by Sara Wolf
“Eclipseguards,” Nightsinger offers. “They are lawguards and soldiers all in one, and watch over Windonhigh with their life.”
“Are they—” I pause.
“Some of them are witches,” she says quickly, anticipating me. “But the majority are Heartless.”
I watch them drill with intent eyes. All adults—or so it seems. But age is deceptive for a Heartless. Most of the eclipseguards look to be in their prime—middle twentyish—but Kavar knows how old they really are. Maybe the witches un-Heartless them, just so they can age to their primes. Who knows? It comforts me only a little to know very few of them have probably lived longer than the natural human lifespan—the Sunless War wiped out most of the Heartless and witches thirty years ago. These Heartless are fifty years old, at most. Maybe sixty. And here I was, thinking my nineteen years were ancient.
with any other witch, you’d be one of them.
At my side, Lucien starts glancing his thumb idly over mine. Reassuringly. Slowly. A satin metronome that ticks out I’m here.
“If you would, Black Rose.” Nightsinger motions up the massive staircase that leads into the stalwart building. “The High Witches await.”
Certainly, they wait. They wait for us to ask them for help, for a spell that could somehow weaken the Bone Tree’s hold on the valkerax. They know best about thralldom, and about how it might be broken.
We have no leads but them.
Malachite sets his jaw, and Fione grips her cane harder. Lucien flashes me a smile—taut and nervous deep in its roots—and lets go of my hand, starting up the stairs lined with eclipseguards.
We follow our prince.
9
MADE WHOLE
The inside of the High Witch’s building is unnaturally cool and dim compared to the bucolic magical springtime outside. Unlike the oil braziers and white mercury lights of Vetris, the witches use living flame—a massive hiss reverberates in the echoing hall, and Malachite unsheathes his sword and I drop my center, ready to fight. Fione’s more willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, watching the streak of black witchfire arc over our heads as it moves between the mouths of two stone wolves.
“Ingenious,” she murmurs, periwinkle eyes drinking in the long rows of stone wolves on either side of us and the streaks of witchfire that rhythmically jump between them, illuminating the hall in bursts. “They’ve staggered the release of the fire to ensure there’s at least one light source at all times.” She turns and looks at us. “You two are a bit jumpy, aren’t you?”
I smother a laugh, and Malachite rolls his eyes.
“Excuse me for being ‘a bit jumpy’ around witches who may or may not wanna gut us,” he says.
Fione sighs and shakes her head like she’s instructing a child. “They have magic, Mal. If they wanted to gut us, they would’ve done it already, and there’s nothing we could’ve done to stop it.”
“A practical—if chilling—thought,” I agree cheerily.
“I’m serious,” Malachite insists, lowering his voice so just we can hear. “Luc’s not really one of them. They could turn on him. And if they do—”
“We’ll use our words like grown-ups.” Fione straightens. “Or rather, I will, because I can’t trust you to string two civil words together when it comes to Lucien’s safety.”
“What about me?” I point at myself.
Fione’s grin is barely there in the fire-washed gloom. “Unfortunately, Lady Zera Y’shennria, you make far too many jokes for your own good. Or for the good of political bargaining.”
“Fair.” I smirk.
The building is labyrinthine, and the farther we get from the entrance, the colder it becomes. Curls of mist hang on the ground, swirling into nothingness as they’re displaced by our shoes. Windows start to appear, or what I think are windows. It’s actually great jagged insertions of glass—not the thin sort, but the thick, unpolished, raw sort I saw outside. This time it grows into the sandstone walls—from the sandstone walls in irregular patches, almost like veins of ore. It’s so thick it lets no light in at all, only captures it. Nothing can be seen beyond it. Not windows, then, and neither was the glass intentionally built—it looks far too…organic.
Nightsinger points Lucien down a series of twists and turns, eclipseguards watching silently as we pass. The glass veins become more common the deeper we go, and bigger—taking up whole walls, arcing over to replace entire sandstone tunnels with glittering black.
