15

THE OCEAN

My words make Fione smile and Malachite shake his head and exhale wearily. They make Lucien watch me intently until, finally, he nods.

“I understand.”

Just those two words. Simple, but far from easy, and said with steel pride. In me, in my convictions. He believes in me, and I hear it in every inch of his voice.

Malachite’s the first to start walking, and we trail behind him. We leave the valkerax corpse behind and come across more. Dozens of them. I glance up every so often, the floating landmass waning away behind and above our heads, and then one more glance, and it’s gone. No sign of the smoke, or the blackened edges, or the roots hanging from the bottom. All of it. Gone. I close my eyes and mutter one last prayer to Y’shennria.

“They’ve reinstated the cloaking magic,” Lucien says, glancing behind him.

“So fast,” Fione marvels.

“It’s impressive,” he agrees. “Considering how big the island is. But having met them, I know it’s more or less child’s play to the High Witches. All seven of them, incredibly strong and working together. There isn’t much they can’t do.”

“Except get out of those glass prisons, apparently,” Malachite grumbles.

The road opens up over the course of the day, gradually melting from grassland to coastline. The smell of salt wafts stronger, the grasses fading yellower and rooted in much drier, sandier soil. The birds turn from crows and sunbirds to gulls and seafalcons nesting in the rocky cliffs that’ve started to poke through the horizon. Fione consults a map briefly at a crossroads, pointing us to the southwest, to where the port town Dolyer—and hopefully our passage to the island of the Black Archives—awaits.

“Do we even have money?” Malachite asks during a water break.

“We can pawn something if we must,” Fione insists, then looks to Lucien. “I could’ve sworn the Breych sage gave you a pouch of coin.”

“Graciously,” the prince agrees. “The majority of it went to the villagers we rescued, but we have enough for a charitable boat.”

“A shitter, you mean,” Malachite sighs.

“A local charmer,” Lucien corrects.

Camp that night is quiet, all of us exhausted after three days walking on the road. It’s a bone-deep exhaustion, plagued with cold and wet all because Malachite saw a few very large and very fresh valkerax tracks in the silty mud and deemed a fire unsafe. Lucien offers to warm us with magic internally, but Fione and I won’t have it, insisting he keep up his energy.

“‘Warming internally?’” Malachite scoffs. “Please, heartbreaker. Save the innuendo for your girl.”

Lucien and I go rigid in our seats, neither of us looking at each other.

“Malachite-whatever-your-family-name-is!” I half shriek, half hiss. “Shut. Up!”

“Save it for the giant squids, rather,” Fione chimes in and saves the day. “It’s spawning season, and they oft mistake the underside of boats for other squid.”

And that settles that, raunchy rib forgotten as we all chew our jerky in disgusted-expression tandem and imagine a squid trying to mate with the underside of a boat.

Thanks and no thanks to Malachite’s comment, Lucien’s and my shared covering-slash-bedroll tonight is more awkward than usual. Every part of him burns like a brand, too close, too radiating. At some point in the night he sits up, both of us still wide awake.

“I can sleep somewhere else.”

“Don’t—” I reach for his shirt and tug him back down. “Don’t be silly.”

“I can’t help it around you.” I can’t see his smirk in the dark, but I hear it. It’s strange. Neither of us smells very good—mud and acidic valkerax blood and the layered sweat of travel—but my body doesn’t care about any of that. It wants to touch him, forever, always, no matter what. Now most of all.

“You know now,” I say.

“Know what?” he murmurs against the shell of my ear.

“My choice. What I’ll choose, always.”

“To help me?” he asks.

“To be with you,” I say. “In death or undeath.”

His arms finally dare to snake around my waist, pulling me close to his chest.

“So dramatic. What do you think about talking less about death, hmm? How about you be with me in life?”

My laugh is small, but the bloom in my chest is sweet. “I can give it a shot.”

It isn’t easy to peel myself out of Lucien’s arms in the morning. And, looking back at his peacefully sleeping face that cracks one eye open to find me and smile, I hope it never is.

Dolyer comes into view around lunchtime, and all four of us couldn’t be happier to see smokestacks, buildings, wells full with water, and an inn bustling with an open hearth. The idea of a bath might be the most distracting, but the docks are what’s most impressive about the town—sprawling and webbed over the water in pale gray salt-soaked and barnacle-encrusted wood. Everything in the village is made with gray—gray skies meeting furious gray sea, gray sands meeting gray grasses, gray buildings, and grayer horses.

But the gray only makes the splashes of color stand out more—the red of the fish gutting, the blue of the westbound ship sails and the maroon of the southbound sails, the jade green of Cavanos lawguard uniforms dotting the browns and golds of the sailors and merchants and stray dogs. The town moves and breathes in boxes—boxes being made by old men with chisels, boxes being loaded by women with arms as big as my thighs, boxes being moved by even bigger men, boxes clogging the docks of nearby ships only to vanish inside with much sweat and labor.

