Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts)

by Sara Wolf

  I suck in a breath, then let it out slowly. The must of ancient things cloys my lungs and helps none.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Lucien assures me, a playful, Whisper-esque edge to it. It almost riles me, how hard he’s trying to be casual about this, but it fades quickly when I hear a popping sound, and feel something solid appear in my fingers.

  I look down to see something blue. A gorgeous blue, deep and vivid and familiar. The shell. The little shell he took from me when we landed off the coast. It’s hard to see in the brightmoss, but he moves his witchfire closer to reveal ridges. It’s been carved with the most delicate touch into an iridescent blue rose, now peeking off a silver band.

  “A— You—” I blink at him. “Is this—”

  “A ring,” he says simply. “In case you couldn’t tell.”

  My unheart clamps down on itself, making it nigh impossible to breathe. “Luc—”

  “When this is over, you’ll think about it, won’t you?” He smiles. “We were supposed to, anyway, before all this happened.”

  “Supposed to what? Marry?” I squeak out.

  His smirk widens. “What I mean is, you were a Spring Bride. And I did, technically and forever, choose you.”

  I gape. “You realize that—”

  “I realize everything,” he assures me, smirk softening. “And I realize, mostly, that I want to realize you. Every day. For as long as you’ll have me. I don’t intend on transferring the old Cavanosian notions of what a wife should or shouldn’t do to the new realm I’ll build. Not that I think you’d ever ascribe to those in the first place.”

  His onyx eyes glitter mischievously, terribly and beautifully, and my blood sings choruses with him in it.

  “Will you marry me, Zera Y’shennria?”

  I can practically feel my bagged heart in his coat pocket rear up, bucking against its seams. Together. Together for as long as we’ll have each other. Never in a thousand years did I think someone would ask me this—that I would be important enough to someone, to their life and their own heart, for them to consider me their partner. Happiness like that—being important to someone I love, and crave—was never possible in Nightsinger’s woods. It was a dreamy fantasy I read about in my witch’s books, tucked away between the garden rhubarb and spring onions, dirt smears on my knees and on the pages, but I was so lost in the fantasy I didn’t care. What would it be like, I thought, to be asked such a monumental question, and by someone I loved? What even was love? I didn’t know.

  But now, in this canyon pulled wide by time and disaster, coated with shadow and mosslight, I do. The world turned upside down, in just a few years that felt more like ages.

  I’ll never really be gone. Still. Still, a shred of sadness tears at me.

  But I have to hold on to any light I can.

  I smile for what feels like the very first time and slide it on my finger.

  “I’ll perhaps consider it.”

  “Just perhaps?” He quirks a brow above his smirk.

  “Just perhaps,” I assert playfully, pretending haughtiness until the very last second, when he pulls me in by my waist, quick and sharp, while his kiss is slow and velvet.

  I’m still dizzy from it when we stop for a water break. Lucien’s chatting with Malachite, the biggest smile plastered on his face as Malachite demands to know why he’s so giddy. Lysulli chimes in that it’s obvious; he’s in love, and Malachite in all his stone-headedness wouldn’t know what that means. It quickly becomes a sniping contest between the two of them, Lucien watching and chuckling at it all.

  Fione sees me fiddling with the ring. She swallows her water, wiping her chin delicately before she speaks. “It’s his way of trying to persuade you to stay.”

  I laugh under my breath, staring into the blue of the rose. “Am I being that obvious?”

  “No. But he’s always had good instincts. For terrible things most of all.”

  “It won’t be terrible,” I insist. “Just…different. New. I won’t pretend it’ll be easy, but. He’ll learn.”

  Fione stares at a scarred canyon wall, at the black moss growing there. “No one wants to learn alone, Zera.”

  “He won’t be alone.” I press down the clawing in my gut. “He’ll have all of you—Yorl, Malachite, you, Varia.”

  At the last name, Fione closes her eyes, as if it’s caused her pain. Or maybe she’s imagining having Varia back. Longing.

  “It’s not—” Her voice, trying so hard to be regal and composed, cracks. “It’s not a fair trade.”

