by Sara Wolf
The lawguards largely ignore the ruined tower, their attention taken up by the caravans. One or two still patrol near the tower, but they pause to speak with a few soldiers. I take a deep breath and dart over the grass to the tower. I pick through the rubble, finding nothing on the ground floor but stones overgrown with wildflowers. There’s a spiral staircase ascending to the roof, but it’s missing the bottom six feet of steps. I perch myself on a little hill and jump with all my might, my arms barely hooking onto the stone. Pulling myself up, I wince at my bruised ribs. I’m sure Lucien had no problem with that jump, if his performance scaling an entire building during the fake witchfire scare at the Temple of Kavar a week ago was any indication. He’s more in shape than I am. And I’m more immortal than he is. It balances out.
“There’s no use comparing us,” I mutter as I scale the worn steps. “I’m clearly the more attractive one.”
As I get to the top of the tower, the sight of a bare chest gleaming in the moonlight stops me in my tracks. The whole of Lucien lazily lies on the demolished stone lip of what remains of a wall, body splayed along it like it’s the most luxurious palace settee. The moonlight embraces the faint lines of his muscles and smooth expanses of his golden skin with overzealous glee. I roll my eyes up at the sky, at the Old God and New God who are clearly laughing at me and any assertion I’ve ever dared to make of my own attractiveness.
“Good to know you two are on my side,” I grumble.
Even my begrudging self has to admit it: he’s beautiful. His eyes are closed, dark lashes laid long against his cheeks and his black hair scattered around his forehead. My unheart skips a traitorous beat. In this moment, framed against the starry sky and the double crimson discs of the Red Twins, he’s like a painting of the New God—untouchable and exquisite.
“I usually charge for extended viewings.” His drawled voice fractures my shock. I can move again, and I pad with as much dignity as I can up the last few steps. Is he here alone? Where is Malachite? He doesn’t usually come with Lucien on his excursions into the city as Whisper, but there’s always the chance.
“I was hoping you’d consider a discount for me.” I throw my hair over my shoulder with a smirk. “Considering how long we’ve been together.”
“Two weeks is nearly a lifetime,” he agrees drily. He sits up, his leather pants crinkling as he swings his long legs around and stands. The moonlight highlights his strong cheekbones, and through my stupor I’m taken aback at the purple circles under his eyes, now much deeper than before. Is he sleeping at all these days? He should be sleeping well. He should have hardly any worries to keep him up, with Varia being the crown princess and all. His family is whole again.
“Do you often call girls out to secluded locations to admire your naked chest under the moonlight?” I quirk a brow. “Or am I a special case?”
“‘Special’ is rather generous and grandiose of you.” He throws me that brittle smile as he pulls on his buckling shirt again, the slice of his skin from neck to navel standing out starkly against the black leather. “I don’t typically think of traitors as special. In fact, they’re rather common in my line of work.”
I hide my flinch expertly—gods bless you, Y’shennria.
“I’m sure being a prince is truly backbreaking work,” I jab. Why is he wasting my time like this? Why would he call me out here and shed clothes while waiting for me? Is he trying to distract me? This is more tormenting than it should be, than I promised myself it would be.
“It is when girls like you test my patience.” He buttons up the leather shirt, one by one, dark eyes meeting mine coolly. With that look in his gaze, I suddenly understand. I don’t affect him at all in this moment. But he’s proving, undeniably, that he affects me. His shirtless ruse is something to rile me. To prove he can control me, instead of the other way around. To lead me the way I led him around for two weeks. I gulp my anger down with cold purpose and give him a smile.
“I assume you called me out here for business, Your Highness. After all, we both know it’s not for pleasure.”
I take one step toward him, and the world moves.
From the shadows, metal spears through the air, a sharp whizz streaking past my ear and sinking into the deteriorating clay just an inch from the toe of my boot. A crossbow bolt. Metal swings through the air, a weighty arc that stops just before my throat. A broadsword.
