Find Me Their Bones

by Sara Wolf

  Varia notices me then, too, but her smile doesn’t fade. Their hands are joined on Fione’s lap, but they part instantly, and I feel more than a little sorry for interrupting their clear affection. Fione scrabbles with the thing they were holding together—the beautiful gold-kissed dagger lined with rings of sapphires and pearls. She shoves it into a scabbard on her hip. That’s the dagger Fione would admire when talking about Varia.

  Out of all of us, I realize now that Fione got the happiest ending, and my unheart can’t help but glow for her.

  “There you are! I was beginning to worry,” the crown princess simpers at me and pats the blanket next to her. She pauses when she sees my tunic. “I thought I told you not to startle my people with any blood.” She sighs. “No matter—sit down with us, will you?”

  I dart my eyes to Fione’s face, but she refuses to look at me, her blush long gone. She shifts in her seat, stroking one thumb over the other. It’s a tiny movement, something I’d never catch before Y’shennria’s training—nerves. Her refusal to look at me hurts, but not as much as the fact that my very presence is clearly making her unbearably uncomfortable in a way that can’t be hidden by her usually perfect noble mask.

  “I really shouldn’t.” I gesture down at my tunic.

  Varia quirks a brow. “Sit.”

  Fione suddenly gets to her feet, leaning on her cane to do so quickly. “I should go. Thank you for the food, Your Highness—”

  “Oh, please, Fione. We can all share a meal together, can’t we?” She blinks between us. I steal a glance at Fione’s terse face.

  “I’d—” I swallow. “I’d like to, yes.”

  “See? She doesn’t want to bite you, Fione.” Varia laughs. “Please sit back down.”

  Fione starts, this time pivoting. “I can’t—”

  Varia lets out an explosive sigh. “Fione, Fione. So brave, so smart, and yet so scared when it comes to Heartless. Did you ever tell her?”

  My stomach plummets. Tell me what? Fione won’t face us, or more precisely me, but I can faintly see her thin shoulders beneath her muslin dress shaking. Varia looks to me pointedly, taking a long sip of wine.

  “Heartless are her greatest fear. Not that I blame her. The storybooks and bards’ songs love to make them seem pants-wettingly terrifying, don’t they?”

  Things click into place in my head like a polymath contraption starting up. That’s why she wouldn’t look at me at the banquet. That’s why she can’t look at me now. I thought it was a fear of what I’d done, but no. It’s a fear of what I am.

  And that hurts far deeper down.

  “Fione,” I start, my mouth moving rustily. “I would never hurt you—”

  “I’ve seen the Sunless War veterans,” Fione says softly. “The men with their legs and arms chewed off. Most of them were not as lucky—some have pieces of their torso missing. Vital organs, eaten. I have seen them die early, because they have barely any liver left at all.”

  I swallow acid, but Fione continues, her voice trembling.

  “Lady Y’shennria’s scar. Do you know how she got it?”

  I brace myself, knotting my hands in the picnic blanket for stability. “No.”

  “She was trying to save her infant girl. She bared her neck to them, so they would go for her instead.”

  Everything inside my chest plummets—every bone, every muscle suddenly weak. Y’shennria never told me. She alluded to it, but it was never said in plain words.

  I knew she had lost her entire family, but this level of brutality and sacrifice…

  Fione pivots then, slowly, her blue eyes carefully fixed to my boots as she speaks. “She knew there was nothing she could do to stop them. They always come back. They always heal, no matter what injuries one inflicts. She couldn’t fight back.” Fione’s hands, clasped tightly around each other, are white down to the veins. “That is the part I am afraid of. Not the hunger. Not the monstrous form. But the fact that one cannot fight back against them. Against…you.”

  the mouse is smart. The hunger laughs. I search for words, any words of comfort at all, but nothing comes. Any attempt would be hollow; I am the monster she fears.

  “Fione, I’m asking this as a favor—” Varia works herself to her feet, waltzing over to the two of us with mincing steps. She sloshes some of her wine from her goblet as she stops beside me, sweeping her eyes to the guards. “Leave us.”

  “But, Your Highness,” one of the guards starts. “His Majesty has ordered—”

  “I know damn well what he’s ordered,” she snaps, then composes herself. “You can still watch us. But you will do so from the firing line.”

  She points at the distant line of rails where the shooting range begins. The guard looks to the others, and wordlessly they trot off in that direction. When their metallic cacophony fades, Varia turns her smile back to Fione.

  “Give me the dagger, Fi.”

  Fione looks up at her, wide-eyed. “What?”

  “Our dagger,” Varia corrects. “I want to show you something, and that sword on Zera’s hip will not do.”

  “I know it’s a bit rusty, but it still cuts as well as any fancy cheese knife.” I make a feeble attempt at a joke, but it falls flat—it doesn’t make Fione look less serious in the slightest. She warily unsheathes the dagger and hands it to the crown princess, ever careful to stay out of my arm’s reach. Varia inspects it, then hands it to me, focusing her dark gaze on mine.

  “If you ever touch Fione, you will immediately find a secluded place and use the nearest sharp object to stab yourself three times in the stomach.” The command and the hunger well up as one in my head. Varia’s obsidian eyes lose their intensity as she turns to Fione with a smile. “There. The stomach should be a painful enough place.”

  Fione’s shakes have only gotten worse, her rosebud lips paling. “Varia—how could you—?”

  “Hush,” Varia chides her. “This is for your peace of mind as much as mine. I won’t let her, or anyone else, hurt you. Go on. Try it out. Touch her.”

  I stand stock-still, petrified. Fione looks nervously between Varia and my shoes, then back to Varia again, her cheeks whiter than bone and her small frame quaking uncontrollably. She’s nervous but not surprised, which means Varia’s already told her about being a witch.

  her fear is sweet. The hunger licks its lips. She’s right to fear me, to fear this emptiness inside me.

  She’s right to fear, but she shouldn’t have to. She was the closest thing I ever had to a friend. She doesn’t deserve to be held captive by fear. She has to see just how much control Varia and the command has over me. She has to see she’s safe.

  With my hands outstretched, I move toward her. She pulls back far too late—my fingers brushing her mouse-brown curls. The command has me in its jaws in the time it takes to blink, wrapping its tendrils about my arms and legs and forcing them to move toward the forest that touches the shooting range. The command must think the relative isolation of the shadows between the trees is secluded enough, because I stride quickly and purposefully through the grass, over the picnic blanket, around trunks and branches until I am alone.

  My hands poise the bejeweled dagger on their own, and I suck in a breath and watch the blade’s beautiful tip kiss the fabric over my stomach. I steel myself, but Varia was right—the stomach is an awful place to be stabbed. Things tend to rupture and twist, and blood pools inside abdominal cavities. I grit my teeth and watch the dagger fly, once, twice, thrice, and the last stab catches something vital in me and my legs buckle out with the pain. My cheek presses into the pine needles, suddenly warm and wet from my blood, and my eyes start to dim as my ears do.

  The sound of a horrified gasp cut short resounds in the forest, and then Varia’s calm, fading voice.

  “…see—this will deter her from ever touching you. You have nothing to fear, Fi. She’s mine. Magic has made her mine
. And I’ll never let her hurt you.”

  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 aroun
d 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.