9

Glass
and Bone

The Laughing Daughter’s magic is so incredibly strong, I’m almost offended by it. It gives me no time to sit and languish in pain and throw a pity banquet for myself at all. The three stab wounds in my stomach stitch themselves together, the skin warming on the edges where it entangles over itself. Those little lines of warmth are what yanks me out of the blank white precipice of death and plops me back into unlife. I crawl to my knees, slipping on the pine needles as I look around for Varia.

I find my witch (gods, so strange to call her that) idly sitting on a log not a few paces away from me, her heels beating against the wood like an impatient child. I scour the forest around her.

“Just you?” I start. “What a disappointing welcome back party.”

Varia shrugs, midnight sheet of hair spilling over her shoulders. “Fione left. She saw your body and ran in the other direction looking sick.”

“Poor thing,” I murmur. “Probably best that way. No human likes to watch flesh mend itself again.”

But at least now she knows—I can’t touch her without very painful consequences. That should ease her mind, at least a little, and that in turn makes me feel a tiny bit better about it all.

Varia clears her throat. “I appreciate the gesture, by the way.”

“Which one? The dying?” I brush dirt off my mouth and motion to my tunic that’s now horrifically bloodied. “Or crashing your gorgeous picnic whilst covered in blood?”

Varia’s smile is strangely absent as she speaks, her wide lips serious. “You reached out to touch her first. I wasn’t relishing the idea of ordering you to do it.”

“Because that’s where you draw the line.” I snort.

Varia’s eyes flash like black witchfire. “Fione is my dear heart. Obviously that’s where I—”

“She’s an eighteen-year-old girl who’s never left the court’s influence,” I retort. “And you’re a twenty-one-year-old witch plotting to use the world’s most terrifying army against it. She spent five years looking for you. Lucien spent five years. Both of them suffered horribly for five years because of you.”

Varia suddenly laughs, the sound bitter. “Oh, this is rich. The Heartless who earned their trust and then betrayed them all—lecturing me on hurting them? You truly are the only funny noble in Vetris, Lady Zera.”

My blood boils at the way she says it. I worked my arse off for Y’shennria to be called that. She was proud of me. No matter how huge a facade it was, I held it up with my own two arms. I earned that title.

“Have you even told her?” I snap back. “Have you told Lucien what you’re going to do with the Bone Tree, either? Or are you keeping that a secret, too, so they can suffer when you transform overnight into the world’s most powerful—most terrifying—person?”

There’s that brimstone flash in her eyes—the same as Lucien’s. I inhale hugely.

“I might’ve betrayed them. But at least I didn’t abandon them.”

She stands abruptly from the log, skirts swirling. “I’m protecting them!”

My mouth falls silent as Varia’s chest rises and falls with her furious breathing. She quips, she smiles, she deflects, but she doesn’t get truly angry. Until now.

“I am the one who will stop the eternal spiral of war in Cavanos,” the crown princess says, softer but with no less hard an edge. “Because it’s what must be done. But I will do it alone.”

“The world will fear you,” I snarl. “And take it from me, Princess—that always leads to hatred.”

“Then they will fear only me.” She raises her chin haughtily. “And they will hate only me.”

I almost blurt a laugh then. Bullheadedness must run thick and undeniable in the d’Malvane blood.

“You could call a truce,” I press. “You’re the crown princess and a witch. You’d be the perfect person to negotiate a peace talk, as an ambassador to both—”

“So that what, Zera?” Varia slices through my words. “So that some ignorant human in a village can ‘accidentally’ drown a witch one day, and Cavanos can go to war again in ten years’ time? No.”

“But…raising the valkerax—”

“I have considered everything,” she interrupts me coldly. “And this is the best option.”

“Best?” This time I do blurt a laugh, though it sounds half hysterical. “What madman would ever think commanding a ravening valkerax army is the best option?”

Varia’s quiet, the forest wind playing with her hair, and then, “This is what the crown princess must do for her people.”

The rising Blue Giant catches her face, lacquering her gold skin with pale azure. Her proud nose gleams, her brows knit, and fierce determination is etched in her every pore, and yet her eyes are piercingly lucid. Where Lucien is a hawk forever hunting, she is an owl—watching, waiting, a sentinel in the night.

I’m awestruck for a moment. I see her for the first time like a younger Lucien might’ve. I understand now why he looks up to her so much. Why he took up the mantle of Whisper to try to behold her ideals while she was away. Lucien grew himself in her image over the years she was gone. She is a pillar of conviction, a pillar lit with flame and blazing alone into the night.

The moment passes, and Varia covers her raw self with a lid of a smile.

“How was your first valkerax session?”

