by Sara Holland
Older now, I’m hiding behind a curtain, peeking through the gap as Ever receives his line of petitioners in the great hall. He conjures things with his sorcery—silks and gold, spices and jewels. It’s nothing to him, but they happily spill their blood in payment, which turns to shining metal before it hits the flagstones. Caro is at his side, gathering up the blood-iron and bandaging each comer, smiling prettily as they shuffle away. Sometimes she leaves them with only a day, only an hour. I’m playing chase with Caro in the woods one day when I trip over something. A body. The woman didn’t even make it back to the village.
In a training session, I lash strength to a dagger and try to kill him. The force of the blade—the force of ten men—hardly makes a scratch. Desperate, I run to a local witch, beg her to help me. She tells me, “The only way to kill pure evil is with pure love.” Then, she packs a small bag and flees.
Next, I’m standing by the crystal window in the room that Caro and I share, begging her to make her father end it. Bleached bones litter the moonlit lawn; wolves prowl at the edge of the woods. The villages in the distance are just dead shapes without light or smoke. “We have to do something, Caro. We have to stop this,” I whisper. In response, she levels those eyes on me—as bright green as the grass once was—and then turns over and closes them. The bottom drops out of my stomach as I realize how alone I am. I cry, “Why won’t you listen?”
In my bed, alone, I resolve to put a stop to Ever myself.
And the last moment unspools in vivid detail—
The lamplight around me has given way to torchlight. Caro sleeps beside me. Our room is dark and quiet around us, her room in the castle that her father built for her. No—for us, a voice inside me whispers, and I know it’s true. He was a father to me. Once. Whatever I think of Lord Ever now, however evil he is, Caro still loves him.
Which makes what I’m about to do so much harder.
Slowly, I sit up in bed, sliding the rubied knife from underneath my pillow. Moonlight flashes off the blade, so bright I’m almost surprised it’s not accompanied by some sort of sound. Breath held, I look down to where Caro sleeps beside me.
The spill of her hair is a dark contrast to the moonlight. She sleeps on her side facing away from me, her shoulders moving up and down in slow, even motions. Her soft breath is the only sound in the room.
She will hate me forever for this.
If she even survives.
No. That can’t happen. I won’t let fear in, not now. It will work its way under my skin, stop me from doing what I have to do. Even as I sit here, I imagine I can hear wailing from all across Sempera as people realize what a terrible bargain Ever has made them privy to. As they bleed away their time and millennia pool in his veins. He is pure evil, and he must be stopped.
Her father is too far gone. But I can’t overcome him on my own. I need Caro’s help. I need her power and then, with her power, I can create the weapon that will defeat pure evil.
Someday, she will understand. She must.
I tell myself this as I lift my hand and freeze time around her, arresting her midbreath.
A chill sinks through me as her shoulders still. Her eyes pause, half-opened. No matter how many times I do this—I’ve been practicing for weeks and weeks, trying to prepare myself—it always sickens and frightens me. She’s not dead, but it feels that way as I roll her onto her back, no pulse in her shoulder, no movement under her eyelids.
It’s not so hard, now, to bring the knife down—blade shining bright with I don’t remember what—and position it over her chest, steadying myself with my left hand on her collarbone. I imagine her as a map, the roads of her veins leading up her arms, through her chest, to the bright space of her heart. Instead of a beat, Caro emanates a kind of steady warmth, positively blazing when she’s joyful or angry. I can feel it now through her skin, faint but there, like I’m holding my palm a few inches from a candle.
I squeeze my eyes shut and bring the blade down. Still frozen in time, she doesn’t make a sound or movement as the dagger sinks between her ribs. But I know if I opened my eyes, I would see muscle and bone and blood. And then below that, something less human.
There. I pull out the knife, willing myself not to think about the blood, and call her heart forward.
Something meets my fingers, rising up out of her. It’s hard and glass smooth, like a jewel, and the heat emanating from it is almost unbearable. But when I wrap my fingers around the shape of her heart, it’s light as air. It comes away easily, as if it were always just waiting for me to reach out and take it.
When I feel the last invisible thread of it pull from her chest, I finally dare to open my eyes. The thing in my hands looks akin to a gem, a treasure—and yet its brilliance makes every diamond I’ve ever seen look like a clod of dull earth. It’s bright, far too bright for it to be just torchlight refracted in its glassy body. No, Caro’s heart spills light like a normal heart would spill blood, liquid and tangible, white light filling up my cupped hands and—
The light, the power itself, melts into burnished gold and red and colors I cannot name, until it’s no longer a solid thing in my hand but something more like a creature—moving, alive, in tendrils of light and power that wind themselves through my fingers. It burns, but I can scarcely feel the pain anymore as it sinks through my skin and into me, heat pouring into my flesh and light shining through my skin. Power. More than I’ve ever felt, filling up my heart, Caro’s strength and mine twisting together to create something more.
I gasp. So much power flows through me. It’s easy, almost nothing, to heal the wound in Caro’s chest, ribs and muscle and skin knitting together with no indication that there’s nothing underneath. Then to vanish the blood all around us, until there’s no red left in the room, only black and silver. My hands shake with power, not weakness, as I turn Caro back on her side, as though something larger than me is trapped beneath my skin and writhing to get out.
