Fox curled against my shoulders. I looked down at the crown and all the curses it held, and all the ire. Fox had said that I had screamed when I’d put on the crown, and Seren had screamed, and the Grandmaster.
But it wasn’t they who were screaming, not really.
The Lady had been trapped just as surely as we, and she had been suffering for such a long time.
There was no cure for the woodcurse. There was no way to break it. And as long as the crown existed, we would all be trapped.
I curled my fingers around the sword and raised it, and Fox pressed his head against my cheek. I didn’t know what the world would be without the crown—who I would be, or Anwen, or Seren, or Fox, or the Wilds itself. But I knew what we were with the crown, and with the crown there were no happy endings.
Wen screamed, reaching for me, her voice a chorus of death.
With all my might, I slammed the sword against the crown. Cracks raced across the golden briars and gilded leaves. A light poured out of the cracks, soft at first, but it grew steadily brighter. Wen shrieked again, and the bone-eaters cried, reaching out their hands to the broken crown at my feet. I pressed my face into Fox’s fur as the light bloomed brighter, and brighter and, like the coming of a sunrise, washed away the night.
40
For Lorne
Cerys
SIX MONTHS PASSED like a sigh through the trees, soft and brisk.
The Wildwood grew orange with autumn, then white and barren in winter, but now I could feel the first sun-kissed winds of spring again. Of change. It pecked my cheeks like pinpricks. I stepped lightly across the last crumbles of snow in our garden and crouched beside a small hole in the ground beside our storehouse.
Humming, I unwrapped a basket full of leftovers—bits of breads and meats that were about to go bad. I clicked my tongue, calling, and a wet nose poked out of the burrow, followed by beady black eyes and large orange ears.
“Good afternoon,” I greeted the fox as he slunk out to take a bit of bread. I rubbed him behind the ears, and he tilted his face toward me, relishing it.
Behind him, three small kits eased out with their mother.
“Oh, they’re growing so fast,” I mused as they came up and ate their fill before returning into their burrow. “You’ll have a family ready for exploring soon. Just don’t go into the baker’s yard,” I added softly. “I have it on good information that he doesn’t take too kindly to foxes—”
“Sprout?” Papa called from the house, and poked his head out of the back door. “C’mon, hurry up—we don’t want to miss it!”
“Coming!” I left the basket for the foxes to pick through later. As I came back into the house, I shrugged out of the tartan shawl I’d wrapped around my shoulders, pulled my shoulder-length hair out of its bun, and shook it out. I’d cut it a few days after I broke the curse, since it’d been burned on the ends, and there were snarls of briars I couldn’t possibly hope to untangle. I liked the new length, though, so I’d kept it.
Papa was on his fourth cup of coffee this afternoon. He didn’t sleep well anymore, and sometimes I could hear him having nightmares from my room across the hall. Most of the people who had been turned into bone-eaters did. Papa said his felt like memories of things he’d surely done—of running through the wood, of tearing meat off a still-kicking rabbit, of a hunger scratching at his bones.
I never asked Wen. Not during our brief stay in Voryn after I broke the curse, nor during the week-long trek back to the Sundermount before the first snowfall, nor any time after. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to know whether or not her nightmares were memories, too. I hoped they weren’t.
With the crown’s magic returned to the wood, the forest awoke in bits and pieces as spring came—a tree here, unfurling from its bone-white husk into a flowering dogwood, another bursting with strange pink flowers, while others still waited to thaw. I could smell it in the air, sharp like lavender. Most folks Papa’s age were still apprehensive about the Wildwood—old habits die hard—but the rest of us felt like a wall that had been up for most of our childhoods was finally gone.
The trees were no longer forbidden, and the wood no longer cursed.
All my life I had thought that I would never flourish where my roots did not grow, but I think that was just a lie I told myself.
When I first returned to the village, it felt so small. The Village-in-the-Valley had been torn apart by what had happened at the castle. Family members turned into monsters, missing, or worse yet, they returned corrupted and wrong. The villagers who had not come to the coronation, who had evaded the woodcurse and kept to their homes, had erected barbed wire around the town when the wood had come for them. They’d protected themselves. They’d fought.
And when the curse broke, most of the people who had been cursed woke up on the edge of the wood. Some of them woke up with too-pointed teeth, others with too-long nails, scars across their arms from where something else had settled where their skin had been. They woke up with a ravaging hunger, some with the taste of blood in their mouths, and nothing settled back into the way it should have been until Wen returned to the castle, her teeth a little too sharp when she smiled.
Most of Aloriya didn’t mind that we no longer possessed an enchanted crown, because we also didn’t have a cursed wood anymore, either. Anwen returned to the Sundermount with her determination and her courage, and she picked up the pieces of her fallen kingdom, and the village began to heal. We began to find a way to live without the crown.
Without the magic.
Without the curse.
Barbed wire still encircled the town, but it grew with brambles and rusted to brown, and soon the village was the one I remembered—with its smoky chimneys and brightly covered rooftops and the clock in the town square ringing noon every day, the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls and high-rising breads from the bakery, the town musician on his fiddle. Kids played in the square again while old men gamed chess on benches outside the pub.
When I returned from Voryn, Papa was waiting for me at the flower shop. “I knew you’d come back,” he said, and we hugged for a long time.
The garden in the backyard reflected our time away. The sunflowers, once bent low on their stalks, were dead on the ground, while the rosebushes grew in snarls, their flowers gone and leaves falling. The magnolias and crawling ivies and buttercups had withered in the coming frost. But the shovel was still propped against the shed where Papa had last put it the day before Anwen’s coronation, and his gloves still hung from their book by the back door. Though now spiders had roosted in the fingers.
It was as though the garden had changed with us.
Everything that I grew up believing was a lie. The stories, the history, the magic. Aloriya was far from perfect. It held poison in its roots like an elderberry tree, where you thought all it offered was wine. And this house that stood in the overgrown ruins of the garden reminded me of the girl who used to drink the wine without questioning how it came to be.
As afternoon sunlight spilled into the quiet flower shop, I leaned my head against Papa’s shoulder. All the vases were emptied, waiting for the spring thaw. “I think we should harvest your mother’s flowers this spring,” he finally said. “The ones in the corner. The ones that came from the wood.”