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Page 81 of Into the Heartless Wood

“I am glad I got to see you once last time.”

“I’m going to save you.”

Pain sparks in her face. “I am long past saving. But there is yet one last thing I can do for you.”

“Mother—”

She presses her hand against my chest, and I gasp as pain flashes through me, as it sinks fiery into the core of my being. It pulses once, twice, and then it’s gone. I stare at her. “Whatwasthat?”

“One last spark of power. To guard you from her. So she can never take your soul, the way she took mine.” She kisses my temple, then crouches back on her heels. “My soul is gone forever, but she cannot have my heart anymore.”

She claws suddenly at her chest, screaming in pain as her nails meet skin and dig deeper. Blood blooms in my vision.

“My heart belongs to you,” comes her voice, thin and distant. “To Awela. To Calon. Tell him—Owen, tell him I’ll always be burning in his sky. Goodbye, brave one. I will love you, always.” She gives one last piercing, inhuman screech, and then in the haze of blood and rain, I see what she’s done.

She’s torn out her own heart. She holds it in her hands as her body goes still on the forest floor.

Animal cries rip raw from my throat. I don’t understand. She can’t be gone, not like this. She can’t be lying there dead, her own heart in her hands.

And yet.

Her heart turns to ash as I watch. The rain washes it away. It cleans the blood from my mother’s hands, cleans the dirt from her face. I take her hand.

I feel like a stranger in my own body. I weep and I scream and I’m scarcely aware that I’m doing it.

She shouldn’t have died like this. She shouldn’t have died here. She shouldn’t have—

“Owen, come away.” Knobby fingers jab under my armpits. Hands lift me to my feet. I’m fighting the hands, the arms, the viselike grip that won’t let me go.

My mother’s body turns to ash, like her heart did.

She’s wholly gone, the rain grinding her into the earth.

“Owen, come away.”

I’m dragged from the river and the heartless tree. I stop resisting after a little while, exhausted and hollow, all the strength sapped from me.

I’m released then. I crumple to the ground like a broken toy.

I look up into Seren’s face.

I followed the tree siren into the wood.

The siren with violets in her hair.

I lunge at her.

Chapter Thirty-Two

SEREN

ICATCHOWEN’S WRISTS.

I hold him back from me.

He howls in the rain and the dark.

He struggles in my grasp. He shouts: “LET ME GO!”