When I let go of my hold on the strings of time binding her, her shoulders start to rise and fall as though nothing at all has happened, though she looks perhaps a little paler.
Now, to make the weapon. An instrument of pure love.
I look at her face and pull from the depths the first memory I have of her, a small face emerging out of the dark. She took my hand, and a spark passed between our palms. The first time our power was shared. Closing my eyes, with Caro’s heart beating inside mine, I picture the memory in and of itself, making it material, as Lord Ever taught me to do with time so long ago. I imagine drawing it out of my mind and thusly out of time itself, like I plucked hours, days, and years to help Caro weave them into blood.
When I open my eyes, I can see it, a bit of white-glowing mist laced through with lightning. I lift the knife and twirl it, the memory collecting against the blade like spider silk. After a moment, it sinks through the surface of the metal, leaving only brightness.
Moment after moment, image after image, memory after memory. I draw out the recollections of our friendship. Bind them all to the blade, which glows with them.
I will Caro’s memories out too—her memories of her father. Bright mist rises from her still brow and joins my memories on the blade. Images flash through my mind, and I don’t know if I’m seeing inside Caro’s memories or my own, my mind desperately clinging on to the precious things even as I steal them.
Eventually, when I reach down into my own mind, there’s nothing there but shadows, piecemeal images I feel but don’t understand.
And when I look down at Caro, I feel nothing. I know that she is my companion, that we have spent many seasons here in comfort together. But I also remember her father—turned captor—his greed, how I must be strong enough to stop him from consuming the lives of all of Sempera.
“Pure love,” I whisper, squeezing the dagger in my hand.
Lord Ever is awake when I stride into his chambers, fully dressed and puttering over his workbench, a miniature version of the great laboratory downstairs. Bits of bri
ght blood-iron litter the floor around him.
“Antonia.” He looks up in surprise, his eyes bright, feverish. “What are you doing up?” He steps around the table, opening his hand to reveal a fistful of rough jewels. “Look—time from children. Who knows what properties it might contain.”
His eyes shine, full of plans and avarice.
I draw close to him, holding the knife behind my back, mouth dry and heart heavy. I didn’t let go of my memories of him like those of Caro—not all of them. I remember how he sent his heralds out to tell Sempera they could live forever, if they only visited his estate and gave a little of their blood. I remember the bodies littering the floor of the great hall, drained of blood and time, while Ever stood among them, a goblet in his hand and his head tipped back in exultation while centuries flowed into him.
He looks strangely at me now, head tilted. “Antonia?”
Caro’s power thrums through me, and my own determination. The dagger thrums in my hand.
He will drain the whole world dry so that the three of us could live forever.
I can’t let it happen.
I lift the knife and bring it across his throat. The blade hisses where it cuts, and Lord Ever falls dead at my feet.
Caro finds me in the hall stumbling toward our room, covered in her father’s blood, the knife held loosely in my hand. We stop and stare at each other, and a terrible dread sinks through me as the look in her eyes hits me. An awful, blazing anger.
“What have you done, Antonia?” she whispers. I know she can see Ever’s broken body through the doorway behind me, the knife still lying in the pool of blood. Anguish fills her eyes but when she opens her mouth, all she speaks is silence—a choked, confused silence. Tearing her eyes away from his corpse, she holds a hand to her chest, loosely cupped as though she’s trying to catch something spilling out.
“What did you do to me?”
My eyes burn. My chest threatens to split open—with grief, with magic, with the Sorceress’s heart.
“You wanted my power.” Her voice trembles with barely contained rage. “You took it. How could you?” She flings her arms out as if to attack me with magic, but nothing happens but a weak stirring of the air. She hisses.
Her face twists into a mask of hate, and she advances on me, hands curled into claws.
I turn from her and run.
33
I explode up to my feet in the tower at Everless, screaming.
Caro stands before me—dagger sunk in her, terror inscribed on her face. Unlike when I stabbed her at Shorehaven, the blood does not recede back into her. Her eyes glitter as she looks down at me, with malice and suspicion and what I think is hatred. But how could it be otherwise, given what I’ve done?
How could I have forgotten?
A weapon of pure love against pure evil.
Gasping, I realize I still grasp the dagger in my fist. I move to pull it out of Caro’s flesh, but find that there’s no longer any blade to pull out. The ruby has completely dissolved into what it contained: the moments of our friendship, lifted from our minds by the Alchemist, by me, right after I stole her heart.
Caro’s eyes close, twitching underneath her eyelids, as if dying is nothing more than a dream.
Tears stream down my face. In my first lifetime, I created a weapon bound with love in order to destroy evil, to destroy Lord Ever. And now, I’ve used it to kill his daughter, the Sorceress.
“Caro.” My friend, my enemy. Her name escapes my lips in an anguished whisper. A sharp pain lances through my chest for the girl she was, the friendship lost to us—the friendship that I bound to a blade. The girl laughing, loving, alive.