It’s a bit of relieving normality after lurking in so much destruction—that village on fire, Vetris turned to rubble, Windonhigh attacked.

“We don’t have time for the inn.” Lucien sees Fione’s longing look at the inn’s sign.

“Where else are we going to secure a boat?” Fione argues. “In the time it takes you to find a captain willing to take us for that paltry sum, I could take three baths.”

“If we don’t dry our shoes, the fungus is gonna start soon,” Malachite helpfully adds. Lucien looks to me to be the last bastion of reason, but I bat my lashes playfully at him.

“Just a half? Please?”

“Do you know where she is now?” he asks. She. Varia.

“No. But I could know. If, say, I lie down for a nap.”

The prince heaves a sigh. “Fine. The inn it is. But the moment we find a captain, we’re out the door.”

Malachite gives a little fist pump, and Fione and I make instantly through the gray grass to the swinging salt-spray sign of the inn. We’re greeted by the stench of old beer and fried bread—a perfectly familiar smell. As we’re wiping off our boots on the mat, it comes to me.

“I thought you of all people wouldn’t want to slow down,” I say to her. “Rescuing Varia is, theoretically, more important than a bath.”

Fione’s blue eyes catch on her glove as she takes it off finger by finger. Her other hand clutches the waterproof sack where she keeps the book we stole from Windonhigh.

“Your little speech made it clear to me,” she says over the inn’s din.

“Uh…it did?”

“My choice,” Fione murmurs. “Everything I’ve done until now, and everything I do going forward, is my choice. But from what you’ve told me, and what the High Witches added, Varia doesn’t have much of a choice anymore. The Bone Tree infects her. Consumes her.”

With a dim sadness, I follow her to the only free table. A gaggle of sailors starts a sea shanty, and Fione leans in so I can hear her better.

“We’re her only hope. And if there’s any scrap of the Varia I love left in her, she knows that, too. We’ll be together, always. She promised me that. And I choose to believe her.”

There’s a flash of iron behind her eyes—that determined iron that laced her every breath in Breych right after it all happened. But it doesn’t stay this time. This time, it lightens, evaporates, as she smiles small.

“Besides. Thinking strategically becomes rather difficult when one has to stop every ten minutes to sample their own reek.”

“Oh so true,” I agree sagely, motioning to the tavernkeep for service.

Fione takes her bath first, upstairs in a small room, and I decide to guard the door, what with all the drunken sailors about. I sit against it, the smell of steam and wild lavender eking out from the crack under the door, and I watch the sun spin silver in the sea clouds through the window.

Varia doesn’t have a choice.

She’s like me now. She’s maybe experiencing firsthand what she did to me as her Heartless. But I can’t be happy about any of it. There are witches all over Arathess, and plenty of them use Heartless. Plenty of them treat their Heartless well, but plenty others treat them badly. I know that now. I know, deep in the flesh of me, that it’s wrong. The hunger’s made that so crystal clear.

Something is wrong, this world with its Heartless in it. The wrong I feel now, and the wrong I felt in my dream of the two trees, the two pendants, the Glass Tree lonely, that feeling like if I didn’t bring them together something horrible would happen…it’s the same. The same wrongness.

Maybe all I’m feeling is nebulous instinct. Maybe it’s remnants of the Bone Tree. Maybe it’s the hunger, or maybe it’s magic. All I know is it’s real, this feeling.

I want to destroy the Glass Tree, too.

I can see only upsides to destroying the Glass Tree. It would release the Heartless, for one. Maybe there’ll be some ripple, a tornado or tidal wave of magic like the Wave that gave the celeon sentience all those years ago. But that’s a small price to pay to ensure no Heartless is ever created again. I’m sure of it.

But the Bone Tree is another matter.

Fione taps me on the shoulder, fresh and dewy, and motions to the steaming bathwater. “Your turn.”

I shake my head. “I told Luc I’d take a nap.”

“You can!” She pushes the small of my back into the room. “In the tub.”

The room’s tiny, all wood, and I sink into the tub built into the floor. No porcelain or gold like the tubs in the palace, but I’ve never been more grateful for one. The water’s soap-murky but more than usable, and I peel off my sweat-soaked leathers and slide into the water and my own thoughts.

If we have to destroy the Bone Tree, that would mean the valkerax go free. And in my unheart I know that’s the right thing to do. I’ve seen Evlorasin’s suffering too closeup to think anything different. The valkerax, like the Heartless, have suffered for long enough as magical thralls. We live and breathe the same. Magic shouldn’t be used to make thralls, no matter how much safety it gives the witches. No matter how much safety it gives a country. And that sounds mad even as I think it. I’m talking about destroying the one thing that keeps the valkerax from rampaging across Cavanos—maybe across the whole world. But Evlorasin showed me that we can talk to them; because Heartless are unique in their deathlessness, Ev and I can talk. And that’s never been done before. Heartless and valkerax have never overlapped before Ev and me. Maybe we’re the first of our kind. And maybe we can change the world. Talk to each other. Ambassadors, both ways.