Malachite stands to my side, ruby eyes glinting determinedly as he holds his sword before my neck. Not to it, like a total threat, but just before it—at most an unfriendly reminder. From behind a stack of rubble, Fione stands, her cherubic face deathly serious and a crossbow clutched in her white-knuckled hands, made of the same polished wood as her cane. A familiar ivory valkerax head is carved into the beak of it, and it supports another gleaming belt bolt aimed right at me.
“Apologies.” Lucien smirks. “They insisted on coming. Something about refusing to leave me alone with a Heartless.”
Father’s sword is too far away on my waist. I chide my own brain for even considering drawing it against Malachite and Fione. They aren’t my enemies.
but neither are they your friends, the hunger assures me. you saw to that with your lies.
I put up my hands slowly. “If I knew it was going to be a party, I would’ve at least put on some blush.”
Fione and Malachite don’t move, don’t even blink at the quip. Lucien is the only one who dares approach me, his footsteps slow, each one beating like a drum against the stone. He puts a hand over Malachite’s blade.
“Easy, Mal.”
“I don’t care how many times you two have stuck your tongues down each other’s throats—if she tries to hurt you, I’m slitting hers.” Malachite narrows his eyes at me. The threat should burn, but it’s not hate in his eyes—it’s just a protectiveness for Lucien. It blazes bright in every corner of his paper-white face. He doesn’t hate me, per se. He just cares for Lucien more.
Lucien’s voice goes serious. “Be reasonable. Asking her questions would be much harder that way.”
“Reasonable?” Malachite snaps. “After all she’s done to you?”
“She’d heal soon anyway.” Fione stands up, crossbow steadied expertly on her forearm. “But she would feel everything.”
Malachite’s eyes don’t flicker, but Lucien’s do. No—I must be imagining it. Surely he knows better than to care for the pain a traitor could go through. Feelings aren’t temporary jewelry, but neither are they permanent tattoos, and he’s doing a miserable job of making either disappear.
“We can stop talking about me like I’m not here,” I lilt. “And start talking about why you called me out. Couldn’t we have conducted this nasty business inside the castle? Or is there someone there you don’t want knowing about this little inquisition of yours?”
Fione’s gaze flickers to Lucien’s, but the prince keeps his dark eyes steady and on me.
“You take a carriage every morning to South Gate,” Lucien starts. “You go in a door, and you come out roughly an hour later. Why?”
“Tourism?” I offer with an innocent smile.
“Answer his question straight,” Malachite barks, raising his sword higher at me. Lucien exhales, his hand gently pressing Malachite’s blade lower.
“Put it down, Mal.”
“She could hurt you, Luc,” Malachite argues. “She’s fast, and I have to be faster—”
“Put it down,” Lucien quietly demands, his fingers clutching the sharp edge of the beneather’s blade with more insistence. I start at the rivulet of blood that seeps from between his long fingers. Why would he—?
“Your Highness—” I blurt. “You’re hurting yourself.”
Malachite’s irritated ruby eyes war with Lucien’s calm obsidian ones for a moment.
“You trust too easily,” Malachite finally mutters at him.
Lucien smiles wanly. “I know.”
It’s a joke between them, among the four of us. Even I know Lucien isn’t trusting in the slightest. Finally, the beneather drops his blade away from me but keeps it tight at his side, ready to spring into action. Lucien wipes his wound on his pants and looks to Fione, still aiming her crossbow at me.
“You, too, Archduchess,” he says. “Ease up.”
“No,” I start. “It’s smart to keep at least one weapon trained on a Heartless at all times. You never know when the monster will come out.”
The fear-etched lines in Fione’s face harden. Lucien’s composure weakens, his jaw going slack for one moment. He must be remembering the clearing, the sight of me, all fangs and claws and blood.
I smile at him. “So? What questions are burning up those precious mortal bodies of yours?” Lucien opens his mouth, but I hold up one finger to interrupt him. “Keep in mind that anything you ask me, any answer I give—all of it could be commanded out of me by Varia. What you say will be far from secret. And I’d hate for all your efforts to call me out here to go to waste.”
