by Sara Wolf
“Starving Wolf,” Evlorasin says in its calm, guttural voice. “I’ve come to aid you.”
“Fire!” Lysulli yells.
“No!” I spin on my heel, wrenching a beneather’s bow out of their hand. “No, no! It’s friendly! Stop!”
But the line doesn’t listen to me—only to Lysulli. They nock their bows, and I watch in horror as a hundred archers pull, tense, and then fly loose their arrows. Some tranq, some not, but they all soar toward Evlorasin’s exact location, exactly at its five white eyes and undulating whiskers—
And then they stop.
The hail of arrows stops just before Evlorasin, who slithers fully out of the darkness, white scales and long halberd claws on display, its wolflike paws pattering down the earth in heavy thumps as it nears, leaving prints the size of horse wagons on the canyon floor.
“Didn’t you hear her?”
The voice seems to boom around the stone, and Yorl and I watch in shock with the archers as a white crow flies to the front, hovering just before the wall of unmoving arrows frozen in space.
Lucien.
The crow’s feathers meld to his armor, his cape, his smirk as he looks back at us.
“This one’s a friend.” The arrows suddenly bunch into one dense knot in the air, floating back toward the line of archers and landing softly on the ground just before them. He’s so powerful. This place…it’s made him a giant. That’s supposed to make me feel happy. Satisfied.
But all it does is terrify me.
will he be strong enough to stop us?
Lucien just throws me a small grin. “Always wise to save ammunition in a time like this, isn’t it?”
“Prince!” Lysulli booms. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? The thing’s next to you—”
Evlorasin slithers just behind Lucien, and joy pierces me as the prince turns to pat it on the nose.
“See?” He looks at Lysulli. “Gentle as a rabbit.”
“It’s the one I told you about.” Malachite sprints over to Lysulli far easier than I with his beneather agility. “The one Zera tamed.”
Yorl hems and haws. “‘Tamed’ isn’t really the correct phraseology—”
I push through Yorl’s words and the firing line and dash toward Evlorasin and Lucien, half-real gold petals scattering as I throw my arms around the prince and then bury myself in Ev’s chest mane.
“Thank you,” I mutter. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I felt the yearning of you,” Evlorasin rumbles. “And so too did it become my yearning.” The great wyrm narrows its five eyes at the firing line, the beneathers clearly jumpy and still ready to attack at a moment’s notice. “Will they have me?”
“I’ll make them have you,” I laugh, teary.
“Any bit of help is welcome,” Lucien says, a twinge of uneasiness to it as he tries to speak directly facing the valkerax. He can’t hear it speaking like I can—to him it’s just hissing—but he must be guessing how the conversation is going based on my words.
Evlorasin blinks down at Lucien, slowly and scrutinizing, sniffing the air around him intently. “This is your mated?” Ev snorts. “It seems rather…small.”
My laugh bubbles up, and I hug the beautiful beast closer.
It takes more than a little negotiation on all our parts to get Lysulli to stop ordering the archers to keep constant aim on Evlorasin. Especially when it breaches the firing line with me and circles my body like a lazy dog assuming its place before the hearth. But somehow, between Malachite’s cajoling at Lysulli and Lucien’s fearless, careful touching of the valkerax to communicate its friendliness to the battalion, we make it. None of the beneathers looks happy about letting the valkerax through and behind them, constantly checking over their shoulders as it curls up on the rubble and waits with us.
Lysulli won’t even approach closely, shouting from the firing line instead. “If it kills my men, I kill you!”
“Fair enough!” I shout back, and then put my hand on Evlorasin’s velvety wet nose. “You’ll have to be careful when the fight breaks out, Ev. They won’t be able to tell you from the rest.”
“Then I will battle deep.” The valkerax thrashes its tail. “Where arrows cannot reach.”
“You have to be careful! There’s a lot more of them that can fly, now. I saw them.”