All I know is things need to change. No more fear. Well, always fear. It’s naive to say fear will never be there. But moving ahead, and in new directions, despite the fear. That’s what I want. That’s what I’ve tried to do, every single day since I left Nightsinger’s woods in Y’shennria’s carriage.

Alyserat, indeed.

Fione’s words come softly through the door. “I’m scared, Zera.”

For all her bravado, for all her determination—she’s still scared. We all are.

“I know,” I say. “Me too.”

It’s a moment, and then two. The sunshine warms the wood, my face, the water, and I embrace the light. Whatever light I can find.

Footsteps suddenly pound on the floor outside, and I hear Fione stand up quickly on her cane. Someone slaps their hand on the side of the room’s little wall.

“Get out of the puddle,” Mal’s voice rings. “We’ve found a boat for the bigger one.”

The Lady Terrible is a far cry from the airship we took from Breych—the most obvious being that in the sky, there are no barnacles. The underside of the ship is completely encrusted with the things, the rhythmic gaping of their beaked mouths as the seawater waves lap up on them nigh nauseating.

“I knew the ocean was big,” I say. “But I had no clue it was also godsdamn weird.”

“Extremely weird,” Fione agrees next to me. “The greatest variety of wildlife live in the sea, and by all polymath estimates, we’ve catalogued only thirty percent of them.”

“My favorite are the blood-sucking eelworms,” Malachite offers as he pulls astride us on the gangplank.

Fione nods wisely. “Their jaws are so strong, they can bite down to your bone and suck out your marrow.”

“Okay, please!” I throw my hands up. “Is an entire valkerax horde after us not enough for you people?”

“There are jellyfish,” Lucien says in my ear as he joins us on the ship’s railing, “with tendrils so poisonous, they rot your skin off wherever they touch.”

“Hello to you, too, my piquant ray of sunshine,” I drawl. Lucien’s laugh feels good to hear, soothing some worried ache I’ve had in me since seeing the valkerax corpse. He pulls away from me, and I instantly miss the heat over my shoulder.

“I’ll tell the captain we’re onboard,” he says. “Try not to cause trouble.”

Malachite looks to me immediately. “Duel to the death?”

“Absolutely.”

Lucien’s snort as he walks away is barely audible over the chanting of the sailors as they raise the anchor and adjust the sail. Unlike Helkyrisian airships, which float via aergasel balloons and propel with precise jets, Cavanos ships are very much just ships—blown by the wind, rowed when necessary. They haven’t strayed from their original form in a long time. The invention of white mercury lamps is the only modern touch, and objectively much safer than open oil lamps on a fully wooden boat. The sailors we pass are curt to us, and not much more—they have work to do.

“Cargo ship, by the looks of it.” Malachite jerks his head toward the barrels crowded belowdeck. “Bringing supplies up to the Feralstorm.”

“The Black Archives are on the way.” Fione nods. “And the sea gets more treacherous the farther northwest we go.”

“Giant squids not included,” I add. We put our things by the hammocks we’ll be using to sleep, but Malachite keeps his broadsword and Fione keeps her waterproof book pouch. I keep Father’s unassembled sword in its hemp bag, tracing it lightly.

“If we have to fight, it’ll either be pirates or valkerax,” I say.

“Ugh,” Malachite groans. “I’d take a hundred valkerax over a ship of pirates.”

“They smell equally bad,” Fione agrees.

“How would you know?” Malachite raises one white brow. “You’ve never been out of Vetris in your life.”

“That doesn’t mean I haven’t met pirates,” Fione argues. “I paid scores of them for information on Varia when she went missing. I’ve sampled all their revolting scents.”

We meander back up deck to find Lucien waiting for us at the railing.

“How long will the voyage be?” I look at the prince. “Malachite and I want to know exactly how many death-duels we can squeeze in between then and now.”

“Four days, allowing for fair weather,” Lucien says, and then judiciously pauses. “Please don’t break anything.”

“Nothing but each other’s hearts.” Malachite makes a swear-on-his-heart motion, then points to me. “Or lack thereof.”

“What do we do if there’s an emergency situation?” Fione asks. “You can’t teleport us far again, like on the airship.”

“Unless we need to take a bath,” I chime.

“Or brine ourselves to make us tastier for the valkerax,” Lucien agrees with a smirk, then fixes Fione with a serious gaze. “We stay on the ship. Defend it with everything we have.”