I manage an inhale. “G-Good. I died twice, but that’s just business as usual.”

“Do you think you can teach it?” she asks.

“No idea. But I’m going to kill myself trying.”

It’s not my strongest joke, but it earns a tiny chuckle from the crown princess, granting a breath of levity to the dense air. The wind whistles through the trees and between us, and finally she turns to walk out of the wood.

“Father is planning to call you in soon for questioning about Gavik’s death.”

“Vachiayis.” I exhale the beneather swear.

Varia presses on. “I’d refrain from telling them the truth of who killed him. Whether or not Gavik was a danger to me, if you tell Father you killed a blooded noble, he is oathbound as king to punish you appropriately. Even I wouldn’t be able to get around that. And, of course, it goes without saying—if you tell Father I’m a witch, you will never get your heart.”

I swallow hard, and Varia raises one hand in farewell as she walks away toward her ring of guards. I walk out and stare at the abandoned picnic blanket, disheveled but still beautiful, and I do what any sane undead thrall about to go on trial for their unlife would do.

I pick up the half-empty wine bottle and chug it.

That night, I have that dream again.

I’m walking in the Hall of Time, the stained glass embracing me with brilliant colors from every which angle. The stained glass tells the history of Vetris in perfect detail—of how it was built by the Old Vetrisians, of how the Cavanosians once fought the neighboring country of Helkyris, of the Old God and the New God worshippers warring; the humans and celeon versus witches and their Heartless.

I recognize I’ve had this dream before—faintly, in the back of my mind as I watch history pass me, I recall this dream. Last time, the Hall of Time fragmented, and I dragged myself through the shards to reach two rosaries with trees on them, so convinced if I didn’t reach them, something horrible would happen.

But this dream is different.

Beyond the stained glass is a dark shadow. Outstretched branches. A tree. By that convincing, totalitarian logic one has in a dream, I know that tree outside the Hall of Time is alone. I can feel loneliness physically emanating from it like waves, repeated and undeniable. My unheart aches for it, for how desperate and deep its loneliness is.

Suddenly, there’s a screeching bestial roar, and the Hall of Time implodes on itself above me, all around me. The stained glass fragments into a million glittering petals of all colors of the rainbow. Razor sharp, they cut me on the way down, scoring my cheeks, my upturned palms.

At last, there’s no Hall separating the tree and me. It’s a naked tree, dark and small and still young, barely taller than I.

I run toward it, the shards of glass serrating my feet. Blood everywhere. But the bloodstained shards begin to move as I do, racing faster than I ever could toward the tree of their own free will, dragging crimson lines of my blood in the ground behind them. I run, but the glass shards run faster, chittering against one another like short-lived bells, like thousands of birds. They reach the tree first, and I watch as they settle against the trunk, securing themselves to it as if they want to be the bark instead. Like chaotic puzzle pieces, they assemble themselves over the tree like armor. The entire history of Vetris, fragmented and broken, gleams up the branches, curls down to the roots. The tree glitters so brightly, I’m nearly blinded, my bloodstains on the glass the only thing daring to dull it.

Still, the waves of loneliness from the tree do not ease. Still, I reach out for it, and suddenly, all at once, like a thousand spears of an army, the glass shards all raise like spines and point square at my face—

I bolt awake on Varia’s couch covered in a cold, clammy sweat. My blurry eyes focus on the room, and I stare at the gorgeous silk curtains, the gold-leaf paintings, the sheer beauty of the princess’s room to ground myself, force myself to calm down. My breathing evens out slowly as my eyes drink in the breathtaking sight of the white marble balcony in the moonlight.

I blink when I find someone standing on it, their long raven hair let loose and tangled as if they’d just woken up. Varia. She’s in her muslin nightgown, facing away from me and toward the Blue Giant half-moon in the sky. I sit up to see her face and freeze.

Her eyes are glazed, far away. Her whole body is still, gently swaying in a way I’ve never seen before. She always stands straight, her posture perfect. But it’s neither her eyes nor her body that alarms me most.

It’s her mouth. Her mouth is moving, quickly and silently. At first I think she’s casting a spell, those wordless spells that only the Old God can hear. But then, slowly, I lift myself off the couch and linger at the balcony’s door, and I hear her monotone words.

“The tree,” she says. “The tree…the tree. The tree.”

Terror grips me, irrational and mind-bendingly strong. How does she know what I dreamed? Or is she dreaming, too?

I back away from the balcony, wrap myself in a fox fur throw blanket, and spend the rest of the night in the corridor with the unquestioning guards.

In the morning, Varia is long gone. What would I even say? That I saw her on the balcony being objectively unsettling? That I, too, dream of a tree? In the cold light of morning, my fear seems childish and unreal. So I push it away to focus on the reality in front of me.

