by Sara Wolf
I meet Fione’s periwinkle eyes, the sole gaze that cuts right through me. She’s the only one who knows both Varia and me intimately. She knows something doesn’t sit right in my words.
“Anyway, I don’t need sleep,” I quickly blurt. “But what if—she’s destroyed Vetris. Helkyris’s capital. Maybe she’s destroying Avel’s right now. After that, all that’s left on the Mist Continent is the beneathers.”
“Pala Amna,” Lucien agrees.
“She could go to the Feralstorm,” Malachite argues.
“No,” Yorl says. “There are more beasts than people there. Disregarding her going out of her way to stalk your group of late, there’s been a pattern to her attacks. The cities Zera just listed are of the greatest population densities. Varia seems to be going by descending order. And the fourth largest is Pala Amna. She’s headed there eventually, regardless if we are or not.”
Malachite’s face goes even whiter, the cargo bay’s shadows clawing at his cheekbones. The silence between us is filled by the creaks and groans of the ship, the pressure of the ocean bearing down like iron. Lucien looks somberly at the matronic. Yorl studies his claws with a frown, and Fione gazes at a far crate with hard eyes. Malachite looks sick at his own thoughts. I clench my fist.
“What if we lure her?” I ask. Fione’s the first to snap her gaze to me.
“With your dream?”
“She’s been following your dreams,” Lucien murmurs.
“Yeah.” I nod. “If we get to Pala Orias first, and then I dream, she’ll track it, and skip over Pala Amna to come right for us.”
“She might. Or she might raze Pala Amna on the way down,” Yorl murmurs behind his paw.
“She’d want to keep the bulk of her forces for us, though, right?” Malachite asks, hope creeping back into his voice.
“She could split the horde,” Lucien offers. “Most of it for Pala Amna, the rest for us. We’re just five people. Logically, a handful of valkerax would be enough.”
“But she’s not operating by logic anymore,” I blurt. “She’s being consumed by the Tree.” I see Fione flinch, but I barrel forward. “The Tree’s dominating more and more of her thoughts as time goes on. And all it wants to do is destroy. Except, that moment at the Black Archives where all the valkerax went still—I think I might’ve done that.”
Everyone’s eyes go wide, Malachite’s just narrowing.
“You?” Yorl blinks. “How?”
“I was—” I swallow. “I told it I was sorry. Sorry it had been alone for so long. And it seemed so…shocked. Shocked someone like me would apologize. That anyone would apologize. I think that’s what made it—and all the valkerax—freeze up. It was confused. Or sad. I dunno. But it worked, right?”
“You think you can do it again?” Lucien squeezes my hand.
“Maybe.” I grin grimly at him. “If I can make it sad, I think I can make it mad. And if I make it mad enough, Varia will ignore everyone else and come right for us.”
“If we can go to the ancestor council and get their help, we can mount a defense before Varia gets there,” Malachite says. “Lay a trap for her in Pala Orias.”
“Lure her, and trap her there so that we split the First Root,” Fione says and looks to Lucien. “Can you do that?”
Lucien shrugs. “I won’t know until I’m there, feeling its magic. There’s a good chance the Old Vetrisian witches split it with a combine weave.”
“Translation?” Malachite drawls.
“More than one witch,” Yorl clarifies, “pouring magic into the same spell.”
“It’s what you’re supposed to do for teleports, too.” I look pointedly at Lucien, and he flushes and scowls.
“Regardless.” He assumes a princely tone. “I’ll do what needs to be done.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself doing it,” I snap.
His chuckle is gentle. “Not planning to, heart.”
The nickname melts me like hot honey over cream, but I won’t let it distract me. I hold his gaze stubbornly.
“We can send for help,” Fione says, looking to me. “Nightsinger would help, wouldn’t she?”
“We can’t trust any of the Windonhigh witches,” Lucien says. “You saw them—they don’t want things to change. They want their Glass Tree and their Heartless to defend against outsiders. If they find out we’re going to weaken the Glass Tree, they won’t be keen on helping us.”
