Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts), Page 2

  It’s now or never.

  she is safer. The hunger tries one last, desperate, honest attempt. you know what she’ll do to you. but him…you have no idea. unsafe, chaos, a gamble, a danger—

  I’ve been afraid. I’ve fought a valkerax, I’ve lived among a human court who’d love nothing more than to burn me alive. I’ve fought off the first mercenary from Nightsinger’s woods, shaking and clutching my sword. Fear never means nothing—not even when you’re immortal. There’s always the fear of pain. Without death, the fear of pain is the only thing you have left. The only thing that anchors you to the world, to the cycle of life and death like everyone else. One foot in agony, the other in the never-grave.

  Fear means everything.

  Fear is all I have.

  I’ve never, in my entire life, been more afraid than the moment the words tumble from my lips.

  “Laughing Daughter!”

  2

  HEARTS

  BENEATH SNOW

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this wide world, it’s that time is the rebellious child. Like yours truly. It doesn’t act like you want it to, especially in crisis. Short moments feel long, long moments go by quickly, everything fragments and spins and comes in as feelings, scents, sounds when it should just be clear, concise thought.

  The moment I say Varia’s witch name, the rebellious child tears apart the world.

  I know for certain that two things happen: her incredibly dense magic tries to clench down on me one last time and then instantly lets go. Freefall. An iron hand, choking me one second and gone the next. I hear her scream, frantic in a way the crown princess of Cavanos has never once been.

  “No, no no—Lucien, give her back!” she yells. “She’ll be your undoing! I know it! I can protect you from her—”

  A tendril of her power shoots through my heart like an arrow, grasping. Searching. I gasp, choking on the feeling, but it’s short-lived. Something not-me pushes the tendril out instantly, resistant and insistent and hard in its decision. Final.

  Lucien’s smirk is nearly too exhausted to exist, but he tries. A tinge of sadness there, almost.

  “Even the mighty Bone Tree can’t go against the rules, Varia,” he says. “You should know that better than I. Much better. You had five years of formal training, after all.”

  “Lucien!” Varia’s snarl turns keening. “Don’t do this!”

  The falling line of valkerax comes closer and closer, the ground trembling and roars crescendoing. A line of writhing white cuts the high blue sky in two. The impact’s going to kill us all. I can see them now, their whiskers and their scales and their eyes—every valkerax with six ghost-white eyes and no pupils, and fear crystallizes into horror as I realize every single one of them is looking right at Varia. No matter which way their body is twisted, no matter how twisted or how fast they writhe, every massive wolf-maw head is focused dead on her. Like they’re going to eat her whole rather than obey her.

  There are so many. So many more than I ever thought.

  Time behaves badly again—someone pulls me away by the hand, and even through the clamminess of their skin I know the feel of those fingers, those callouses. Lucien. A flash of white hair as Malachite pulls us both away from Varia, and Fione’s broken sob as she raises her crossbow higher. Toward Varia.

  The valkerax are close enough for me to smell their collective rotting breath.

  Time slows. Impossibly slow, for all of one quick second. I turn my head over my shoulder, my neck bobbing at the force of Malachite’s simultaneous yank, but my eyes strain to stay on Varia. A Varia standing alone in a muddy wasteland, looking at us. Betrayal, anger—all the burning emotions on her face melt away to something quieter. Lonelier as we flee from her. From it. White feathers and scales from the valkerax rain down like animal snow.

  A lonely princess stands there and stares as the world falls down on her. A single white feather lands delicately in her outstretched palm.

  The shadow of the valkerax eclipses her.

  Impact.

  The first bodies to hit the ground break instantly under the others, flesh and bone and valkerax screams. Blood vaporized by sheer speed explodes out, a fine, hazy red mist hanging in the air for a split second. And then the earth heaves, force rippling the mud like waves, and all four of us are flung off our feet like rag dolls.

  Someone reaches for me in the air, gripping frantically and curling around me. We hit mud, not hard ground, going skidding for what feels like miles. Malachite to my side, Fione on top of me, Lucien around me, and then the ground gives way, and we fall into nothing. Fione’s scream, Malachite’s beneather swear, and Lucien’s hand around my waist, his golden fingers turning black at the tips, up the knuckle, to the palm.

