by Sara Wolf
A guard suddenly walks in when I’m dressed and offers me Father’s rusted sword. Just seeing its flaking metal handle has me breathing easier. It’s the last thing I own of my parents’, and here, at the end of my world and the beginning of a new one, I couldn’t ask for anything sturdier to lean on. I take it, pinning it to my belt. I feel doubly protected now, even if I know it’s a hollow illusion. Varia points to a pair of black boots near the door, and I lace them up my calves, watching her out of the corner of my eye. When I’m done, she immediately moves for the door and motions for me to follow her.
The palace should look different—as different as my life feels—but it doesn’t. Moonlight still streams through the windows and onto both the sleek red carpeting and the marble statues of half-naked women with spears. The guards at every door bow to the princess, and she nods back with perfect regality, as if she wasn’t absent for five years. They shoot me wary looks—Lady Zera Y’shennria, with the princess?—but they don’t question it. Varia walks ahead of me, and my feet woodenly try to keep up even as my mind spins circles around itself.
“I’ve told Father you’re a Heartless, of course,” the princess says softly. “And he’s ordered that information to be kept under lock and key, lest panic break out. I’ve also told him your witch is eager to keep you alive, and I’ve assured him you can’t share any of Vetris’s secrets with them. But I’m certain at some point he’ll have to question you about Gavik’s death. You won’t tell him anything, of course.”
“You obviously don’t know me,” I shoot back. “I’m a notorious blabbermouth. I’ll tell him you’re a witch. Even if you command me—”
“I’m not going to command you to keep quiet,” she says lightly. “I won’t need to. You won’t say a thing to anyone, least of all him.”
Her mystifying conviction is iron. How can she be so confident of that? Does she know I can Weep? Reginall—Y’shennria’s butler and a veteran of the Sunless War—taught me the framework of a technique the Heartless developed out of desperation during the War. A handful of Heartless managed to resist their witches’ commands to fight and kill. They called this Weeping, for the way blood tears stream from our eyes for the duration. Even if it’s temporary, the act of Weeping makes the hunger’s voice go away. Totally. Not dulling it, like feeding on raw organs does, but eradicating it.
It frees a Heartless completely—allowing them to do whatever they want, regardless of what they’ve been commanded to do, regardless of the hunger’s fanatical, blood-lusted voice. It’s the closest thing a Heartless can ever come to being human without having their heart again. I Wept that night in the clearing when my monstrous form killed Gavik, his men, and then turned on Lucien. I managed to Weep and control the monster before it could kill the prince.
Did Varia see me do it? Reginall told me the witches in the Sunless War didn’t take kindly to their Heartless learning how to defy them. Those who could were shattered—their hearts kept by the witches crushed, which kills the Heartless for good. If I don’t want to end up like them, I need to play my cards very carefully.
I almost stop walking. Can I still Weep? There are two parts to Weeping: one, the internal calming of thoughts, the clearing of the mind, and two, the external, being cut by a pure white mercury blade. My old connection to Nightsinger had been weakened the moment Lucien accidentally cut me with his white mercury blade during the duel. But this connection between Varia and me hasn’t been mangled by magic-suppressing white mercury. It’s strong and vibrant.
My stomach writhes as we pass all-too-familiar doors—to the banquet hall, to the throne room, to the gorgeous stained glass Hall of Time and the entrance hall. Lucien’s psychic scent lingers in all of them—shadows of memories of when we met for the first (second, really) time. These are places I’ve been as a different person, as a monster pretending to be a human. He tolerated me then.
He loved me then.
My nerves walk on broken glass—my body had been waiting for two whole weeks in this palace to be reviled and hated, for my secret to come loose. I keep looking around, sick with the thought that I might find Lucien around every corner.
How he must hate me now.
The one boy I felt my unheart beat for, hating me.
The thought tries to drive me madder than the hunger does. It reaches twisting fingers for me, but I focus on every curve of the marble statues, every fiber of the grand carpets, every petal of the vases of impeccable hothouse flowers. The painting in the entrance hall of the New God Kavar looms dark in the night, the scales in his long hands tipping, the hundreds of eyes tattooed onto his divine golden skin glaring down at me as if seeming to say, There is no escaping justice. You will atone for what you have done.
Fourteen men. One for each finger on my hand, and then some.
