Page 57 of Into the Heartless Wood
I live for these nights:
for stars on a hill,
for Owen’s gentle heart.
I hate the days:
my sisters’ shrieking music,
blood and death and soul upon soul
taken for my mother,
power for her war against the Eater.
But I cannot have the nights
without the days.
Dawn comes.
He slips away.
I wonder
if this will be the day
that
I
lose
him,
or if we will have another night
under the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
OWEN
FATHER IS WAITING WHENICLIMB OVER THE WALL.
His arms are folded across his chest, the muscles jumping in his jaw. The sunrise touches his features with red light.
Mother’s phonograph is strapped awkwardly to my back, and Father’s eyes light on it briefly before fixing on my face. “Give it to me.” His words are cold, short, sharp.
I shrug out of the strap and hand him the phonograph, my sudden, wild fear hardly dimming my lingering elation.
My father hurls the phonograph at the wall. It splinters apart, the pieces falling limp to the grass. It’s all the warning I have before he seizes my arm and drags me back to the house.
I have never, in all my seventeen years, seen my father this angry. He yanks me through the kitchen, past a confused Awela, who’s eating porridge, and up the stairs to my room. He flings me inside, shaking with fury.
“How many nights, Owen?” He speaks quietly, every word edged with iron.
It would be better if he shouted.