“Care cannot be afforded against blood kin.” Ev’s whiskers undulate in a deceptively calm rhythm. “We are of the song and will only cease for it.”
“Still!” I pout, patting down its mane. “You’ve gotta be—”
The five white eyes slick over to me in their sockets, nictating membranes blinking. “I will not die, Starving Wolf. Not until my kin are free.”
I know how stubborn Ev is. How stubborn I am. A small smile pulls at my lips. “It’s a promise, then.”
Ev drapes itself over the mouth of the cave, and I duck beneath it to join Lucien again. Our fingers intertwine just near the pearl puddle, waiting. Waiting for maybe-death. For all of us.
The amethyst bracelet on my wrist, the heart locket around my neck. Both of them glimmer.
“Will they write books about us, you think?” Lucien asks softly.
I put my head on his shoulder and laugh. “Gods, I hope not.”
32
TOGETHER
In war, there is no grand moment of beginning.
The bards like to sing about it—that still second before the world turns on, the gears of mortals grinding as two armies face each other, and then the horn. Always a horn, announcing the charge, and two glorious lines of steeds and men charging at one another.
But that’s song. Fantasy. Not reality. Maybe it happens in mortal war. In wars between humans, not between humans and witches. Without magic. Maybe, somewhere across the sea from the Mist Continent, war has that grand horn and that majestic charge. But what comes after is nothing poetic.
Be wary always of bards who sing about beautiful war.
Because it’s nothing but pain, and death, and horrible, horrible disfigurement. Because, when the valkerax finally arrive, it’s in secret, through the canyons and from crevices below, and we never see it coming.
Peace one moment, and furious chaos the next.
Varia doesn’t stand on her valkerax valiantly or line them up and charge them in like a mortal might. She doesn’t gloat or pose dramatic before her victory. She fights with her wyrm weapons like a beast fighting for survival, for revenge—ragingly, the bulk of the horde descending on us in what feels like an instant. Fire suddenly everywhere, licking invisible flowers and eating what wood is left in the ruins of Pala Orias, snaking up the corpses of beneathers far too young to die. Beneathers who have only ever known war.
The archers shoot frantically, the white valkerax swarming over the canyon walls and staggering at the tranqs in their scales, passing out dead cold and tripping the others rushing in behind them. Pileups of wyrms writhe around one another, snapping and scrabbling to get their bearings and charge, claws ripping one another apart as much as they rip the beneathers.
Evlorasin immediately ascends, roaring out a vicious battle cry as its mane shines rainbow. Up, and up, and then I lose sight of it.
“Be well,” Ev says to me, but the words fade all too quickly. I watch its pure white feathers drift softly down to the earth with something like regret. Lucien stands, and I stand with him and watch as the fingers of his working hand turn black up to the wrist.
“I put a barrier around the front line,” he clarifies. “A bubble. It won’t stop the valkerax, but it will slow them down marginally. Make them easier targets.”
“Is Varia nearby?” I ask.
“Yes.” He narrows his eyes out of the cave’s mouth. “But not close enough. She’s staying just out of range. It’s like she…knows.”
“Shit,” I hiss. “I can lure her
out. Make her angrier, make her come right for us—”
“By sleeping again?” Lucien frowns. I should say yes, but I can’t. If I sleep, and lure her, and Varia gets close enough, I might not wake up in time to stop Lucien from splitting the First Root again. I have to be here to interrupt him. To put it back together before he splits it apart.
I can’t go to her in the dream. But the only other way I have to communicate with her, to lure her, is the hunger. My valkerax blood promise, and the Bone Tree song inside her, calling to me. The hunger here is muted by Lucien’s powerful magic. Just a little more from me, and I can push it down entirely. But if I Weep, that valkerax part of me comes out, too. The six eyes. It could make me more vulnerable to the Bone Tree’s command, not less. I could communicate with her, goad her closer, but she could also just grab my reins, force me to hurt and kill like she almost did in the Black Archives.
