by Sara Wolf
“Yorl?” I try calling out. “Yorl? What’s going on?”
His voice floats to me, too calm. “The painkilling concoctions are wearing off. It needs much more with the scales removed.”
“Give it some, then, and be quick about it.” My voice cracks dry as I feel hot breath coming closer to my back.
“Just stand up,” Yorl says carefully. “And make your way to the gate.”
I’m not imagining things—I can feel the hot breath burning down my spine now, as if Evlorasin has its mouth right against my back. I won’t die, but the thought of getting digested, alive, through the wyrm’s entire body, has suddenly jumped to number one on Zera Y’shennria’s Comprehensive List of Ways in Which She Prefers Not Dying. Faintly, through my terror, I catch the screeching of the gate as it opens, and as calmly as my shaking legs allow, I get up and walk with ginger steps toward it.
“That’s it,” Yorl encourages me. “You’re almost there.”
“The song,” Evlorasin pants, its voice more distorted than I’ve ever heard it—more agonized than these last few days combined. “The song calls for you.”
Shivers snap-freeze my nerves, my rational thought, and I start sprinting. Evlorasin lunges, its claws scrabbling over dirt, its huge maw snapping up air as it tries for me. I make a dive for what I think is the gate, hitting the ground hard, and almost instantly I feel displaced air as heavy metal slams down just behind the soles of my feet.
“Come back!” The valkerax laughs, and I can hear it pacing behind the gate, mewling kindly one moment and snarling the next. “Come back, little wolf! We are alone in the song! But we can be together! The tree of bone and the tree of glass, together at last!”
My incisors nip my tongue out of pure shock. Bone. Glass. That line—it’s so similar to the one Gavik sang. This is more than coincidence. Something is bashing against something else in my head, trying with all its might to line up and slot into place. It could be the terror or the near-digested experience, but my body goes cold, my eyes roll back in my head. I try desperately to hold on to consciousness, to ask Evlorasin about what it means, but death always has its due.
The world goes black.
Yorl wakes me up on the small sleeping mat, and I’ve never been happier to see someone so colorful and illuminated and with slightly fewer teeth.
“Is Evlorasin going to be like that from now on?” I wipe the remnants of cold sweat off my forehead.
“Evlorasin?” Yorl furrows his brows.
“That’s its true name.”
Yorl thinks on this, then offers his paw to me, and we start to ascend the stairs. “I misjudged the amount of painkiller required. I’ll adjust, and tomorrow it will remain sedated for a little longer.”
“Isn’t that gonna push into our teaching time?”
“Yes.” He shakes his head. “We’ll have less time. And time is crucial now, in the valkerax’s last days, more than ever. But—” He winces.
“But what?”
“I have…” He winces again. “Faith.”
“Faith?”
“I don’t have it often,” he snaps, as if I’ve thrown a punch at him instead of a word. “I hold little stock in the imaginary, baseless, unprovable belief that has all but turned this country against itself. But for some infuriating reason, I have it now. I have faith in…in, well, you.” He manages to finish with a great flinch.
A smile curls my lips. “Well then. Let me just jot you onto my list of people I’m trying desperately not to let down.”
The dark stair climb is becoming less and less taxing on my body. Yorl barely has to drag my unseeing self up the stairs by the hand at all—I remember how the steps go.
“It said something about the tree of bone and the tree of glass,” I say, and with a great swallow, I press on. “Your grandfather—his name was Muro Farspear-Ashwalker.”
I can’t see him, but Yorl’s whole body goes rigid next to me.
“How did you—?”
“He went to King Sref once,” I push forward. “The king was worried about Varia’s nightmares. Your grandfather sang them a song, and it had a line like that in it. A tree of bone and a tree of glass.” There’s a beat. “Lucien told me.”
Yorl’s absolutely silent, and I swear the air between us is suddenly a thousand times colder.
“What does it mean—?” I start, but Yorl is faster.
