Page 171 of Into the Heartless Wood
“Why your soul came back to you?” says a voice behind me.
I turn to find one of the tree-like creatures gazing down at me. He has a beard that seems to be made of moss, and his eyes look very sad. “My mother touched my sister’s heartblood, and when that heartblood was tangled up with the powerful protection woven around your soul—”
“It would not stay within me,” says the Gwydden, with marked bitterness. “It could not. And so all I am left with is the seed of the soul that once belonged to me. A burnt-out, useless husk.”
“Not altogether useless,” the mossy-bearded creature says. “It has made you into what you once were. The thing you were born as, before the Soul Eater cursed you.”
Once more, my father’s words echo inside of me.There is a way to save her. There is a way to stop all of this. It’s what the stars have been telling us, all this time. You must only give back what he stole, and what she sacrificed.
This is what he meant: a heart, a soul. It’s all it took to free the Gwydden. Seren’s heart. My soul.
But it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. We both of us sacrificed ourselves, but Seren died, and I lived. And here I am. Without her.
“I am powerless,” whispers the Gwydden. “I am nothing.”
“You are not nothing,” says the tree creature.
She looks miserably at the wood, which stands still and silent now, wreathed with smoke in the falling rain. Lifeless, without her power to feed it. The remains of Gwaed’s army stand in a daze, blinking and bewildered. Through the trees come Seren’s six remaining sisters. They are weeping. Begging.
They turn, one by one, back into the trees they were made from. I blink, and six birches stand all in a line, the rain drenching their dappled leaves.
The other two tree creatures join the one with the mossy beard, solemn and sad. Slowly, their features freeze, bark creeping up their bodies, faces smoothing away, arms growing longer and splitting off into others. And then they are nothing but three stately pines, all indistinguishable.
Grief claws up my throat.
“So pass my daughters,” says the Gwydden, “and so my sons.”
She looks to me with clear eyes, and I see in her a glimpse of what she must have been, once, when she was young and lost her heart to a boy hardly older than myself.
“There is only me now, fixed into this life that I no longer desire.”
“Gwydden—”
“That is not my name, you know.”
My heart pulses painfully. “What is your name?”
“Enaid,” she says.
It is a bitter name, but a true one. It means soul.
Enaid lifts her arms to the sky, tilts her head back so the rain washes over her. She has little power left, but enough, it seems, that she can will her own life away. One moment she is there, smiling into the sky.
The next she is smoke, dissolved on the wind.
Then I am alone in a field of corpses and wounded soldiers, the Gwaed army and the leaves of the smoldering forest my only company.
I kneel beside Seren’s body, brushing my fingers across her cold face. It is cruel that I am here and she is not. She was not even afforded the honor of her brothers and sisters. She does not even get to become again the tree she once was. Her body shimmers. It turns to ash. The rain washes it away.
“NO!” I scramble to grasp the remains of her, but it is impossible to hold onto dust in a rainstorm.
She is gone and gone and gone.
I sob, broken, undone. I whisper the name she took for herself. “Seren, Seren, Seren.”
It does not bring her back.
But when a pair of Gwaed soldiers take me by my good arm and help me to my feet, I see what she left me: her heart, washed clean by the rain.
