Page 93 of Into the Heartless Wood
I say: “Protected?”
Pren nods. “As long as her soul endures, her heart cannot be killed. Our power is great, but it is not that great.”
“And so you came here.” I gesture around the clearing. “To … garden?”
Criafol laughs. “We came to wait, until the end of her time, when we can roam freely through the wood again.”
Their answers do not satisfy me.
I think perhaps they are cowards.
Their power is greater than mine,
yet they do not stand up against our mother,
do not help the humans.
They only hide.
“But you still have not answered my question.” Pren peers at me, his beard bobbing against his chest. “What is it that you want from us?”
I say: “To wholly forsake the thing my mother made me. To become human.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
OWEN
THE TRAIN RIDE IS LONG AND UNEVENTFUL,ANDIARRIVE INBreindal just as the sun is setting. I disembark from the train, and step up to the ticket counter inside the station, where a white-haired old steward is yawning as he pulls down a metal grate to lock up for the evening.
“Excuse me,” I say hastily. “Can you give me directions up to the palace?”
He scowls. “Just follow the road, boy. A babe could find it. But they won’t let you in until morning. Gates shut strictly at seven.” He slams his grate closed, effectively ending our conversation.
I don’t have time to wait. I have to find my father and Awelanow—I don’t care about the gates being shut. The king isgoingto let me in.
Stars appear as I climb up the twisting city streets, toward the palace on its distant hill. They look dimmer here. Too much light and smoke from the city factories. I understand why the king sent my father to our house by the wood, to dark skies and clean air.
On the plains below the palace are the army barracks and training grounds. It’s where I would have gone, if I’d listened to my father’s advice and enlisted. I look south, toward Gwaed. According to the history books, there was a Tarian king some centuries back who took an army across the mountains and attempted to conquer Gwaed with no provocation. The Tarian army was defeated, and slunk back home. Gwaed suffered heavy enough losses that they made no pursuit, but relations between our two nations never quite recovered. If Gwaed decides to pick up the threads of old grievances and declare war, Tarian would be caught between an enemy army and the Gwydden’s Wood. I don’t think even King Elynion’s army could survive that.
A pair of guards stand watch at the city’s southern gates—beyond them is the only road up to the palace. Torchlight gleams on the rows of brass buttons marching down their uniform jackets, the brims of their caps shadowing their eyes. Both guards are armed with swords and muskets.
“Gates are shut,” says the left guard gruffly. “Come back in the morning.”
I fish my father’s arrest warrant from my pocket, and hand it over. “I need to see the king.”
The guard peruses it, then hands it to his fellow. “Come with me,” says the right guard. He relieves me of the knife I put to Seren’s throat just last night, then unlatches the gate and waves me through. He starts up the hill. I follow.
It’s a steep climb. I’m panting and sweating by the time we reach the palace gates: tall arched doors made of stone, carved and painted in a green and gold pattern that is not immediately familiar to me. As the guard explains my presence to another pair of guards stationed here, my eyes make sense of the pattern: The green and gold are leaves and stars, intertwined with each other in an unending sequence. I wonder why our king, who has been at war with the Gwydden for longer than I’ve been alive, would adorn his palace with the symbols of her wood.
The city guard passes me off to one of the gate guards, who unlocks a small door inside of the gate and unceremoniously shoves me through.
I’m left alone in the palace courtyard, the gates at my back, high stone walls on either side thick with ivy. The palace itself looms ahead of me, an imposing structure that’s all angles and arches, silhouetted against the rising moon. I shift the pack on my aching shoulders, and march up to the front door, where I show my father’s arrest warrant to yet another pair of guards. They’re both female and are young and old versions of each other, clearly related. The younger guard’s hair is cropped to her chin; the older one wears hers in a long braid draped over one shoulder.
The older guard beckons me across the courtyard, and brings me through a door cut into the ivy-covered wall. We walk a few minutes down a stone corridor, lit by oil lamps, until she deposits me into a room that is clearly someone’s office. A desk at the back is mounded with paper. A dilapidated bookshelf bows under the weight of far more books than it was meant to hold. A red ottoman boasts a tea tray mounded with dirty teacups and a smattering of half-eaten biscuits. From one corner, a brown and yellow cat peers at me suspiciously.
“Merrick’s son,” says the guard to the man sitting at the desk. He’s thirty, perhaps, with dark hair and eyes, and what looks like a king’s ransom in medals pinned to his cobalt blue uniform.
“Owen,” I supply, as the guard salutes her captain and retreats.