“‘The Hymn of the Forest,’” Yorl interrupts, every word cutting. “Grandfather based all his research on it. And he was called a fool for it.”
“Yorl—”
“That’s enough,” he barks. “You don’t need to know it. Forget you ever heard about it.”
“But that’s not—”
His warm paws suddenly grip my hands. “I’m serious, Zera.” Not Heartless but Zera this time. “It’s nonsense. It drove my grandfather to ruin. You have to drop it before it ruins you, too.”
He waits. As if I’m going to forget about a coincidence like this. But he’s not going to budge unless I assent.
Finally, I nod. “Okay. All right. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
He sighs. “It’s fine. Just as long as you have the good sense not to go pursuing it.”
After a long, mostly silent journey, we reach the top of the stairs. For once, I’m not a panting mess.
“As much as I hate to admit it, you did good work today,” Yorl says in the doorway.
“Aw, I appreciate you, too.” I reach to bop his black nose, but he lifts his chin out of the way.
“Don’t.”
I stamp my foot. “Why does everyone in this city hate fun?”
“Do you think a stranger sticking their fingers up your nose is fun?”
“Up your nose? Gross. I was just going to tap it. Who’s been trying to stick their fingers up your nose?”
“The human children,” he grumbles. “Every chance they get.”
I laugh. “Well, don’t walk around all sour and hunched, and maybe you’ll be too tall for their grimy fingers to reach.”
“Goodness. Do you give advice for a living?” Yorl drawls.
“You know, it told me your true name.” I ignore him. “Evlorasin did.”
His huge green eyes light up like twin shooting stars, and he pushes his glasses on his nose. “It did?”
“Yeah. Ironspeaker. Then it started spiraling, saying something about its duty to read? And that my duty is dying.” I sigh. “Was that just rambling? I mean, you put its scales into the Dark Below so it would ramble less, right?”
Yorl’s muzzle frowns. “I don’t know. My grandfather liked to say they are mystifying creatures. They live for roughly five hundred years, but most of my research indicates they predate humans and beneathers by over ten thousand. By all accounts, they were here at the beginning of the world, and they will be here at the end.”
The song that sings of barren immortality, Evlorasin had said. Barren immortality - five hundred years. I can’t imagine living as long as a valkerax. Except I can, actually, and that’s why I’m teaching a valkerax for my heart.
“The Ironspeaker.” I point to Yorl, then to me. “The Starving Wolf.” There’s a beat as I think it over and put on a horseshit-eating grin. “My true name is way better.”
Yorl rolls his eyes. “Just because you say something once out loud doesn’t make it true.”
It’s a moment of lightness before I have to trudge through the ash-laden South Gate and return to the teetering, frantic humans plunging into war, and I bask in it as long as I can—which isn’t very long, considering Yorl is obsessed with his work and leaves me nigh-instantly to go back down to the valkerax. But I do hear him happily muttering “Ironspeaker” to himself as he goes, like the name is a coat and he’s trying it on in the dressing room.
The valkerax. Everything it said swirls, diaphanous and enigma
tic, in my mind. I know so little about witches and valkerax and true names, and yet they all seem intertwined. But what good does knowing do? I’m not a witch. All I need is to teach it. Everything else is pointless.
On the way back to the palace, a vendor still open amid the war crisis is selling steaming hot maple-glazed sweetrounds. There’s something deeply familiar about the smell, so I buy one. I cup it in my hands knowing I can’t bite it—I’d weep blood tears after ingesting such a human food, and too many lawguards are around, all of them on a knife’s point and searching rabidly for signs of Heartless. A girl dabbing her eyes too much could be one of them.
“Look at me, being smart and worrying about my own well-being,” I marvel. I settle for smelling the sweetround, the mere act of keeping it close by me somehow strangely comforting.