Lucien seems to think twice, then motions Fione forward. She doesn’t move, her cornflower blue eyes hard and on me over the sights of her crossbow.
“You’re Varia’s Heartless,” she says.
“Oh, c’mon.” I laugh. “We all know I am. Give me one of the harder questions. I can handle it.”
Fione’s frown only gets deeper. “You go to the South Gate and in that door. Varia’s told me you do it because you’re helping her train our soldiers on how to fight the Heartless. Is that true?”
I look up at Lucien, whose face is suddenly unreadable. Malachite is packed to the brim with equal parts suspicion and hair-threaded readiness.
I give another laugh, this one lighter. “You’re Vetrisian. You know a lie when you hear one. I’d say yes, but the three of you are smarter than that. Well, maybe not Malachite. People like him and me have to work to be smart. You two were born into it.”
“Don’t lump me in with you,” Malachite instantly fires out. “I didn’t betray anyone.”
“We’re very different creatures,” I agree. “Your honor is pristine, and I never had any to begin with. I suppose it left with all my memories of my old life.”
“Memories?” Lucien asks, quiet.
“Oh. You didn’t know?” I examine my nails carelessly. “When our hearts are taken out, we forget everything about our human lives before that moment. Mothers, fathers, growing up, sad memories and happy ones, loving ones and hateful ones—all of it. Gone.”
None of the three speaks. The muggy summer air chokes us all silent, the droning of the cicadas filling the quiet.
Malachite, ever the brave one, blurts, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to make us feel sorry for you.”
I snort. “I’m long past trying to make any of you feel anything for me. It won’t get me my heart anymore. So there’s no real point.”
“Then what are you doing beneath South Gate?” Lucien asks sharply. “I’ve tried to get in. I’ve gone by every route, old and new, but the security is impenetrable.”
“And I’ve tried to bribe every last guard,” Fione offers. “Every polymath, every adjacent laborer. But no one budges. Someone always budges. Always. But not this time.”
They’ve been working so hard. They can’t just leave well enough alone, can they? I smile sympathetically. “And that worries you, doesn’t it?”
“Answer their spiritsdamn questions!” Malachite demands.
I shrug.
“She might not be able to,” Fione murmurs. “I’ve seen Varia command her to do…terrible things. She could have command her to stay silent.”
“She hasn’t,” I correct. “But why would I talk?”
Fione and Malachite share a look, and Lucien’s eyes harden. It’s never been clearer than in this moment that they think of me as an enemy. I could wipe away all their suspicion, all their wariness, if I just told them what was going on. If I told them about the valkerax, surely their feelings for me would soften. We wouldn’t go back to the way things were, but at least it wouldn’t be this crushing mistrustfulness anymore.
But the valkerax is dangerous. The Bone Tree is dangerous. Varia’s keeping them in the dark for a reason—she doesn’t want them to be associated with the fallout of it. She wants to take all the power and all the hate and fear that come with it. And she’s right. Anyone involved with the Bone Tree will be public enemy number one when Varia finally gets it.
They’ll be safer not knowing.
I breathe in. “Varia’s offering my heart to do what I do, quietly and quickly. And you three are offering me, well.” I smile wider, looking Lucien up and down. “Nothing but heartbreak and threats.”
The prince suddenly moves in, our chests perilously close to touching, our moonlit shadows mingling on the ruins of the tower. He looks down at me with a soft edge to his black eyes—an echo of the softness in his gaze I beheld in the Hunt’s tent, just before the kiss that lit my soul on fire. He smells faintly of not ash and clearwater, but of something like white mercury. Perhaps that’s just the city’s smell.
“Zera.” He says my name gently, like fingers on a windlute’s deepest notes. “Please. Tell me—what are you doing for my sister?”
I want to trust him. I want to trust the warmth seeping into me from beneath his skin. I want to trust his lips, so close. I want to trust that he holds enough affection for me, still, to be this close willingly, to believe me when I speak.
“You actually think I would tell you the truth? After everything I’ve done?” I whisper up at him.
