by Sara Wolf
It’s her mouth. Her mouth is moving, quickly and silently. At first I think she’s casting a spell, those wordless spells that only the Old God can hear. But then, slowly, I lift myself off the couch and linger at the balcony’s door, and I hear her monotone words.
“The tree,” she says. “The tree…the tree. The tree.”
Terror grips me, irrational and mind-bendingly strong. How does she know what I dreamed? Or is she dreaming, too?
I back away from the balcony, wrap myself in a fox fur throw blanket, and spend the rest of the night in the corridor with the unquestioning guards.
In the morning, Varia is long gone. What would I even say? That I saw her on the balcony being objectively unsettling? That I, too, dream of a tree? In the cold light of morning, my fear seems childish and unreal. So I push it away to focus on the reality in front of me.
I wait for the king to call on me. Waiting is the worst part of life; it feels like walking on a bed of rusted nails, every step painful.
But the king doesn’t call for me. First, he calls for his army.
King Sref sends for the bulk of the Vetrisian army to gather at the capital. He also calls the farmers and the tradesmen to consolidate resources in Vetris—in no time the streets crowd with grain wagons moving back and forth to storage towers. It’s a grim reminder that I can cocoon myself in my worries all I want, but the war outside will move forward inexorably.
Varia barely returns to her room—either in meetings with ministers or with Fione spending time together in the library—which means I have free rein of the apartments. If I wanted to appear proper to the court, I would go back to Y’shennria’s manor to live. And I’m sure Varia would be fine with it. But living in that empty mansion, full of so many memories, would gnaw at me. I know that. So I stay among the silks and the marble, watching the darkwood manse from afar. The nobles approve insomuch as they can—praising Varia for taking pity on me when Lady Y’shennria’s all but “abandoned” me.
Fione avoids me at all costs, darting out when we enter the same rooms, making muttered excuses to flee any social situation I exist in. Malachite still won’t look at me straight when I’m around. Lucien, on the other hand, acts the opposite. He looks up when I pass and makes a point to shoot me the most grating, placating smile I’ve ever seen each time we meet in the halls. The sort of smile he gives to people he dislikes. It itches, burns like an acidfire under skin—a fire I can’t escape no matter which way I turn or how far I get. He addresses me once, as we meet on the stairs of the palace entrance—me going to the valkerax, and him returning from riding, his hair sweat-beaded and his cheeks flushed.
“Lady Zera.” He smiles bitterly, his shed riding jacket under his arm. “I hope I find you well.”
It’s such a trite thing to say, a furious laugh starts to bubble up in me. It’s for girls much more gullible than I am. Girls much younger than I am. Girls much more human than I am. It’s not a pleasantry; it’s an insult. And we both know it.
His disdainful smile pushes me away, the white dress shirt clinging to the muscles of his arm, drawing me in. His face is handsome as always, but his faked smile isn’t enough to hide the faintly purple circles under his eyes. I blink, throwing him a more brilliant smile than ever before, constructed out of sheer anger-cut glass.
“You’ve found me incredibly fine, Your Highness. Whatever can I do to repay you for your inquiring kindness?”
This doesn’t throw him. Of course it doesn’t. He’s endured these sorts of exchanges all his life. He blinks and runs a hand through his short black hair, mussing it more.
“Your smile, Lady Zera,” he says, voice dripping with honey-laced wrongness. “That’s all I’d request from you.”
For a second, I have no idea what to do or say. For the first time, I feel as if I’m squaring off against him as an equal. We’re both standing here, smiling at each other, knowing exactly what we both are. It’s no longer me deceiving him, secrets always up my laced sleeve. This is the two of us on equal footing.
At last.
His dark eyes hold me. He’s won this time. I can feel it as he walks away—his shoulders broad and proud. He’s won something invisible back from me. Something I didn’t even know I had taken.
I linger on the steps, staring at the one he’d been standing on. If I had a heartbeat, I know it would be painfully loud in my ears.
