3

The White Wyrm
and the
Ironspeaker

“Do you know much about Old Vetris, Zera?” Princess Varia asks as we reach the very back of the South Gate crowd—where the edge of the cobblestone city meets the foot of the white wall that encapsulates Vetris proper. It looms, gargantuan and glowing with unholy light beneath the three moons, but my eyes can barely look at its beauty before my feet steer me uncontrollably after Varia.

Under the effects of the command, I can still move my face and my neck independently. But the rest of my body feels as if it’s fallen asleep, like the muscles I move aren’t really my own. I can both feel them moving and not feel them. I got drunk once, on cheap mulled mead Nightsinger was brewing behind her cabin, and that feeling of being absolutely haggard drunk is the closest thing I can compare it to. Here but not here. Aware but unable to do anything but gnaw my lip and answer. I’d love to hurl every insult under the sun at her, but fear is starting to win over my anger. What if I’m under her sway forevermore?

My vocal cords are free, at least—a small mercy. I’m not sure what I’d do if I couldn’t constantly voice my flawless opinion.

“No,” I say.

The princess stops just before a brass door in the wall, flanked on either side by dour-faced lawguards. I’ve never been this close to the wall before, at least not from the inside—so I’m surprised to see it has doors at all. Now that I think about it, these doors must be how the guards get up the wall to patrol—the single scaffolding at South Gate wouldn’t be enough to traffic every guard.

Princess Varia clears her throat and speaks, softly but clearly. “The Laughing Daughter calls.”

I’ve no time to be shocked at the fact she’s telling these lawguards her witchname. Maybe they don’t know it’s hers. Maybe it’s just a password to them. The lawguards immediately straighten and then move away from the door to let us pass, Varia pressing through the creaky brass door, and, without any control, my feet follow her into the dimness on the other side.

I crane my head to the guards. “She’s a witc—”

Varia’s grip on my wrist is instant. “If you want your heart back, you will tell no one that I am a witch.”

My heart? Is she…is she tempting me right now? Is she being genuine? If I had my heart, I could escape her grip on me forever—I could escape the hunger. My heart is the entire reason I came to Vetris and betrayed the prince in the first place. Everything up till the moment in the clearing was for my heart.

The princess shuts the door behind us, giving a piercing smile to the guards. There’s no command on me to not say anything, but the mere chance of getting my heart back has my tongue still. Once again, I’m chained by more than chains. A prisoner in my own body.

I try not to think about it. But like all things one tries not to think about, it’s suddenly all I can think about. She could order me to do anything, and I’d be powerless. Powerless. Gods, I hate that word. It saps all the hope from me, the hunger laughing and repeating it over and over.

powerless, powerless, it taunts. just give up.

No. There has to be something I can do. There has to be some way out. And if it’s keeping my mouth shut about her being a witch, then so be it. The idea of another three years or more as a Heartless is unthinkable. I barely made it through in the woods, and that was with Crav’s and Peligli’s calming presences and with a witch who didn’t command me. I won’t be able to keep sane through something like that again, alone.

Whatever it takes, I have to get free.

The steady rhythmic drip of water grows in my ears, and my eyes adjust quickly; the inside of the wall is cavernous and long and stretches on seemingly forever, like a hollow snake laid over the horizon. Piercing white mercury lamps are riveted to the riblike brass support beams that shape the wall. An aqueduct carves through the floor, flanked on both sides by grated walkways, and by the light of the lamps I can see that over the years, the steady moisture inside this place has worn every inch of brass a brilliant viridian green.

Varia turns, her face unreadable as she walks on the right side of the grating with sure steps, as if she’s been here a thousand times. Maybe she has—Vetris was where she grew up, after all. My legs move me after her, even as I crane my neck to look everywhere. Guards patrol inside the wall, too, marching up and down the grating, and among their armor I spot the odd brown robe of a wandering polymath. A wall this big requires maintaining, no doubt.

“Old Vetris was what the kingdom of Cavanos was called a thousand years ago,” the princess recites briskly. “It spanned the entire Mist Continent—from the Twisted Ocean to the Northern Strait, from the Feralstorm to the Avellish Sea. It was the largest kingdom in the world.”

