8

WINDONHIGH

“Nightsinger!” I cry, the looming death-drop just beyond my feet forgotten as I launch myself at her. “I—I never thought—”

“As did I,” she agrees softly, embracing me. Always soft, eyes evergreen. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for sending you off on such a selfish mission—”

“It’s okay. Really.” I flash a smile. “We’re here now, and I’m starting to learn that’s all that matters.”

Nightsinger’s nod is small, her smile wry. “Crav and Peligli are very excited to see you. You must have so much to talk about.” Her eyes slide over to Lucien as he steps to my side. “Ah.”

“Greetings,” he starts with a careful bow, eyes never leaving her.

“You—” One of the witches at Nightsinger’s side narrows his gaze.

“We will allow them entry, Valeweaver,” Nightsinger says instantly. “For he is witch.”

“It is custom to entertain brethren in one’s home,” the other witch at her side murmurs, her stunningly embroidered mantle lifting in the wind.

“But—” Valeweaver’s tail of braids whips with his indignation. “He looks exactly like Laughing Daughter. He feels just like her. Is she not—is he not—”

“He’s the prince of Cavanos,” Malachite suddenly cuts in, standing in front of Lucien with what I know by now to be his lightly menacing aura. “And if you’ve got a problem with that, you can take it up with me and all four feet of my sword.”

“What our beneather friend means to say,” Fione jumps in, “is that we won’t be here long.”

“They’ve requested two days,” Y’shennria says to Valeweaver.

“How do we know he’s not on the Laughing Daughter’s side?” he argues. “They’re family! They’re—”

Lucien muscles around Malachite, his expression all granite and ice. “My sister and I have parted ways. Forever.”

To hear the words from his own mouth, in his own voice, is chilling. It stirs up some sick feeling in my gut. Guilt. Guilt and the hunger that preys on it.

because of you—

But we fight it. We fight it instead of give in to it. We cut it off, we don’t even entertain it anymore. The wind brays at our wet clothes, and Fione starts to shiver. I walk over and offer her my arm, a body-heat embrace, and she takes it, leaning hard into me.

“It is not for us to decide whether they stay or go,” Nightsinger says. “Guests of import are to be brought to the High Ones. Do you have objections?”

Valeweaver frowns but steps back. “No. None.”

“Wonderful.” Nightsinger turns to me and smiles. “Then let us depart. There are so many eager to meet you.”

“Go where, exactly?” Malachite motions at the empty sky separating us and the major floating landmass in the distance.

“You, sir, speak far too much for a bodyguard,” Y’shennria quips.

Malachite feigns utter flattery, fanning his face. “Goodness. Thank you.”

“Can my friends and loved ones maybe try to get along, please?” I posit the question to the air, not really expecting a response.

“Prince of Cavanos, come, if you would,” Nightsinger says over the squabble. Lucien walks to her, to the edge of the small plateau we stand on, and they face outward toward the sky together.

“What, pray tell, is your witch name?” Nightsinger asks. Lucien hesitates, and Nightsinger senses it, smiling gently. “No harm can be done to one witch with another’s name. That is only a Heartless’s caution. But it must be shared if you wish to spell with us.”

I watch his dark eyes thinking, choosing to trust the other half of his bloodline, and then he says, “Black Rose.”

“Black Rose.” Nightsinger offers her hand. “Shall we?”

Something wordless passes between them, and he takes it. Their fingers grow instantly dark, too-quickly staining with midnight void at the same rate, like mirror images of each other. Lucien lets out a strangled choke and pulls away like he’s been burned. The sound of Malachite’s sword unsheathing is a half-second harbinger of his anger. And mine.

“What did you do to him—”

“Don’t hurt—”

“It’s fine,” Lucien says suddenly, panting and holding his hand up to us. “Both of you. I’m fine.”

“Apologies, Zera,” Nightsinger says softly. “You must be so worried. What a tangled thing, to be both Heartless and lover.”

I blink, not understanding at all. But Lucien does.

“You—” he starts. “You’re a skinreader, too.”

“You are?” I turn to her, agape. I never knew. Not for the three years I lived with her.

