I never asked him what he saw in the Gwydden’s Wood, how he managed to escape, if he’d found my mother, if he’d seen the Gwydden or her daughters.
A part of me had always wanted to believe that my mother was alive, that she’d escaped somehow.
Now, I have no such illusions.
My father saved me.
But he couldn’t save her.
Father stays home with Awela and me the rest of the day and all of the next. I’m glad he’s here. I don’t know how to give Awela the attention she needs when my head is splitting apart trying to forget yellow eyes and silver-white skin. Trying to block out the screams of the train passengers, the snap of their bones, the tree siren’s song, pinning me helpless to the ground.
At least in the light of day, there’s the garden to weed and the meals to cook and the futile task of attempting to keep Awela out of mischief. When night falls, there are the stars to chart with my father, a pot of cinnamon tea to drain down to dregs. But after that, when I crawl into bed and try to sleep—there is nothing to keep that day in the wood from playing itself over and over behind my eyes, an endless parade of blood and leaves ringed with a violet-flower crown.
It is impossible to distinguish the moment my thoughts morph into nightmares, for my sleep is the same as my waking: yellow eyes and silver skin, blood dripping red onto the ground.
But in my dreams the tree siren doesn’t let me go. In my dreams she never stops singing, not even when she rips my heart from my body, not even when she breaks all my bones and leaves me gasping up at the wheeling sky, the lifeblood pouring out of me. Even in death, I hear her song.
She kills me again and again, her teeth sinking into my throat, her branches impaling my chest. I drown in dirt and leaves and blood.
I wake up screaming, my heart racing like a wild hare, my body slick with sweat.
I don’t try to go back to sleep. I pull on a robe and climb up to the observatory, opening the dome and adjusting the telescope. I take comfort in the planets and stars, in telling myself the old stories of the constellations.
Astronomers speculate that the constellations as we see them now didn’t always look the same—that they have shifted, little by little, over time. In a few thousand years, I might not even recognize the Twysog Mileinig—the Spiteful Prince—or the Morwyn, the Maiden. Maybe future astronomers will rename these constellations, create new myths to go with them. But I can’t imagine the Spiteful Prince being anything other than the thief who betrayed the Morwyn and stole her crown. He escaped up into the heavens, where he made himself into a constellation to hide from her. She wasn’t deceived; she followed him there, and now every year she chases him around the ecliptic, stretching out her hand for the crown, never quite catching it.
Nonsense, of course. But it was one of my mother’s favorite stories.
It hurts to think of her. I shift the telescope to a different part of the sky, and doze off in the chair trying to forget anything ever existed apart from the stars.
Father goes back to his work at Brennan’s Farm, and I go back to minding Awela and the house every day, trying to regather the pieces of myself that fractured apart in the Gwydden’s Wood.
It’s hard. It’s so, so hard, and try as I might I can’t quite fall back into the rhythm of it. I’m restless and uneasy, my eyes traveling always to the trees over Father’s wall. They hang lower with every passing day, trailing leaves rattling over the stone. It feels as if the wood is watching me. Waiting.
I don’t trust it. And I don’t trust myself around it.
So as much as is humanly possible, I try to keep Awela indoors.
Her response is to learn how to unlatch the door and let herself out, and after that I do take her outside, so I’ll at least always know where she is.
Because I don’t trust Father’s wall, either.
Spring deepens into summer, and Awela helps me pick the first batches of strawberries from our garden. Most of the ones she picks don’t make it into her basket, and she’s soon covered in sticky red juice. I wash her with water from the pump, and she laughs and wriggles and screams as I scrub her clean.
“Come inside, little one. Time for lunch,” I tell her.
“Want stay siiiiide!” my sister wails.
And I can’t quite deny her, so I make a picnic for us, and we eat on the blanket in full view of the warm sun. A cool breeze curls out from the wood and over the wall, smelling of earth and growth and that acrid scent of dead things. I push away the memory of yellow eyes and blood dripping from silver skin.
Exhaustion weighs on me. Nightmares chased me to the observatory again last night—as they have every night since my father rescued me—and Awela woke earlier than usual. She eats half her lamb and potato pasty and licks the gravy from her fingers, then clamors for her milk. I lounge on the blanket and she leans against my chest as she drinks, curling her small body into the hollow of my shoulder.
The trees whisper and the bees hum in the garden. The blanket is soft beneath my cheek. My eyelids drift shut.
For the first time in weeks, I sleep deeply, dreamless. Some part of me is certain Awela hasn’t left the shelter of my arm, that she has fallen asleep, too.
But when I wake with a start, the afternoon is half gone and I am alone, Awela’s bottle empty and abandoned beside me.
For a moment, I don’t understand the sudden, paralyzing fear that seizes me. Then I raise my eyes, and see the hole in Father’s wall.
No. No. This isn’t real. I’m dreaming.
I jerk upright and bolt to the wall. The ground bulges with the lump of a tree root, with the tumbled stones it shifted as it grew—somehow—in the short time I was sleeping. The hole is big enough for a child to squeeze through. A child wearing a dress the same color blue as the scrap of torn cloth caught on the jagged edge of one of the stones. The trees rustle eerily, though there is no wind.
I can’t breathe. This is a dream.
But I drag my finger along the broken stone, and suck in a breath at the prick of pain, at the blood beading up.
Something else catches my eye just beyond the wall, incongruous with the undergrowth.
It’s one of Awela’s shoes: scuffed brown leather, the strap undone.
I shimmy over the wall and drop down on the other side and snatch it up.
I’m caught in one of my nightmares. This can’t be real. This is a dream.
But it’s not, oh God it’s not.
I’m shaking hard. I can’t stop. Please, I plead, please let this be a dream. I can’t go back in there. I can’t.
The trees whisper around me, the ground undulates with more hidden roots, moving like living creatures under the earth.
Terror suffocates me. Paralyzes me. But I can’t let my sister be swallowed by the wood. I won’t. I will find her. Save her, like my father saved me. And then all three of us will go away from here. Far, far away. We’ll never come back.
I’m still shaking as I shove Awela’s shoe into my pocket, and step under the trees.
Chapter Eight
MONSTER
THE SOULS ARE TOO HEAVY.
I cannot bear them any longer.
There is a patch of earth at the foot of an ash. It is dappled with sunlight, thick with moss.
I kneel in the earth, tug the orb from my neck.