Page 2 of Into the Heartless Wood
But she trots along after me as I fetch the wash basin and fill it from the pump in front of the house. When it’s full, I put the basin by the garden—the flowers and vegetable seedlings will appreciate the water Awela is absolutely going to splash out.
I strip her of her grimy dress and plunk her in, grabbing a bar of soap and scrubbing vigorously. She shouts and laughs and splashes, thoroughly enjoying herself. I finish scrubbing and let her play in the water, my eyes wandering sometimes to the wood beyond the garden and my father’s wall, and sometimes to the house I’ve lived in for as long as I can remember.
It’s a small stone house, ordinary except for the tower that serves as my father’s observatory, the silver dome closed until evening, the telescope safe inside. Flowers wilt in the bright blue window boxes, like they never did when my mother tended them instead of me. I’ve tried to keep all the pieces of her alive. I’ve tried not to surrender the whole of her memory to the Gwydden’s Wood.
Everyone says we’re fools to live on the border of the wood itself. Maybe we are.
But there was nowhere else far enough away from the village for my father to observe the stars in solitude. Few people know he’s an astronomer. No one knows he charts the stars for King Elynion himself, on the king’s coin no less. Father works as a day laborer at Brennan’s Farm to keep people from asking questions about how he earns his money and adhere to the king’s condition of secrecy. Brennan is our closest neighbor, a three-mile walk northeast of our house. The village is another five miles north, and even that’s considered perilously close to the wood.
It grows chilly as the wind picks up. Clouds knot dark over the sun, and it smells suddenly of rain. The music is stronger now, loud enough to hear clearly over the rising wind. It pulls at me. I shudder, clench my jaw, steel myself against it.
“Time to go inside, little one,” I tell Awela. I pour a pitcher of clean water over her head and she screams like I’m murdering her. I just tickle her chin and scoop her out of the basin, wrapping her in a large towel and carrying her toward the house.
The music follows, sinking into me with invisible barbs. The same music that lured my mother into the wood, where she was lost forever. I wonder if anyone heard her scream when the Gwydden’s eight monstrous daughters fell on her and rent her to pieces. I wonder if any part of her remains, or if she is nothing more than dust now, strewn about the forest floor amongst the molded leaves.
I carry Awela up the two steps to our front door in a hurry, reaching for the handle.
“Is Calon Merrick at home?”
I jump at the overloud voice, turning to see what is obviously one of the king’s men striding up, his long cobalt coat fixed with gold-plated buttons, his smart blue cap trimmed with gold to match. A tall oilcloth satchel hangs over one shoulder, and he’s somewhere between my father’s age and my own seventeen years. He has dark brown skin, which speaks of Saeth descent.
“I’m Owen Merrick,” I reply. “My father isn’t here right now. You’ve come for the star charts?”
The king’s man’s eyes flick between me and my baby sister with obvious distaste. He taps his ears, and I realize he must have put wax in them, to protect against the tree sirens’ song—he can’t hear me.
I open the door and wave him inside. He steps through, but only takes the wax out when the door is shut firmly behind him. His eyes flick uneasily to the wood outside the kitchen window. “I’m here for the charts.”
“I’ll fetch them,” I promise. “Just a moment.” I set the kettle on the stove while I find Awela a cloth diaper and a clean nightgown. She scampers about, shrieking. The king’s man frowns, pressing his back against the wall by the fireplace because he physically can’t get any farther away from her.
I scowl at him when he’s not looking—does he suppose he sprang from his mother’s womb as fully grown and thoroughly dull as he is now?
I leave him with a cup of tea at the kitchen table and carry Awela up to the observatory with me to collect the month’s star charts. Ordinarily I wouldn’t take her, but there’s no chance in hell I’m leaving her downstairs with that dullard.
“Don’t touch anything, little one,” I instruct with great futility as I set her down in the middle of the observatory. For a few moments she stares around her with huge, fascinated eyes, and then the next instant she’s racing round the room in circles, shrieking with mad delight.
The charts are in bundles on the bookcase beside the telescope. I gather them under my arms and manage to herd Awela out of the room in front of me.
She half tumbles down the stairs—it’s past time for her nap.
“Here they are,” I tell the king’s man, piling the charts on the table for him to examine.
I give Awela some milk and sit with her at the table; she nestles into me.
The king’s man takes each chart from its casing and gives it a cursory glance before putting it back. He’s clearly new to this job—King Elynion normally sends the same few servants to collect the charts and bring my father’s payment, and I’ve never seen this man before. I can also tell by the way his eyes dart around the star charts that he doesn’t actually know how to read them.
“Everything appears to be in order,” he says when he’s perused the last one.
I don’t call his bluff. I’m annoyed that he hasn’t even touched his tea, leaving it to go cold at his elbow. I shouldn’t have wasted it on him.
Outside, the clouds break, and rain slants hard past the window. Awela is half asleep in my arms.
“Your father’s payment, as agreed upon.” The king’s man takes a blue velvet pouch from an inner pocket, and sets it on the table with a faint clink of metal. “You can count it, if you wish, but be quick about it. I want to be back in the village by nightfall.”
Nightfall isn’t for hours, but I see how his gaze travels once more to the window, to the shadow of the wood that lies just beyond his view. I wonder if he’s ever laid eyes on it before today.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” he says in an undertone. “I don’t know how you sleep at night, so near her wood. So nearher.”
The Gwydden. Few say her name aloud, but everyone thinks it: the witch who rules the wood, powerful enough to bend the things of God to her own will, just as she bends her daughters, the tree sirens. She wields them like weapons, commanding them to sing, to lure men and women into the wood and devour them.
