20

THE IRONSPEAKER
AND THE
STARVING WOLF

It’s been only a week and a half, bordering two, but I’ve never been more relieved to see the smartest being in the world.

And Yorl Farspear-Ashwalker is, objectively, the smartest being in the world. Or at least, the smartest I know. He and Fione tied, maybe. There might be others, too, but his dedication to helping Varia solve the mysteries of Heartless-valkerax communication made it possible for her to get the Bone Tree in the first place, and for me to get to know Evlorasin. We’d conspired together in the hopes I’d get my heart back, and his end of the deal was being able to conduct one-of-a-kind research—specifically, to finish his grandfather’s life’s work—in order to gain entry and ratify his grandfather’s findings in the Black Archives forever.

All of this is to say Yorl was there for me during the hardest parts of Evlorasin’s training, and, when I’d shoved Fione and Lucien and even Malachite away, he was there for me. When I was in the depths of loneliness, Yorl was my only source of levity, of positive interaction. He’s relatively new in my unlife, but after what we’ve been through, our friendship feels so old.

He bends the knee at the base of the throne.

“Finally,” I drawl. “The respect I deserve.”

Yorl’s laugh is deep, ragged in that celeon way, as he claps metal restraints onto my wrists and ankles.

“Strange way to show respect, isn’t it?” He plays along.

“Very.” I act puzzled as I look down at the metal, then slide a glance at the silver-robed polymaths bustling around the room. “Your new friends don’t trust me much, I take it?”

“My new friends don’t trust one another,” he murmurs. “Let alone total strangers. Interdepartmental feuds are the air we breathe.”

“So sad.” I try to draw a tear down my face, but the wrist restraints clang. The polymaths all look at me at once, alarmed, and I smile. “Sorry, sorry! No more sudden movements, I promise.”

Yorl smooths my hair away from my eyes because I can’t—a kind gesture, in his own way.

“If this was my project, I could ask them to forego the restraints,” he sighs. “But the high-running valkerax fears have been one of the only things from the mainland to take root here. The bastion won’t hear of it.”

“The bastion being your boss, I imagine,” I say.

“Something like that.” He nods, his vermillion-shot mane bobbing on the ends. It looks silkier than when I saw it last.

“You look better, at least,” I press. “It’s almost as if you don’t have anything to desperately prove anymore and can focus on the little things like eating and sleeping and keeping your body functioning.”

“It hasn’t even been a quarter-half,” Yorl grumbles. “And you’re already patronizing me.”

“Lovingly,” I assure him. “So what are you going to actually do to me? Flay me alive? A bit out of style, but I’m game. Hmm…draw and quarter me? That’s always fun.”

“Nothing that extreme.” He shakes his mane. “They’re going to take the ten biological samples required for a full analysis. Blood, bile, liver, saliva, brain—”

“Brain?” I hiss. “How exactly do you plan to—”

A polymath walks up to Yorl bearing a full leather canvas packed to the brim with wicked hooked needles, and all the blood in my body curdles away from it.

“Yes, well,” Yorl sighs. “Because you’re technically a ‘dead’ specimen, they voted against the far kinder live-gathering methods.”

“But you voted for them, right?” My voice goes high as the polymath pulls out a hooked needle and wipes it clean with alcohol. Yorl snatches it from the human’s hand almost too quickly, and they look utterly shocked. Yorl’s green feline eyes widen, too, like he’s alarmed at what he just did, but his voice remains smooth.

“Please, scholar. This is technically messy, menial corpse work. Let an adjutant like myself ensure your hands remain clean.”

He’s good at covering, but the scholar doesn’t buy it, snorting as his thick eyebrows wrinkle under his hood.

“‘Menial corpse work’? You must be joking. If our suspicions are accurate, she’s the first nonhuman Heartless specimen in Arathess history. Surely even an adjutant like yourself can see how important she truly is.”

“Not important enough to spare her pain, though,” I mutter, perhaps a bit too loudly. The scholar’s dark eyes snap to me, a flicker of familiar Fione-like curiosity in them.

“Can you hear the song, Heartless?” he demands suddenly.

“I’m from the Vetrisian court, where a quartet accompanies every breath,” I chime. “I’ve heard a lot of songs—none of them particularly noteworthy.”

“No,” he presses, leaning in. “The song. The one all valkerax hear.”

he means us.

I pause, the hunger echoing. “You mean the Bone Tree’s hunger?” He nods, and I tilt my head. “I’d love to tell you. But on the condition I get a painkiller or three.”

“There are no conditions,” the scholar snaps. “We will take your information, and your friends will receive theirs. So it has been deemed.”