I wait for the king to call on me. Waiting is the worst part of life; it feels like walking on a bed of rusted nails, every step painful.

But the king doesn’t call for me. First, he calls for his army.

King Sref sends for the bulk of the Vetrisian army to gather at the capital. He also calls the farmers and the tradesmen to consolidate resources in Vetris—in no time the streets crowd with grain wagons moving back and forth to storage towers. It’s a grim reminder that I can cocoon myself in my worries all I want, but the war outside will move forward inexorably.

Varia barely returns to her room—either in meetings with ministers or with Fione spending time together in the library—which means I have free rein of the apartments. If I wanted to appear proper to the court, I would go back to Y’shennria’s manor to live. And I’m sure Varia would be fine with it. But living in that empty mansion, full of so many memories, would gnaw at me. I know that. So I stay among the silks and the marble, watching the darkwood manse from afar. The nobles approve insomuch as they can—praising Varia for taking pity on me when Lady Y’shennria’s all but “abandoned” me.

Fione avoids me at all costs, darting out when we enter the same rooms, making muttered excuses to flee any social situation I exist in. Malachite still won’t look at me straight when I’m around. Lucien, on the other hand, acts the opposite. He looks up when I pass and makes a point to shoot me the most grating, placating smile I’ve ever seen each time we meet in the halls. The sort of smile he gives to people he dislikes. It itches, burns like an acidfire under skin—a fire I can’t escape no matter which way I turn or how far I get. He addresses me once, as we meet on the stairs of the palace entrance—me going to the valkerax, and him returning from riding, his hair sweat-beaded and his cheeks flushed.

“Lady Zera.” He smiles bitterly, his shed riding jacket under his arm. “I hope I find you well.”

It’s such a trite thing to say, a furious laugh starts to bubble up in me. It’s for girls much more gullible than I am. Girls much younger than I am. Girls much more human than I am. It’s not a pleasantry; it’s an insult. And we both know it.

His disdainful smile pushes me away, the white dress shirt clinging to the muscles of his arm, drawing me in. His face is handsome as always, but his faked smile isn’t enough to hide the faintly purple circles under his eyes. I blink, throwing him a more brilliant smile than ever before, constructed out of sheer anger-cut glass.

“You’ve found me incredibly fine, Your Highness. Whatever can I do to repay you for your inquiring kindness?”

This doesn’t throw him. Of course it doesn’t. He’s endured these sorts of exchanges all his life. He blinks and runs a hand through his short black hair, mussing it more.

“Your smile, Lady Zera,” he says, voice dripping with honey-laced wrongness. “That’s all I’d request from you.”

For a second, I have no idea what to do or say. For the first time, I feel as if I’m squaring off against him as an equal. We’re both standing here, smiling at each other, knowing exactly what we both are. It’s no longer me deceiving him, secrets always up my laced sleeve. This is the two of us on equal footing.

At last.

His dark eyes hold me. He’s won this time. I can feel it as he walks away—his shoulders broad and proud. He’s won something invisible back from me. Something I didn’t even know I had taken.

I linger on the steps, staring at the one he’d been standing on. If I had a heartbeat, I know it would be painfully loud in my ears.

Sometimes, I catch glimpses of Lucien around the palace with Varia. Usually the two of them are accompanied by Fione. I watch them walk the gardens, laughing and teasing one another. Varia tucks daisies behind Lucien’s ear, and he grins sheepishly. Fione trips over roots or brick walkways, and Lucien reaches out to catch her before she falls. Varia never hesitates to kiss Fione’s hand at every opportunity. They ride horses together, Lucien challenging his sister to a race. Fione insists on riding the same horse as Varia, clinging to her back for dear life with a delighted red flush on her cheeks.

They are…happy. Lucien is happier than I’ve ever seen him before. I feel somehow guilty for watching them like this. But it’s the only time I can catch glimpses of his rare, golden smile, the true one, the one that squeezes my chest so hard it feels as if I have a heart again.

I watch, and I wonder, wistfully, what it would be like to join them.

Malachite must’ve taken my plea about introducing Lucien to other girls to heart, because I start to see Lucien walking with someone who isn’t Varia or Fione; a beautiful girl with pale milk-blond hair and warm brown eyes of cinnamon. She’s as graceful as Y’shennria and far quieter than I. On the first day, Lucien is as cold as winter toward her—ignoring everything she rarely says, walking fast as if trying to ditch her. But she keeps coming back. Malachite keeps smiling at her when she walks up. He approves of her, that much is clear, and I feel a pang of regret that I can’t be the one he’s smiling at.

