by Sara Wolf
I snake my hand up to my heart-shaped locket, to the one that lets me go a greater distance from my witch than just a mile and a half. For a while, in Vetris, the locket was that symbol for me. Something to hold on to—a taste of hope. A taste is all you need to keep moving forward sometimes. To do what needs to be done, no matter how afraid or exhausted you are.
Malachite gives a guttural snore and rolls over, flinging his uninjured arm around a root, and for the millionth time my anticipation for the moment when my guard shift ends and I can kick his arse awake builds even higher. Not that I need to sleep. But Malachite wouldn’t hear of it—we were going to do shifts like normal people do. Like mortals do.
I grip the locket tighter against the warmth in my chest. Being treated like a mortal…is nice. Being given consideration, my condition and life treated as something important. Worth preserving, instead of throwing away. It’s all very nice. Too nice, maybe. Maybe I’m getting spoiled. Soft.
Or maybe I’m growing. Growing up. Growing older, like I never thought I could.
The Blue Giant reaches zenith, and I gleefully lodge my booted toe in Malachite’s spine. He jolts awake, muttering obscenities, and blearily staggers to take over the log I was sitting on. He stokes the half-dead coals, sparks eating air, and I make my way to Lucien’s side. Still sleeping. I watch his chest rise and fall, his hair smeared with blood on the ends but his skin clean after I took the liberty of using the leftover hot water on him. He healed his own wounds—and Malachite’s—all in the same moment he healed Fione. That’s why he was sweating, exerting so much. And his magic healed my wounds, too, funneling into me like pure energy. I’m fine. Everyone is absolutely fine, thanks to him.
I watch his working hand twitch in his sleep as I lie beside him.
“But at what cost?” I breathe, my words brushing at his bangs. He’s not a High Witch. The Glass Tree hasn’t encased him, suspending him. What body part of his won’t work tomorrow? His other eye? His nose, or his lips? Or maybe something more internal—his voice, his lungs, his stomach? How many parts can he risk, until he hits something critical and dies?
Until the both of us die, together; me as his Heartless, him as my witch?
to kill him now would be an easy thing. to end both your suffering, all your suffering. you could kill them all and spare them this impossible fight.
The hunger can’t touch me. Not in Lucien’s arms. I carefully brush his hair aside, fingers glancing on his cheek. I press a kiss to his forehead and snuggle beneath his chin. The night sky twinkles down on us, and I know somewhere up there is Windonhigh—Y’shennria, Nightsinger, Crav and Peligli. I can’t see it. Hidden by magic, probably. All I can see are stars, and the blueness of the Giant, and my fear of falling asleep again…of dreaming. Of being connected forever to Varia—to the Bone Tree.
Malachite had a point. If I have the blood promise, the six eyes, if his eyes light up when I Weep and he smells me…am I a valkerax? Am I one of them?
Am I one of Varia’s tools?
No matter how afraid I am, life still comes. Lucien is still here, with me, warm and real and handsome as ever. That feeling of safety comes, like nothing can touch me, and I drift into the darkness of oblivion.
This time, in this dream, I can feel Varia’s excitement.
It’s not just hers—it’s her hunger’s, too. That twin hunger of mine, not-same and not-different. We—she—is so proud. I can feel her pride blossoming in her chest like the world’s biggest flower. She’s done well.
Because through her eyes, I see Windonhigh.
In flames.
She’s so happy—the voice is quiet for once. That terrible, aching hunger to destroy, to ruin—it hasn’t spoken to her once since she set the last witch city on fire. She’s done it. She’s obeyed, and more than that, she’s found out how to silence it. Zera—I—had Weeping. But she—we—have this.
Destruction.
As long as she destroys, it stops swallowing her mind whole. That’s when the tides of the Bone Tree’s power even out and she can surface above the waves of chaos. She can see the mousy-haired girl’s face now and remember her name—Fione. Flashes of memory—of stolen kisses beneath cherry trees, of slow, never-silent touches beneath silk sheets. The smell of her is the lightest of perfumes, clover and lemongrass, and she tastes of beeswax and copper, especially when she comes in from her uncle’s workshop.
Lovely Fione. Loyal Fione.
Loyal no longer.
Varia’s heart pangs, but we keep our chin high. We will carve the world—a better world, a safer world—for her.
We must.
And so, we listen happily to the flames and the screams of the witches as our white wyrms circle the floating city.
Circling, in rainbow halos.
Flying.
My unheart—just mine—shudders. Flying?! How are they flying? Only Evlorasin knows how—how to Weep, how to fly. Peligli, Crav, Y’shennria—no, I just found them. I just left them, safe in their beds…
I’m thrown out of her body. Her eyes aren’t mine anymore. I’m behind her, floating somewhere above her, and I watch in slow, dripping horror as she turns around and looks right at me. Up, and at me, with a smile.
“Blood, Zera,” she says with a little laugh, motioning to the flying valkerax like I’m a dense child. “Remember? Blood is a conversation for them.”