Nightsinger smiles patiently, fox-green eyes two content slits. “Together we could do great things, Black Rose,” she says. “But for today, we will only make a path.”

He’s looking at her with a whole new expression—something like fear, like respect, like a student looks at a teacher, and then he nods.

“Together,” he says.

“We could help—“ Valeweaver offers.

“No.” The other witch shakes her head. “Let our new brethren learn.”

Nightsinger offers her hand again, and this time Lucien takes it without hesitation. The wind blares between the silence, between their fingers growing black at the tips and upward, and then it happens.

I’ve learned magic is silent, until suddenly it’s not.

There’s a persistent, quiet crackle like a sugar crust being broken, and then the empty space of cloud between our plateau and the main land springs to life, the clouds shifting and moving and reassembling into one flat white plane, wispy lattices growing around and up until they enmesh as one.

It’s a tunnel. A beautiful, unreal tunnel spun out of clouds.

Nightsinger and Lucien let go, and she starts walking across, flanked by her two witches. Y’shennria follows, and I’m about to yelp for her to stop—she’ll fall through. They’re clouds. But her silk shoes land as if it’s solid ground, the only clue it’s not being the little puffs of white wisp eking from under her soles with every step. And the fact she’s not plummeting to her demise.

“I suppose this would be a bad time to mention I’m afraid of heights,” Malachite drawls.

“Close your eyes,” I tease. “I’ll lead you by the hand.”

“If you wanted to hold my hand, Six-Eyes, all you had to do was ask.”

I boop his nose. “You’re delusional.”

Lucien turns to us then and says, “Let’s go.”

“Do we have to?” Malachite asks. “It looks like death.”

“Oh, please,” Fione snorts. “It’s just magic.”

She’s the first to walk past Lucien, to set foot on the cloudbridge and cross it with her head held fearlessly high.

“The polymathematical genius is right,” I chirp, walking after her and stamping my boots hard on the cloud for effect. “It’s. Just. Magic!”

Malachite follows, one toe at a time, swearing in beneather the whole way as I tug him along. Lucien catches up to me and slides his left hand in my free one. Even if he can’t move it, it feels good. A reassurance.

“It was hard for you in that forest for three years,” he murmurs. “Wasn’t it?”

The question catches me off guard and digs far deeper than it should. Than I want it to. Did he—

“I saw it,” he admits. “Through Nightsinger.”

I want to get mad at this invasion of privacy, but I can’t. My past is the one thing I don’t mind him seeing, the one thing I never told him properly. Maybe it’s better he saw it through Nightsinger—more accurate. More real. More true to why and how I came to Vetris to steal his heart.

“It was…it was dark,” I start. “And lonely. But not always. Isn’t that how everything is, though? How life is?”

“No,” he says. “I think you had it differently than most. And harder than most.”

I nudge an elbow in his ribs lightly. “So did you.”

“I didn’t ever lose my heart,” he says. “Or watch my parents get killed. Or get killed myself. Or lose all those memories.”

His insistence hits like a bell, echoing in my empty ribs. I want to argue, to insist he had it worse, but there’s no use in comparing things, is there? It’s all right to say I had it hard. It’s all right to say I suffered and not put someone else before that. My pain is my pain, and it feels good—more than good—to have someone recognize it. To have him recognize it. My face crumbles with it all, and I lean into his shoulder as we walk, the piercingly blue sky surrounding us. Malachite stops groaning so much behind us, as if picking up on the feeling.

“I’m sorry,” Lucien says. “That I was so hard on you—so bitter—for wanting your heart back. If I had known what you’d been through up until that point—”

“It’s okay,” I say, half muffled by his shoulder. “You didn’t know. But now you do.”

“Now I do,” he agrees softly, wiping the sudden tear off my cheek with his working hand.

…

When we all set foot on the mainland, the cloudbridge instantly vanishes, blown away by the wind until there are nothing but remnant wisps of structure left hanging in the sky. Y’shennria and the two witches separate from us, but not before Y’shennria gives me a perfect curtsy.

