The Heartless
Chapter XVIII: in which some reunions are bittersweet

I could not remember blacking out, but when I opened my eyes next, I was on my back with bright, leafy green branches filling the sky high above my head. After a few moments, recognition set in; this was the oak tree, the same one I would perch in nearly every night and look out for trouble, trying to spot Petra on her way back from town.

If I had a heart, it would have clenched. Petra—I wondered with a heavy sense of grief whether she was even still alive.

“Welcome back,” a somber voice piped up beside me.

I leapt out of my skin, scrambling to balance myself upright. There was Petra, as if on cue, hair now chopped shoddily above her chin. Her eyes, in the months since I’d last seen her, had taken on a haunted look too mature for a fourteen-year-old child. She had a bow and arrow slung over her shoulder—mine, the old bow I had given her before I left.

“Petra!” I exclaimed. “What… What happened?”

“I found you passed out in the middle of the village and dragged you here.”

“No, no, that’s not— You know what I mean!”

Petra exhaled brusquely and averted her eyes to the treetops. “A while after you left, the royal guard came to the village. Burnt it to the ground. I saw them approaching while I was in town, and managed to warn most of the village to flee, with Marley’s help.” She paused, biting her lip. “Everyone who left has long since moved on by now, probably in hiding in other villages. There was no use coming home to a pile of rubble, only to see if they’d come back a second time. I know Marley took a lot of folks with her. Maybe they aren’t even in the kingdom anymore, I don’t really know.”

“And... Bertrand?”

“He refused to leave his study, no matter how much I begged.”

“Oh.”

“I couldn’t save everyone.”

“Petra, I’m—”

“I know it’s because of you, Ace. I’ve spent enough time out there to know that the king was assassinated by one of the Heartless, and something tells me you had something to do with that.”

Finally, she returned my eye contact once more. Her mouth was set in a permanent frown. It was then that I realized this was not exactly a welcome reunion.

“I… Yes,” I admitted. “I killed him. It was a lapse in judgement. I didn’t think they’d—they thought I was dead. Why would they come here?”

“Do you really think they needed a reason?” Petra snapped. “Ace, why would you do that? Why would you put us all in danger like that? Sure, we didn’t have much, but why would you throw every good thing we did have away just for your moment of glory?”

I pulled absentmindedly at the grass beneath me, twisting the blades around between my fingers. “The royal guard… killed my parents. I was going to confront him, and then… then he was dead. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret getting his blood on my hands like that. And, evidently… the entire village’s.”

Petra averted her gaze again.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she murmured, fist clenching in her lap until her knuckles went white. “But you know what, Ace? That’s not even the worst of it. It’s been months since then, and all this time I’ve been coming back here over and over waiting for you even though I’m so mad that you abandoned us and left me here. Where have you been?”

It was then that I remembered everything I had wanted to tell her before I found what was left of the village. I told her everything, from invading the royal palace with Knife Boy to being dumped in the woods to waking up in Frida’s house to reuniting with Basil and everything in between. When I told her the truth about the curse, she leapt to her feet and began screaming at me, letting loose the kind of pain and anguish that can only be felt by a child who has been lied to her whole life.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she yelled. “I’ve been here on my own for months because the royal guard finally decided to take us all out, and now you’re telling me we never deserved ANY of this? That all this time we were struggling in poverty and isolation is just because everyone hates us, not because there’s something wrong with us? How is that supposed to make this less terrible?” Petra started crying then, hot and angry tears rolling down her face.

“It isn’t,” I replied gently. “I just thought you deserved to know the truth.”

“I don’t care anymore! Whether we’re broken or not, we’re still not allowed to be happy! What’s the point?” Petra snatched the bow and arrow off her shoulder and flung it across the dirt, sending stiff feathers flying into the air. A deep, ragged breath escaped her lungs before she continued, quieter, “Just when you think things are working out, they replace another way to ruin you. By taking out the king, Ace, you brought us one step forward but many, many steps back.”

