Page 87 of Into the Heartless Wood
“Awela’s not here. The king’s soldiers took her away with your father to the capital.”
“WHAT?”
She shrinks back from me.
I force myself to breathe. “Forgive me, Efa. Why would they take her?”
“I don’t know. The same reason they arrested your father, perhaps. I wondered what had become of you. Why you weren’t with them.”
I can’t even begin to explain, even if there were time. “Do you know why he was arrested?”
She shakes her head. “They’d bound his hands,” she says. “Awela was crying. They wouldn’t let me comfort her. They just took her away.”
My gut wrenches. “Thanks for looking after her, Efa.”
Tears slip down her cheeks. “If I’d known they would take her, I would have hidden her. I would have—”
“You did all you could,” I say gently. “Thank you.” I pull her into a swift hug.
She pats my arm and wipes her eyes. “Hurry. You don’t want to miss the train.”
I walk to the village in the sucking mud. Rain slips under my collar and drips from the brim of my hat. I blink and see vacant eyes and clawing fingers, blood and ashes.
I try to remember Mother as she was in life: full of laughter and music. Playing her cello in the garden, cursing when she realized she’d set her stool in the cabbage bed and mangled several of the plants. Baking bread in the kitchen, her belly round with Awela, her nose streaked with flour. Dancing with my father in the observatory to the music of the phonograph, their elbows bumping against the bookcase because it was far too small up there to dance. The wonder in her eyes when she first held Awela, though her face was pale and streaked with tears.
She shouldn’t have ended that way.
She shouldn’t have.
I make it to the village before the train, and duck into the inn to buy my ticket. Mairwen Griffith eyes me across the counter, accepting my fare and writing the ticket for me. Wisps of dark hair have come loose from her bun, and I remember how beautiful I used to think she was. How I imagined I might marry her.
But I don’t think her beautiful now. Or maybe her beauty just doesn’t hold the same charm it once did.
Silver skin and silver lips. The scent of violets.
I followed the tree siren into the wood.
The siren with violets in her hair.
I shudder.
“Owen? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I say.
She offers me the ticket, and I take it.
She studies me. “When you come back, will you have that dinner with me? I’ve been waiting quite a while.”
“I’m sorry, Mairwen,” I reply. “But I don’t think I’m coming back.”
I settle into my seat, tugging my father’s coat tight against my shoulders as the train lurches into motion. I take off my hat and put it on the empty seat beside me. The rainy countryside blurs past my window, and I hurtle toward Breindal City, toward my father and Awela and the king.
I try not to think about the last time I was on a train.
Part Two
STARS