“And they say witches aren’t nice to their Heartless,” I offer, my voice echoing off the high metal ceiling. “Yet here you are, giving me a free, boring history lesson.”

She ignores me completely. “But the Old Vetris we know—the one that built this city—was not comprised solely of humans. A wall this size, of this strength, is still impossible for us to build today. Do you know why that is?”

“Magic, right?” I blow an annoying strand of hair out of my face, my hands riveted at my sides. “The humans and the witches built Old Vetris and lived in harmony together.”

The princess shoots me a look over her shoulder. “So you’re smarter than a schoolchild after all.”

She stops abruptly in front of another brass door and opens it, revealing a spiral staircase descending into utter darkness. She steps onto it without an ounce of fear, and my body blindly follows her, strapped tight to the order. Despite the fact that it gets darker as we descend down the spiral stairs, Varia doesn’t proffer a light or seem to lose her footing in the slightest. And neither do I.

“Witches hate humans,” her voice rings out. “Humans hate witches. My father and the High Witches are mired in a hate far older than any of them could imagine.” She pauses, our footsteps echoing nakedly. “Father will go to war very soon. Whether you had taken my brother’s heart for the witches or not, he would’ve gone to war—of that much I’m sure. His father went to war before him, and his grandfather before him. Fighting witches gives Cavanosians purpose. It’s built all their traditions, their religions, their culture. Helkyris reveres knowledge. Avel reveres beauty. Cavanos reveres war. It has built itself a life out of killing.”

Her laughter rings out, cold and without comfort. “Though the witches are few in number now, they were once mighty. ’Twas not always so that humans chased witches like this—a hundred years ago, humans were very much on the losing side. The witches have built lives out of war, too, just in different ways. They’ve planted spies. They’ve thought up new, horrible magics made to kill and wound and poison. They’ve found ways to build their cities so high and hidden that humans will never find them. They’re like two snakes eating each other’s tails. I know that now, after having lived with both of them.”

My knees start to ache with how many stairs we’ve taken, but still my legs pump on, the command caring not for how much pain I’m in. Finally, after what feels like a thousand more steps, we even out onto a stone floor. I can barely see the princess anymore—even with my adjusted eyes. I can hear her boots pause, though.

“Before Old Vetris was formed,” she says, “Cavanos’s annals were riddled with stories of wars between humans and witches. So one has to wonder: What could’ve possibly forced these mortal enemies to come together and make the walled cities? What could have forced them to work together to build an empire, instead of tearing each other apart?”

I know the answer. Everyone who’s picked up a book in the last thousand years would know the answer.

The darkness around us is so deep now that I can close my eyes and open them and not be able to tell the difference. All I have to go by are the sounds of dripping water and a new sound: a deep, sonorous rhythm echoing off the walls that’s gotten louder the lower we’ve gone. Is it the hum of a polymath contraption, maybe? But that wouldn’t explain why there are no lights down here.

We walk for a few more seconds, silently, and gradually the sounds of shuffling and the clank of armor and faint, rough voices start to filter in. Celeon voices—unmistakable in their half-purring, half-hissing tone. Five, ten—there has to be at least a dozen of them all around us. Royal guards, maybe?

There are some celeon lawguards, but most of them directly serve the crown. It makes sense—they have no problem seeing in this dark. Bound with muscle and able to see and hear keenly even with a complete absence of light, celeon are a race of catlike, lizard-like people who were once creatures without sentience. But after a stray magic spell went awry, they were given thought. Since then they’ve developed a profound hatred for witches, allying themselves instead with the humans. The ones down here might not know Varia’s a witch. They likely see her only as a member of the royal d’Malvane family to be obeyed.

Varia must’ve stopped, because my feet come to a grinding halt.

“Your Highness,” a celeon voice says. “We were unaware you were coming so soon. Yorl is on the observation level, taking measurements of the beast. I can call him if—”

“There will be no need just yet,” Varia interrupts her smoothly. “At ease. I will inform you when I need you.”

Another clanking shuffle echoes from all directions, like all the celeon are doing something at once. Bowing?

“As you wish, Your Highness.”

There’s more clanking as footsteps pad past me, away from me. I feel a sudden grasp on my wrist as Varia’s voice hovers just above my shoulder, a singsong tone to it.