I feel a sting in my unheart. “But Nightsinger might. She’d want to help me—”
“We can’t take the risk.” Lucien looks to me. “You understand, right?”
I breathe in shakily and nod. Lucien strokes his thumb over mine, as if trying to comfort me. He’s right. We have to do it before any interested party can find out and try to stop us. Nightsinger’s and Lucien’s combined magic would have better odds at splitting the First Root, and Lucien wouldn’t have to lose himself over it, or worse—die. But he won’t die. He won’t need to split the First Root on his own. They think that’s how it will go, how it must go. But it won’t.
They have to live. All of them. They have to live, and the world has to change.
The Tree has to be put back together.
the wolf will eat the world, the hunger hisses.
Yorl’s stomach gurgles just at that moment, a welcome reprieve of levity as Malachite snickers and Yorl’s ochre face tints darker with his blush.
“All right, enough serious talk.” I grin. “Can’t plan strategy without something to eat, now, can we?”
I usher everyone up the stairs and set about delivering the dried meat and fruit the Black Archives gave us to the few polymaths working the ship. I come back to the captain’s quarters with rations and a bottle of wine to lift everyone’s spirits, and as soon as I open the door, the sound of arguing filters out.
“What do we tell the beneathers, then?” Yorl demands. “How do we get them to carve a way into Pala Orias for us? Any actual ideas, or is it just empty battle-lust in that head of yours?”
“Battle’s not the point, arse-licker!” Malachite bellows. “We won’t have to carve anything anywhere if we use Six-Eyes’ dream thing right! We tell Varia where we are at just the right time, and we won’t have to lose so many spiritsdamn beneathers to the valkerax!”
Fione’s buried herself in the green-covered book again, trying desperately to do something useful instead of adding fuel to the argument. Lucien looks up when I come in, flashing me a tired grin and motioning for me to sit by him. I flop into the chair next to him and clunk the wine bottle down on the table.
“Do I need to put you two down for nappy time?” I chime. “Or can we talk about this like civilized folk?”
Yorl and Mal both open their mouths, but Lucien smoothly interjects with all the effortless authority of a prince.
“Zera will stay awake for as long as it take us to get to Pala Amna. I’ll make sure of it. When we arrive, we inform the ancestor council of our plan first. We travel with their reinforcements to Pala Orias, allowing us to lay down traps and ambushes for the valkerax. Only when that’s done will Zera sleep, informing Varia of our plan.”
Yorl’s huge green eyes narrow at me. “Can you truly stay awake that long? It’s an instinct for Heartless to sleep when they become emotionally drained—”
“She can do it,” Malachite interrupts him, his voiced laced with a thread of pride. “I’m sure of it.”
“But that means we can’t risk sedatives,” Fione offers without looking up from her book. “If Varia calls her again—”
“She won’t,” I say. “I think—I think after the last battle, she might be afraid. Of me.” I scramble to cover. “Of what I did on the island. Stopped her valkerax, you know?”
“It’s not just her in her body, though,” Lucien argues. “It’s also the Bone Tree.”
“I don’t think the
Bone Tree is as keen on trying to kill us at the moment, either.” I smile, but it feels paper-thin. “I felt it recoil when I said I was sorry. It’s confused. It might get unconfused shortly, but I think we have a little leeway.”
“And if we don’t?” Malachite grunts.
“Well,” I breathe in. “Then chain me to the rudder and throw me in the sea and let me drag along out there. Much less likely to kill someone if my excessively toothy mouth is full of seawater and fish.”
“You’re not—” Lucien’s handsome face hardens with a frown. “No. You’re here, with us. And that’s final.”
“She got through my Weeping, Lucien,” I say gently. “Your magic won’t be enough.”
His onyx eyes meet mine, studded with steel. “I will make it enough.”
“Not at the cost of your body—”
“At any cost.”