My feet take me home. Not to the palace but to Y’shennria’s manor. I stand in front of the severe darkwood architecture clutching the black iron gate in one hand and the sweetround in the other. The smell of black roses cloys my way—heavy with honey and licorice. The windows are empty, lifeless. I stare at Y’shennria’s bedroom window at the very top, quiet and bitterly still, and close my eyes. For a moment, the window is lit in buttery light, and against it is the regal silhouette of a woman with puffed hair, a teacup in her hand as she stares at the night, looking out for someone.
The patrolling lawguards will find the maple-glazed sweetround lying on Lady Y’shennria’s porch, and wonder.
15
The Hymn
of the
Forest
I wake up the next morning to a terrible wine headache and thick billows of smoke in the distance.
I sip chocolate drink—blood tears be damned—to be rid of the taste of last night’s mistakes and watch the clouds of smoke smolder on the horizon: not inside Vetris this time but far east and west of the city. Those must be the forests burning.
How many witches are losing the last home they have right now?
Varia wakes up later than I do but not by much, and she watches the smoke with me in her silk bathrobe, the two of us silent for a long moment.
“Try not to worry so much about Nightsinger. I sent word,” she says as she turns from the window to get ready for the day. “She should be in Windonhigh now, if she wasn’t already.”
I swallow the relief, refusing to let her see it. She has me at a disadvantage enough already.
“You’d think they’d name the last witch enclave something, oh, I don’t know, more intimidating,” I say. “Witchier. A lot more ‘dark’ and ‘blood’ words involved.”
Varia says nothing to this, wordlessly letting her maids in to dress her, which inherently forbids any more heretical talk of witches. Fione comes in soon after, and we wait together, awkwardly sitting on the couches facing each other while the maids finish Varia’s hair. Her cane with the valkerax head on it gleams in the morning sun, and I marvel that such a seemingly small thing can transform into a fully fledged crossbow.
“Bonbon?” I offer her a chocolate from the plate of them. She stares at the ground, determined not to meet my eyes. What do I say to her? Don’t be scared? It’s all right? She should be scared. And nothing is all right.
“Did you make that thing yourself?” I jerk my head to the cane, and Fione finally nods.
“Yes. Using my uncle’s materials and blueprints.”
I whistle, impressed. “You ever consider being a polymath if the whole ‘archduchess’ thing doesn’t work out?”
“It…it sort of will always work out,” she says softly. “Because I was born into it.”
There’s a beat of awkward but somehow ridiculous silence, and to my surprise when I burst out laughing, so does she. We lock eyes over our laughter, hers much quieter but still there, and for a moment it’s like everything is back to normal. I savor it as long as it lasts.
“How could I forget?” I wheeze. “About how fairly nobility works?”
“Extremely fairly,” Fione rolls her eyes through her laugh. When we’ve calmed, I inhale hugely.
“I’m glad, you know,” I try. “That you got the chance to tell Varia how you feel.”
This gets her eyes to stutter up to me, and I smile. She starts to open her mouth to say something when Varia walks in, putting a hand on Fione’s shoulder and grinning at her.
“Are you ready to go?”
Fione looks between her and me and then nods up at Varia, taking her hand and rising. They leave, and I see Fione pause at the door.
“Something wrong, darling?” Varia asks her gently.
Fione shakes her head. “No.”
I stare at the place where she used to sit, the remnants of our laughter still ringing in my ears. It’s then I notice something sticking out of the cushions of the couch she was sitting on. Brown, leathery. I walk over and pluck it out. It’s a notebook of some sort. I open it up and parse through the wild scribbles, the diagrams of strange contraptions and a sketch of a sword I recognize—Varia’s white mercury sword.
This…this is Gavik’s diary. Fione actually brought it for me.
My unheart leaps as my fingers leap faster, flipping through the pages frantically. I calm down enough to realize being hasty isn’t going to get me anywhere, and while I finish my drink, I read the whole thing.