“Interesting design choice,” Malachite murmurs in awe.
“It wasn’t a choice,” I mutter back. He doesn’t press it, but he does start to narrow his ruby eyes at the glass with a newfound suspicion.
Suddenly, Nightsinger stops us before a seemingly innocuous wall. She nods at a nearby eclipseguard, and the guard nods back. They lift their spear, and next to me I feel Malachite tense, but the spearhead whips around to hit the wall instead. The impact should be short-lived, metal on solid stone, but it rings like a bell. Exactly like a bell, hollow and lingering. Lucien makes a step back as the wall begins to crumble, rubble spilling over the misty floor like an ancient, too-dried thing. No dust, which means we can see the door revealed in the wall clearly—stone. Pure stone, and far too heavy to open with manpower alone.
Which is why, when the doors part swiftly and easily peel apart, I know it’s being done by magic.
Lucien tries to immediately march in, but Nightsinger stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “A moment, Your Highness.”
He turns, eyeing Nightsinger as she steps in and whispers something to him. He nods, thanking her and then turning to us, his face set with all its princely cool.
“Let’s go. Together.”
“Together it is.” Malachite strides in headfirst, disappearing into the darkness of the open door. Fione follows, and I lace my fingers in Lucien’s hand again, smiling up at him.
“Together it is.”
The darkness envelops us instantly, and I startle at how familiar the air suddenly feels—heavy, important, different. This is the same feeling I always had walking up the stairs of Nightsinger’s cabin and to her sanctuary of a room.
This air is ripe with magic.
“What did she say to you?” I ask softly, the hall echoing my every noise.
“She warned me,” he murmurs.
“Of…?” I lead, but he doesn’t say anything more, and it puts me on edge. There are no lights in this hallway, none until the very end, where a cold gray light filters through.
We break into it, like surfacing above water.
Eclipseguards—I see them first. Lined up in the dozens against the room’s circular wall. Malachite and Fione are frozen in front of us. The room itself is gigantic, cavernous in a way I’ve seen only once before—the arena beneath Vetris where I trained Evlorasin. It’s almost as big as that, the floor entirely slate, and the walls entirely, entirely raw glass. A plateau high up forms from the glass, sleek and strangely polished compared to the rest of it, and from that plateau, the High Witches stare down at us.
They don’t move. Just stare.
Because they can’t move.
Because they’re encased in glass.
Seven chunks of glass jut out from the wall situated atop the plateau, these chunks nearly human-sized and polished clear. The size of small boats, or maybe coffins. Coffins, I decide, because the seven pair of eyes staring down at us must be dead.
After all, people sawed in half are most certainly dead.
Seven witches are encased in glass, each of them missing body parts. One of them is nearly untouched, with only a leg missing. But another is just a head. An unblinking head, staring down at us. Most of them are missing their torsos, their arms, but nothing is torn. It’s all clean, precise chunks taken, with no blood. No hanging organs or ligaments. Only smooth skin where the severances begin and end.
Lucie
n’s hand grips mine harder for a moment, and then he lets go.
And then they move.
Seven pairs of eyes move with Lucien as he steps up and makes a bow.
“High Ones,” he says, rich voice echoing in the cavernous room. “The Black Rose honors you.”
Malachite’s head turns woodenly to look back at me, and Fione’s face tinges both curious and utterly terrified. I don’t know what to say, what to do. Something tells me if I so much as twitch, I’ll be watched, judged, and summarily taken care of. If not by the dozens of eclipseguards on the walls, then by the looming witch monoliths themselves.
They might look still, but something in me screams they are very alive. Can they even use magic? They have to—Y’shennria said the black rose that led her to me was made by a High Witch. One of these seven. Why are they missing their body parts? Magic? Is it like Lucien’s eye or his hand—eaten up by the most powerful magic and then discarded because it’s no longer of use?