“You must come to my apartments for dinner, Zera. Maeve is making a venison roast, and Reginall has been polishing the silverware idly for many a day.”

My chest inflates. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“You are invited too, Your Highness. And Your Grace. ”

“I would be honored,” Lucien agrees, and Fione nods.

“Then…” Y’shennria curtsies again, and I curtsy deeper back, our eyes meeting as we come up and the smallest smirk on her face obvious. “Try not to get into too much trouble.”

“No guarantee!” I laugh, and as she walks away I’m struck by how glad my unheart is to know she’s safe, and here, and that I’ll eat dinner with her again. Small things. Important things. Direly important things, in the middle of a war.

For all its height way up in the sky, Windonhigh is surprisingly temperate. When we four finally catch up to Nightsinger, she explains it’s because of magic. A dome of magic, to be precise, that keeps in the breathable air produced by the trees and siphons more from the sky. The dome maintains a constant temperature, meaning it’s never not the most pleasant of springs in the city.

Because, despite the fact it’s dripping with magic, it is still a city.

Sandstone paths carve inward to the city center, dividing the sky-land up into four quadrants—not entirely unlike Vetris. They’re all named after the four animals witches can shift into—Crow, Bear, Deer, and Fox.

Fox is mercantile—stalls and shops tucked into sandstone corners and down little alleyways, brilliant banners of crimson and gold strung from every eave. The crowd is a mix of all ages, all skin colors, all hair types, but their clothes have a theme—flowing, robe-like things, cut in what Vetrisians would consider odd places to show skin and shoulders and knees.

Y’shennria trained me well—no piece of bone or brass jewelry escapes my eye. Piercings are very popular in Windonhigh, it seems, all manner of lavish studs lined over brows and jawlines and on collarbones. We get strange looks, the witches doing their daily shopping looking at Lucien most of all. It’s like they can sense his magic, that he’s one of them. They stare, whisper, trying to figure him out, and he has all their attention. Or, most of it. The rest of us are just his curious window dressing.

The only ones who don’t openly stare are what my thief instincts assume are lawguard equivalents—witches in black armor, spiked all around the shoulders and collar and boots. As if they didn’t look intimidating enough already, their mostly smooth, small-horned helmets encase their entire face—dark and reflective—and yet somehow they can see, tracking us as we walk. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but it’s one I’m used to.

The Deer quarter is the housing area, where the tall stone spires wind around one another seemingly into infinity. They loom up into the heavens, near touching the sun and ribbed with long curlicue lengths of stairways and dotted with proud balconies. Nightsinger explains they’re mostly empty due to the Sunless War. There aren’t nearly enough witches to fill them anymore, and suddenly the towers I thought looked grand now only look lonely.

But witches wash their clothes in the nearby river, fingers black as they spell the water to move in tight, cleansing whirlpools, and others lay out vegetables and salted meats to carefully dry on blankets in the sun, and a few older witches cradle babies to sleep with creak-voiced lullabies, and life indelibly goes on.

It goes on around glass, because deep in the riverbed, I catch the glint of it. Thick, clouded, and raw. Raw, jagged glass seemingly…growing from the riverbed. Embedded. Emerging. Not little pebbles or discarded shards. This is so thick it’s like glacier ice, big enough to be boulders. Why would—why would glass just be sitting there? In the open?

I shake it off quickly. Magic is magic. Who knows what purpose it serves?

Crow is the quarter for farming and art, and by “art,” I mean “extremely magical art.” To be completely godsdamn honest, I had no idea magic could look anything like this; on the edges of small plots of farmland, there are incredible sculptures of glass—thin, refined glass—filled with living lights bouncing around inside, like trapped fireflies. When we get too close the sculptures move, and I let out the ugliest yelp of my life. Malachite almost beheads one with his sword, but Lucien pulls him back at the last second.

The glowing glass sculptures roam around Crow’s grounds—prides of wildcats, snakes slithering underfoot, jellyfish floating in midair as though it were water. It’s so surreal to see witch children running around, playing among and with the living sculptures, transforming in a blink into little fox kits, little bear cubs, and back again, their laughter ringing all the while as they chase one another.