His last words ring in the captain’s room, ricocheting off the glass wine bottle, off the windows and bedframe and my cold hands. Fione looks up from the book. Malachite looks pained, and Yorl just looks at me. It won’t come to that. I won’t let him consume himself for me.
He stares at me, unblinking, sure of himself, his sacrifice. But that’s not how this story in the history textbooks goes. Lucien lives to rebuild Cavanos greater than ever before. I know it.
“What do we do now?” Fione whispers the question.
I tear my gaze from Lucien’s fiercely burning one, moving to the iron Eye of Kavar nailed to the wall above the captain’s bed, and nod at it.
“We do what the rest of the world is doing.”
“Dying?” Malachite offers cynically.
“Praying,” I correct softly.
“Do you believe in the gods now, all of a sudden?” Fione scoffs, the uncertainty getting to her, too. I feel for Lucien’s hand under the table, and he holds me.
“I believe in what people do and what people don’t do. I believe in our power to come together and to come apart. And that’s all. That’s all I know for sure.”
The words hang, nervous and young and small. They sound ridiculous in the face of so much importance. We’re talking about the final battle, the last stand, and all I can do is give platitudes. All I can do is stay awake, stay strong, stay ready. I have to be ready for the moment, because it will come in all the chaos, and I have to snatch it from between the fingers of my well-meaning friends.
because you did this, the hunger whispers. you freed the valkerax. all those cities, all those people—dead because of you, wolf.
That beach running red. All those valkerax dead because of me. Lucien’s grip tightens. He’s skinreading me, I know it. The horrible guilt is a more effective armor for my intentions than even the songpoem of the wolf who eats the world.
Not me. I didn’t do this. This horrible web was spun long before I was even born. The Old Vetrisians, the witches. Decisions were made by scared people, by power-hungry people, by people. I didn’t do this; we all did. All of us fed into it and out of it, like a constant polymath machine. A cycle. A cycle that feels too big and too ingrained to ever break. Breaking it would mean breaking the world apart, throwing every previous rule into chaos. The end of the world.
No—the end of this world.
And the beginning of a new one.
A new one for Lucien, for Fione and Mal and Yorl. For Varia. Varia was wrong. We can’t just carve the world into a shape we want. That’s not how things change. One person can’t hold the chisel. There’s no point in holding the chisel at all if what you’re trying to carve is the bare tip of the iceberg.
The whole iceberg has to break for the river to flow again.
I am not a chisel. I won’t use a chisel. Not like everyone else. Maybe it’s the valkerax blood promise in me, but even my littlest thoughts are clear and certain and like poetry, like songs—my mind moves like a song and I finally understand Muro. His words. Evlorasin, too. Everything the valkerax ever said that sounded like nonsense becomes so clear.
Two hungers are in me, and they drive me forward. I was born to starve. I lost my parents to starve. I was brought to Vetris to starve, I fell in love with Lucien to starve, I killed those fourteen men to starve, and my hungers drove me to my friends, and my choices, and they drive me now to the river, and the iceberg, and the end of all things.
True names are true.
I am the Starving Wolf.
And I will eat the world.
26
THE WOUNDED
It’s the nights that are the hardest.
But I always knew that.
In Nightsinger’s woods, the deep cold and the deep darkness ate away at you. They gnawed like the valkerax gnaw, like the Bone Tree gnaws at Varia even now. I’d stay awake, listening to Crav and Peligli breathing in their unneeded Heartless slumbers, their cheeks and eyes puffy with childhood. A childhood suspended in midair, like a dewdrop off a tree branch.
Remembering how I used to watch them sleep, I understand. I understand the witches of Old Vetris and their desire to freeze their beloveds in time. To never have them age or grow sick. To have them by their sides, always. But isn’t that cruel? The witch would die eventually, taking all the Heartless with them. Wouldn’t it be so cruel, to ask people to tie their fate to yours like that?
