs off his worthless plate armor.
“Take my soul,” I say. “Take it freely.” I know now why my mother protected my soul against the king. She was protecting it for this moment. For this reason.
I see the Gwydden consider it, the hardness on her strange face, the astuteness in her dark eyes. “Why would you give me your soul?”
“Because what he did to you was wrong. Because everyone deserves a chance to make it right. Because I suspect that a soul freely given will burn stronger inside you than one ripped away. And because Seren is gone, and I could not give my soul to her.”
The Gwydden frowns. “Seren? Who is Seren?”
My shoulders stiffen. My heart constricts. “Your youngest daughter.”
She looks past me to Seren’s form, still and cold in the muddy grass, and if the Gwydden feels anything for her, it doesn’t show. “My daughter has no name save Fool.”
The king whimpers and gurgles, his eyes rolling back into his head. He was so mighty, and now he is nothing.
Impassively, the Gwydden watches Elynion die, one last sharpened branch thrust through his heart. When his body goes limp, her branches release him, and he crumples to the ground. She crosses the short distance between them, and crouches beside him. She smooths the hair on his brow, closes his eyes with gentle fingers.
I don’t understand how the Gwydden can be gentle.
She puts his hands on his chest and begins to sing, a simple melody that twists into the air. A wisp rises out of him, a simple coil of smoke that is there and then gone in an instant, washed away by the rain.
The Gwydden turns back to me, and the sorrow on her face nearly unravels me. How can she feel sorrow for the man she killed? The man she’s hated for centuries?
And yet clearly, she does.
“You are right,” she says. “There is nothing left of his soul.” She looks to the battle that rages on between the burning wood and the Gwaed army. Three strange tree-like creatures are fighting, too. Not with the wood—against it.
“Then will you take mine?” I ask her.
“It would kill you.”
I shrug. “I would not want to live without a soul.” I wince at my words—that is what the Gwydden has done. That is what Seren has done. What my mother did, for over a year. Grief wrenches me.
The Gwydden looks suddenly smaller, like all the fight and the anger has gone out of her with the death of the king. “I will take your soul,” she says. “If you will give it to me.”
I nod. My throat is dry, my body chilled through. I pace to where Seren lies, and kneel beside her in the blood that has spilled out from her heart. It is dark around her, almost indistinguishable from the mud. A single shredded violet trembles in her hair.
The Gwydden follows. She looks down at me with something like pity and something like sorrow. And yet there is hunger in her eyes. “Farewell, boy.”
A thousand needle-like branches shoot up from the ground, and between one breath and the next, they pierce through me. For an instant, the shock of it numbs the pain, but then it’s there, raging and roaring. I am skewered like an insect on a board. I cannot breathe or see or hear—there are thorns in my nose, my mouth, my eyes. Panic seizes me. There is blood in my mouth, blood pouring from my eyes and down my face. I choke on it.