The writing style is, of course, insufferably full of itself. Most of it is boring day-to-day details of what it takes to keep the royal polymaths operating. Lists of materials like copper, silver, acid, and base, notes rife with equations and numbers on hundreds of experiments pursued in the name of making the Vetrisian army stronger against witches. Even more of it is inane notes scribbled about certain nobles: their weaknesses, their “uses,” things Gavik can employ to manipulate them. Dated two weeks ago, he talks about insinuating to the Priseless twins that I needed to be “taken care of.” It lines up perfectly with when the Priseless twins tried to tie me and scarify my face during my very first banquet. Malachite saved me that time.
Scoffing, I move on. Gavik’s hatred for witches and Old God worshippers permeates it all, calling them every bad name under the sun. One page utterly shocks me; it talks about how Y’shennria refused Gavik’s hand for marriage once, a long, long time ago. That’s why the old rancid arsehole hated her so much. I always thought his vitriol was excessive toward her—more than just a hatred for her religion. My own hatred for him burns even hotter now.
There are some pages I just can’t read at all—written in some sort of glyphic code. And there are other pages entirely covered in numbers that are too long to be equations. More code, maybe.
Finally, finally, I find what I’m looking for.
It’s a page tucked away at the very end of the journal, faded and water stained. It looks like it was torn out of another book, a book much older than this journal. The letters are unreadable, but I recognize a few of them. They look exactly like the beneather runes I saw in the pipe with the valkerax skeleton. Old Vetrisian runes, like the ones carved over the arches of each one of the four gates of Vetris. Mercifully, between every line, Gavik has scribbled translations:
An empire of untold greatness, a rich land built in mirth,
Made strong in the ashes, of the wyrms sealed at birth,
By the bones that reach sky, magic wrought clear
Glass made as a blade, to defy the deaths of those we hold dear,
Two trees grown, great roots between the stone crawl,
The happiness of the once-great empire they did maul,
A funeral for the hands held, our Vetrisian flags at half-mast,
The tree of bone and tree of glass, will sit together as family at last.
I gape, my mouth fishing for the words I can’t find. I read the sentences over and over. This is the “Hymn of the Forest” Yorl talked about. I can gather the bare gist of it; Old Vetris seals the valkerax with the Bone Tr
ee. But then, glass? Glass made as a blade, to defy death?
My mind flashes to the splinter of glass in my heart bag. No. No—it can’t be that glass. But Varia said herself the splinters are what links me to her and gives me my immortality.
A tree of glass, like in my dream.
I have to find Gavik.
I don a simple brown cloak and race out of the palace. Varia’s carriage is gone, taking the princess and Fione to their breakfast, so I walk off the palace grounds myself. It’s probably for the better—I won’t be able to find Gavik in a carriage that can’t fit through tiny alleys. I comb the underbelly of Vetris, weaving through roads and side alleys, asking stall vendors and guards if they’ve seen a man in a gray robe. Nothing—they’ve seen him around, of course, but all the haunts they point me to are empty. The city is taut and wound around itself, King Sref’s declaration of war plastered on every pillar and empty space of wall. No matter where you turn, soldiers choke the streets, marching to the shouted orders of their superiors, their bright jade-green uniforms with silver trim gleaming in the sun.
I slump against the wall of a shop in Butcher’s Alley, clutching the diary close to my chest. Where would he be? I know he’s been ordered to pass out bread, but how hard can finding a hunched man with a big basket of bread be?
“You look lost.” A deep voice makes me look up. There, standing in front of me, is Lucien in his Whisper outfit, the leathers sleek against every angle of his body, his eyes weary and thick with dark circles though his cowl. His posture is a little worn but refusing to look anything less than strong. My unheart sings, begging me to run forward and ask him if he’s all right, inspect him to make sure he’s healed. That he’s real, alive, and not going anywhere. But I’m not his Spring Bride anymore. I gave that mantle to Tarroux yesterday.
I clench my fist, struggling to make my voice sound light.
“And you look terrible. Any particular reason why you’re out of bed and moving around against the wishes of your polymaths?”