Page 172 of Into the Heartless Wood
For one breath, two, I think I hear it beating.
But by the time I scramble to cradle it in my hands, it has gone irrevocably still.
Chapter Sixty-Five
OWEN
IBURYSEREN’S HEART ON THE HILL IN THE MIDST OF THE WOOD, where we danced four minutes at a time to the music of my mother’s phonograph. I dig the hole as the sun sets, awkward with my one good arm, and wait until the stars glimmer into being to lay this last piece of her to rest. I made a wooden box for her heart. I carved it with leaves and stars.
“I still don’t believe you,” I tell her conversationally as I smooth the dirt overtop of her. “I still think you have a soul.”
I sit with her as the moon rises cold above the tree line. I play my mother’s cello for her. I weep.
When dawn glimmers silver, I tell her that I have to go away for a little while, because I have to go and fetch my sister. “You remember Awela,” I say. “You watched over her, that day in the woods, instead of killing her. And then when I came, you watched over me, too.” I touch the patch of earth where her heart lies with gentle fingers. My throat constricts. “When I’ve brought her home again, I will come and visit you every single day. I won’t miss even one.” Fresh tears burn my eyes. “Not even in midwinter.”
Light floods the hill, and my shadow skews stark against the grass. “The wood is quieter, you know.” I swallow. “Without you.”
I get reluctantly to my feet, and follow the path back through the wood to my parents’ cottage, which is exactly how I left it, save for a layer of dust I’ll attack with soap and rags when I get back with Awela.
It’s painful to leave the house and the wood, to buy a ticket from Mairwen Griffith and board the train to Breindal City. If I didn’t yearn for Awela, I couldn’t have made myself leave at all.
The miles blur past the train window, but not as swiftly as I wish. I am still stiff and sore, bandages wound about every inch of my chest. My broken arm hangs useless in a sling. All of me is starting to itch, which the nurse who tended me—the same nurse who once bandaged my lash marks—said would be a good sign. It’s a miracle I survived, she said. I’d lost far too much blood. By rights I should be dead.
But I’m not. I’m still here.
God knows there was more work for gravediggers than physicians after the battle with the wood.
When Rheinallt found me in the medical tent, I was in a bad way. Frantic about Seren’s heart. Frantic about Awela. I explained to Rheinallt that my sister was missing, that I didn’t know where she was, but I thought she must be hidden somewhere near the palace.
I was desperate to find her, desperate to know she was all right.
But Rheinallt didn’t miss the way my eyes refused to stray from the box I held tight in my hands, the box that contained Seren’s heart.
“I’ll find your sister,” he told me. “I’ll send you a telegram the moment I do. You go and bury your dead.”
So I’d gone.
I felt easier when I’d arrived in Blodyn Village to find the telegram already waiting for me. I felt easier still when Seren’s heart lay quiet in the earth.
And now?
Now I’m ready to take Awela home.
The train stops at a village a ways outside of the city—Breindal’s station is in ruins, torn to pieces by the Gwydden’s trees. I hire a horse, hardly dipping into my heavy purse of silver, and ride on toward Breindal.
Whatever it was that happened that day, when I lost Seren to the wood, the Gwaed army that appeared so unexpectedly saw me as the boy who stood against the Gwydden, and destroyed her. That isn’t the whole truth—it’s hardly even a piece of it. But it was enough to make the Gwaed soldiers—or rather, their leader—give me everything I asked for.
Breindal City is destroyed. The Gwydden’s Wood marched very far, and corpses lie tumbled about with the stones. There are hardly enough people to clear them, and it will be a long, horrible job. Everywhere are the remnants of Enaid and Elynion’s quarrel. The death and ruin they left behind them.
But the world is not gone,I think.There is a chance yet, at life, at peace.
My heart is heavy as I pick my way through the rubble of the city gates, then up the hill to the palace.
Gwaed flags fly from the roof, a violet sword on a white field. I’m not surprised, but tension squeezes my throat as I climb from the horse and hand the reins to a scrawny stable boy.
I’m ushered into the same drawing room where I waited so long for the king. This time, I’m barely there a minute before the door opens, and Rheinallt comes in.
He looks different than he did all those weeks training with Baines and me and the rest of the soldiers. His pale hair is tied back at the nape of his neck. A pair of sapphire earrings flash in the light pouring in through the windows. He’s dressed simply, in the Gwaed violet and white, but that doesn’t disguise the way he holds himself like a king. I wonder I never saw it before.