“Zera, no,” Lucien starts. “What if—”
“I won’t,” I say. “Trust me. Please.”
He hedges, black eyes sliced thin. “I can’t lose you.”
“You won’t.” I say it, and unsay it. “It’ll be only for a second. Please.”
I feel the grip of his magic loosen before his expression does. “Only a second.”
I suppress my smile and dive straight into the silence. Of the silence. One foot in front of the other, one step deeper at a time. Falling, like falling into a weightless ocean. I’ve seen the ocean now.
What a beautiful unlife it’s been.
I surface into absolute stillness, into the world being split six ways, six eyes looking at six Luciens. Magma-hot blood tears streak down my face, eye-corner to eye-corner, the blood dripping to the floor and mixing with the pearl blood of the Tree of Souls. The hunger in my head is gone, gnawing at me no longer, but I understand it better now. It’s not really gone. Weeping doesn’t get rid of the hunger. It just lets it rest—from the pain. From the anger. From the guilt.
Weeping isn’t to suppress the hunger. It’s to embrace it.
To embrace all of myself, no matter how dark or terrifying.
I’m here.
I’m here, I think loudly and clearly. Come and get me.
I look at the First Root sticking out of the dirt, crystallize its sundered shape in my mind. The connection between Bone Tree Varia and the valkerax part of me twinges, a harp string plucked too fast and too hard. She’s seen it. She knows I’m looking at the First Root. So close to splitting it again. Too close.
The impact is instantaneous. I hear Malachite shouting outside, Fione wailing, the hiss of steam as Yorl’s matronic moves, the battle raging outside as my unheart splinters into a thousand shards. Lucien’s face looks ashen and fearful—scared of losing everyone. Of losing me.
But we can’t move. We can’t go out and help them. We have to be here, at the First Root, to fix it all. To end—and begin—it all.
I have to trust that they’re still alive. I can’t let the emotion of fear submerge me. Drown me. The ocean is so big, so full of life, but I won’t drown in it. I can swim. I’ve learned to swim now. Reginall taught me. Ev taught me. The fourteen men I killed taught me. Lucien taught me.
Everyone in my life taught me to swim in the ocean of myself.
I can swim now, and there’s an island I have to reach—that black-rock island of Rel’donas, that small, peaceful room where I found rest at last.
Fire starts to lick at the cave’s mouth, and the ground rocks us to our knees as two valkerax entwined in furious combat writhe over each other just outside, slamming into the cave and away from it, blood spattering over earth and our clothes and staining the First Root. Dirt and dust fall from the precarious ceiling, white feathers and fur flying.
Ev.
Ev, tearing into the stomach of its brethren, as its stomach is torn into, too.
And then Varia.
She appears out of nowhere—teleporting? I don’t know, but she feels like she’s gone, far away, and then she’s in front of us, sallow and hungry and mere rags, a skeleton of the princess I knew and the sister Lucien loves. It’s clear to read on his face—he doesn’t move. He can’t. She looks like a corpse. Dead. Worse—sucked clean of all life. The bone choker around her neck is nearly decapitating her now, the red flesh of her windpipe showing, the white tendons of her throat column exposed. She looks a waif, but the power around her is harder and heavier than lead.
And her milky, shriveled eyes are on me.
In a way, Lucien’s shock, that one moment of hesitation—his love for his sister sealed the world’s fate. He could’ve gone for the First Root the moment she appeared. But his love roots him to the spot for just this one second. And I take it.
He has never starved. But he has loved.
And that’s why, at the end of the world, there are wolves and not mortals.
That’s why I reach the Root first. That’s why Varia lunges for me, my hands gripping the slippery pearlescent blood as I try desperately to push the two halves of the First Root together again. To hold it there, to heal it there. She’s only destruction. She doesn’t know—she can’t know of healing. Of what I’m doing.