  I know, deep down, that he can’t protect me. I’m the immortal one.

  It has to be the other way around.

  I twist my weightless body in the air, clutching him close, covering his skull, his chest, his abdomen with all of me. The vulnerable parts. If we hit ground, I’ll be first. I have to be first.

  Bone and blood exploding, like the valkerax.

  I have to protect him. I’m his Heartless.

  No.

  I’m his.

  The wind whistles cold. Malachite shouts something. And then everything goes dark, the image of Varia standing alone with the white feather in her palm burned like an emblem on the back of my eyelids.

  It’s not a dream. Not really. Not the way it’s supposed to be, floaty and out of place and certain. There’s the smell of blood everywhere. Darkness everywhere. Too real to be a dream but not real enough to be my reality.

  I’m looking through someone else’s eyes—two eyes, and in my heart there’s an unshakable strangeness in seeing through only two. It’s supposed to be more than two. Far more. I’m being crushed—no, not me, the person I’m seeing this through. Weight everywhere. We have to escape. A hand in my vision—not mine—reaches out into the weight, gripping, summoning, and a hot blast of fire explodes from their palm.

  Light.

  Light pierces through the flesh-dangling hole, and we crawl out, inch by inch, until we flop into freedom, the sunlight. The crushing weight moves from our outside to the inside. To our chest, where our heart should be.

  A heart.

  I can feel it beating. This is definitely not me. A mortal. They look down at their hands, golden hands with midnight fingertips shrinking, the animate darkness retreating to smaller and smaller bits until it’s gone entirely. Human nails. Human skin. Half the fingers human, the other half wood.

  Varia.

  And the screaming.

  Gods above and below, the screaming. Like broken bells, like metal on metal, like things dying and being born and dying all over again, an endless cycle of noise. We can barely hear, barely think. We fight vomit, collapsing to our feet and staring at the mud. Dirty. Unpleasant. Pointless. The world is spinning, and screaming, and sickening.

  DESTROY.

  The hunger? Here, in her, too? Witches don’t have the hunger.

  DESTROY.

  Not the hunger. Not my hunger. This is clear, not tamed by magic or freshly consumed flesh. This will never be tamed, never be lessened. This isn’t a hunger.

  It’s a wound.

  DESTROY.

  It’s a command. An imperative. Our head floods with flashes of burning forests, of burning houses, of burning people. Flashes of lightning splitting the earth, of seas demolishing mountains, of broken bones and yellow fat and gray organ sacs spilled, burning wood and stone, rubble. All of it rubble, the flesh-kind and not-flesh-kind. And it never stops. Never pauses. Like a million chain link of memories that aren’t mine or even Varia’s. Ruin.

  This thing in us wants ruin.

  But we invited it in, didn’t we? We’re going to use it, aren’t we?

&nb
sp; It is our tool, not the other way around.

  We get to our feet, the snarling and snapping of a thousand valkerax behind us, and we hold close the only thing we have left. A face. A sweet, apple-cheeked face with a mass of mousy curls, standing strong even as the images of death and ruin flash behind it.

  We look over at the Bone Tree, no longer swaying in an invisible wind. It’s perfectly still. And beside it, faintly and like a ghost, is another tree. One I know but Varia doesn’t. One that I can see but Varia might not.

  Like a trick of light on water, this tree wavers in the air. It’s a mirage made of glass branches, glass roots, glass leaves, moving gently in some unknowable breeze.

  The Glass Tree.

  TOGETHER AT LAST.

  In a stunning turn of events, my body wakes up before my brain does. And my mouth wakes up before the both of them.

  “Old God’s great hairy shit in a bush—”

  “Whoa.” A voice, and a hand instantly trying to press me down. “Whoa there, Six-Eyes. Calm down. You’re safe.”