The beneather is smart, and he knows how Lucien works—he keeps talking to her long enough to force Lucien to engage with her as well. She walks quickly to keep up with Lucien, sometimes running—an unsightly thing noble girls are never supposed to do. But unlike the other noble girls, she doesn’t seem to care how she looks. Her dresses are simple, her hair even simpler. She trips over carpets as she runs, but she always gets to her feet instantly and determinedly continues after Lucien, apologizing for her own clumsiness.

It doesn’t take long for me to overhear exactly who she is—Lady Ania Tarroux, a Goldblood whose father’s money is funding a great deal of the war effort. The nobles call her simple and rather hopeless, but the way she so genuinely tries to keep up with Lucien despite him ignoring her—something about it plays on my unheart strings. She doesn’t laugh excessively, or bat her eyelashes, or desperately try to get him to talk. She’s just…there, steady and gentle. I’m half in awe of how well Malachite knows Lucien—steadiness and persistence are the two things a girl pursuing Lucien needs more than anything, and she has it in spades. He’s picked well.

Sometimes, it gets hard to breathe when I think such thoughts. But I like to blame it on the dust in the palace.

I ask around about her—the kitchen maids more than happy to gossip with me. Lady Tarroux lost her mother at a very young age, and by all accounts she’s the one raising her four other sisters. She’s very devout—spending most of her time in prayer in the Temple of Kavar in the center of the city—and often she’s spotted handing out food and clothing with the priestesses. She’s due to debut next year at the Spring Welcoming, and the rumors are, of course, already circulating about it, seeing as Lucien hasn’t announced his engagement to me. Or to anyone.

Lady Tarroux is the exact opposite of everything I am—quiet, gentle, easygoing, innocent. And best of all, she’s humble. She’s different from the other nobles, enough that she could catch Lucien’s eye, if he just gave her a chance. And Malachite seems dead set on providing that chance.

She’s perfect.

The perfect wedge to drive between Lucien and me—so perfect I almost pity her. I’m going to use the poor girl like a tool, and she’ll never see it coming. But maybe that’s for the best—she’ll have a princely husband out of it, if all goes well.

But I don’t have the time to help Malachite orchestrate anything between Tarroux and Lucien. For four days, my life is consumed entirely by the valkerax. First thing in the morning, I wash and dress and head to the South Gate via Varia’s carriage. In the dark arena below the city with Yorl, I try desperately to teach the valkerax how to sit still (an increasingly impossible feat, considering how much pain it’s in) while simultaneously trying to understand its lyrical, half-mad poetry. Each day I walk into the arena, its voice gets a little softer, and that worries me. Yorl insists the valkerax is stable, but it’s hard not to think otherwise. On the second day, its voice is barely loud enough to hear. Yorl’s there with me every step of the way, unflinchingly brave even when the valkerax thrashes around violently in fits of pain. We barely make any progress—and I hardly even manage to get two coherent words out of the valkerax. The sound of it whining in sheer agony makes my stomach sink and pity rise.

“Can’t you, I dunno, give it some permanent polymath painkiller? Or have Varia magic the pain away?” I ask Yorl as we ascend the stairs after the session, his paw in mine. I feel Yorl’s immature mane brush my shoulders as he shakes his head.

“I’ve tried. But the Bone Tree was made with the most advanced Old Vetrisian magic available. That sort of forging is lost to us. There are temporary solutions, but nothing works permanently to relieve their pain. It’s almost as if it’s a fundamental agony the Bone Tree has written into the laws of valkerax existence.”

“Couldn’t I just…” I stumble over a stair and Yorl tenses his arm, and I pull myself up by it. “Couldn’t I just go down to where the valkerax live, then? Into the Dark Below? I could teach one that isn’t in pain.”

Yorl snorts. “No one goes into the Dark Below and survives—not humans and not witches. Perhaps if you were a beneather culling party, but even then there’s a good chance half of you wouldn’t make it back.”

“And my locket.” I clutch the gold heart around my neck. “I’m guessing valkerax live way more than a mile and a half down, huh? Varia wouldn’t want to risk her death going very far.”

Yorl blinks at me with his huge green eyes. “I must be rubbing off on you. You almost sounded intelligent just then.”

I can’t see my own rude gesture, but he can. We’re quiet as we walk the rest of the way up the stairs, and Yorl leaves me at the top.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll feed it well and sedate it as much as I can. We can try again tomorrow.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

Yorl stares at me steadily. “There are other Old Vetrisian methods I can try. But they are…brutal. I’d prefer not to resort to such things.”

“Brutal how?” I swallow nervously.

“It involves taking off parts of the valkerax’s body.”

as always, the hunger sneers at Yorl. we are forever expendable to them.