  Me, for Varia. My laugh comes again, softer. There’s a silence filled by the shuffling battalions opening their helmets to drink, opening their armguards to wipe off sweat, adjusting the metal of their swords and spears. Lucien’s laugh. Malachite’s grumbling. The hiss of the matronic letting off steam, Yorl’s faint busy purr as he scribbles observations about the canyon on a pad.

  I brave the silence first. “I know it’s hard to believe. I know you don’t believe in the gods. You believe in polymathematics, in reality. But I’ve lived it and died it. No one’s ever really gone, Fione. We’re all connected. I know it. Maybe by the gods, or not by them at all. All I know is I’ve seen it, Muro’s seen it—the Tree of Souls connects us all, through our memories, and our love, and our feelings. That’s what a soul is: a root. It’s memories and love and feelings. And that can’t be destroyed. I promised you then and I promise you now—no one is ever really gone.”

  She opens her mouth to say something, closes it. Opens it again, closes it. She stares out at the darkness, finally, the deep stretching thing with no end, and I watch her luminous periwinkle eyes fill with tears. Eyes I hope she gives her children. Eyes I hope see a new, peaceful world born.

  And then, silently, she nods.

  Pala Orias sits at the nexus where the five great-canyons merge, or so Lysulli says. Yorl looks thoughtfully around at the canyon wall, then murmurs to Lucien and me, “It stands to reason, then, that these five great-canyons were created when the Old Vetrisians split the Tree of Souls in two.”

  “Probably,” Lucien agrees.

  “These?” My eyes bug out. “But these canyons are huge!”

  “So is the Tree of Souls’ power.” Yorl nods. “Or, so was the Tree of Souls’ power.”

  I make a frown. “What’ll happen if we split it again, then? More canyons?”

  Yorl and Lucien share a look. It’s a silent answer but a thorough one. No one knows. More destruction, maybe. Maybe the whole place will collapse in on us and kill us.

  All hypotheticals that’ll never come to pass, if I have any say in it.

  I’m so mentally exhausted that my boots start to drag on the stone. No sleep, no rest, my mind listless and everywhere and droopy. I’m not even sure what’s keeping me awake at this point—Lucien, probably. He leans in and offers me his shoulder, and I take it. His working hand smooths my hair, his murmur of “soon, heart” the only thing forcing my feet one after another.

  And then they catch on something.

  I stumble forward, Lucien gripping my arm and pulling me back to standing at the last second. A string caught me and snapped—no. Not a string. A vine. A root.

  A flower.

  It’s not a real flower—it can’t be. It wobbles and wavers like a heatwave, made of what looks like golden mist so faint it could be mistaken for a mirage, a water spray suspended overlong. But its root caught my shoe, so it must be real. Real enough to trip me.

  There come more of them the farther we walk—dotting the canyon floor like hesitant golden dreams, bunching together and apart. The strangest bit is that they bob in some invisible wind, and it’s surely invisible because the air down here is deader than I technically am.

  “Flowers,” Malachite laugh-marvels, “in the Dark Below. Gran was right.”

  “Our grandparents knew all along,” Yorl asser
ts, then turns to me. “They’d heard the stories. This is as far as I’ve been—Grandfather’s notes advised against getting any closer to the Pala.”

  “Yeah, the place is a ruin—it could crumble at any time. But I’ve never—I’ve never seen these flowers in my life.” Lysulli frowns. “And I’ve patrolled here countless times. It’s…it’s usually just a crater.”

  “The Tree of Souls is the source of all magic,” Lucien insists. “It disappeared physically, but its fingerprints still remain.”

  “You talk like it’s alive.” They huff.

  “It could be.” Lucien shrugs.

  “Why would these flowers appear now, then?” I ask. “All of a sudden, when we come down here? Isn’t that too coincidental?”

  “Coincidental indeed,” he muses, staring right at me.

  I answer my own question wordlessly; it’s because the Tree of Souls wants me here. It gave me that dream ages ago, of the two tree pendants, and that overwhelming feeling of wrongness. It’s wanted me for at least that long—maybe even before that, Muro said. I try not to let the nerves overtake my thoughts. Lucien can’t know. He can’t. I can only be the poem-song, the mantra.

  Finally the prince breaks his crushing gaze on me, and he inhales, exhales. “Gods above—I feel like I could do anything here.”