Sometimes, I catch glimpses of Lucien around the palace with Varia. Usually the two of them are accompanied by Fione. I watch them walk the gardens, laughing and teasing one another. Varia tucks daisies behind Lucien’s ear, and he grins sheepishly. Fione trips over roots or brick walkways, and Lucien reaches out to catch her before she falls. Varia never hesitates to kiss Fione’s hand at every opportunity. They ride horses together, Lucien challenging his sister to a race. Fione insists on riding the same horse as Varia, clinging to her back for dear life with a delighted red flush on her cheeks.
They are…happy. Lucien is happier than I’ve ever seen him before. I feel somehow guilty for watching them like this. But it’s the only time I can catch glimpses of his rare, golden smile, the true one, the one that squeezes my chest so hard it feels as if I have a heart again.
I watch, and I wonder, wistfully, what it would be like to join them.
Malachite must’ve taken my plea about introducing Lucien to other girls to heart, because I start to see Lucien walking with someone who isn’t Varia or Fione; a beautiful girl with pale milk-blond hair and warm brown eyes of cinnamon. She’s as graceful as Y’shennria and far quieter than I. On the first day, Lucien is as cold as winter toward her—ignoring everything she rarely says, walking fast as if trying to ditch her. But she keeps coming back. Malachite keeps smiling at her when she walks up. He approves of her, that much is clear, and I feel a pang of regret that I can’t be the one he’s smiling at.
The beneather is smart, and he knows how Lucien works—he keeps talking to her long enough to force Lucien to engage with her as well. She walks quickly to keep up with Lucien, sometimes running—an unsightly thing noble girls are never supposed to do. But unlike the other noble girls, she doesn’t seem to care how she looks. Her dresses are simple, her hair even simpler. She trips over carpets as she runs, but she always gets to her feet instantly and determinedly continues after Lucien, apologizing for her own clumsiness.
It doesn’t take long for me to overhear exactly who she is—Lady Ania Tarroux, a Goldblood whose father’s money is funding a great deal of the war effort. The nobles call her simple and rather hopeless, but the way she so genuinely tries to keep up with Lucien despite him ignoring her—something about it plays on my unheart strings. She doesn’t laugh excessively, or bat her eyelashes, or desperately try to get him to talk. She’s just…there, steady and gentle. I’m half in awe of how well Malachite knows Lucien—steadiness and persistence are the two things a girl pursuing Lucien needs more than anything, and she has it in spades. He’s picked well.
Sometimes, it gets hard to breathe when I think such thoughts. But I like to blame it on the dust in the palace.
I ask around about her—the kitchen maids more than happy to gossip with me. Lady Tarroux lost her mother at a very young age, and by all accounts she’s the one raising her four other sisters. She’s very devout—spending most of her time in prayer in the Temple of Kavar in the center of the city—and often she’s spotted handing out food and clothing with the priestesses. She’s due to debut next year at the Spring Welcoming, and the rumors are, of course, already circulating about it, seeing as Lucien hasn’t announced his engagement to me. Or to anyone.
Lady Tarroux is the exact opposite of everything I am—quiet, gentle, easygoing, innocent. And best of all, she’s humble. She’s different from the other nobles, enough that she could catch Lucien’s eye, if he just gave her a chance. And Malachite seems dead set on providing that chance.
She’s perfect.
The perfect wedge to drive between Lucien and me—so perfect I almost pity her. I’m going to use the poor girl like a tool, and she’ll never see it coming. But maybe that’s for the best—she’ll have a princely husband out of it, if all goes well.