How are they alive in there? Is it like my Heartlessness?
All I can do is listen. Watch. Wait for my witch’s orders, just like the eclipseguard wait for theirs.
Suddenly, one of the glass monoliths blazes to life, red light illuminating the glass from the inside—showing exactly the witch inside, missing legs and an arm and half their skull, only one eye riveted to Lucien.
“What honor do you bring us, Prince of Cavanos?”
The voice is deep, booming in the high ceilings. The red light flickers with the cadence of the witch’s voice, like lips moving, like sound becoming visible.
Lucien straightens from his bow, onyx eyes sharper now. “My sister Laughing Daughter has taken the Bone Tree.”
“You bring us information we already know.” Another monolith on the opposite end lights up, a witch with long hair and no arms and a voice like a blade. “Hardly honor at all.”
“‘Taken’ is a generous term,” a monolith of a witch with just their chest and head says, lighting up. “And implies conscious autonomy. The Bone Tree has chosen her. It chose her from birth. Laughing Daughter had no say in the matter.”
I see Fione bristle, her fists clenching under her wool covering.
“The valkerax rise again,” the first monolith says. “With much thanks to your Heartless.”
The eyes move, all seven pairs of them at once, from Lucien to me. I swallow the urge to run, all the magic in the air crystallizing and prickling against my skin. A promise of needles. A promise of pain.
“There’s no use in placing blame,” Lucien starts instantly. “My sister would’ve gotten the tree eventually.”
None of the monoliths speak. Lucien angles his body in front of me, between them and me, and my blood thrums.
“She’s none of your—”
“She is precisely our business.” A monolith flares to life, the voice furious.
“With all due respect to the High Ones, I’m telling you,” Lucien insists, his own voice blooming anger. “My sister—”
Every other monolith lights up, sound and light gearing to explode in argument.
“Heartless,” the middle monolith croaks—no booming, no blades. Just slow, ancient words from an old, old witch encased in glass only as a head. A head with frazzled white hair, whose mouth never moves. His speech silences the room, silences Lucien and makes the other six monoliths go dark again instantly. He’s…talking to me? He must be, because he waits for me to acknowledge, and I start forward.
“Y-Yes?”
“You have taught a valkerax to Weep.”
Not a question. A statement. I nod. “Yes. Sir.”
“Has the valkerax told you your true name?”
“Yes.” I try to hold my chin up, but the magic bristles heavy at me.
“Would you say it before us?”
A request. Not a gentle one—one made of old, old bone and old, old steel. I want to dart my eyes to Lucien, to ask with my eyes if it’s all right to tell them. True names mean something. Witches seem to value them highly. But I can’t move.
we are in danger. we can’t disobey. The hunger slithers through me uneasily, around the cracks in the magic, around Lucien’s unbridled, uncontrolled feeling of worry. say it.
“Starving Wolf.”
The silence that follows my true name reverberates in on itself—deep and long—and then the monoliths light up. Softly. Their whispers flicker crimson into Lucien’s abyssal eyes, watching me wordlessly. And then they stop, suddenly, and the center one, the old witch with just a head, speaks again.
“At the end of the world, there will be wolves.”
I’m utterly lost, so I croak, “Sir?”
“A saying,” he continues. “Passed down many a generation. Long forgotten in origin but true in nature.”
Evlorasin’s words, mad as they were, stroke eerily at the back of my mind.
A wolf to end the world.
One of the monolith’s whispers is too loud. “They cannot fly. They’ve lost the knowledge. Even if she’s taught one, it is just one—”
Lucien squares his shoulders and braves speech.
“I came here, High Ones, to ask your aid. The Bone Tree is an Old Vetrisian invention. Surely you must know a spell that can interfere with it.”
“Why would we interfere with that which keeps the valkerax in check?” A monolith flares to life.
For a fraction of a moment, Lucien looks like someone’s hit him. Alarmed. Fione’s eyes widen, and Malachite’s narrow.