Varia points out the entrance hall, to the gigantic oaken front doors being held open by the guards. Outside, a black-trimmed carriage awaits at the bottom of the grand steps.
“Hurry now. There’s something I want you to see.” She ushers, sweeping past me and descending the stairs with her skirts held high. Every step of hers is so perfect by Vetrisian court standards that I know even Y’shennria would be impressed.
Y’shennria.
she left you here to rot, the hunger snarls. she abandoned you to save her own skin.
My unheart pangs as I climb into the carriage and seat myself opposite Varia’s prim posture. I don’t blame Y’shennria for leaving me here in Vetris all alone, but part of me wants to. Part of me wants to rage and scream at the unfairness of it all—I wanted only my heart. I failed. Why do I have to suffer, to keep living like this, chained to a witch all over again? A part of me is furious. A part of me is scared to the bone. And all of me doesn’t want to be alone.
Nightsinger, Crav, Peligli—where are they now? Will I ever see them again?
I look up at Varia’s faintly smiling face. Her sheet of black hair gleams in the moonlight. She turns her eyes from the window to look at me, and her smile widens. Calm. Satisfied. In control. She is the total opposite of me.
The city, too, is no different than when I left it. The iron talismans twirl and spin in the midnight wind from every eave and rain gutter—a crescent with three lines moving through it. The Eye of Kavar. Even here, the humans’ god is watching me. The spire of the Temple of Kavar broods over the alleyways and streets as we pass through them, drunkards shouting hymns and bedding songs equally as they stagger home from taverns.
Whatever Varia wants to show me, it isn’t in the heart of the city. The carriage leads us to what I think is the South Gate, hung with sagging chains of warm oil lamps and choked with the soft hum of murmured conversation as the trading caravans prepare for predawn departures. The princess is silent the entire ride until the carriage comes to a rough stop at the gate.
“We’re here.” She motions for me to get out. “Try to be on your best behavior.”
“Oh, I’ll certainly try,” I murmur and swing my legs out. “And more certainly fail.”
The sleepy crowd envelops us almost instantly, and for a moment as I push through them to follow Varia, the huge iron-cast doors of the South Gate catch my eye. Ten on the ground, twenty—no, thirty lawguards in shining armor stand rigid on the white wall the gate is nestled in, perched like vultures as they watch the crowd below. The wall surrounding Vetris might keep witches and bandits out, but it’s the lawguards who keep people in.
My mind flickers briefly to escape. Even if I scaled the wall by some miracle and got past the thirty guards without being riddled with spearheads, Varia would surely stop me with a command. And I’m not sure of my Weeping anymore. But if I don’t run…
I’ll have to face Lucien. Fione. Malachite. I’ll have to face them as a traitor. As who I really am—a murderer. A liar.
Everything in me wants to run. The scaffolding up the wall is so close. I could run. I could spri
nt like my life depended on it—
Varia’s noticed me lagging and turns in the throng. If the crowd recognizes her, none of them shows it. How could they? It’s been five years since she was seen last. She’s morphed into a young woman, proud and strong.
“Come on,” she urges me. “There are things to be done.”
I back away from her slowly, and my feet move for the scaffold. I have to try. I can’t face Lucien. Not now. Not now that I’m a monster to him. Varia could be bluffing, could be lying about being my new witch, about the entire transferring ownership ordeal, and I could leap that scaffold. The only thing between me and running free at last could be that white wall, the curve of those wooden inclines against it.
“Don’t.” Varia’s voice turns harder. “Zera—I’m warning you.”
“What?” I sneer back at her. “Afraid you’re not my witch after all? Afraid I’ll escape?”
I spin on my heel, only to be frozen by her words.
“You will follow me.”
It’s only half her voice. The other half is a dark, deep, visceral tone I know all too well, reverberating up from some jet bell nestled inside my very being. Varia and the hunger say the same words at the same time, and the sound—the meaning—courses through me like icy river water, locking me in place. I will follow her. I will follow them—her and the hunger—until I can follow no more.
I spin again on my heels, this time toward her, and like I’m outside my body, hovering above it and observing it like a play on a stage, I watch myself obediently trot after the princess farther and farther into the crowd.
She is my witch.
Every single step of my boots on the cobblestones beats it into me like a terrible, inescapable drumbeat.
Princess Varia d’Malvane of Cavanos—the Laughing Daughter—is my new witch.
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.