But I don’t have the time to help Malachite orchestrate anything between Tarroux and Lucien. For four days, my life is consumed entirely by the valkerax. First thing in the morning, I wash and dress and head to the South Gate via Varia’s carriage. In the dark arena below the city with Yorl, I try desperately to teach the valkerax how to sit still (an increasingly impossible feat, considering how much pain it’s in) while simultaneously trying to understand its lyrical, half-mad poetry. Each day I walk into the arena, its voice gets a little softer, and that worries me. Yorl insists the valkerax is stable, but it’s hard not to think otherwise. On the second day, its voice is barely loud enough to hear. Yorl’s there with me every step of the way, unflinchingly brave even when the valkerax thrashes around violently in fits of pain. We barely make any progress—and I hardly even manage to get two coherent words out of the valkerax. The sound of it whining in sheer agony makes my stomach sink and pity rise.
“Can’t you, I dunno, give it some permanent polymath painkiller? Or have Varia magic the pain away?” I ask Yorl as we ascend the stairs after the session, his paw in mine. I feel Yorl’s immature mane brush my shoulders as he shakes his head.
“I’ve tried. But the Bone Tree was made with the most advanced Old Vetrisian magic available. That sort of forging is lost to us. There are temporary solutions, but nothing works permanently to relieve their pain. It’s almost as if it’s a fundamental agony the Bone Tree has written into the laws of valkerax existence.”
“Couldn’t I just…” I stumble over a stair and Yorl tenses his arm, and I pull myself up by it. “Couldn’t I just go down to where the valkerax live, then? Into the Dark Below? I could teach one that isn’t in pain.”
Yorl snorts. “No one goes into the Dark Below and survives—not humans and not witches. Perhaps if you were a beneather culling party, but even then there’s a good chance half of you wouldn’t make it back.”
“And my locket.” I clutch the gold heart around my neck. “I’m guessing valkerax live way more than a mile and a half down, huh? Varia wouldn’t want to risk her death going very far.”
Yorl blinks at me with his huge green eyes. “I must be rubbing off on you. You almost sounded intelligent just then.”
I can’t see my own rude gesture, but he can. We’re quiet as we walk the rest of the way up the stairs, and Yorl leaves me at the top.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll feed it well and sedate it as much as I can. We can try again tomorrow.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
Yorl stares at me steadily. “There are other Old Vetrisian methods I can try. But they are…brutal. I’d prefer not to resort to such things.”
“Brutal how?” I swallow nervously.
“It involves taking off parts of the valkerax’s body.”
as always, the hunger sneers at Yorl. we are forever expendable to them.
“Is there any way to not dismember a living thing for what we want?” I ask lightly.
“I will do it if I must,” he says, resolute, his tail swishing. “I will become a polymath, no matter what must be done. And you? Will you do it, for your heart?”
The taunting gap where the memories of my heart were inside me widens, yawning open. To never eat raw things, to never have to kill again. To never have to take orders, and to remember everything I once was, at the cost of a creature’s pain.
“These methods won’t kill it?” I narrow my eyes at Yorl.
He shakes his head. “No. It would temporarily inflict great pain, and the valkerax may never regrow them back.”
I have to try everything I possibly can to make the valkerax talk cohesively, to teach it, to make sure it doesn’t come to that. But if it does…
if it does, you would, the hunger insists with rock-hard truth. you desire your weak humanity as a moth desires flame, and it will be your undoing.
I stare into the darkness of the doorway behind him and think of the majestic creature that sits there at the bottom, alone, in pain, half dead and all mad. If I was a good person, I would say no. If I was a dishonest person, I would say no.
But I am done with lies.
“Yes,” I start. “If that’s what it comes to.”
Yorl and I share a long glance, our twin goals laced in the abject silence of dirty deeds, and then he turns wordlessly and descends back down the dark staircase, the door creaking shut behind him. I take a deep breath to clear the heaviness in my chest, turn on my heel, and leave the wall. I blink as my eyes frantically adjust to the bright, late-afternoon sunlight. Not as many people stare at me this time as I walk through South Gate’s crowd, entirely because I’m not covered in blood. The valkerax hasn’t had the presence of mind to speak two sensible words to me, let alone the energy to try to bite me again.
There was something the valkerax said today, though, that stuck with me.
The branches cry out in the night to those who will listen in slumber.
