Page 94 of Wench

‘She rejectedherself,’ Wodenna corrects. ‘She did not want her gift, and so she left it to fallow ground. But fallow does not mean barren, Marian. It waited.’ Her gaze sharpens, fixing Marian as if she is both wound and salve. ‘For you.’

The words lance Marian. She wants to scream. To cry and demand her mother rise from the grave and answer for herself. Her trembling fingers hover above her tattoo. She wants to both claw it off her skin and to press it deeper, brand herself permanently. She can’t decide which hunger is stronger.

The truth gnaws at her. If her mother had offered herself to the Eldwyrd, then Marian would have been spared this. She might have still grown up in a cruel house, still bartered, but untouched by this beating inheritance that now threatens to devour her. She might have remained human, ordinary, invisible enough to survive.

The thought sours. She remembers every time her mother’s mouth tightened when Marian asked about the woods. The forbidding. The punishment. The insistence that Sherwood was danger, ruin, and death. Had all of that been fear of losing her daughter to the very calling she herself had denied?

Marian’s voice trembles. ‘If she couldn’t bear it, how can I? She had more courage than I ever did. She endured her cage. I only ever wanted to run from mine.’

Wodenna’s face softens, but the words she speaks are flint. ‘Your mother endured until she vanished inside herself; you tore open your seams and fled into the claws of what silently hunted you. Both are choices. One denies inheritance. The other answers it.’

The suspended heart pulses above them, shedding a faint rain of ember-light. It paints the cavern walls in shades of wound and bruise. The sound climbs Marian’s spine again, insistent, relentless, amplifying and mirroring her own heartbeat.

She thinks of Lox – his ragged voice as he held her bleeding body, his vow to burn Sherwood itself before letting her be unmade.I wonder what Sherwood might be if its heart still beat alongside its shield, he had whispered once.

Had he known all along the heart would be her?

Shéruel steps closer, and the humming in Marian’s bones heightens. ‘You were not made to live small, Marian.’ The ghosting sensation of Shéruel’s crooked finger tips her head up to look at him. ‘You were made to break and mend in rhythm with the land that birthed you.’

Her knees tremble. She thinks of her mother again – her silences, her warnings, her refusal. She wonders if Isadora had feared not just being unmade, but also feeling too much. If she had chosen marble halls because they dulled the echo. If she had looked at her child and thought,Let her be spared the weight of this grief.

And now Marian is here, the grief pressing into her ribs, asking to be carried.

The heart beats again, a low thunder that shakes dust from the cavern ceiling. Her vine-mark flares hot, pulsing in time with it.

‘Tell me truthfully,’ she says. ‘If I say yes and take this into me, will I be able to put it down when I need to? Will I be allowed to laugh at Allen’s obscene rhymes and roll my eyes when Will pretends not to cry? To hold Little John’s hand when words won’t go?’ The list spills out of her. It is embarrassing and bracing to want so much. ‘Will I still be . . . Marian?’

‘If the forest takes you from yourself, it has chosen poorly and we will unmake that choosing,’ Shéruel says, his voice gone iron. ‘We do not hunger for saints.’

‘We hunger forpeople,’ Wodenna finishes softly. ‘Fallible and furious. Tender to a fault.’ Her eyes soften. ‘Your mother feared being devoured. So do you. Good. Keep that fear. It will warn you when devotion twists into consumption.’ She glances up toward the ember. ‘There is no shame in wanting a different life. But there is danger in denying what you are. Your mother’s choice was hers to make, and yours is yours. She chose the mortal world. Do you?’

Marian closes her eyes. The hum does not dim in the dark behind her lids; it clarifies. Heat washes the underside of her skin, more intimate than touch. She sees roots running under every path she knows, under Hallomere’s stone and Elswyth’s woven bridges. The lines knot under the heart, knuckles of wood pressing through soil. She sees them without seeing, unfurling under her in a sense she does not have a word for yet.

She lifts her head and looks at the suspended heart. ‘I am not worthy,’ she answers, ‘but I am willing.’

All the blossoms on the pale-barked tree tremble as if a storm has passed through them. The ember-heart flares white-hot for one impossible instant, and the sound that follows is not a beat but a roar, as if Sherwood has remembered how to breathe. Heat pours through her bones, down to the marrow. It is not a flood that wants to sweep her clean, but a graft. The sense of a bark seam splitting to make room for green. Her vision blazes gold before steadying. The resonant tone climbs her spine like a hand on a ladder, rung by rung, until it moves to live behind her sternum.

Marian staggers beneath the weight of it. She feels the echo slam through her chest, her arms, her legs, and down into her feet, until she is nothing but conduit. She is both the drum and the drumbeat, the wound and the healing, the grief and the song.

‘What title do you choose?’ they intone.

‘Heartkeeper,’ she whispers. It surfaces without question, sending a jolt through her bones. The beat settles inside her, not as command but communion. The pulse steadies beneath her skin, no longer borrowed but born anew. When the forest breathes, it is through her ribs, and for the first time, she does not feel thrown to the wild, but claimed by it.

ChapterTwenty-Nine

The dark folds around Marian for mere seconds before the roots draw back from her skin. Cool air and the last remnants of the day’s sun flood the hollow.

She takes a deep breath and it tastes sickly-sweet. The pain in her gut is gone. She touches her stomach, half-expecting the wound to open fresh under her palm, but instead her fingers brush raised ridges, a pattern of scars seared into her belly – her very own set of roots. Their ridges thrum faintly, as if Sherwood itself has stitched itself into her body.

Her eyes flutter open and the world erupts in threads of gold.

Everywhere she looks, molten veins throb through every living thing, moving under the skin of creation. It spills through the earth in bright currents, rising in rivulets through roots, shimmering inside the bodies of trees. Leaves shiver with it. Ferns breathe it. Even the moss beneath her hands hums, tiny capillaries pulsing just under the surface.

Her breath sticks in her throat. The light is not confined to the plants. It burns in the shape of the fox slinking between shrubs, golden ore coursing through every tendon. Birds flutter overhead, each wingbeat scattering sparks within the current.

The ore is ineverything.

Marian looks down and swallows a gasp. Ore shines faintly beneath her skin, glimmering through her veins, but the scars at her belly blaze brighter than the rest, gold caught in the grooves like molten sap sealed into bark.