  “What does that mean?” Fione inquires at his side.

  “The magic’s unstable, but there’s so much of it. So much more than anywhere else, than even Windonhigh.” He marvels, dark eyes catching the faint golden glow of the flowers. “It’s like—like I’ve only ever stepped in puddles, and now I’m swimming in the sea.”

  “So you’ve got full capability, is what you’re saying,” Malachite grunts.

  “Which means Varia will, too,” Fione murmurs.

  “We’re setting up the perimeter, regardless,” Lysulli interrupts. “I’m splitting the battalions into fourths and stationing them in a phalanx formation surrounding the centerline of the Pala. We’ll back ourselves against the north canyon wall.”

  “Depending on the terrain, we can hide some of the archers for an ambush farther up,” Lucien says.

  Lysulli looks at him, mildly approving. “Agreed. Clever move.”

  “We can follow the centerline to the First Root,” Yorl says. “It should be there, at the axis of north and west.”

  We soldier onward, the flowers becoming so thick under our feet, we can’t step without crushing some. They bounce back quickly though, bobbing cheerily and spraying an ethereal, half-real golden pollen of some sort. The canyon finally starts to narrow, but the flowers do the opposite, growing bigger and bigger until they’re waist-tall and thick enough to hide our legs entirely. Fione struggles with her shorter height until Malachite puts her on his shoulders without a word. The light of the collective flowers grows stronger, illuminating our faces with gold from below.

  The first time I see Pala Orias, it feels like home.

  It’s the valkerax blood promise in me, probably. A sweet, buttery feeling settles on the void in my chest the moment the golden flower-light reveals it—an old, crumbling ruin. Arches, plazas, chipping supports of houses long collapsed. The architecture is entirely different from Pala Amna—far smoother, taller, lots of domes and curves and strange pillars of coiled stone. Not spiraled but coiled tight. Malachite can’t stop looking everywhere, and neither can Yorl, but I look at only one place—ahead.

  here at the cradle, the hunger whispers. here at the grave.

  At first I think it’s me—my eyes going bad. But then I realize it’s a warp in the air. You can see it only when the golden flower-light hits it just so—a shimmering, rainbow-esque outline of something. Something huge, something looming gargantuan over the ruins, over us, spreading far and wide with many sturdy limbs and without a single thrown shadow. It gives off a faint rainbow light in a pattern like veins, pulsing gently in time to some unseen heartbeat, to some unseen music. To an unseen song.

  The song. The one in my head, the one in my heart. The one in Evlorasin’s head, Evlorasin’s heart.

  Our song.

  “The Tree,” Lucien breathes.

  “Spirits.” Lysulli’s ruby eyes bug out. “It’s…it’s real.”

  “Shit,” Malachite manages to grit out. “It’s huge.”

  “Like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Fione agrees in awe.

  “They say it began here.” Yorl’s green eyes shine with the Tree’s light as he takes it in, tail swishing madly. “Life. They say the Tree of Souls was the first thing to ever grow on Arathess.”

  I look up with an awed sigh at the shimmering veins—no, they’re branches. Branches bigger than entire rivers latticing the darkness above us. “And I godsdamn believe it.”

  Lysulli gets over their awe first, and immediately begins shouting orders, the clamor of the battalions splitting to their positions drowning out the ethereal peace, their bone armor thundering over the stone ruins as they take their places.

  “Prince!” Lysulli shouts, standing in front of a swathe of waiting archers. “Can I trust your terrible human eyesight to oversee the ambush placement?”

  They motion to the archers and Malachite bristles, but Lucien starts.

  “Yes! One moment!” He throws a smile at me. “I’ll be back.”

  “Far too soon,” I tease. He gives me a last squeeze of my hand, then jogs over to the archers. I watch them clamber nimbly together over the debris of the ruins for a moment and then disappear up a cliff face.

  “We should position ourselves near the First Root,” Yorl advises, wading through the ruins as the matronic trudges behind him, displacing rocks and rubble with its huge bulk. “So that when Varia approaches within terminal range, we can act.”

  “Lucien can act, you mean,” Malachite says.