“You haven’t answered my question, Zera. What could possibly have driven the humans and witches to work together to form Old Vetris all those years ago?”

My brain thunders in my skull, mirrored by that heavy, sonorous rhythm lathing the darkness. This is no contraption. It’s too big. It sounds too…alive. The celeon mentioned a “beast.” Varia’s question, a beast in the dark. But there’s no possible way—

Varia’s voice seems faint, far away, as she barks to someone, “Open the gates.”

“Begging your pardon, Your Highness—but are you sure?” another celeon voice asks nervously. “It just woke up, and it’s very hungry.”

“Do as I say,” Varia bites. “Open the gate.”

The screech of metal as something heavy starts to lift makes me jump out of my own skin. Every hair on my arm stands straight up, my entire body covered in gooseflesh. Something huge shakes the ground suddenly, vibrating my very bones, and if I wasn’t immortal, this would be the point where I would’ve most definitely pissed myself. The smell hits me all at once—a wave of putrid death, like rotting blood, carried on a moist sheaf of air. The sound of scales raking across stone.

I understand suddenly, too late and in one horrible swoop—the rhythmic sound is breathing, and it’s so loud it’s like a waterfall’s roar in my ears. No, it’s not possible by any reach of the imagination. But a tiny, terrified voice rings in my mind: if Gavik kept one in the pipe below the East River Tower for years…

My feet take me forward, following Varia automatically again, even as the fear crawls up my throat and tries to pull me back. Suddenly my eyes catch a haze of light, growing from one of Varia’s fingers—one of the wood fingers she used to replace her lost ones. A flame. It gives off a little halo of orange luminescence, beating hard against the dark. With it, the corners of my eyes catch a sliver of a massive steel gate, of a dirt floor extending for what seems like forever into darkness. And then the flamelight reveals something in the dirt as Varia walks forward: scratch marks, impossibly deep and impossibly long.

My breathing is so shallow, it hurts. It can’t be—

Something slithers in the darkness beyond the firelight, the hissing sound of scales growing louder. It’s huge. I can hear how huge it is—how the air moves to make space for it. The rhythmic breathing stops all at once, and so does mine. A heavy spear of air moving fast pierces in front of me, so fast I can see the dust clouds curl before it, and then a mouth lunges into the firelight.

Teeth. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

a fellow monster. The hunger leers.

Teeth, serrated and made for ripping, each one bigger than my entire arm and dripping thick strands of saliva. A forked tongue lashing against the teeth, tasting the firelight. It’s not the whole mouth—it’s simply a small part of it, the lower corner of a giant, wolflike white jaw—and yet it could swallow Varia and me comfortably whole right this instant. I can’t think—all I can do is watch, petrified, as Varia calmly looks at the jaw not three feet in front of her with her dark eyes. The hot, heavy smell of rotting meat and decaying innards intensifies as the creature’s breath washes over us, in and out like the tide.

“The answer to my question, Zera,” Varia demands evenly, watching as the fangs drop a puddle of drool larger than her on the ground. The firelight flickers over her placid face. “What is it? What was the thing that made humans and witches unite under one banner, again? I’m so absentminded.”

Through my gritted teeth, I manage a single hoarse word.

“V-Valkerax.”

…

The princess is braver than anyone in the world.

For example, she’s standing three feet away from a full-grown valkerax without an inch of terror on her face.

She looks resolute, proud, as if trapping this giant wyrm down here is her greatest accomplishment. It’s like she’s showing it off to me as a child does a particularly beautiful beetle they’ve caught or a river stone they’ve found.

“Don’t be afraid, Zera.” She laughs softly. “I assure you—it’s sedated with the strongest concoctions a polymath can make and held back by the freshest beneather runes. If Gavik is useful for anything, it’s for telling me exactly how to keep a valkerax alive and trapped without letting it bite my head off.”

I can’t see the beneather runes carved anywhere thanks to the darkness, but knowing they’re present eases my fear by a fraction. The beneathers—Malachite’s people who live beneath the ground in the Dark Below—are the only ones who know how to fight valkerax, how to keep them away. They’ve been doing both for a thousand years, after all. According to what Malachite told me nearly a week ago, beneather runes can keep a valkerax out of a place, or inside of a place, by binding them with their true name.