I glance at Yorl, but from the way his green eyes slide around, I get the feeling he can’t interfere or assert himself. Not without risking his own position. Organizations are fickle like that. But thankfully, I’m a free agent.

I make a sweet smile. “Oh, sure. You can take all my information. Slice me up, take bits of me all you want, look at me under a lens. But my parts won’t tell you what my mouth can.”

“We don’t need your words,” the scholar insists, “to know you.”

“Yes, I’m certain you’re very good at sussing things out,” I agree placidly. “I saw your matronics, all your little machines. But that must be so much work. So much effort, so many long nights in your laboratories. So much brainwork, trying to analyze my brainwork. All my experiences, all my perceptions. I could just tell you and save you the bother.”

I’ve got him, and I know I’ve got him because he pauses on the brink of leaning in farther, like he’s pulling himself back from temptation.

The old me would have let them hurt me. The old me would have gladly thrown herself into the fire to achieve a means to an end.

But the new me has different ideas. The new me has people who care about her.

Twist the knife, Zera, salt the wound, make him want to wash it out. Save yourself.

being kind to yourself? The hunger laughs. a pathetic escape attempt.

“The first nonhuman Heartless in the world,” I murmur, looking down at myself. “Wow. That’s so amazing. Who knew?”

I look over to Yorl innocently, wide-eyed with my faux wondering. He can’t assert himself, but he can play along. He nods solemnly, an emotion he’s incredibly good at showing. Perfect, really. And it tips the scholar over the edge, the hooked needle in his hand retreating into his sleeve.

“Fine,” he assents calmly. “We administer pain relievers, then.”

“Will that work on her Heartless body?” Yorl asks, and I’m simultaneously flashing eyes at him to shut up and curious about it myself.

“We’ll use the formula intended for large game.” The scholar motions to the other silver robes on the wall, and they scatter out and back in, wheeling a tray with multicolored bottles on it. “It’s not as if overdosing will kill her.”

“Good point.” I flash a wink at Yorl as the scholar tips a bottle into my mouth. The taste is scathing tar and ferment, but it works almost instantly—all the muscles in my body unwind like coiled snakes, and I sink into the black rock throne far more relaxed. Yorl is an ochre blur above me, the muscles in my eyes drooping.

“I’ve gotta say, Ironspeaker, this stuff is way better than what you used to give me.”

“Shut up,” Yorl says, not an ounce of anger in it, only gentleness.

“Not quite yet.” The scholar steps in, holding either side of my face in his hands. “You have your painless time, Heartless. Now tell me; do you hear the song?”

I have no filter anymore, my thoughts spilling out faster than I can make them.

“I hear both songs. Glass and bone. But the bone song only ever in my dreams.”

He blinks. “The Heartless hunger is not the song.”

“It is,” I argue, my head lolling uselessly back as he lets go of me. “I’ve heard them both. They’re the same thing. Different notes, but the same music, deep down. I can feel it.”

“That’s—that’s utter nonsense.”

I laugh, rolling my head to look at him. “I sound a bit like a valkerax, don’t I? But don’t you know? The Old Vetrisians split the Tree of Souls.”

“Of course.” He pulls a shining scalpel out of his pocket, testing my skin. “But it’s been more than a thousand years. By all deductions, the Trees’ connection to each other should’ve completely eroded at this point.”

I go quiet, watching the silver blade split my skin and hot blood ooze out. Yorl holds my wrist softly between his paws, steadying the work. I want him to push the hair off my face again, but he’s Yorl. He has a job to do, and polymathematics to aid. It’s enough for me that he cares enough to be here, that he came to this at all. I’m starting to slip in and out of consciousness, the world blurring on the edges. Better to pass out, I suppose, because I’m not particularly fond of the idea of being here when they take my slice of brain.

to be together, the hunger slithers. to undo what you did, weak things afraid of death.

“They want to be together again,” I mumble. “More than anything. So they sing. They sing to punish us…to—to guilt us. To make it unbearable. To make us undo what we did.”

The darkness claws around me, but softly, folding interlocking talons one by one over the light until there’s only shadow and the hunger left—two hungers, same but different and both ringing clear as winter rain in my head.

together.

TOGETHER.

The feeling of someone’s leathery pads pushing my hair off my sweating face gingerly, and then nothing.

As with most people I’ve met, once they have what they want, the scholars of the Black Archives are far nicer to me. In that they leave me the afterlife alone.

“Humans really are humans, no matter where they are or how smart they think they are,” I groan, massaging my head as Yorl undoes my restraints. When I wake up again he’s the only one left in the room, the instruments and blood all cleared out and cleaned up. It’s like nothing ever happened—like I just sat down here and fell asleep. With leather wristbands on, but still.

