Oh God. I am going to die here. I’ll never see my father or Awela again. Never have the chance to talk to Mairwen Griffith.
Silver and yellow, violet and green. Blood on her hands.
My head throbs and my body aches. Silver and yellow, violet and green. Red and red and red.
Suddenly it’s not the train passengers I see—it’s my mother, her body bloody and broken, her eyes staring into nothing, a last ragged bit of her hair gleaming gold as the vines wrap over her and pull her under the earth. No one should have ended that way, least of all my mother. Not her, not her.
I weep for her, understanding for the first time that she’s wholly, entirely gone. My father understood it from the beginning. It broke him, body and soul.
Exhaustion crowds my mind. Creatures rustle somewhere in the underbrush. The wind rattles the leaves away overhead.
I want to sleep. I don’t want to see silver and yellow, violet and green. I don’t want to see red. I let unconsciousness steal over me, piece by piece. I let the horror of the Gwydden’s Wood lull me to sleep.
I wake to the blear of orange light and hands under my armpits, hauling me upward. I look into the gaunt face of my father, his mouth pressed into a grim line. “Are there any others?”
I don’t understand the question. I’m bleary and bewildered. Every part of me aches, and for a moment I forget why I was lying on the train tracks in the middle of the wood. I don’t understand why my father is here.
“Owen,” he says gently. “Are there any other survivors?”
Remembrance slams through me and I stagger under the weight of it. My father keeps a steady hand under my elbow.
“She slaughtered them.” The words choke out of me. “She slaughtered them all.”
He nods, like he was expecting this. “Stay close. We have to move fast.” He shoves wax in my ears and ties a scarf over my head, then does the same for himself.
The world is suddenly muffled.
Father grabs the torch lying on the ground—the source of the orange light—and brandishes it ahead of him like a sword. He takes my arm, and I stumble along with him down the railroad tracks. I feel as if I’m in a dream. Perhaps I am.
We walk quickly. The trees don’t like my father’s torch. They hiss and draw back, and I pray to God they’re not calling for their mistress. She would laugh at the fire while she sank her claws into us, while she broke us like so many twigs.
Around us, the sky begins to lighten. I never expected to see another morning, and yet here are the ragged edges of dawn. The sight of it chokes me.
And then we’re stepping from the forest, turning south toward our house. We don’t take the scarves from our heads or dig the wax from our ears until the observatory tower comes into view, bright in the morning sun.
We stop at the garden gate, and Father turns toward me, clapping his hands on my arms.
My jaw works as I reach for adequate words to express my gratitude and sorrow and relief. I realize none exist.
“How …?” I say instead.
“I went to the telegraph office last evening on my way home from Brennan’s Farm. There was no telegram from you, so I sent one inquiring after your train. It had never arrived.”
I’m shaking. I can’t stop. It’s only my father’s presence that grounds me. “How did you know to come look for me? How did you know I wasn’t …”
“I wasn’t going to lose my son like I lost my wife.” His voice is jagged and raw. “I would have burned the forest to the ground to find you. I would have driven a knife into the witch’s heart. I would have ended all the world before I lost you.”
I believe him.
He pulls me into an embrace, holding me hard against his chest as I shake and shake.
I’m safe now. I don’t have to be afraid.
But I am.
Horribly, horribly afraid.
Father goes to fetch Awela from Brennan’s Farm, and I crawl into my bed and try to sleep. All I can see are her yellow eyes, the blood dripping red from her hands.
Chapter Seven
OWEN
THE DAY WE LOST OUR MOTHER WAS AWELA’S FIRST BIRTHDAY. There were cake crumbs scattered on the floor beneath the kitchen table. Mother tucked Awela into her crib after lunch and took her cello outside into the garden, where she liked to play for the birds and record music on wax cylinders for her phonograph. She composed her own music, but that’s not how she explained it. She said she played the songs her heart taught her, or the wind whispered into her ears. I wondered sometimes if she played the songs of the wood witch’s daughters, too, but I never asked her that.
Perhaps I should have.
I liked hearing Mother play. I played some, too—she’d given me my first lessons when I was so small the cello dwarfed me, my hand barely big enough to wrap around the bow. I enjoyed playing, but I’d never be as good as her. Her whole soul was filled with music; mine brimmed with stars.
That day I was up in my room, reading one of my father’s scientific journals about a telescope being built in Saeth that would be powerful enough to look deeper into space than ever before. My mother’s music drifted up from the garden.
She stopped playing suddenly, in the middle of a phrase. It was strange enough that I glanced out the window in time to see her drop her cello onto the cabbages to stride with purpose toward the Gwydden’s Wood.
“MOTHER!” I cried, flinging the journal onto my bed and bolting downstairs.
Alerted by my shout, Father joined me on the stairs, and the two of us burst outside just as the hem of my mother’s dress vanished among the trees.
“Eira!” my father cried. He ran after her.
“Father! Father, wait!”
“Stay with Awela!” he called back to me. “Keep her safe.”
And then the forest swallowed him, too.
I paced in front of the house, more shocked than frightened. I trusted my father to bring my mother back. I didn’t fear the Gwydden then, not any more than a child fears a monster from a story.
But when Awela woke and there was still no sign of either of our parents, I was afraid.
And when the sun set and clouds rolled in and Awela cried for her dinner and they hadn’t come back, dread gripped me in its lion’s jaws. I fed Awela leftover birthday cake and lumpy porridge, because it was the only thing I knew how to cook. I ran outside to save Mother’s cello when it started to rain. I shoveled coal into the stove when the early spring night grew swiftly cold.
I put Awela to bed, trying to remember all the songs my mother usually sang to her. I swept the cake crumbs off the floor. And then I collapsed in front of the fire and wondered if I was an orphan.
I must have dozed, because when the door banged open sometime during the night, I jerked awake to find my father stumbling into the house.
He looked like he had been to Hell and back again. His clothes ragged and torn, dried blood caking both his arms, his neck and face covered in scratches. There were leaves caught in his dark hair.
“Father?” I whispered.
He collapsed to the floor and wept, his whole body shaking. “She’s gone,” he choked out, over and over. “She’s gone.”
The next day he started building the wall, working feverishly from sunrise to sunset, hardly sleeping, hardly eating. He worked until his hands were scraped raw, until his skin was gray with mortar. He didn’t stop until he’d finished it: a mile long and five feet high. It was meant to protect us from the Gwydden, but I saw what it really was: a memorial to my mother. The evidence of my father’s guilt and shame, because if he’d built it earlier, like he’d always meant to, he might not have lost her at all.