“How,” I breathe, watching with horror as the jaw disappears from the firelight and the massive shuffle of scales and breathing resumes as the valkerax moves somewhere else. “How did you—?”

There’s an earth-shaking thump that rattles the very pebbles on the ground, and Varia and I start at the same time. I’m relieved to see the princess stride backward—so even she’s scared of the thing, deep down—over the lip of the open gate, and I follow her, my body shaking and eager to get away. The metal screech of the gate closes behind us.

“The hows aren’t important.” Varia sniffs, her face paler in the firelight from her finger but no less serious and composed. “It’s the whats I want us to focus on.”

I swallow, gulping down stale air. “As in ‘what in Kavar’s bloody eye socket are you planning to do with that thing?’”

“Indeed. Yorl.” She turns to someone in the darkness. “What am I going to do with that thing?”

My heart catches again as another figure steps into the dim firelight—a celeon, blinking his liquid emerald eyes quickly as they adjust to the light. He isn’t an adult celeon—his mane too short and bristly along his neck to be fully realized, his features too sharp and lanky, like a tree that’s been growing too fast for its own bark with none of the muscle or substance to back it up. The brown robe he wears (a polymath robe without a tool belt—strange) hangs loose on him. It’s hard to tell in such a dim environment, but I think his fur is an ochre yellow, spotted with vermillion scales on his ribs and legs. His broad triangular ears are studded with two rows of silver earrings. He carries a bundle of scrolls under one arm and a quill in the other paw. A pair of glasses rests on his face, the bridge wide to accommodate his wider nose.

“Who is this?” The celeon frowns at me, then at the princess. “I won’t welcome another distraction in my lab, Varia. You’ve given me only one month—”

“She’s the Heartless you asked for,” Varia chimes, seemingly unmoved by the fact he’s addressing her so casually. The celeon narrows his eyes at me, the firelight catching his glasses and making them opaque.

“Hi,” I try, wetting my fear-parched lips. “Nice dungeon you’ve got here. I think. I haven’t seen much of it because you appear to have an aversion to interior lighting.”

There’s a beat as Yorl looks me over and then turns back to Varia. “I’d prefer Gavik over the talkative one.”

I bristle internally. I might not have a godsdamn clue what’s going on, but anyone who prefers Gavik to me is obviously either a terrible person or an uncaring one—they tend to occur in tandem.

“Yes, well.” The princess sighs. “Gavik can’t Weep. This one can.”

My eyes rivet to her instantly. So she does know about Weeping. Then her confidence that I wouldn’t tell the king she’s a witch is even more mystifying—unless she thinks the shaky promise of my heart is enough to silence me. And it is. But I’d rather rot in the afterlife than tell her that.

“Really?” Yorl scoffs. “This thing? She looks like she crawled out of a gutter.”

“And you look like you crawled out of a basement with a lot of valkerax drool in it, but you don’t see me insulting you about it,” I offer. It’s almost nice to be angry instead of devastated, and I let it fuel my tongue. Yorl doesn’t so much as blink at the insult, inspecting me from behind his glasses with a cool, unmoving gaze.

“There will be no arguing between you two.” Varia clears her throat, her voice every inch a princess’s. “We don’t have much time to do what is needed. Pray tell her, Yorl, precisely why that valkerax is here and why you need her here, too.”

Yorl narrows his emerald eyes on me. “You’re going to teach that valkerax how to Weep.”

Every word is Common Vetrisian. Every word is one I know, but strung together, they make no sense. I decide to make an inhale instead of a laugh. “I must’ve misheard you. What you said would imply valkerax are Heartless. And I’m one hundred percent certain there’s not a jar in the world that can fit a heart that big.”

Yorl scoffs, turning to Varia. “I’m not going to explain everything from the ground up to her.”

Varia just smiles at him sweetly. “I beg you to remember—I’m the only one outside of the Black Archives who can give you the polymath title you so desire.”

Yorl winces behind his glasses. I’ve never seen a celeon polymath. Lawguards, sure. But not polymaths. They’re either rare or, knowing Vetris, discriminated against. If that’s the case, it would definitely be true that Varia is one of the few who can manage to make him one.

He turns his yellow head wearily back to me, his voice a drone. “A thousand years ago, the humans and witches united against the valkerax threat that was razing the kingdom.”