“Is there any way to not dismember a living thing for what we want?” I ask lightly.

“I will do it if I must,” he says, resolute, his tail swishing. “I will become a polymath, no matter what must be done. And you? Will you do it, for your heart?”

The taunting gap where the memories of my heart were inside me widens, yawning open. To never eat raw things, to never have to kill again. To never have to take orders, and to remember everything I once was, at the cost of a creature’s pain.

“These methods won’t kill it?” I narrow my eyes at Yorl.

He shakes his head. “No. It would temporarily inflict great pain, and the valkerax may never regrow them back.”

I have to try everything I possibly can to make the valkerax talk cohesively, to teach it, to make sure it doesn’t come to that. But if it does…

if it does, you would, the hunger insists with rock-hard truth. you desire your weak humanity as a moth desires flame, and it will be your undoing.

I stare into the darkness of the doorway behind him and think of the majestic creature that sits there at the bottom, alone, in pain, half dead and all mad. If I was a good person, I would say no. If I was a dishonest person, I would say no.

But I am done with lies.

“Yes,” I start. “If that’s what it comes to.”

Yorl and I share a long glance, our twin goals laced in the abject silence of dirty deeds, and then he turns wordlessly and descends back down the dark staircase, the door creaking shut behind him. I take a deep breath to clear the heaviness in my chest, turn on my heel, and leave the wall. I blink as my eyes frantically adjust to the bright, late-afternoon sunlight. Not as many people stare at me this time as I walk through South Gate’s crowd, entirely because I’m not covered in blood. The valkerax hasn’t had the presence of mind to speak two sensible words to me, let alone the energy to try to bite me again.

There was something the valkerax said today, though, that stuck with me.

The branches cry out in the night to those who will listen in slumber.

It had no context, blurted between bouts of pain, but it echoes in my head. It would be easy to write off such a sentence as gibberish if I hadn’t had that dream of the tree the other night. To listen in slumber—that could be dreaming. And there had been branches in my dream, covered in bloodstained glass. Glass that pointed itself at me when I tried to come near.

But Vetris is no place to dream for a Heartless.

The war, the valkerax, how to push Lady Tarroux at Lucien—I mull it over every hour of the day, barely falling into the mockery of sleep Heartless experience. Varia’s maids send a pitcher of wine to her room every night, and I find myself dipping into it more than is healthy, the wine the only thing capable of slowing my racing mind. But soon—like all places I stare at the walls of for more than two days—the palace starts to feel like a prison. And so I turn to the only place left to me—the city.

The looming war permeates Vetris as thoroughly as the stink of white mercury; the blacksmiths never quiet their anvils as they produce piles of swords and armor. The polymaths gather in groups, in taverns and on the cobblestone streets, gesturing wildly with their baggy sleeves at buildings and walls and arguing over how to better fortify them against magical attacks. The Vetrisian army trickles in from all over the country thanks to the king’s summons, gathering outside the white wall in little nodes of tents that rapidly grow to sprawl over the grassland.

The soldiers run drills during the day, the sound of their boots most prominently heard near the gates, and at night they stagger through the alleys and roads of Vetris, drunk and blustering about how many witches and Heartless they’ll kill soon. I allow myself a single flinch when I hear such things for the first time, said with such venom and bravado all at once. Said as if they were convinced it was the right thing to do. The children follow on their heels, excited to see so many uniforms, their voices rising up as they joyfully sing the little songs they do while playing games:

“Dark clouds, dark clouds,

Kavar break them all,

Water for a witch and fire for their thralls!”

I swallow down, sick. The humans kill witches with water—drowning them, to stop them from speaking spells and escaping. And fire works better than any other weapon to slow down a Heartless—burning a body gives even magic a difficult time regenerating it. Hearing methods to kill witches and Heartless spill from the mouths of children sends shivers up my spine.

Why do the humans and witches hate each other at all?

I realize almost immediately that it’s a pointless question to ask. Old Vetris fell to ruins about a thousand years ago. They united against the valkerax threat, but their differences eventually tore them apart. That’s what the books say, anyway, written by polymaths well versed in history; their differences were just irreconcilable. The more I try to ask myself why the humans and witches hate each other, the more juvenile it sounds; magic is power. Power causes fear. Fear curdles to hate. Wondering where the root of all these wars began is pointless; witches are witches. Humans are humans. They fear. They hate.

Even if the initial disagreement was small, the thousand years of bloodshed between witch and human have turned it into something far, far larger—a web that feels like it can never be destroyed or escaped from. Suffocating us all.

It’s the third day when the valkerax finally says something that makes a drop of sense. It curls around itself, panting, and wheezes, “The tree of bone will always call to the chime strong enough to become its roots.”

