Page 97 of Into the Heartless Wood
Dirt
scratches
my cheek.
I whisper: “Then make me human for as long as you can.”
“Do not bow before us, little sister.” Pren touches my face, lifts it to his. His expression is steeped in sorrow.
I say: “Please. I cannot bear to be the thing she made me a moment longer. Even if it is only for a little while. I want to know what it is like to be something else.Someoneelse.”
All three of my brothers sigh, but they do not rebuke me.
Cangen takes my hand.
He lifts me to my feet again.
“It will hurt, dear one. The changing.”
I think of my mother,
piercing my arms with her claws,
stripping the skin from my back.
I think of Owen’s mother,
dead in the mud
because of me. “I do not care about the pain.”
Cangen says: “Then come with us and be, for a little while, reborn.”
Cangen walks with me. His rough hand encircles mine. Pren and Criafol flank us.
We return to the pool where Cangen first found me,
the waterfall crashing from the rocks above our heads,
sunlight refracting through the water.
Patches of rainbows glint,
dance.
I kneel on the edge of the pool,
my face
to the wood,
my back
to the waterfall.
Pren asks me, solemn: “Are you certain?”
I think of dancing with Owen under the stars