“They aren’t in check anymore. My sister has it,” Lucien argues. “My sister controls it!”
“You are presumptuous.” Another monolith lights up, blade-voice snickering. “And very confident in your sister’s abilities.”
“This magic—the Bone Tree is half the witches’ doing!” The prince’s brows knit deep, anger edging his cheekbones. “You would take responsibility!”
One of the monoliths bleeds black from its base, the glass turning from transparent to opaque as animate midnight slithers up the facets. It happens so fast—Lucien’s whole body giving instantly, forced to his knees. He grunts and snarls as he fights the invisible weight, magic crushing in on him.
I lunge at him, and Malachite draws his weapon, and in the next second all I can hear is a ringing in my ears, my head on the slate floor and my body crumpled against a wall and dozens of feet away from Lucien. I taste blood on my lips. Malachite’s fared no better—his broadsword spiraling up in the air and sinking deep into the slate floor. He runs over, trying to pull it out, but even with his beneather strength, it won’t move an inch.
“Listen well, Black Rose, and carefully,” one of the monoliths says. “The Bone Tree requires a powerful witch to feed once every century. Of this we are sure. It chooses this witch and consumes them. Of this we are sure. The Laughing Daughter fights it, but it will consume her as it has all the others. She uses it, but it will use her, in the end. And when it is over, the Bone Tree will be sated with magic enough to keep the valkerax in the Dark Below for a hundred years more. Of this we are sure.”
“You’re just going to—” Fione’s throat bobs. “You’re just going to let her die? Let her wreak havoc on the world? What if she comes for you?”
“We have ways and methods. We will be safe. We cannot speak for your kind, though, human.”
My anger boils up, faster than the blood over my lip. Fione’s hand around her cane goes slack, and it drops to the ground with a clatter.
“You’re using this,” Lucien manages, throat dry and cracking. “You’re using my sister to—to wipe out the humans for you? To wipe out my kingdom for you?” He roars the last words, the echo harsh and burning.
None of the monoliths speak until the center one lights up, voice even despite everything.
“The scales have been, for a great time, tipped toward humanity. And now,
with your sister, they will become balanced once more.”
A cold nausea works into my stomach, and I can’t tell if it’s all me, or some of Lucien’s feelings, or a dizzying combination of both. We thought they’d help us. It would make sense for them to want to stop Varia, stop the Laughing Daughter who took shelter with them five years ago, who learned from them, who took one of their magical artifacts and turned it against the world. It would make sense to want to help. But they’re using this. They’re using the crisis for their own benefit. And that’s…
I wipe my split lip, swallow more blood, and rise.
“You realize the valkerax have fire, right?” I limp back over to the monoliths, Lucien’s magic healing me rapidly. “No matter how many eclipseguard Heartless you have, the valkerax will burn through them like kindling, and you’ll be left defenseless for the hours it takes for them to heal.”
“There will be no more discussion, Starving Wolf,” one of the monoliths echoes. “You have conspired with the valkerax. You have done nothing but risk everything. And for that you are held in contempt.”
I can’t stop my scoff. “Bit used to that.”
There’s a swell of black midnight on one of the monolith’s facets, and I brace myself for retaliation. For pain. But it never comes. Instead, something small and brass appears in midair before Lucien—a medallion, embossed with a wolf and covered in tiny jet gems.
“You will take this sigil. It will allow you free passage within the city. On the morn of Watersday, you will be gone.”
Lucien’s disdain is clear on his face as he takes the thing, gripping it tight in long fingers and a longer frown.
“As you will, High Ones.”
His bow, and our bows, feel forced. Fione picks up her cane with trembling hands. The magic holding Malachite’s sword finally gives, and he manages to pull it out of the stone and sheathe it again.
As we walk away, I’m the only one who looks back. I’m the only one who sees the slivered hole the blade left in the slate closing up—filling with raw, cloudy, rapidly solidifying glass, like a wound does with blood.