There’s a moment of breathing, mine and its, and I dare to hope that I’ve gotten through to it, that the next few sentences it says will make sense just like that one.

“You have to fight it!” I call into the dark. “I know it’s hard, but you have to clear your thoughts of the pain!”

I wait on needles, praying it will acknowledge me at all. But instead it groans, the sound like wood being bent until it breaks.

“Immortal hate, immortal anger. Life squirming in a world of undeath. Below the sun and above the moons, together at last.” The valkerax’s voice is a bare whisper. “The mother calls to the son; two long to become one. A daughter like a weapon. A rose between them. A wolf to end the world. A WOLF. TO END. THE WORLD!”

Its voice is suddenly so earsplittingly loud, booming around the arena and dislodging pebbles from the ceiling. Dirt rains down, and I duck beneath its thrashing tail just as the serum overtakes me, cold death waiting with open arms.

Yorl looks tired for the very first time when I wake up again, his whiskers drooping even as he scribbles on his parchment, his mouth a thoughtful line.

“It’s not reacting to the painkillers the same way the last one did,” he mutters. “Unusually willful.”

“I could try to dance for it,” I quip. “I’ve been told that takes all the fight out of people.”

I smirk, thinking of Y’shennria and how exasperated she was when she taught me to dance. Yorl doesn’t bite. He’s quiet the whole time we walk up the stairs, and even when we part at the top, his emerald eyes are deep in racing thought.

“You’re not going to do that whole body part thing—” I start.

“I will do what is necessary.” He interrupts me coldly without looking up. “Better the valkerax be in pain than die and give us nothing.”

“Is it…really that bad?” I swallow, my throat dry.

“You’ve seen how weak it’s getting,” Yorl says, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “The Bone Tree’s command is eating away at it like the basest acid. It will not survive aboveground much longer.”

I watch him go back down the dark stairs with a twisting in my stomach.

“The tree of bone will always call to the chime strong enough to become its roots.”

That one sentence, among all the gibberish, haunts the space between my ears. I know the tree of bone. Varia’s after it. A chime—the valkerax uses that word for witches. Based on what the valkerax said, can the Bone Tree call to a witch? How? And why would it? It’s an Old Vetrisian magical relic, for the gods’ sakes, not a person with sentient thought.

Would it—could it—try to use a witch for its own purposes?

I shake my hair free of dust. No, it’d be foolish to take anything the valkerax says in those throes of pain seriously. It’s under so much stress and agony. If anything of what it says while suffering from the Bone Tree’s command were true, then Varia wouldn’t need me to teach it to Weep in the first place. Gibberish. That’s all it is.

I’m walking past a dark alley tavern when I see a familiar figure in a gray robe backed against a wall by half a dozen angry men. Gavik. The men palm wooden clubs and the hilts of swords, the air thick and tensely wound, like an invisible nest of threads pulled tight enough to cut.

“—not as dense as you think we are!” One of the men gets in Gavik’s gaunt face. “I saw you with my own two eyes, that night in the black market!”

The men behind him shift, some of them nodding along, others grunting. Gavik refuses to blink—staring down at the shorter man over his nose. Is the man talking about the night Gavik made the raid on the black market here in Vetris, the one Lucien showed me? The one that traded vital food and supplies beneath the radar to escape the crushing taxes Gavik had enacted?

“Don’t waste your energy on the wrong man.” Gavik sneers, his words slurring as if he’s…drunk? I squint, and sure enough, I see him tottering from one leg to the other. “Whyever would an archduke be here, in a disgusting alley, with a disgusting pack of sniveling dogs?”

“That’s it!” the man in his face barks, pulling out a club. “Get him, boys!”

The men descend like ravens on a corpse, the dull smacking sound of heavy blows meeting flesh resounding. Gavik, as self-contained as he is, as I always saw him be in the palace, isn’t immune to the pain. Pain is the great equalizer. It makes us all look foolish and weak. It makes us all cry out the same, and Gavik is no different. He bellows like a wounded buck, and in the glimpses between the men’s flying limbs and flashes of swords, I see him gnashing his teeth, blood and spittle running down his chin.

I wait.

Varia’s magic is too strong even for me—I can’t bring out the monster much further than a few claws and teeth. I’m sure letting the archduke wander free among the people of Vetris means Varia’s taken precautions against him turning, but one can never be too sure with the hunger. I’m the only one who could feasibly stop him if worse came to worst.

But…neither do I stop the men. All I can see is the boy I first met when I came to Vetris, his terrified face as he was forced to ascend the stepladder into the water coffin on Gavik’s orders and drown. My wrist aches with the phantom memory of the pain when Gavik, that same fateful black market night, ordered one of his men to shoot me with a crossbow.