“The entry hole closed almost instantly.” Yorl jerks his hairy chin to where I’m massaging my skull. “In a way that suggests your new witch is either very powerful, or very attentive to you.”

“I want it to be the latter,” I admit. “But I think it’s more likely the former.”

“Or a combination of both,” Yorl suggests.

“I forgot I can always rely on you to be the stark realist,” I tease, poking his wet nose lightly with one finger when my hand works free. “Yes, it’s true. I’m in love with my witch.”

Yorl mechanically undoes my other restraint, not a single twitch on his face.

“No applause, please,” I add.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he deadpans, offering a spare shift. “Do you want new clothes, or what?”

“Here I am talking about direly important things like love,” I huff. “And all you want to talk about is which burlap sack would look best on me!”

“I doubt your love’s going to appreciate it if you come back looking like that.” He motions to my blood-smeared everything, and I sigh, grabbing the shift.

“You’re right.”

“I usually am.”

Ignoring his infuriating confidence, I slip behind the throne to change.

“So,” I start, pulling blood-soaked cotton over my head carefully. “How’ve you been? What’ve you eaten? How many other girls have you experimented on while I was gone?”

“You’d think a recent death experience would make you less chatty, not more.” He sighs. “Come. We need to vacate the surgery.”

I walk around the throne, now far drier and cleaner-looking. “Personally I’d call it a dungeon, but all right. You’re the boss. Although apparently not enough of a boss. Do you always let the other polymaths in here push you around?”

“I’d like you to realize earning a kingsmedal whilst also bypassing initiate and going straight to adjutant is a feat no one has accomplished in the history of the Black Archives ever.”

“Goodness! Both firsts in history, the two of us.” I walk out with him, his silver robe swishing along the floor. “When will I get my results back?”

“They aren’t yours to get back,” Yorl says evenly.

“But you’re going to tell me what they think about them.”

“Obviously,” he agrees. “Depending, of course, on how long you plan on staying here.”

“As long as it takes to translate a book we stole from the High Witches,” I say. “We think it’ll tell us how to stop Varia and the Bone Tree.”

Yorl’s quiet, the white mercury lights of the hallway glittering in his large green eyes. “I hope you don’t expect me to feel guilty.”

My laugh bounces off the walls. “Nah. I’m done with guilt, too. We did what we had to. But say that enough times and it starts to sound like a terrible excuse, so I’ve started to tell myself ‘what’s done is done’ instead. Convenient and catchy.”

The comfortable quiet that fell between us all those times walking down to Evlorasin’s arena falls now. He’s not the type to talk unless excited about something, so when he starts, I know it’s important.

“When I was helping Varia get the Bone Tree, I didn’t anticipate I’d make Arathess’s first nonhuman Heartless.”

“I mean, I’m still human.”

“Yes,” he starts slowly. “But not entirely. You’re also technically valkerax.”

“Because of the blood promise, right?” I ask. He gives me a dull obviously stare, and I laugh. “Fine, sorry. Continue, master polymath.”

And so he does, between sighs.

“I told you before—blood promises are like conversations for valkerax. They communicate thoughts, concepts, entire memories through ingesting one another’s blood, given willingly.”

“Right. But if a mortal ingests their blood, they die.”

He nods. “But if you survive… We don’t know what happens if a mortal survives. We didn’t know. Until you.”

“Six eyes, it turns out. And a weird connection to the Bone Tree.” I smirk.

“A connection?” Yorl frowns.

“I can…” I pause. “See Varia. Well, through her. In my dreams. And she can see me. Any ideas what that might be?”

“Your guess is as good as mine in that regard. It may very well be the Bone Tree sensing the valkerax blood promise in you and tying you to itself.” Yorl’s sigh is practically thunderous. “I underestimated the power of the blood promise. I thought—because you were a Heartless—that your witch’s magic would overturn the promise. Valkerax blood promises work because they remain in the blood—but a Heartless’s body is constantly regenerated by magic. And by that, I mean you’re not like a human.”

“You don’t say,” I drawl.

“Mortal blood is very efficient.” He ignores me. “And their bodies only replace it with fresh blood when blood loss occurs. Their heart pumps the new blood around. But as a Heartless, your blood is replenished by magic. That’s how you survive—not through circulation, but through constant magic replenishment.”

“So you thought the valkerax blood promise would be cycled out of my veins eventually,” I finish, and Yorl’s sigh this time is pleased.

“You’ve gotten mildly smarter.”

“And you’ve gotten slightly longer with your explanations,” I tease.

He snorts, but I know him enough by now to know that’s his version of laughter. The hall becomes familiar eventually, going thin and entirely lined with dozens of doors.

Yorl pauses before our door, looking over at me. “I’m…I have to confess. I’m nervous.”