It had no context, blurted between bouts of pain, but it echoes in my head. It would be easy to write off such a sentence as gibberish if I hadn’t had that dream of the tree the other night. To listen in slumber—that could be dreaming. And there had been branches in my dream, covered in bloodstained glass. Glass that pointed itself at me when I tried to come near.
But Vetris is no place to dream for a Heartless.
The war, the valkerax, how to push Lady Tarroux at Lucien—I mull it over every hour of the day, barely falling into the mockery of sleep Heartless experience. Varia’s maids send a pitcher of wine to her room every night, and I find myself dipping into it more than is healthy, the wine the only thing capable of slowing my racing mind. But soon—like all places I stare at the walls of for more than two days—the palace starts to feel like a prison. And so I turn to the only place left to me—the city.
The looming war permeates Vetris as thoroughly as the stink of white mercury; the blacksmiths never quiet their anvils as they produce piles of swords and armor. The polymaths gather in groups, in taverns and on the cobblestone streets, gesturing wildly with their baggy sleeves at buildings and walls and arguing over how to better fortify them against magical attacks. The Vetrisian army trickles in from all over the country thanks to the king’s summons, gathering outside the white wall in little nodes of tents that rapidly grow to sprawl over the grassland.
The soldiers run drills during the day, the sound of their boots most prominently heard near the gates, and at night they stagger through the alleys and roads of Vetris, drunk and blustering about how many witches and Heartless they’ll kill soon. I allow myself a single flinch when I hear such things for the first time, said with such venom and bravado all at once. Said as if they were convinced it was the right thing to do. The children follow on their heels, excited to see so many uniforms, their voices rising up as they joyfully sing the little songs they do while playing games:
“Dark clouds, dark clouds,
Kavar break them all,
Water for a witch and fire for their thralls!”
I swallow down, sick. The humans kill witches with water—drowning them, to stop them from speaking spells and escaping. And fire works better than any other weapon to slow down a Heartless—burning a body gives even magic a difficult time regenerating it. Hearing methods to kill witches and Heartless spill from the mouths of children sends shivers up my spine.
Why do the humans and witches hate each other at all?
I realize almost immediately that it’s a pointless question to ask. Old Vetris fell to ruins about a thousand years ago. They united against the valkerax threat, but their differences eventually tore them apart. That’s what the
books say, anyway, written by polymaths well versed in history; their differences were just irreconcilable. The more I try to ask myself why the humans and witches hate each other, the more juvenile it sounds; magic is power. Power causes fear. Fear curdles to hate. Wondering where the root of all these wars began is pointless; witches are witches. Humans are humans. They fear. They hate.
Even if the initial disagreement was small, the thousand years of bloodshed between witch and human have turned it into something far, far larger—a web that feels like it can never be destroyed or escaped from. Suffocating us all.
It’s the third day when the valkerax finally says something that makes a drop of sense. It curls around itself, panting, and wheezes, “The tree of bone will always call to the chime strong enough to become its roots.”
There’s a moment of breathing, mine and its, and I dare to hope that I’ve gotten through to it, that the next few sentences it says will make sense just like that one.
“You have to fight it!” I call into the dark. “I know it’s hard, but you have to clear your thoughts of the pain!”
I wait on needles, praying it will acknowledge me at all. But instead it groans, the sound like wood being bent until it breaks.
“Immortal hate, immortal anger. Life squirming in a world of undeath. Below the sun and above the moons, together at last.” The valkerax’s voice is a bare whisper. “The mother calls to the son; two long to become one. A daughter like a weapon. A rose between them. A wolf to end the world. A WOLF. TO END. THE WORLD!”
Its voice is suddenly so earsplittingly loud, booming around the arena and dislodging pebbles from the ceiling. Dirt rains down, and I duck beneath its thrashing tail just as the serum overtakes me, cold death waiting with open arms.
Yorl looks tired for the very first time when I wake up again, his whiskers drooping even as he scribbles on his parchment, his mouth a thoughtful line.