“I wonder if the West Star is out tonight,” I murmur lightly, looking up at the glittering sky between the alley’s roofs. The cries of pain ricochet, and I almost laugh.

Lady Tarroux would, surely, help anyone in pain. And here I am, just enjoying myself.

evil, the hunger cackles. evil down to your core.

“No,” I argue softly. “I’m not the evil tonight.”

When the men finally run out of steam, they spit on his crumpled body and walk off. Blood seeps between the cobblestones as I approach the figure of Gavik slumped against the wall.

“My, my, my.” I lean next to him on the wall, my eyes on the warm lights of the tavern opposite us. “I had no idea this place served just desserts.”

It’s merciful the men didn’t stay, because my eyes catch the wounds on Gavik’s legs mending already. The bruises fade from deep reddish purple to green, to yellow, and then to nothing. The cuts close up, sewing skin against skin. Gavik just shudders and holds himself.

“I thought you were supposed to be dead,” I try. “Don’t the common people know that you’ve been declared murdered?”

Gavik says nothing, his voice rasping in his injured throat with a weak noise.

“You’re right,” I agree. “Why would the nobles tell the common people anything? And why would the common people care about one murdered noble, when their sons and daughters are poised to go off to war and experience the same a thousand times over?”

My instincts hone in on a shadow in the corner of the woodwork, just outside the tavern. An opportunistic vulture, waiting for the right time to strike.

“Unfortunately, he’s not dying tonight,” I call out to it. “And his soul is emptier than his pockets. So move along.”

The shadow rescinds, and I sigh lightly and look down at Gavik.

“It’s cruel of Varia, isn’t it? To send you out here and not give you a new face? You’ve been starving and torturing and killing these people and their loved ones for years. They’re bound to know what you look like. You’re a smart man. The first thing you’d do is put on a mask. Which means Varia must’ve commanded you to keep your face clear.”

Gavik coughs, the sound wet but healing. His breath reeks of stale wine.

“It’s a song,” he rasps.

I wrinkle an eyebrow. “You’ve certainly gotten worse at conversational segues since your time away from court.”

He leans his head against the wall, gray hood falling to reveal the bloodstained skin of his old, drained face as his watery eyes move to me.

“I know how I remember the Bone Tree. It’s a song.”

“It must’ve been a terribly memorable song,” I lilt.

His creaky voice warbles out, low and off tune, the lyrics echoing among the alley’s walls. “The tree of bone and tree of glass, will sit together as family at last.”

My unheart clenches. A tree of glass. Like the one in my dream. I keep my face cool, composed. “What sort of song is that?”

He narrows his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any more of it. But I heard it a long, long time ago. And it was important. I pursued it—I must’ve. I couldn’t remember anything of my human life when I first woke up as a Heartless. But over time, the single line of that song broke through my mind. I caught myself humming it, and then the words came. After that, the memory of the Bone Tree flooded in.”

I frown. “What sort of memories about the Bone Tree are kicking around in that hateful old skull of yours?”

“None.” His watery eyes dim, and he looks down at the bloodstained cobblestones. “I don’t remember anything about it. But I remember it exists and that it’s dangerous. A terrible, dangerous weapon.”

I blow out air. He’s not technically wrong. I realized that, too, the moment Varia and Yorl told me what the Bone Tree is, and does.

“I know that,” I bite. “What’s your point?”

“Varia can’t have it,” he insists.

“She’s going to get it,” I say. “And I’m going to help her.”

“You have to stop,” the archduke insists. “I don’t remember—” He slams his fist on the ground, knuckles skinning themselves and healing all in a second. “I don’t remember why, but the Bone Tree is terribly dangerous. More so than you think, more than anyone knows.”

Doubt starts to creep in, but my unheart burns. Of course it’s dangerous. But it’s the one path left to my heart. It’s the last road left open, the last one I can walk on my own. Mother’s face lingers, an outline that I know can be filled in so easily, so warmly, if my heart returns to my chest.

“You don’t say,” I drawl. “It’s almost like it’s a tree that can control all valkerax.”

Suddenly, to my utter horror, I feel something tug on my breech cuffs. I look down to see Gavik…begging. On his knees, folded in half, his hands clinging on my boots and his face downturned. I stagger back in alarm.

“Please.” His voice is thin, all traces of sneering superiority gone. “You must stop helping her find the Bone Tree. I don’t know how, or why, but I can feel it—if she finds the Tree, it will mean disaster.”

An archduke. Not just any archduke—the most powerful archduke, the most influential noble in Vetris. The most proud, arrogant man in all of Cavanos, the man who hated me with a burning passion as Y’shennria’s niece and an outspoken girl, now begging me.