Caro blinks, once, twice. And I see the fire of hatred grow, then burn out in her eyes, along with the half-life that sustained it. The silver mist around her evaporates with a soft whisper of heat. When there’s no trace of it left, Caro pitches forward.
Fear cascades through me, and my body takes over, moving without authorization to catch her. I reach out with my left hand, and she finds my arm, grips it and leans into me.
I sink to my knees with her. Her hand flies to her chest. Our faces are inches apart; close enough that even through the tears in my eyes I can see realization chasing realization across her face, like scudding clouds.
Shock.
Anger.
Sorrow.
Fear.
“You killed him, Jules,” she whispers. “You killed me.”
I can only nod. I raise a hand to her face, meaning to wipe away tears that she hasn’t cried. But she doesn’t flinch away. She lifts her own hand to cover my own, and I feel the cold of her skin. My oldest companion. My best and oldest friend.
“Jules,” she whispers again. “It’s so beautiful.”
Fire rises in my throat. “What’s beautiful, Caro?”
Caro looks down at my chest. Sweat darkens my dress, but something else is seeping out of the wound her blade left over my heart. Light. Golden, almost liquid, shimmering light, like the pure time I spilled at Everless but brighter. Caro reaches out and catches some of the light on her fingers, and I see her close it into her palm when the answer comes all at once, in a soul-sickening shudder.
It’s her heart, broken from mine, like the seal of magic that kept it there. Finally free.
My body rocks. It was never Liam’s death that I had to fear, just as it wasn’t Roan’s, nor any of those who Caro tried to kill throughout my lives.
First and last and always, it was my oldest friend’s death that would break my heart.
Throughout every life, the only knowledge that kept my heart intact was forgetting our friendship, removing it from my mind as easily as lifting a pouch of blood-irons.
How could this be true?
And yet how could anything else be true? What else could explain twelve lifetimes of this, centuries of my heart remaining whole and unbroken?
The answer is here: I hear Caro’s laughter again in the glen; I see her hand reaching out to mine in the forest; I see my heart opening up to her, my dearest friend, the only one who could understand me, who could draw me out and help me become who I am.
My vision is dimming, blackness rapidly pressing in around the edges. The brightest thing I can see is the spilled light of her heart, widening in a gold circle around us. Spreading and spreading and spreading, growing thinner but never less beautiful.
I look down at Caro to see if she’s watching—but her eyes are blank, and I realize that it’s too late. She’s already gone.
EPILOGUE
What happens next comes to me in pieces.
I’m slumped against Liam’s back, Ina’s huntsman cloak turned into a makeshift sling as he descends the vault shaft. Each of his labored steps on the ladder sends a jolt of pain through me, my limbs heavy and cold. But through the haze, I can see gold light clinging to Liam’s hair, his eyelashes, playing over his knuckles as he carries me.
I’m lying on one of the oak tables in the kitchen where I labored so many hours after returning to Everless, a pastiche of half-familiar, highly concerned faces hovering above, and Lora bandaging my side, where Caro’s heart tore through. The gold light is on them too, clinging to skin like dew, leaping from person to person like something alive. No one else seems to notice it.
Something is changing, I think.
Days later, I’m standing on Everless’s summer lawn, watching a river of gold light flow out through the gates. I don’t know what it means—only that when I visited a Laista timelender and cut my palm, all that came out was blood; the flames and vials produced nothing. Liam has visited the Everless vaults to find half the blood-iron there crumbled into dust. I wonder whether soon, the whole queendom will be like Elias, unbound, as the magic recedes from Sempera like tides from the shore. Whether now that the Sorceress is gone and the bond between her and me broken, blood-iron will fade away too.
It is here that I finally tell Liam what happened in Everless’s vaulted tower. How I watched as the light left Ca
ro’s eyes before the heart could burrow back into her chest, which was so long wanting it.
When Ina and Elias returned to Everless together, it made sense: his spine, her fire. My sister oversaw Caro’s burial, agreeing to my request that she be buried not out in the Gerling cemetery but in Everless’s most interior garden, where the Sorceress’s beloved plant, ice holly, grows. Liam helped me set a corner aside for her, far from the pathways where nobles stroll. A place where I can go every day if I choose, to sit and think or weep or talk. It’s high summer now, but ice holly already grows over her grave.
I tell her what’s happening in the world outside, everything I never had a chance to tell her, both the good and bad, of the journey that brought me back to her.
When I woke up crying over the loss of my friend, Liam only pulled me into him, cupping his body around mine, careful not to jostle the bandages wrapping my chest where the Sorceress’s heart left me. He whispered in my ear that it would be all right, of course it would all right, as tears dripped off the bridge of my nose.
I believed him that day, and every day after that, because nothing remained unspoken between us any longer. No half-truths or lies separated us.
Except for one.
Ina is the only person who would understand. One day, I confess.
I tell her during one of our long walks through Everless’s grounds and the gardens, then outside the estate walls to Laista, into the woods and fields beyond. I usually do more listening than speaking on these excursions, trying to help as Ina talks through Sempera’s problems of currency, of unrest, of change. I don’t envy her these puzzles, nor she mine.
