Page 59 of Into the Heartless Wood
She’s fascinating,my mind whispers back.As fascinating as the stars—more. She’s brilliant. She’s beautiful. I want to be near her.
My heart throbs uncomfortably. I go back to pacing.
There’s noise downstairs as Father and Awela come in. I wonder if I’m to be allowed down to supper.
I’m not. The sun sets. The first stars come out. The house grows quiet again—Awela must be in bed.
Father’s steps creak past my room and up the stairs to the observatory. It’s remarkably unfair that he means to keep me from the stars, too. I halfheartedly shove my shoulder against the door. It doesn’t shift.
I pace and pace. I turn up my oil lamp and try to read, but I can’t concentrate. Hunger and restlessness gnaw through me. My eyes wander continually to the wood. I poke my head out of the window. I couldattemptto climb down without the aid of the ivy. I might make it—I also might break my neck. I curse.
I’m about to surrender what remains of my dignity and batter on the door until Father comes and lets me out when I catch a flash of light in the corner of my eye.
I turn to the window. Another streak of light flashes across the sky, followed by a third. Meteors. I’m surprised to see so many—it’s not late enough in the summer for the Lleidr Meteor Shower, which happens every year. I itch to discuss it with my father, to see what he makes of the anomaly.
And then it seems the whole world fills with light.
Meteor after meteor illuminates the sky, a hundred at a time, more. It looks like it’s raining stars.
I gape, so stunned I hardly hear the scrape of the trunk in the hallway, the creak of the door.
Father claps his hand on my arm. “Come up to the observatory. Quick.”
We pound upstairs, but we needn’t have hurried. The meteors flash and die, flash and die, streaking through the constellations, painting the sky with their fierce, impossible light.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, staring out at the shower of stars, silent in our joint awe.
I think, perhaps, that it’s the end of the world.
But little by little, meteor by meteor, the shower lessens, until there’s only fifty at a time, then twenty, then ten.
One last meteor streaks across the sky, its tail burning long and white. It dies at the horizon, and the night is still.
I take a breath, the first I’m aware of since the meteor shower started.
Father turns to me, his face awash with conflicting emotions. “Shall we do the charts?”
But I’m staring at the sky. I don’t need to look through the telescope to know that the stars have—
“Father.” I nod to the window.
He looks. He grows very still. “Bring out last night’s charts, will you?”
I oblige him, even though we both know it’s not necessary. I take them from their designated case and he unrolls the one he wants. He frowns at it. We both do.
“What about the charts from last week?”
I bring them to him.
He spreads them all out on the table, comparing them desperately against each other, trying to find some reason for what is staring at us so baldly from the night sky.
The stars havechanged.
The Morwyn constellation, comprised of almost two dozen stars of varying brightnesses and distance from our planet, hasmoved.She’s no longer chasing the Twysog Mileinig, the Spiteful Prince. Her constellation has swallowed his up; his is a mass of broken stars, the crown the legends say he stole from her burning in her midst. And all around the Morwyn hang stars I have never seen before: a cluster of eight bright ones, near her right side; many, many dimmer ones strewn about her feet and left side, and scattered around her crown.
It’s absolutely impossible.
It breaks every natural law.