She can see me. Talk to me. A conversation. Evlorasin gave me its blood, and I know where the Bone Tree is at all times. Forever. I know where she is, forever. Evlorasin’s wound on its hind leg, telling me other valkerax bit, that they followed. That’s how they followed Evlorasin, that’s why it struck me as strange that they could follow Ev at all—they learned. Through Ev’s blood, they learned to fly.
And they’ve attacked Windonhigh. My friends. My family.
Varia’s eyes search me, her gaze resting around me, and she breaks out in the most piercingly beautiful of smiles.
“Shall we find where you are?”
She reaches out to me, her fingers rich with animate midnight, and I panic. I step back without stepping back, trapped in the motionless torpor of the dream. My body won’t respond—I don’t even think I have a body. She’s going to touch me, and it’s going to end. Everything. If she touches me, I know she’ll come to us, to Lucien and Malachite and Fione in the camp, and hurt them. Capture them. Using my body. Using her magic. And I can’t even move to stop it.
Just as the shrill panic in my head crescendos, she freezes, fingers inches from my unface. Something slithers on the floating grass island where she’s standing, between her boots, and her own horror is clear as she looks down slowly. Something clear on the edges, cloudy in the middle, glinting like porcelain.
Glass.
Raw glass grows inch by inch around her boots, up, consuming it like a living thing, like a glass plant in fast motion. A thick wedge of it, boxy and smooth, encasing her leg up to the ankle. Trapping her, as I’m trapped in the dream. She tries to yank free, tries to point her blackened fingers at it to free herself with magic, but the glass stays, still and gleaming in the fire bursts from the distant battle in Windonhigh.
“What—” Her onyx eyes narrow. “What is this?”
I can’t say a thing. My mouth won’t move, or I would’ve told her. I would’ve told her the Bone Tree choker made of valkerax fangs—pressed around and into her throat like organic jewelry—is moving. Growing.
The fangs elongate, fanning down and outward like a birdcage around her. Bone, like vines. Living and bending and moving past her shoulders, and as the bone tendrils reach the bottom of her legs, the thick glass wedge around her foot starts to branch off. Little glass nubs like sprouts grow up to the bones, reaching for them. Both of them, like plants reaching for the sun.
Yearning for each other.
Varia’s eyes suddenly widen, and her hands grow
midnight up to her elbows in a split second. I don’t see the magic, but I see the aftermath—a cut hanging in the air between the glass and bone tendrils, separating them, shattering them. Bone splinters and glass splinters rain down. The bone choker shrinks rapidly, back to its normal size, and the glass wedge melts away into the grass like water, freeing her.
The princess looks up at me, haggard, her hair in sweat-soaked spates on her face, the dark circles around her serious eyes magnified as she tries so hard to hide her fear with a sudden gleam of deadly determination, the dark pressure of all her incredible magic pointed at me like claws.
“You. You did this. You’re trying to undo all of this, aren’t you?”
14
THE CHOICE
I bolt awake, covered in cold sweat and rapidly trembling against someone’s chest. That smell of honey that’s now imprinted permanently on my brain. Lucien.
His dark eyes look down at me in his arms. “Are you all right?”
The dream-haze still lingers, and the black of his irises, the shape of his eyes, the thick lashes—the same as Varia. Varia.
I scrabble backward, panting hard. “You—”
His expression goes from soft to brittle in a second, but he keeps it from crumbling as he sits up, making his voice gentler.
“Zera, it’s me.”
I look him over—black hair, short. Proud nose. Broader shoulders than her. It’s him. It’s him, not her. The sharp fear scraping my throat recedes, and Lucien’s frown is slight.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I shake my head, sweat flying. “N-Not right now.”
“Can I do anything for you?” he asks. “Right now?”
what can you do that I can’t, little prince?
The instinct to deal with myself on my own rears up.
we know ourselves better than you.
I want him to do something. I don’t know what, or for how long, but it hangs there on the tip of my tongue.
we do better alone.
I don’t even have time to shake off the hunger before Lucien moves in a blur of sleeves and then I’m pressed against him, wrapped in his arms, his mouth near my ear.
“It’s going to be all right.”
The hardness in my body unwinds, in increments instead of abruptly, days instead of years. Feeling the heat of him against me, real and alive and human, pulls me back from the brink. He’s just here.
He’s just here, and that’s all I need.
I don’t know how much time passes. The sky is still dark outside the sanctuary of Lucien’s arms. At some point, Malachite crunches over and makes some joke at me to switch shifts, but I hear Lucien’s voice rumble in his chest—asking Mal to extend his watch a little longer. The beneather agrees, and I hear him shuffle off.
I can’t cry.
I wish I could. This feeling is like the emotional equivalent of nausea—if I could just cry, just throw up, it would go away. I’d feel so much better. But nothing comes. No relief, just the endless purgatory of my own thoughts, my own feelings. I want to stop it, but I can’t. It just keeps stretching on and on. I should be stronger than this. I used to be stronger, didn’t I? But now I’m here, leaning on someone else. On Lucien. On the one person I don’t want to see me weak.
I straighten, too embarrassed to look at him. “I’m sorry. For this.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” The prince smiles down at me.
“No, I should—I shouldn’t be putting this on you.”
He pulls my hand up with his own, putting it to his heart. “You had to be strong for a long time on your own, didn’t you?”