“Right, Old Vetris,” I agree. “You can skip ahead—I’m not quite as slow as I look.”

Yorl just stares at me like I’m a particularly boring piece of art. “With the combined powers of the polymaths’ knowledge and the witches’ magic, they were able to devise a method to control the valkerax.”

“You mean like the beneather runes?” I ask. Yorl’s stare turns to a flat glare, and I put on a smile. “Sorry, sorry. You have the floor. Until I decide to lay down on it out of utter boredom.”

“Beneather runes simply forbid a valkerax to leave or enter a set area.” Yorl’s annoyed expression lifts the longer he gets to speak. “Such runes were devised by Old Vetris and given to the beneathers, yes. We have them carved into the walls of the arena we keep this valkerax in. But you are much more familiar with the other method the Old Vetrisians invented.”

Yorl holds up his paw, showing me each of his clawed fingers and putting one down for every new point he makes. “Valkerax heal at a surprising rate. It’s why they are so difficult to kill. Nothing compared to a Heartless, of course, but faster than any other creature in the world. The Old Vetrisians discovered that by taking a part of the valkerax and anchoring it to a magic-infused object, any witch who touched that object could command the valkerax, and any of their future offspring, to do their bidding.”

My unheart goes cold as the hunger slithers through my ears: just like us. chained like us.

“You mean…Heartlessness?” I mutter.

Yorl shakes out his half-grown mane. “If anything, it was a prototype of the Heartless curse. But yes. Heartlessness was developed later, purely by the witches and their magic alone, using methods based on Old Vetrisian valkerax control.”

My mind races back to the books I’ve read, the histories I pored over in Nightsinger’s cabin with naught else to do. The books were never specific about how the Old Vetrisians managed to save the world from the valkerax rampage, but now…

“That’s how Old Vetris sent the valkerax into the Dark Below,” I marvel. “They commanded them?”

Varia nods. “Precisely. Old Vetris forced them under, and the beneathers sealed them there with the runes. Those of us above can live in peace, while the beneathers act as their jailors.”

Beneather jailors for valkerax, witch jailors for Heartless. Pity reaches corrosive fingers into my heart, but I remember the massive fanged jaw I saw not seconds ago, and the fingers curl in on themselves. The books that spoke of burned villages and mountains of dead bodies only glanced over the valkerax’s reign of destruction. They weren’t always hostile, but one day during the time of Old Vetris they became so and have been ever since. The beneathers are all that stand between them and us.

“Even now,” Yorl continues, “the valkerax you saw inside the arena is withering away. The Old Vetrisian command to remain in the Dark Below is eating at its very being, driving it mad with pain. It will eventually die if we do not return it to the Dark Below soon.”

“But if I can teach it to Weep…” I trail off.

“If you can teach it to Weep, it could—in theory—resist the all-consuming command,” Varia agrees.

I glower at her. “And what do you get from it being able to resist?”

Varia blinks, surprised, the firelight catching the falter in her eyes just before she laughs. “So suspicious.” She inspects her flawless nails to regain herself. “Lucien told me you and he found that valkerax skeleton of Gavik’s in the tunnels beneath the East River Tower.”

We had. Fione needed information to reveal the misdeeds of Gavik—her uncle. She led us to his secret repository, where Gavik had kept a valkerax in the tunnels to guard it. I nod, recalling the beneather runes Malachite read on the wall where its massive skeleton had been. “The runes said it was killed by the Laughing Daughter. Out of mercy.”

Laughing Daughter. That was the code word to get down here. And it’s Varia’s witchname.

“And Lucien’s sword fit perfectly in the head wound the skull had,” she agrees. “Yes—I killed that valkerax. Gavik was keeping it for study, and the pain of being out of the Dark Below was hurting it horribly. It begged me to kill it.”

I pause. “Valkerax…can talk?”

Yorl and Varia share a look. A look I don’t like. It reeks of secrets.

“In a manner.” Yorl shrugs. “What matters is their minds have been warped by the magic of the command. They speak in fragmented riddles. To stay in the Dark Below is all they care for. If one brings a valkerax above the surface, they are in tremendous amounts of pain. And the fragmented riddles become only more difficult to understand. Unreliable gibberish at best.”