  I blink, and from the offending swathe of bright light carves shadow and color. Deep ruby-red eyes, ears so long and pointed they droop a little, a mouth that always looks slightly entertained. And three new, angry red claw wounds across a nose, ripping the corner of a mouth up. No pain in my body. I’m not hurt. But he is.

  “Malachite!” I inhale. “What are you—” The room’s strange, too much stone and blue velvet. I’m in a too-soft bed. “Where are we?”

  “Some city. We’re taking a break after all that horseshit, that’s all I know. Hold on.” He lifts one finger, rummaging around in his chainmail back pocket and pulling out a hastily scrawled piece of parchment. He clears his throat excessively and reads: “‘Zera, I wrote this for you because Malachite likes to twist my words to his liking.’”

  “Lucien.” I exhale a half laugh, leaning back on my pillows. Malachite trundles on with all the emotion of a carriage wheel.

  “‘We’re in Breych. It’s a small Helkyrisian city just on the border.’” Malachite pauses, making his own addendum. “And is full of boring things like books. ‘Varia’s alive,’” he continues. “‘I’m sure of it. Fione and I are fine—I’ve gone to speak with the sage, and she’s conferencing with the local polymaths. We’ll be back soon with a plan. In the meantime, please rest. Yours, Lucien.’”

  “Is he really fine?” I press, zooming my face into the parchment. “Is Fione—”

  “Don’t ask me how.” Malachite grunts as he crumples up the parchment and lobs it smoothly out the thin stone-cut window. “But he managed to cushion our fall with whatever scrap of magic he unbelievably had left. And by some stroke of rune-crusted luck, we ended up hitting one of Breych’s many safety nets.”

  “Safety…nets?”

  He sighs. “Knowing you, you won’t get it until you see it for yourself.”

  He stands from the chair at my bedside and heads for the window, and my perfectly healed body follows him, the holes and tears in my clothes funneling cold air onto my skin. It’s so bitterly cold—far colder than Cavanos ever gets, even in the dead of winter. The beneather motions with one long hand to the window, and I stick my head out.

  “Vachi-godsdamn-ayis.” I breathe a white-cloud swear.

  It’s the city of towers I saw on my hike up to the Bone Tree, but real and eye level. It looked so small when I had Varia on my back, like a toy set for a child, and now it’s looming all around me, on every side. Towers. Dozens upon dozens of towers, built straight off the stone of three mountain ridges, stately and yet placed in chaotic, half-baked rows. Some towers are grand and huge, with gargoyles carved in bone-moth likenesses and steeples of gold and lapis lazuli, while others barely look sturdy at all, their wooden supports rickety and their stone sills sagging with thick beards of moss, the roofs gabled simply in green and purple tile. Between the three close ridges runs a dizzying spate of rope bridges back and forth, some wide, some thin, but all of them connecting the towers. Sunset peeks out from between two towers, catching the diamond glass of their roofs.

  And between the ridges? Between the towers? Nothing at all. Darkness. Hundreds of miles of drop, an abyss, yawning all around the city. I squint—not quite right. Threaded over the shadows of the crevasse I can see tawny strands. Woven. Purposefully. Huge beams of wood jut out from beneath the towers every which way, planted all along the stone ridges and supporting an intricate web of nets that spans the whole city, like a last halo of salvation, as if a massive spider’s carefully woven a web around it. The wind whistles viciously, and I pull my head back in to avoid the shards of ice.

  “The people here felt the explosion,” Malachite says. “And the quake from the falling valkerax.”

  “Were any of them hurt?” I blurt.

  He sighs. “Do you two have to do that?”

  “Do what?” I blink.

  “Ask the same question right in the exact same spot. You’re either the same person or meant for each other.”

  He means Lucien. Heat tries to tickle my cheeks, but I won’t let it.

  “No one in Breych got hurt,” he finishes wearily.

  “Fantastic. How long have I been out?”

  “Seven halves.”

  “Good!” I throw my hands up. “Not enough time to miss anything important. Where can I get clothes?”

  “Here.” Malachite walks over to a dresser, throwing me a drab-yet-functional mustard dress and a heavy black wolf-fur covering.