  “Same thing.” I wave his grumpy arse off and turn to the celeon. “Lead the way, Master Polymath.”

  “Not a master yet,” Yorl corrects. “An adjutant.”

  I laugh and step around a boulder. “You mistake me for someone who gives a shit about any titles ever, darling.”

  “I thought you’re engaged.” Fione sniffs. “Shouldn’t you be calling fewer people ‘darling’ now?”

  Dead silence. The matronic hisses a little. Malachite makes a sputtering noise behind me.

  Oops.

  “E-Engaged? SINCE WHEN?”

  “Keep your voice down!” Yorl hisses at Mal. “Lest you start a rockslide!”

  “Being buried under a rockslide would be preferable to listening to him chew me out for the next seventeen months,” I lilt.

  “Months?” Malachite chokes out. “Try YEARS! Decades! I can’t believe you two are so thickheaded! Who gets married in a time like this? Who even proposes? What do you even eat at a stupid upworlder’s wedding?” He pauses his rant and looks at me with the tiniest of plaintive gazes. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”

  “It was literally a half ago, Mal.” I pat his shoulder sympathetically. “Fione just noticed because she’s observant about jewelry.”

  Malachite glances down at the blue rose on my finger, and his eyes widen. “Oh.”

  “Hurry up,” Yorl insists. “We’re almost there.”

  He points one claw into the distance, to the very middle of the ruin. We follow a decorative line in the ground, glazed reddish tile long buried in dust and fragmented by time. The smell of flowers is everywhere—so faint it’s more of a suggestion than a true scent. Half vanilla, half cinnamon—it’s a smell I’ve never smelled before. It changes moment to moment, wildly swinging between sharp rosemary, to musty lavender, back to vanilla and everything in between.

  “Are those the flowers, you think?” I ask Yorl. He’s covering his nose.

  “Hopefully not,” he says, muffled by his handkerchief. “They reek.”

  “I don’t think they’re s
o bad,” I muse, watching as the ghostly golden blooms bob like a sea lapping at our waists.

  “You’re a Heartless. Of course you think the smell of rotting meat isn’t so bad,” he grunts.

  I blink once. Twice.

  “They smell like rotting meat to you?” I ask.

  Yorl’s green eyes over his handkerchief freeze on mine. Fione catches up to us then, and chimes in, “Definitely rotting meat.”

  All three of us look at Malachite, who, though still wrapped in his own thorny disgruntlement, blurts words. “Yup. Bad meat.”

  Yorl glances at the flowers, then warily back to me. “Let us continue, regardless.”

  I sniff hard and wait for unpleasant, but while the scent cycles, it never changes from utterly delightful. Could it be…the Tree of Souls? It feels like this scent is welcoming me, and only me. I look up as we walk, the shimmering branches suspended high above and the not-quite-there trunk so massive it seems to hold up the entire world. It connects everyone; I saw it. I don’t know how, or why, or what it really is, but it isn’t just magic. And it isn’t just a Tree. It’s more than that.

  A god.

  No, not a god. Because a god can’t be split, or hurt, or wounded by mortals. But it’s the closest thing to one I’ve ever known, ever felt, ever dreamed of. It gives magic to the entire world, visiting each witch in their dreams when they’re ready for it. It’s the same one that Lucien saw in his dream before becoming a witch. Nightsinger, Varia, the High Witches—all of them. They got their magic from this wounded Tree. Such powerful magic, from a wounded thing.

  Such a powerful, torn soul.

  “Are you the one who sent me those dreams?” I ask the branches softly.

  I don’t get an answer, but the scent of lavender-vanilla tickles my nose, and I suddenly don’t need one.

  Yorl stops in what must be the center of the ruin, his paws hovering over the red tile line in the earth. He bends down, and we gather around him. Just in front of his clawed toes is a hole, barely the width of two humans. It slithers down into a shallow cave, the light of the Tree and the flowers illuminating the dimness inside enough to see something sticking out of the earthen wall of the cave—something that looks to be made of pearl. It snakes in and out of the soil, a single strand, the origin of it shimmery and not-quite-real like the Tree above is, but the very end…the very end is solid wood. Solid, white-ish wood like birch, with veins of what look like pearlescent sap.