“I’m giving you another chance to,” he says.
I want to believe in another chance. But I know. I know this is just an act—the same one he uses to fool the court, the nobles, the girls who dare bat their eyes at him. Beneath this softness is a brittle disappointment, a deep and betrayed hurt. I can see it, sharp and ever-growing, like rose thorns taken root in his eyes.
No amount of petals can cover the wounds I’ve inflicted on him. On us.
There is no going back.
My sadness and guilt give way to disbelieving fury. He’s using me. He’s using our attraction against me right now. Is he that desperate for information about what his sister is doing?
With perfect, enraged control, I tilt my face up to his, our lips nearly touching as I murmur, “Don’t you trust your sister, Your Highness? You heard her in the clearing. She’s going to stop the war. Isn’t that what you want? A peaceful country for your people?”
He doesn’t step away. On the contrary, he puts his hand on my hip, and my whole body ripples with a shudder from the epicenter. “She can’t do that alone.”
To melt into him right now would be so easy. Malachite might as well not exist, Fione likewise blank. Right now, it’s just him and me and the stars. But our chests pressed together would beat with the sound of only one heart.
he’s using us like everyone else does, the hunger sneers. we are nothing to him but a doll.
I tear myself away, my skin enmeshed in his crying out at the pain of being pulled apart. I turn to Fione, whose cheeks are tinged with the slightest red, her eyes wide. Lucien is trying to use me. All three of them are. But I can use them, too.
“If we can’t be friends,” I start, “we can at least be one another’s tools. Don’t you agree, Your Grace?”
Fione jumps slightly when I address her, her crossbow still clutched in her petite hands. When she knits her lips, I smile.
“Gavik’s things. Varia said you and she burned them all.”
“And?” Fione mutters. Varia might’ve been convinced Fione burned it all. But I know Fione better than that—she spent five years collecting important information about important people on the streets of Vetris in order to avenge Varia. Habits like that don’t die easily.
&
nbsp; “Did you really burn it all? So quickly?”
Fione’s blue eyes dart around. “I don’t see how this concerns you—”
“Gavik told me he kept a diary,” I say. “You’ve seen him, I’m sure—walking around Vetris handing out bread to the poor.”
“I have,” Lucien cuts in. “But she hasn’t. He turns tail and runs whenever he sees her.”
Varia’s commanded me to stab myself if I ever touch Fione, a command Varia is convinced will protect her, make her feel at ease. She’s probably commanded Gavik in the same manner to stay out of Fione’s way.
“Bring me his diary,” I say. “If it still exists. And maybe I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
“The one that speaks of the Bone Tree?” Fione blurts. A hush falls over us, and I smile with all my teeth—the human ones, not my hungry ones. So she did keep some of his things. And she read them. The Bone Tree—Gavik really did write about it. His instinct regarding his human self was right.
“Yeah. That one.”
“It’s not real,” Fione insists quickly. “It’s just a delusional excuse he was using to persecute Varia. He was paranoid. All he wanted was the white mercury sword.”
“So you’ve told me,” I lilt.
“The Bone Tree doesn’t exist. It’s just a bedtime story once meant to scare Old Vetrisian children.”
“Just as Heartless are a bedtime story,” I say. “Meant to scare New Vetrisian children.”
“The evidence for its existence is anecdotal at best,” she presses harshly, sounding so much like Yorl when he gets onto a subject he knows much about, and some part of me wistfully realizes they’d get along amazingly. “Anti-witch propaganda at worst. No one has ever been able to conclusively prove it exists. It’s just a religious symbol the Old God followers worship.”
The naked tree rosary clutched in Y’shennria’s hand when she and I were forced to go to Kavar’s temple. My nightmare of the two tree rosaries—not one. Two.
I shake my head. The urge to tell them everything almost overflows, like an overfilled cup. The urge to trust them again, to confide in them. To rely on anyone other than the hunger—to trust someone fully instead of halfheartedly like I do Varia—it sounds like paradise. It would make the burden I carry so much lighter.