  “Ugh.” I wince. “The colors.”

  “Bright, clashing shit seems to be the order of the day around here.” He opens his own leather covering to reveal a pink tunic with a mess of magenta ruffles. We both burst out laughing, the sound quickly swallowed up by the dour stone. The silence isn’t oppressive, but it’s there, echoing shards of reality back at us. A reality that’s changed so quickly, so brutally.

  Varia’s gone. She has the Bone Tree. The valkerax.

  I’m Lucien’s Heartless.

  Fione is…

  Malachite and I—

  “I hurt you,” I say, reaching out to touch the edge of his face. Not the ointment-smeared wounds that must be agony but the skin still whole.

  His red eyes soften, and his smirk crooks high. “You wish you managed to hurt me.”

  “Mal—”

  “It’s over, Zera.” He cuts me off. Not hard. Easily. Gently. “You made your choice. And for once, I happen to agree with it.”

  I step behind the wooden divider, pulling the rags of my clothes over my head. It’s not all forgiveness from Malachite. It can’t be. His wounds are too fresh for that. My betrayal up until that moment on the mountain peak is too fresh for that. It’s not forgiveness, but it’s the start of it. Better than nothing. Kinder than nothing. He’s so kind to me, even after everything.

  I’m going to cry. I’m going to cry behind this godsdamned ugly divider. Ugh, no. I’m not. He wouldn’t want that. I know that.

  I know him.

  I’m so glad I know him.

  Quiet at last. A moment, behind the ugly divider, where I can be alone after everything. Well, not all alone.

  never alone.

  The hunger is so faint, I have to strain to hear it. That’s a first. And possibly a last. Lucien’s trying hard to suppress it with his magic. Devoting way too much to it, probably, more than Nightsinger and Varia ever did. It doesn’t feel sustainable.

  Me as his Heartless. Him as my witch. Is that sustainable? Is it even right?

  What do we do after losing everything? We lost. Varia has the Bone Tree. We lost. I wasn’t supposed to lose, but I did. I was supposed to get my heart, and now…

  Now I have my friends again.

  And maybe, some small part of me whispers, that’s a fair trade.

  “Well.” I step out in the mustard dress and try the coy
est of smiles. “I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky to still be alive to complain at all.”

  “Yeah.” Malachite’s mouth twitches as he offers his arm and a dripping noble accent. “My clashing lady? Shall we venture out into the city and hunt our lovable quarry down?”

  “Verily,” I agree, taking his arm with a terribly overacted haughtiness.

  …

  My room is a tower room, I learn, about as quickly as it takes me to descend the seemingly endless spiral staircase. But it’s not the only room by far—this entire tower is an inn of some sort, with numbered doors all along the descent and a main room at the bottom serving drinks at a small wooden bar. The farther we go down, the colder it gets. Malachite opens the door and icicles ooze off the doorway, cracking and sliding soundlessly into the banks of snow below like blades into scabbards.

  “It’s even colder outside!” I whine. “How do people live like this?”

  “Warmly,” he drawls, motioning around at the rope bridges nearby, a throng of people walking back and forth about their daily business in heavy, eye-searingly colored wool. The beneather leads me over one bridge, then another, and I’m surprised at how sturdy the structures are compared to how fragile they looked from far up. No slots open in the lacquered slats, and not a single sway in the bridge, not even when it’s full to bursting with momentum and wind.

  Every step I take over a bridge slat is another step of worry. Of fear.

  What do we even do now? Varia is the most powerful witch in the world, isn’t she? And then there’s us—my thief instincts muse over survival first, always. A beneather, a very smart girl with a crossbow aim, a witch, and a single Heartless. I know we have our strengths. But realism bites down on me hard—we have strengths, but none strong enough to face the Bone Tree power I felt in Varia.

  She touched me even through my Weeping. Weeping, my last safety. A safety that’s supposed to be impenetrable.

  I’m so lost in thought, Malachite has to suddenly jerk me to one side to avoid a townsperson. “Hey, you feelin’ all right?” He peers into my face.