But the bones of her choker spear out of her and into me all the same.
Four, five—I can’t count how many points of pain, of entry. Maybe a thousand. It feels like a thousand, the agony ripping through muscle and organ and every undead part of me. My skin tries to curl away from itself, vomit and hot-cold blood like nausea, a tide that moves with my inhales and exhales. Each breath, pain.
Every year of the thousand this Tree has had to endure—pain.
“NO!” Lucien bellows, and the flash of black light dizzies me. He does something—I don’t know what—but Varia staggers back woodenly, like a doll, and lunges for me again.
This time, her half-dead visage freezes. Completely unmoving, her withered eye sockets focused only on me. Her bones still spear my body, but I manage to turn my head over my shoulder to look at Lucien. His entire body is eaten by the void, up to his neck, to his jaw, creeping over his lips as he trembles, shakes, holding his sister in place with all his magic.
“Lucien!” I scream, blood spattering out of my throat. “Let go!”
He doesn’t.
“It’ll kill you!” My voice shatters. “LUCIEN!”
His eyes flicker from his sister to me, just that one movement so impossibly hard for him. “You…let go…”
“I have to put it together!” I shake my head. “You have to trust me!”
Varia’s eyes are dead. But his are alive and burning. Burning alive with his love for me, his worry, our memories together. The two halves of the First Root start to keen in my hands, close, their wounds touching and reaching out for one another all at once. Something booms beneath us, around us, above us. It sends out shock waves, little tremor warnings, and I know.
I know like the valkerax know. Or maybe it’s the fact I’m holding the First Root itself in my hands. Maybe it’s talking to me with its soul, its magic. However it’s doing it, I can see it like a clear dream. Like I’m dreaming lucid, awake. Images, feelings. I can see the battle unfolding below, valkerax dead, beneathers dead, blood smearing the ghostly gold flowers. I can see the now and the future. The Tree of Souls won’t heal without first hurting. It’ll collapse the cavern. All the canyons. The destruction will be huge.
Everyone will die.
“Lucien, take them,” I beg him. “Everyone. Take them and go.”
Spittle and blood foam in the corners of his mouth, the animate void crawling steadily up his throat, Varia’s limbs beginning to twitch.
“I won’t leave you…behind…again,” he hisses.
“Take everyone,” I say. “I can do the rest. You have to—you have to get away. To Pala Amna. As far as you can get.”
His black eyes flicker with great effort over to Vari
a. I make a smile.
“I’ll send her along,” I say. “When the Tree lets go of her. I promise.”
“You…can’t—”
“I can,” I assure him. “I know it’s selfish. But I can—”
“You will let go of the First Root.”
His command hits me like an arrow to my chest already riddled with them. But this one hurts more than any. He promised. He was different from the others—he’d never use me like this. He said that. He showed that. But now the magic rises up, curling around my arms, forcing itself through even the peace of my Weeping—his magic is so much stronger here at the Tree of Souls. Strong enough to defy my Weeping like Varia does. He doesn’t have a Tree in him, but even being near one is enough to give him the magical power to brute force through my will. But it’s killing him. Holding Varia and making me obey this command is…it’s too much. It’ll kill him. The hunger laces razor threads around my wrists, my fingers, pulling them apart without my will.
“You said—” I gasp. “You said you’d never—”
“I will not.” He pauses, gasping for breath. “Lose you again.”
I see it in his eyes, and the hurt drains from me one feather-touch at a time. Love.
He’s doing this for love.
He’s commanding me for love.
Not like Varia did. Not in his best interest or in mine. In ours. He wants a world with me in it, as I want that world, too. Desperately. More than anything.
We teeter on the edge of a knife, the past and the future. Our past together, our future together. The battle rages outside, Evlorasin’s roar cracking the deadly tension in the cave.
A tear slips from my fifth and sixth eye, my human eyes, as my smile widens and the words tumble from my lips, tragic and hopeful all at once.