“No magically desperate teleporting,” I warn. “Promise?”

He sighs and rolls his eyes. “I promise.”

The anchor finally begins lifting, Malachite jumping in on the ring of men to help winch it up. The ship backs out of the harbor, the gentle bobbing of the water becoming harsh lashing the farther out we go. Soon, the town of Dolyer fades behind us, nothing more than a gray collection of shapes on a foggy horizon.

The Western Sea is brutal.

Maybe I knew that, once upon a time. But it’s new information to me now. And to my stomach.

“I wasn’t aware Heartless could get seasick.” Fione rubs circles on my back comfortingly as I heave nothing into the water.

“New God’s toe skin—” I stop, lurch, and try to breathe deep. “Why am I—I didn’t get airsick!”

“Air and water are two different fluids with entirely different currents,” Fione assures me. Unlike her stint on the airship, she looks completely composed and non-nauseated. “No wonder witches don’t live near the sea. Cavanos witches, anyway.”

“What’s the difference?” I choke, desperate to think about anything other than the roiling in my guts.

“You know.” She shrugs lightly. “Cavanos witches rely more on Heartless than others.”

“Do you think—do you think there are Heartless outside the Mist Continent?”

“Perhaps.” She nods, gathering my hair gently back as I retch again. “I know in Qessen a witch having a Heartless is seen as crude and barbaric. Or so Varia told me. In Helkyris, Heartless are almost exclusively used for all kinds of polymath experimentation. Paid of course, though that hardly makes it better. Cavanos is the only place where Heartlessness is prized as a tool of war.” She thinks, and then says, “Out of necessity.”

I steel my throat. “I’m starting to think none of it is a necessity.”

There’s a long unsilence as the sea rasps and I rasp, and in a quiet lull Fione finally says, “You mean the trees. Destroying them.”

I only manage to nod, but it’s enough for her. She lets out a sigh.

“I’ve thought of that, too. But the consequences—they’re too wildly unpredictable. Presumably the valkerax would be free—”

“I could talk to them,” I blurt. “Through Evlorasin.”

“True,” she agrees. “But coming to peaceful diplomacy with them could take years. And in that time, they’d run free. With the added ability to fly, now—which means to more than just the Mist Continent. That’s why the High Witches were so upset with you. Not because you gave the Bone Tree to Varia but because you taught one to fly. And one valkerax means more very quickly, apparently.”

We shudder collectively as the sea wind blows, slicing over our grim faces. The idea of these skies being cut across by valkerax, forging new paths into unknown territories—all the stories of Old Vetris, all the myths and legends. Would it start all over? Would it be war, forever? The exact opposite of what any of us wants—the exact opposite of what Varia wants, too. Wanted, at least, before the Bone Tree overwhelmed her. I straighten, the bout of sickness passing at last.

“Destroying the Glass Tree won’t make the New God’s religion go away,” Fione insists. “It will just take away the Heartless. And without Heartless, the witches of Cavanos would be exposed to Kavar’s believers.”

“I know that.”

“You’re willing to put them at risk? And to put the whole world at risk of the valkerax? All at the same time?”

“I—” I clench my fist. “I dunno. All I know, in my deepest heart in that bag, is that something has to change. It can’t keep going on like this—magic can’t be used to keep living things hostage anymore.”

Fione’s silent, and Malachite take that as his cue to butt in, long ear tips bobbing.

“You two look minister-serious. What’s the occasion?”

“The fate of the world,” I chirp.

“Ah.” He nods. “Real important stuff. Well, whatever it is, you either do it or you don’t, right? Right. Now come fight me.”

Next to me, Fione bristles. “It’s not that simple—”

Malachite instantly lopes away, drawing his sword off his back. I wipe my mouth on the hem of my tunic and straighten with a smile at Fione.

“He’s right, though,” I say. “We can talk about it all we want. We can debate it. We can weigh the tentative pros and unknown cons. But at the end of all things, we either do it or we don’t.”

Her fingers find the waterproof pouch at her hip, her nails gripping a corner of the hard book cover within. The book that holds an answer. Or at least I hope it does. For all our sakes.

“If destroying the Trees will save Varia, then I’m with you,” she finally says.

“And if it doesn’t?”

Her periwinkle eyes search mine. “Then I’m against you.”

It’s a serious moment. I shouldn’t laugh. But I do. I do, because I know if the roles were reversed, if it were Lucien and me, I’d say the same thing. Over and over again. Always. Because I know now, like she does. I know what love means.

I know what loss means.

I know what a heart means.

She and I have to follow our hearts, no matter where that takes us. So many untranslatable concepts. So many important things that would take years—whole libraries of books—to say. To even explain. That’s why, when I stand up and grab a sailor’s sword lying on the deck and walk toward a waiting Malachite, all I say back to her is:

“Good.”