“I know.”

Petra sighed and dropped back down into the grass, sitting cross-legged with her chin in her hands. She sniffled once or twice and wiped the lingering tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. We sat there in silence for a few moments, as the reality of what our lives had swiftly turned into began to sink in.

“You’re going to leave me here again, aren’t you?” she whispered after a couple of minutes.

My stomach lurched, and I knew that after all that both of us had been through, I could not lie to her.

“You could come with me,” I suggested instead.

“What, and leave home?” Petra shook her head, smiling despite herself. “I couldn’t, not after everything.”

“There’s nothing left here, Petra. It’d just be you.”

Petra frowned at the dirt, yanking blades of grass and twirling them between her fingers.

“It’s different for you, Ace. Home for you was always something far-off, like some fantasy you got to live as a child where you had parents who loved you and tried to keep you safe. Me? This place, and the curse that I always thought came along with it, is all I’ve ever known.”

“I lost my home, so I made a new one, over and over again. You can do the same.”

She looked back up at me and furrowed her brow. “Easy for you to say. You knew life before this. For you, the Village of the Heartless gets to be an unfortunate dark patch in between two perfect realities where you get to be safe and live happily ever after. I don’t have that luxury. This village was your temporary hell, but it’s my hometown.”

It was a child’s oversimplification; when I thought of Swallow’s Point and its inhabitants, the ever-present fear of being discovered as Heartless, any image I could conjure up in my mind was far from idyllic. The Village of the Heartless had become home to me for many years, but I had also indirectly been the cause of its demise. I couldn’t deny that Petra’s words had some truth to them, however exaggerated.

I paused, considering my next words carefully. “Listen, Petra, like it or not, I can’t stay here. I’m a fugitive,” I pointed out. “The entire kingdom thinks I’m dead, and if I’m ever caught, I can assure you they will not hesitate to try to kill me again, and this time, they will make sure they succeed. You can go back and stay with Esther, tell her the truth if you want, or tell her I’m dead, I don’t care. But I can’t stay here, not now.”

Petra averted her eyes again, pulling her knees up to her chest.

“No, I’m coming with you,” she muttered.

I had been expecting more of a fight. “You are?”

“I don’t think I have a choice.” Petra at last raised her eyes to meet mine again, and I saw the glint of determination behind the last few tears she hadn’t been able to suppress. “I’m not going to let you get yourself killed just to make me happy by staying here. And I’m not going to let you leave me again, either.”

I watched in awe as she clambered to her feet and walked over behind the tree, retrieving the bow and arrow she had thrown in her anger.

“But if we’re heading out together again”—she held them out to me—“you’re going to be needing this.”

I took it and ran my thumb and forefinger along the thin maple of the bow, instantly being called back to the day I received it from Marley, and the first time I succeeded at hitting the targets I had set up behind Bertrand’s house out of old tin cans and spoiled gourds, and the nights I spent perched in that same oak tree looking for trouble after dark. This was not the bow with which I had condemned my village, but the one with which I had defended it; Petra now entrusted me with that duty again, although there was nothing left to defend.

The incongruity of this responsibility weighed heavily on me as we dusted the dirt from our pants and set off up the hill through what was once the Village of the Heartless, headed toward the back woods in the direction of the commune. I came to a halt at the top of the hill, frozen stiff before the remains of Bertrand’s house, the tiny run-down cottage I had called home for so many years. Like the rest of the village, it was only burnt rubble now, sprouting soft and verdant with the new growth of spring. I was struck with the realization that Bertrand had died still believing he was a failure for never breaking a curse that had never existed; I wondered briefly whether in his final moments he thought of me fondly or cursed himself for ever giving me shelter.

The weight of the suffering I had caused rose up from the blood-soaked soil and flooded the vacant spaces where my heart should be, and it settled there, heavy and still.

What a monstrous thing it was to be human.