Page 92 of Wench

The kiss is bruising and trembling and wet with goodbye. ‘You will not be lost,’ he tells her as if reading her thoughts. ‘Trust yourself and you’ll find your way back to me.’

The ground beneath her shifts.

She gasps as tendrils curl around her legs and hips, sliding over her belly where blood slicks her skin. The bark parts with a low groan as living wood closes in. Marian tries to arch away, terror slamming through her. But she is too weak.

The roots cocoon her, tighter and tighter. Slowly, the forest disappears and the last light she sees is the gold of Lox’s eyes, burning bright.

For her.

ChapterTwenty-Eight

The first sensation is pressure. Not the blunt, external kind, but an inward closing, as if the world has become a fist made of wood and it is curling around her. The roots are everywhere: cool, living bands across her ribs and thighs, the bark’s ridges imprinting her skin.

For a moment Marian is convinced she has died. Then the dark opens like a shell cracked wide, bringing gentle light with it. The kind of shadow that holds colour secret in its ribs. The cavern that holds her is vast enough to unmake scale. It feels hollowed, not by hands, but by time – an immense bowl scooped from the earth by a patient, living force. Vines braid the walls in thick, coiling tapestries, their skins slick with condensation.

At the centre stands a tree.

It is smaller than the heart tree and yet older by some other measure, as if youth and age have traded places. Its trunk is lean, its crown a pale tumble of petals, luminous even in the gloom. The tree rises from a shallow basin edged in chalk-white mineral, a ring that gleams like bone. In the basin, water lies perfectly still. The blossoms shed a slow drift of pale dust that lands on the surface and does not sink.

Above it, something hangs.

Suspended from the web of branches is a massive, heart-like shape, all tangled tendrils and binding vines – a living oubliette of thorns and old growth. Within that woven sphere, a deep, ember-red glows with the smoulder of coals and the heat of something that has been burning with no intention of ever going out. Every so often, the glow pulses. When it does, the entire chamber seems to beat with a low thrum that shudders her bones.

Marian realizes that the tone she has carried since she first sensed fae ore, livesinsidethis suspended heart.

She takes a step forward as if compelled to. Her feet make no sound. The moss here is the softest she has ever felt, a plush pelt that yields and rises beneath her. The cavern smells of green things shut away for winter too long, and of the kind of freshly turned soil that gets under fingernails and lives there.

At her approach, the blossoms shiver. Each petal falls with purpose, swirling and connecting to its neighbour until they begin to take the shape not of flowers, but of silhouettes. First, antlers carve themselves from shadow and light. Then hair, silver as water under moonlight, spills over bronzed shoulders. One figure is broad and antlered; the other is slender, with eyes bright as spring leaves. Their garments look grown rather than made – woven bark, threadbare moss, silk spun from root-fibres. Their faces are not young, nor are they old; they wear the kind of age that comes from being looked at for centuries without blinking. Power clings to them the way cold clings in a cave: everywhere, and inescapable.

Shéruel. Wodenna.

The names arrive not by thought but by recognition. Marian feels the shape of them in her mouth before she dares to speak. She stands straighter without meaning to, palms prickling with an impulse to offer them to the earth.

They stand before her, not entirely separate from the tree that birthed them. Shéruel’s antlers trail into branches. Wodenna’s hair merges with cascading roots. Their mouths move, but the sound is more than voices; it is the hum of the heart overhead braided into words.

‘Welcome, daughter of Eamon Hallomere and Isadora Thornvale,’ they utter in unison. ‘We’ve been waiting a long time for you.’

Marian’s throat goes tight. Her mother had been Isadora Hallomere in every mouth that mattered; of course, she had a name before she married Marian’s father, but a name like Thornvale does not belong inside marble halls and the crisp fold of starched linen. It belongs to wet loam and green meadows and dark soil.

Wodenna’s head tilts as if watching the cogs turn in Marian’s mind. The motion is small and devastatingly gentle.

‘Mortals make names into shackles while fair folk let them be paths to both their past and future. What name do you carry, child of two worlds?’

The heart above her beats once and the sound wrings the air itself, until even her bones are vibrating. Marian staggers a fraction – not from pain, but from the way the world here insists on being heard.

Shéruel and Wodenna study her as if she were a page they’d waited centuries to read.

‘We have much to say,’ they speak together, with the cadence of birdsong. ‘But little time in which to say it.’

Their gaze falls to the stickiness at Marian’s middle. She looks down. Her tunic is the colour of wine where the Sheriff’s blade went in, the colour of rust where it spread.

‘You won’t last long,’ Shéruel says matter-of-factly. ‘Sherwood’s heart has slowed what would have finished you, so that we might speak, but it has not stopped it.’

‘Marian Hallomere,’ they chant, but the name feels like a shirt she has already outgrown. ‘Do you believe yourself worthy of saving?’

The heart above them smoulders.

‘I don’t know,’ she answers. The ache in her belly tightens, then loosens, as if pain itself is listening and deciding what to do. ‘I have done harm with my hands, whether I meant to or not. I have survived in ways that cost others their skin. I’ve bled for Sherwood, but I’ve also drawn blood from Sherwood. If being saved is something you earn the way a mark is earned,’ her palm hovers above the vine beneath her collarbone, ‘then I don’t know how to be the kind of person a forest chooses.’