“The sculptures look best at night.” Nightsinger smiles placidly.

“What are those?” Fione points. I follow it to what looks like another clump of solid, raw glass, this time jutting out of the grass and looking decidedly out of place in the midst of so many refined glass sculptures. There are more of them, scattered about and stabbing up from the ground in variable heights and shapes. Obelisks, almost. The children don’t go near them, giving them a wide berth as they play.

I watch Nightsinger’s eyelashes flicker. “Nothing of import. Please, let us continue.”

There are mushroom gardens, some of them as tall as trees and as little as sewing needles, a few oozing beads of fluorescent sap and others curling tendrils in and out like breathing, and some belching forth puffs of great glittering gas when footsteps approach. Fione and Malachite both lose their minds when we come across a human-tall mushroom that’s clear and faceted and deep blue, like it’s made of sapphire, and I can listen to their incoherent babbling for only a moment before I’m completely lost in the jargon. Something about subterranean life cycles and spore rarity and volcanic conditions.

“You have to present one of ’em to your partner,” Malachite explains. “If you wanna get joined. Married, whatever. You gotta hunt one down but it’s spiritsdamn hard. And they’re never that big.” He looks at my bewildered face and waves me off. “S’a whole beneather thing.”

“You never see them aboveground!” Fione insists, and for this one moment the usual curious twinkle is back in her eye. “They require incredibly high levels of bessell acid to grow! And then there’s the pressure, the small-worm growth, the light levels—whoever made this had to get every single aspect perfect. Has to! Continuously! Or this would wither in a second!”

“I’ll pass your compliments on to the artist,” Nightsinger smiles.

“Is it art?” Lucien asks quietly. “Or is it a show of magical strength?”

“Both,” she says. “Feats of magic are our art, brethren. To make art is to be strong. To have precise control over your magic, to have the diligence to maintain it and see it through, to have the endurance to practice and not give up—all indicators of strength. Of worthiness in magic.”

“Aha,” I start. “So it’s a competition.”

“Somewhat,” she agrees. “A competition, and a display, and a communication.”

“Yeah, well, this one says, ‘Don’t fuck with me and my giant glintshroom.’” Malachite waves his hands at the sapphire fungus’s everything, and Lucien and I laugh.

The Bear quarter of Windonhigh is, unfortunately, no laughing matter.

It’s the seat of war and politics—the High Witches have a stately sandstone tower in the very center, this one not curly or whimsical in the slightest. This building stands perfectly straight, perfectly conical, great banners of red and gold strung from a gleaming lapis orb on the very top, and descending long down the sides of the building, pulled taut at the ends to form a beautiful spiral that undulates in the wind and frames the massive staircase leading up to the dark, open archway of an entrance.

“The walls.” Malachite points when we get closer. Sure enough, dozens of runes are carved into the imposing building. Familiar ones—ones I’ve seen on the stone gates of Vetris.

“Old Vetrisian.” Fione marvels. “I’ve never seen so much of it before. And so intact.”

“The witch-cities were constructed in the Old Vetrisian era,” Nightsinger says. “And I’m afraid Windonhigh is one of only a handful left in the world. We are hardly capable of making such a large piece of land float anymore.”

“How did you guys stay hidden for so long,” Malachite muses, “if the Helkyrisians have airships? They’d see you up here, right?”

Fione shoots him an “obviously” stare. “If the Helkyrisians flew a ship into Cavanos territory, it would be an act of war.”

“Ah.” Malachite puts his fist in his palm. “Right you are.”

“Do you know what keeps it floating?” Lucien asks.

Nightsinger flashes him a small smile. “Not entirely. Magic, perhaps. Technology, maybe. But an Old Vetrisian blending of the two is most likely. They were a decidedly advanced bunch, but we work to understand them—and what they’ve left behind—every day.”

“Do you have polymath equivalents researching it?” Fione blurts.

“Something like that,” Nightsinger agrees.

There are more of the spiky witch-lawguards here than anywhere else—whole platoons doing drills on the grass, throwing fireballs at distant stone targets.

“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.