I cock my head. “What? Why?”

“Your friends are in here, aren’t they?”

I pat his broad shoulder. “One of them’s out here in the hall, too.”

The flicker of his lashes against the gloom of the hall tells me everything I need to know—surprise. He’s not one to be easily surprised, Yorl. He’s like me. He knows things, and accounts for things, and predicts things ahead of time. To keep safe, to accomplish goals. We’re both planners, schemers, and that’s what I like best about him. Us. As I push the door open and Lucien bolts up from his chair and Malachite hefts off the wall and Fione grips her cane and stands, all their eyes fall on me, not him.

Lucien’s over in two strides, taking my hands, glancing his way down my body as if studying me, his gaze heavy with onyx concern.

“Did they—”

“I managed to wheedle some painkillers out of them,” I lilt. “So ease up on the worried look, okay? It doesn’t suit Your Highness.”

His laugh is small, but the kiss he leans into and gives me is anything but.

“I warned you about that title,” he murmurs when we part.

“And I warned you about kissing girls,” I whisper conspiratorially back. “Who knows what’s going to happen after this. I might even fall in love with you.”

“Here we go again.” Malachite rolls his eyes to the ceiling. On their way down they catch on Yorl. “Who’s this?”

“Yorl,” I pull myself out of the intimate spell of Lucien and motion to the celeon. “He’s my friend. And, by some stroke of luck, he works here.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Yorl snorts, then realizes everyone’s looking at him. He makes a quick, polite bow. “Yorl Farspear-Ashwalker, Adjutant of the Black Archives. I was—” He shakes his mane. “I am the one who aided Varia in getting the Bone Tree.”

“Ah!” Malachite muses. “I knew you looked familiar. You’re the guy I helped catch the valkerax for.”

“One and the same,” Yorl agrees. “Thank you again for your aid.”

“Psh.” The beneather waves his hand. “That was nothing. I could capture valkerax in my sleep. With eleven other beneathers also sleeping,” he adds.

Yorl goes stiff upon seeing Lucien, and I remember their flash of a confrontation, back before the Bone Tree was found. But this time, Lucien nods at him, and Yorl eases into a nod back.

“You’re all right then, Zera?” Fione’s frown crumples her heart-shaped face.

“Right as rain, Your Grace.” I tap my cheek. “You can kiss me too, if you want.”

Her expression lightens minutely. “No, thank you. I’m saving them for someone.”

It goes unsaid, but it makes both of us smile. Varia. The Varia we’ll get back when we translate the book. The Varia who’s this much closer now that I’ve returned and given the Black Archives what they want.

Fione turns to Yorl, then, and puts on her best Vetrisian smile.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. I’ve heard much of you from Varia, and more from Zera. Both of them seemed to insist we’d get along.”

“I have likewise heard of you.” Yorl nods at her.

“Show ’im the white mercury dagger, Fi,” I urge.

Yorl’s eyebrows instantly shoot up. “A white mercury weapon—it can’t be.”

Fione, shier than I’ve seen her in months, pulls the dagger out and unsheathes it before Yorl. He leans in eagerly, whiskers twitching.

“It took a little reconfiguring of the mathematics,” she admits sheepishly. “My uncle thought it was the metal’s ratio to the mercury from which the common base had to be built, but in actuality, it was the gradual introduction of the ore compound through acid—”

“Through acidic methods,” Yorl finishes for her, and as he looks up at her from the dagger, his eyes widen. “How did you realize that?”

“I had help,” she assures him, a blush on her cheeks from all the attention.

“From whom? Who else would know? The smithing methods have never been recorded. Which means…you discovered it on your own. You’re—” He pauses. “You’re incredible.”

“Oh.” Fione makes a high, wavering laugh. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far—”

I lean in and elbow her with a wicked grin. “I’ve never once heard him use the word ‘incredible.’ I didn’t even think compliments were in his dictionary. Live it up.”

Fione pauses, Yorl’s eyes shining at her, and when she looks up this time, all the sheepish modesty is gone. Her face is set, ready.

“Will you help me, Sir Farspear-Ashwalker?”

“Just Yorl is fine,” he hurriedly insists. “Help you with what, Your Grace?”

She holds up the green-bound book in one hand, and our kingsmedal in the other. “This. Seven hundred pages of Old Vetrisian, some of it mixed with Qessen, and half of it near-illegible.”

“We’ll have to wait for the results of Zera’s testing, but…yes. Gladly. It sounds a true challenge.” Yorl laughs. Really laughs, a soft growl-purr under his breath. Fione looks equally pleased, eagerness beneath all her iron willpower. The celeon looks back at me, at Mal and Lucien and me, and nods.

“This may take a while. Let me show you to the beach.”