He’s right. Tarian imports wood and coal from Saeth. We would be in bad trouble without it. Besides the slow, perilous sea routes, there’s no other way to get to Saeth, unless one was foolish enough to go through the wood on foot—horses won’t go near her trees.
Awela shifts on my shoulder, her small hands fisting my shirt. Outside, the rain drives on and on, and the tree sirens’ song fades into nothing. “You’ve been in the wood, then,” I say, not missing his use of “we.”
He shudders and nods. “I worked on the railroad six months, and I’m often sent out to guard the repair crew.”
My pulse throbs in my neck. “Have you ever seen them? The–the witch’s daughters?”
His hands twitch, the star chart casings in the oilcloth satchel rattling against each other. “Once. It was two months ago, the first time we were sent to repair a section of the track in the newly grown wood. We stuffed our ears with wax against their songs. We armed ourselves with knives and guns. But when they came, it wasn’t enough. There were three of them, and their devilish music was loud even through the wax. They were fast as snakes, with glowing eyes and bony hands, and they bound our bodies with living branches that twisted and squeezed, winding into our flesh.”
I stare at the king’s man in utter horror.
“It was our captain who saved most of us, with a bundle of kerosene-soaked rags and a packet of gunpowder. Scared the devils off long enough for us to escape. But our captain died anyway. He’d lost too much blood.”
I eye the king’s man with new respect.
He shakes his head, as if to shake the memory away. He seems to realize the music has faded from the wood. “Good day, then.” He stuffs the wax into his ears and steps outside, shutting the door behind him. I’m not sorry to see him go. I tuck Awela into her little bed on the first floor, then climb up to the second floor, passing my and my father’s bedrooms before taking the narrow stair to the observatory. Assuming the storm passes, it won’t be dark enough to use the telescope for some hours yet, but I like the quiet peace of this room. When the dome is open, the glass ceiling is a window to the sky; when it’s shut, there’s only a small window to the left of the cast-iron stove operated with a crank. I turn it and stare into the Gwydden’s Wood, my eyes straining to see past the rain and into the heart of the forest. No one touches the Gwydden’s trees—they are sacred to her. The stories say she thinks of them as her children, that she even made children from them: her eight daughters, the tree sirens, whose eerie song twists up again through the window.
There was a time when the wood was significantly smaller than it is now, but it grows year by year. More rapidly, according to the king’s man’s report, than I realized. I wonder if by the time Awela is as old as I am it will have swallowed all the world the way it swallowed my mother.
For a moment more I stare into the trees, listening to the song of the Gwydden’s daughters. The music rakes through me with jagged claws, and I find myself leaning out of the observatory, stretching my hands to the trees. Awareness slams through me. I jerk my head back inside and crank the window shut again.
Chapter Two
OWEN
IT MAY BE SPRING, BUT THE CHILL OF WINTER LINGERS WHEN THE evenings come, so I shovel coal into the downstairs stove before I start cooking supper.
I’m a fair cook, which is not generally thought dignified for a boy, but I enjoy it: the rhythm of chopping vegetables, the satisfaction of stirring flour and butter and sugar together to make Awela’s favorite little cakes. I’m proud I’ve kept all three of us alive since the day Mother was lost to the wood, even though it meant leaving school a year early.
Tonight I stir cawl in a pot bubbling on the kitchen stove, and mix tea-soaked dried currants into my bara brith dough. I shape the dough into loaves and leave them to rise overnight—they’ll go straight into the oven in the morning. Awela wakes up from her nap and comes darting out into the kitchen, wrapping herself around my legs and giggling as I walk with her attached to me.
“Wen, Wen!” she cries, pleased.
Father steps through the door just as I am spooning cawl into three bowls, and Awela launches herself at him, searching his pockets for the chocolates she knows he’s tucked away for her there. She finds half a dozen, which I confiscate from her, promising she can eat them after dinner. Father pulls off his boots, hangs his cap on its wall peg, and stretches, his skin weathered and tanned from his long days of work in full view of the sun. He perches his spectacles onto his nose—he never wears them in the fields, for fear of breaking them—then washes up and comes to sit at the table.
We eat, and afterward Awela plays on the floor by Father’s feet while he reads his newspaper, glancing down at her affectionately every minute or so. I step outside for more coal, shoveling it into the coal scuttle from the bin outside the kitchen. The bin is running low—I’ll have to walk into the village soon to buy more. Long ago, the people of Tarian burned wood in their fireplaces, just like Saeth and Gwaed across the mountains. Some people still do, if they can’t afford coal, collecting loose twigs or branches the wind has broken off. Only the greatest of fools would dare cut down a whole tree.
King Elynion tried to burn the Gwydden’s Wood, once, in the early days of his reign. He scorched miles of trees, and she retaliated by slaughtering an entire village of people. He thwarts her in different ways, now. With the train. With the telegraph wires running for miles under the ground to make communication with Saeth and Gwaed swift and cost effective. But if the king’s man is to be believed, she is finding her own ways to fight back.
I return to the house, lugging the coal.
The mantel clock chimes eight, and I scoop up the protesting Awela for bed. She gives Father four slimy kisses and then I take her into her room, changing her back into her little nightgown, tucking the covers up to her chin.
“Story, Wen,” she says in her high squeaky voice. “Story.”
I tell her the story I do most nights, about the man who watches the stars, about his wife who goes away on a long journey and can’t find her way back to him. She makes herself into a star so he can always see her, so that, in a way, she can always be with him.
Awela doesn’t understand, but she likes the sound of my voice, the familiar rhythm of the story. I turn down her lamp and kiss her forehead and shut her door.
Out in the main part of the house, Father has already gone, his newspaper and spectacles absent from their place on the little end table by the stove. I don’t know how late he stays up reading every night before falling asleep in the room that must feel empty without my mother. But I do know it’s up to me to fulfill his contract with King Elynion, as it has been every night since my mother was lost.
I set our stewpot to soak in the sink, and climb up to the observatory.
I light the lamp on the worn wooden desk that waits beside the telescope, and absently spin the rings of the brass armillary sphere my father brought back from his university days. I put the kettle on the stove that hugs the back wall and make a pot of cinnamon tea; its potent sweet scent fills the whole room. Then there’s the dome to open and the telescope to adjust, this evening’s empty star charts to take from their drawer and lay out on the desk.