He could be lying. But why would he? He’s lost his memories. He’s lost everything. Is this some bid to make me pity him, to get his heart back eventually? I killed him, for the gods’ sakes. He should be consumed with revenge and fury toward me, but this… Is he truly that scared? Scared enough to beg?

And if he’s this scared, then shouldn’t I be, too?

I shake him off my boots like a slug.

“Don’t you dare ask me for favors,” I growl down at him. “Not after everything you’ve done.”

I leave him in the alley, his song ringing eerily in my head.

The tree of bone and the tree of glass, will sit together as family at last.

Two trees. Not one, but two.

My nightmare was about two trees. Running through the broken shards of the palace’s stained glass Hall of Time, the shards ripping at me, my hands reaching for two rosaries with naked trees on them, like the one Y’shennria carried. I remember it as if it were real. I remember it for the terrible certainty it made me feel.

A certainty that, if I didn’t reach those twin rosaries, something horrible would happen.

If she finds the Tree, it will mean disaster.

Ido my best to keep Gavik’s unsettling words out of my work. Wine helps, but working with the valkerax is better. It’s easy to lose a scared archduke’s nonsense within more nonsense. But my questions still linger, my nightmare still lingers, unsettling me down to the bone. Gavik said he had the urge to keep a diary coursing through him, and he seemed convinced on our first re-meeting that he’d have written about the Bone Tree somewhere.

On one of the rare nights Varia returns to her apartments, I lean in the doorframe of her bathroom. She’s languishing in a full silver tub of rose- and violet-perfumed water spiked with goat’s milk, the petals swirling in the murky white.

“You…wouldn’t happen to have Gavik’s things on hand, would you?” I ask. “I want to frame some of them for posterity.”

Varia sighs, leaning her head against the tub so her sheet of wet hair hangs over the lip.

“Fione and I agreed it would be cathartic for her to burn it all.”

“Everything?” I try to sound as uninterested as possible, but Varia catches on. She sits up, turning to look at me with mild irritation.

“You expect a girl who’s been abused by her uncle to keep even one thing of his?”

“No,” I blurt. “Obviously not.”

Now I look like the horse’s arse for asking. Of course I wouldn’t deny Fione her catharsis about Gavik’s mistreatment of her. But I still can’t keep myself from feeling disappointed. a friend only in name, wishing for her pain over your curiosity. The hunger laughs.

Seemingly satisfied with my answer, Varia relaxes back into the tub, pulling her slender living wood leg out of the water and rubbing it down with a bar of gold-flaked Avellish soap. It’s easy to forget sometimes that she’s only two years older than I am—my technical nineteen years and her twenty-one feel so far apart when her body looks so much more mature than mine. It’s hard to feel around her age when she’s a princess. And my witch.

“Your Highness?” A maid’s voice filters through the apartments. “A letter has come for Lady Zera.”

“What rich fool would waste paper on me?” I trill, plucking the letter from the maid’s offered tray. The parchment is thick and creamy—high grade—and the wax seal on the front is embossed with a serpent. Just one.

Lucien.

I should throw it in the fire to keep up appearances. The maid would surely tell everyone she could that she saw Lucien’s Spring Bride (the mere sound of those words strung together stings, nowadays) throwing his letter away like trash.

I should throw it away. For my heart. To keep him at arm’s length, mile’s length. To make sure he has no hold over me ever again.

My fingers peel under the envelope before I can stop them.

There is a derelict grain tower by the West Gate with a perfect view of city and stars alike. Your prince requests you join him there tonight, at the fourteenth-half.

I look up at the maid waiting expectantly.

“Shall I fetch you a quill and parchment, milady?” the maid asks, wide-eyed. No one would dare refuse to respond to a missive from the prince. She knows that. The whole court knows that, down to the last stable boy.

I stare longingly at the ink spirals of his large, neat handwriting. We exchanged letters like this not two weeks ago. How my blood had warmed at the sight of his words. I was a fool then. He is a fool now. There’s a whole world of women waiting at his feet, none of them murderers and none of them liars. A true love—a real love—based in truth and kindness, instead of deceit and darkness, is out there somewhere for him. Her name could be Lady Tarroux. It could be anyone. All I know for certain is that it’s not me.

I turn to the maid with an Y’shennria-perfect smile. “No. That won’t be necessary.”

The maid starts. “But, milady—”

“I think it’ll make a lovely piece of kindling,” I say airily, walking over to the fireplace. My fingers hesitate, the letter hanging above the flames.

My heart is mine, and mine alone. I will not let him have it this time.

The letter tips from my hand and falls gracefully into the fire, the flames consuming it eagerly and instantly, leaving nothing behind but ash.