Looking around the ship at night, at Yorl serenely in the crow’s nest with his tail hanging and Lucien and Malachite at the prow talking, I realize it’s not unusual. Isn’t that what friendship is? When you become friends, you ask one another to stay. To tie their fate to yours, until that same fate rips you apart.
So when, I wonder, did Heartlessness become a tool for war and not love? Was it ever love? Did inflicting the hunger on a loved one make them love you more? No. Less, surely. Living with the hunger is not a fair exchange, ever. Not even for immortality. And those who became Heartless in the more peaceful days of Old Vetris still would’ve lost their memories of being human. They would’ve forgotten the very people who made them immortal, their family and friends. They would’ve had to start over.
Love doesn’t take things away. It gives. I know that now.
I’m glad I got to know that in my lifetime.
I watch Lucien’s broad back, he and Malachite laughing together about something. I watch him transform into a crow, black hair growing long and swirling around him and turning white, his clothes bleaching white and his body shrinking small and feathery. He does a quick circle around Malachite’s head before turning back to human, boots thumping on the wood of the deck. Malachite looks pissed, but Lucien just laughs, smile bright under the brighter moons.
Trying so hard to steal moments of laughter, even though we all know the end is coming.
I watch his hand, the one I know isn’t really there. He’ll have to tell, eventually. And Malachite won’t be pleased, to put it far too lightly. Neither will Varia, when they get her back.
I laugh under my breath. Varia. Oh, the princess is gonna be piping-hot fish-pie mad when she comes back and finds out it was me who did the whole world-changing thing, not her. She’ll hate me more than she does now, if that’s even possible. I can just imagine her walking through New Vetris and constantly spitting on whatever silly statues of me Lucien decides to erect.
“He better make me look good,” I mutter to no one and pat my chest. “But then again, with this figure, how could he not?”
“How lucky it is you developed a habit of talking to yourself outside your time at the Vetrisian court,” Fione’s voice comes from behind me. I whirl to smile at her.
“Indeed, Your Grace. Can you imagine the scandal I would’ve started if someone caught me muttering about eating cow’s brains for lunch?”
“Utter mayhem,” she agrees, the stars twinkling in her blue eyes.
“I would’ve died,” I say. “Again.”
“For good, maybe.”
; “Oh, no one dies for good.” I wave her off. “Haven’t you read any books? Characters live on forever.”
“You’re not a character, Zera.” Her voice goes flat. Does she suspect? No. She couldn’t have. I haven’t let anything show.
“Obviously.” I motion at my everything. “I’m larger than life. And, occasionally, my own corsets.”
Her face doesn’t move, and that’s how I know she’s thinking about it. Of course she is. Out of all my friends (what a luxury, that sentence), she’s always been the whip-smart one. Yorl is just as intelligent, certainly, but Fione knows. She has uncanny intuitions and she follows them, because she’s a creature of heart. Some part of me still connected to Varia knows that’s what the princess loves best about her.
“You can’t leave,” Fione says finally. I lean on the railing of the ship, watching the sea churn black, embroidered white by our froth.
I grin at her, small and faint. “Why would I?”
“I meant what I said, Zera. I don’t want to lose anyone anymore.”
“Neither do I,” I agree.
She leans beside me, staring into the water with me. “You can’t keep doing things on your own.”
“Oh, I’m not—not this time. I have all of you.”
My smile doesn’t reach her, her gaze searching the ocean desperately. “I promised, you know. I made Varia promise we’d name our first child after you.”
I laugh, watery. “Bet she fucking hated that.”
“More than a little,” Fione agrees. “But when this is all over she’ll probably come around, considering you’re going to save her.”
There’s a pause in her voice, like she’s waiting for me to correct her, to let her down, to shatter the little bead of hope I gave her with my promises to save Varia no matter what. But I’m done doing that. So I just chuckle instead.
“I am, aren’t I?”
I watch her compose herself, noble training ramrodding her back straight like I’ve seen Y’shennria do so many times. To recover. To look strong.
“There will be a celebration when it’s over, of course,” she says in her best archduchess voice. “And you will be there.”