My mind skitters around itself as I think. Heartlessness and what the valkerax have gone through might not be the same thing, but they are similar. Not being able to speak, being in pain—it sounds like when I tried to run from Nightsinger at the beginning of my Heartless life. I moved more than a mile and a half away from her and my mind went blank with pure agony. I couldn’t think or move or feel anything but the thunderous pain throbbing through my body. It felt like hours passed before Nightsinger found me and brought me back into her radius.

But Nightsinger isn’t my witch anymore.

Varia sweeps her black eyes to the gate, the firelight on her finger kissing the steel just enough to see the massive outline, and then she turns back to me.

“I saw you Weep in the clearing, Zera. It took me a great amount of sleuthing and wheedling, but when I lived with the witches, I managed to get one of the older ones to explain it to me—it lets Heartless have control over themselves again and brings them clarity, even if they are in their monster forms. You will teach the valkerax to Weep, and when it can control itself and speak, it will tell me where their bones are.”

I frown. “Their bones?”

“The Old Vetrisians realized controlling the valkerax one by one with thousands of witches wasn’t economical,” Yorl says softly. “Or statistically possible, for that matter. The valkerax outnumbered the witches greatly. So they gathered as many valkerax parts onto one intensely magical object as they could, to make an attempt at mass control.”

“A tree,” Varia clarifies. “It’s a tree, greatly magical, made entirely of valkerax bones. And entirely lost to time. But the valkerax know where it is. They can feel its presence always, commanding them to remain in the Dark Below. It’s what keeps them there.”

A tree of bones that can be used to control every valkerax in the world. Varia, who insisted in the clearing she has to stop the war. Suddenly it all falls into place.

“You…” I look to Varia, my eyes working up her legs, her cloaked torso, to her firelit face at last. “You want to control them.”

Varia’s smile widens. “But whatever would I do with them, my cleverest Zera?”

The insult barely pierces through my disbelief. “You’re going to use them to force a standstill. An army of valkerax, poised between the humans and witches. No one would dare to fight.”

“No one would dare to fight,” she repeats softly after me. “Indeed.”

“You’re mad,” I blurt.

The princess’s eyes go cold, but her smile warms. “No, Zera. I’m simply realistic.”

“The valkerax nearly destroyed the world!” I throw my hands out. “They could break free someday and they’d raze it all over again! Even if you could keep control over this tree, over them, you’d be feared and reviled even more than witches, more than anyone—”

“Yorl.” Varia suddenly looks to him, breezing through my points like they don’t exist. “How soon can we send her in?”

“When the concoction is finished brewing.” Yorl squints into the darkness. “Which should be tomorrow morning.”

“I’m not doing this,” I snap. “I’m not helping you play with a power like this!”

“You will,” she says. That confidence again. I could rip it apart with my sheer anger, but I chew my lip and hold myself steady.

she holds us hostage like the last witch, the hunger whispers. I lift my chin.

“In no conceivable universe will I help you, Princess.”

I expect her to command me to help. But no words come out of her mouth, laced with the hunger or otherwise. With her non-firelit hand, she reaches into her cloak and pulls out something soft and pliable. It sags to one side in her wooden fingers. A bag—a small velvet sack, stitched with black letters; traitor.

Traitor. Just like Lucien called me.

It’s identical to the bag I saw Varia put Archduke Gavik’s heart in, though his read “leech.” She dangles it before me, her smile blazing hot and somehow ferocious on the edges.

“You will help me, Zera, because in return, I’m going to give you back the heart you’ve always wanted. The one you tried to kill and enthrall my brother for.”

My anger snuffs out as quickly as the bag in her hand moves, gently bumping into her palm in a steady rhythm. A heartbeat.

She slides the bag off, and there, in her fingers, rests a pink organ the size of a fist. That’s… Is that my heart? Just there, in her hands? The gap in my chest keens with an aching longing—the same one I felt each time I stared at my heart over Nightsinger’s fire.

She has it. Just as Varia took control of my reins, she’s standing right in front of me with my heart. No bars around it, no glass between it and me.

I can hear it beating. I can see every blue vein in it pulsing with my memories, my human life. The thing I came to Vetris for. The thing I suffered these three years and two long weeks for.

our heart, the hunger whimpers.

“My heart,” I whisper.