Prologue
MONSTER
I WAS BORN A TREE. IT WAS EASIER, THEN. ALL I NEEDED WAS THE earth and the wind and the rain. All I needed was the sunlight warm in my dappled leaves.
There was no fear, just growth. No wanting, just sky. No thirst, thirst, thirst.
Only starlight.
But my mother wanted daughters, and she chose the birch ring.
I remember the day of my birth: the stretch of wood becoming sinew, of leaves becoming hair. I felt the dirt under my toes and I opened my eyes for the first time and saw what I had never seen before: the deep green wood and the wide blue sky, the gray and white forms of my seven sisters.
And my mother, who is neither tree nor woman nor anything that there are words for. She is power and beauty and binding. She does what she wants, and woe to anyone who stands in her way. I understood that, in my first moment of life, and I bowed before her, my green and yellow hair spilling around my shoulders like a shining stream.
What I did not understand was that I was born to be a soldier. What I did not understand was that I would no longer be free.
At first, I thought I loved my mother. She opened my eyes and loosed my tongue. She taught me the names of all the things in the wood; she taught me to sing. And the music, music, music, that welled up inside of me and spooled out from my lips was a thing of such wonder, such beauty, that I thought it was good, because how could it not be? So I sang and I grew, and I allowed her to shape me into her monster without realizing she did so.
When I was old enough to lure a man with my song, to trap him in the heart of the wood and break him like so many dead branches, I did it without question, without thought.
And when I had done it two times and ten and twenty, when I had lured a hundred men to their deaths in my mother’s forest, I forgot that I had ever been a tree.
I forgot I had ever been anything but my mother’s youngest monster.
Part One
LEAVES
Never go into the deep parts of the forest, for there are many dangers there, both dark and bright, and they will ensnare your soul.
—Robert Beatty, Serafina and the Black Cloak
Chapter One
OWEN
THE GWYDDEN’S WOOD IS QUIET TODAY. THERE IS NO HIGH, eerie melody woven into the air, pulling at my mind and my body, tempting me to come among the trees, though I know very well what would happen if I did. I’m more able to resist the music than most. But it’s easier when it’s quiet.
The wood smells as it always does: of loam and earth and the sour hint of decay. Branches hang over the chest-high boundary wall my father built too late. Leaves scrape against the stone; they’re a luminescent green, new-furled. But they can’t trick me into admiring them—I know what they conceal.
What they’ve taken from us.
Awela tumbles like a new puppy in the grass, nearly in the shadow of the wall. She doesn’t understand the danger that lurks so close. How could she? She’s only two. She doesn’t remember our mother. She doesn’t hear our father’s gut-wrenching cries in the dark of night when he thinks I’m sleeping. Father would be angry that we’re out here at all, but Awela is part wild thing. She can’t be kept indoors all day. Besides, there’s no music coiling out of the forest at present, and Father is away working at Brennan’s Farm. He doesn’t need to know. And it’s not like I take my eyes off her, even for a second.
I don’t think Father’s wall can keep the trees out if they really want to come in.
Awela races about in circles, squealing with joy until she’s so dizzy she falls down. There’s dirt on every inch of her, and she’s managed to rip her dress. Her skin is freckled and tanned from the sun, her dark curls—the same ones I have, inherited from Father—springing out in every direction. She never sits still long enough for me to properly comb her hair, which right now is tangled with grass and twigs. She has Father’s brown eyes and Mother’s broad smile and more mischief than any person so small should be able to contain. She exhausts me, and I adore her to bits.
“Awela!” I cry, as she trots up to the wall and stretches up her tiny hand, reaching for a low-hanging branch.
Panic jolts through me, and I leap up from where I’ve been sprawling in the grass. In another heartbeat I’m at her side, grabbing her wrist and tugging her back to the safety of the open sky.
She screams at me and wriggles loose, but I catch her again and twirl her around and around until she laughs, forgetting her desire to run back to the wall and that devilish branch. I don’t dare fetch the axe from the shed and hack the branch off. Not even Father would dare. I try to forget my own uneasiness, try not to hear the faint thread of a song coiling out from the depth of the wood.
“Time for a bath, little one,” I tell my sister.
“No bath!” Awela shrieks.
But she trots along after me as I fetch the wash basin and fill it from the pump in front of the house. When it’s full, I put the basin by the garden—the flowers and vegetable seedlings will appreciate the water Awela is absolutely going to splash out.
I strip her of her grimy dress and plunk her in, grabbing a bar of soap and scrubbing vigorously. She shouts and laughs and splashes, thoroughly enjoying herself. I finish scrubbing and let her play in the water, my eyes wandering sometimes to the wood beyond the garden and my father’s wall, and sometimes to the house I’ve lived in for as long as I can remember.
It’s a small stone house, ordinary except for the tower that serves as my father’s observatory, the silver dome closed until evening, the telescope safe inside. Flowers wilt in the bright blue window boxes, like they never did when my mother tended them instead of me. I’ve tried to keep all the pieces of her alive. I’ve tried not to surrender the whole of her memory to the Gwydden’s Wood.
Everyone says we’re fools to live on the border of the wood itself. Maybe we are.
But there was nowhere else far enough away from the village for my father to observe the stars in solitude. Few people know he’s an astronomer. No one knows he charts the stars for King Elynion himself, on the king’s coin no less. Father works as a day laborer at Brennan’s Farm to keep people from asking questions about how he earns his money and adhere to the king’s condition of secrecy. Brennan is our closest neighbor, a three-mile walk northeast of our house. The village is another five miles north, and even that’s considered perilously close to the wood.
It grows chilly as the wind picks up. Clouds knot dark over the sun, and it smells suddenly of rain. The music is stronger now, loud enough to hear clearly over the rising wind. It pulls at me. I shudder, clench my jaw, steel myself against it.
“Time to go inside, little one,” I tell Awela. I pour a pitcher of clean water over her head and she screams like I’m murdering her. I just tickle her chin and scoop her out of the basin, wrapping her in a large towel and carrying her toward the house.
The music follows, sinking into me with invisible barbs. The same music that lured my mother into the wood, where she was lost forever. I wonder if anyone heard her scream when the Gwydden’s eight monstrous daughters fell on her and rent her to pieces. I wonder if any part of her remains, or if she is nothing more than dust now, strewn about the forest floor amongst the molded leaves.