I can feel two heartbeats under my palm—mine and his. His, in his chest, and mine kept in the bag near his chest.
“You have me now,” he presses. “And Malachite and Fione. But I like to think you have me most of all. Your problems are my problems. Your feelings are my feelings. We deal with them together—that’s what it means. Or what I think it means, anyway. To be in love.”
His face flushes red on the edges, and the sight bubbles up a laugh in me.
He cocks his head, still smiling. “What?”
“You,” I say. “Just you.”
He leans in, bit by bit, until he’s almost touching my lips with his as he echoes me.
“Just you.”
I don’t know how long we stay up or when we fall asleep, but when I next wake, the sun’s slatting through the branches from above, a particularly intense light lancing right into my face. I eke out of Lucien’s arms, blinking away sun dust, and look up.
“Thank you, gods. Needed that one right in the eye.”
“Oh, relax,” Malachite drawls from a stump, whittling a piece of wood with his boot dagger. “You have five more of them.”
I stand up and stretch, turning it into a formal bow. “Good morning to you too, grumpy.”
“Interestin’ approach to thanking the guy who just covered your last three shifts.”
I meander to him and peer over his shoulder at the carving—a little dog. Lucien was right. I do have him. Him, and Fione, and Malachite. They’re still here, after everything. Gratitude.
What is gratitude, but a promise made whole?
I sneak in a quick kiss to the side of the beneather’s pale face. “Thank you dearly, dear.”
He wipes his cheek with the back of his knife hand and grimaces. But when I turn away, I swear I see a flash of a contented smirk.
When Lucien and Fione wake up, I tell them. Gathered around the remains of last night’s fire and a breakfast of freshly picked summer blackberries, I tell them everything I saw in my dream last night—the valkerax attacking Windonhigh, the valkerax flying, Varia’s boot, and the glass and bone trying so desperately to meet.
“She knows where you are? All the time?” Fione presses.
“Maybe? I got the feeling she’d know if she touched me in the dream.”
“Either way, we should think about leaving shortly,” Lucien dryly muses. I catch him mid-eating, and he flashes one of his golden smiles at me, flooding warmth into my whole body. My return smile feels goofy almost. Blissful.
what have you done, to earn this?
Pity rabbit organs are so small, I retort back to the hunger. Otherwise you’d be much quieter.
“Why would the Glass Tree and the Bone Tree react to each other like that?” Malachite frowns. “They’re two different things, right? Two different Old Vetrisian inventions.”
“Not entirely,” Fione corrects him, daintily consuming a berry with crimson-stained lips. “The Bone Tree is certainly an Old Vetrisian invention. But the Glass Tree is a witch thing. Barely any polymath contributions in it at all. Which means it’s essentially pure magic.”
“And that means?”
“It’s more unpredictable than the Bone Tree, certainly,” she says. “It has fewer rules. Or rather, the rules are not defined by any polymath terms, so I can’t begin to guess at what they are.”
“What about the Hymn of the Forest?” I ask. “The tree of bone and the tree of glass—”
“—will sit together as family at last,” Lucien finishes for me.
I nod. “They were trying to come together—the glass and the bone. Does it have anything to do with the Hymn?”
“But they’re two different things,” Malachite insists.
“The Glass Tree was made from a shard of the Bone Tree, right?” Lucien muses. “So they’re not entirely different.”
“Perhaps,” Fione muses. “It’s possible they… No—”
“We have the High Witch’s secret book. We head to the Black Archives and get you the reference material to translate it,” Lucien interrupts her. “And with the valkerax able to fly now, we should move as quickly as possible.”
“Spirits,” Malachite exhales. “Big teeth,
big claws, big fire, and now big airborne. Perfect. Exactly what I wished for last Snowsum’s Eve.”
“Are you—” I look Lucien up and down. “Are you all right? From yesterday?”
His smile is small. “Of course.”
“Everything’s working?” Malachite looks him over suspiciously.
“Would you like to test me out?” Lucien makes a vague motion at the sword on his hip, and Malachite just rolls his eyes.
Packing up is easy when you don’t have much—no utensils, no rain guards. All we have to do is bury the coals of the fire and the bones of the rabbit, and we’re gone.
I’ve never seen the west coast of Cavanos, or if I have, I don’t remember it. My parents—traveling merchants as they were—probably brought me here once or twice. The biggest maritime trade route into Cavanos runs west-east, after all. But the roads are near empty. We pass the occasional trading caravan, dusty mules and creaking wheels and terse smiles from under wide-brimmed hats, but they’re few and far between. If the promise of war profit attracted them, the valkerax attacks surely scared them off.
Not to mention the ash raining down from the smoking island in the sky, visible today as it wasn’t yesterday.
We start to see it when the trees clear up and as the road widens—Windonhigh. Windonhigh looming far, far above us and behind us, not much more than a speck tinted faintly green and brown and—horrifyingly—gray. Ash blown by the fires flits down, filling the potholes of the road with feathery gray softness, smearing on our skin. Lucien grips my hand tighter, and I can practically feel his unsurety of what to say. But there’s nothing that can be said. All I can do, all I want, is to hold his hand.