by Sara Wolf
Not again. I won’t let human weakness steal my heart from me again.
I give a proper bow fit for a prince and archduchess and start down the stairs with an uncaring wave of my hand.
“Bring me that diary, my good nobles. And then I’ll consider telling you a story.”
…
The patrols in the palace are more alert than usual, perhaps preparing for the war. Being caught wandering the halls in the dead of night isn’t illegal for a noble, but still the guards stop me, asking questions. I give them the excuse that I’d felt sick and went to visit the royal polymaths in the palace’s Sun Ward. I smile brightly, and while I’m positive they know I’m lying, they don’t dare stop me—the crown princess has told them I’m allowed in her apartments, and to stop me might mean invoking her ire.
When I slip into the sitting room, the oil lamps are all snuffed out, the apartments engulfed in dimness. The blue moonlight filters through the glass windows, and I carefully tiptoe past the bedroom. My eyes catch on the dark figure in it. A dark figure, moving. No—thrashing. Varia’s black hair is slicked to her head with sweat, her limbs twitching, struggling to be free of the sheets. Her eyes are closed—she’s fast asleep, and yet moving like she’s fighting something.
I should leave her. She’s my witch—holding me hostage by my heart. At the very least, she deserves nightmares. But…the soft whine that escapes her lips suddenly tugs at me. Peligli used to have nightmares like these, mewling like this, and I’d always wake her up.
She means so much to Fione. To Lucien.
I gulp down a breath and walk over to her bedside. This close, I can see just how pale and tinged green her skin’s become, as if she’s sick, her eyes moving frantically behind her eyelids.
Gingerly, I put my hand on her shoulder. “Your Highness?” I say. She doesn’t respond. “Varia?”
Suddenly, her thrashing gets violent, her limbs bashing against one another, quaking the mattress. Her shin hits a wooden poster of the bed so hard it vibrates through the floor, blood pooling instantly crimson beneath her skin. I put both hands on her shoulders and shake her.
“Varia!”
Her dark eyes snap open, her thrashing going still at the same moment that she sits straight up in the bed.
“The Tree!” She gasps, sucking in air like she’s been underwater for far too long. Was she dreaming of the tree again, like she was that night on the balcony? Her eyes are wide black discs, terrified and fervid all at once, like she’s seen into the face of the New God himself. She notices me out of the corner of her eye, and she flicks her sweat-sheened face to me.
“You. What are you doing here?”
“You were having a nightmare,” I say, pointing at her leg. “And beating yourself up about it.”
Varia’s disoriented gaze moves down to the injury, her face twisting with irritation and her chest rising hard and quick as she tries to catch her breath.
“Get out.”
“You—” I start, my throat dry. “Were you dreaming of the Bone Tree?”
“I said get out!”
Her eyes are embers—hotter even than the moment I saw her in the woods. She isn’t a wise, waiting owl now. She is carved in anger and something like panic. The command is a chokehold—the hunger gripping my legs and arms and forcing me out of the room in an instant. The bedroom doors in front of my face slam shut with some invisible force—magic, no doubt. The slam echoes and then settles.
The command releases my rigid body and confused mind, and I collapse on the nearest love seat. I’ve never seen her command so quickly, so ferociously.
Why would she react like that to a simple, innocent question?
11
The Weight
of Unliving
The next morning, Varia acts like nothing at all happened.
It could be that she doesn’t remember it. Or it could be that she’s purposely pretending it never happened. Either way, the crown princess is ensconced in her closet, being dressed by her maids, when Fione walks in, her hair left long and curled and tied with daisy-yellow ribbons to match her dress. She looks lovely. She looks uneasy. The full fear I saw in her face the first few times we met again after the clearing is much less—no doubt thanks to Varia’s command. If I touch her, I stab myself. And I can see, tangibly, that idea is giving Fione some measure of security; her eyes still avoid meeting mine, but I catch her staring at my profile every so often.
“Where are you two off to this fine morning, Your Grace?” I play the polite noble card, hoping to put her more at ease. Fione’s lips purse slightly.
“A breakfast,” she says. “At my manor.”
“That’s right.” I whistle. “You have the whole of the Himintell estate to yourself now.”
“It’s nothing much,” she says modestly, and I laugh, picking up my morning chocolate drink and sipping at it, washing away the taste of the liver I’d consumed not minutes before she and the maids walked in.
“When we first met at that banquet,” I start, “you were Lady Himintell, being picked on by those frilly walking dung piles and ridiculed by Gavik. And now”—I motion to her dress, her stiff posture—“you got rid of him. Now you’re an archduchess. Give yourself a thimbleful of credit, will you? You’ve done well.”
Fione breathes out, her gaze skittering over the floor as she thinks of what to say. Finally she looks up, and this time it’s right into my eyes. For the first time since the clearing, her cornflower blue eyes look at me.
“Thank you,” she says.
It’s like the first sprout of spring breaking through a snow bank. My chest warms, and I smile back. It isn’t a long moment, and soon her gaze is out the windows again, but at the very least, it happened. My unheart doesn’t feel so heavy suddenly. Encouraged by it all, I open my mouth.
“Does she usually have nightmares?” Fione’s head snaps up, and I continue. “It’s just, she spends most nights at your place, so I don’t see it often. But last night—”
“She hurt herself. And talked about the Tree,” Fione finishes for me. “Right?”
It’s my turn to look surprised. “How did you—?”
Fione lowers her voice, her face suddenly expressionless, as if she’s trying hard to keep it together. “It’s happened every night since she’s been back. She flails, she screams, she cries. And she mutters about the Tree the whole time.”
Quietly, we watch the maids flicker in and out of the dressing room with long lengths of purple ribbon. Fione’s face is so drawn, so tight with worry. I can’t imagine what it must be like—to have your beloved back, only to watch them struggling so in their sleep.
I lean in to Fione, careful not to get close enough to scare her, and murmur, “If the Tree isn’t real, as you said in the tower, then why is she having so many nightmares about it?”
I know the Tree is real. Or, at the very least, I know Varia thinks the Tree is real. I know Yorl has given me explanations and evidence as to why the Tree is real. The valkerax has talked about it. But I’ve never seen it. I know the Tree is real in the same sense one knows the gods are real—belief. Fione has never held such beliefs for the gods; if anything, she’s shown disdain for them. She’s a lady of facts and evidence, resisting the unquestioning faith most of Vetris has been scared into by Gavik and the sheer intimidating threat of magic itself.
So my question hangs, and she’s unable to answer it.
“She’ll be all right.” I make a smile. “I’ll wake her up if it ever gets too bad. You’ll wake her up at your place. Together, we’ll keep our crown princess unbruised yet.”
Fione’s expression crumbles, worry tingeing it. “Yes.”
The guards come in then and announce that my carriage to South Gate is ready. I resist the urge to hug Fione, to put my arm on her shoulder, even, and make a bow to her instead.
I watch the city
flash by, the older parts of the common quarter bustling. Construction noisily tears down old buildings and erects new ones as barracks for soldiers, and more construction still happens between the streets and alleys as emergency barricades are put in place, in case of invasion. The Temple of Kavar is being particularly insulated by such barricades, a priest standing on the steps and blessing the workers as they haul wood and metal, his sermon ringing out as my carriage passes.
“The weight of living belongs to us all!”
“Indeed. But,” I murmur to the carriage’s ceiling, “what about the weight of unliving? Who does that belong to?”
The crown princess hasn’t told Lucien or Fione what she’s doing with the valkerax, for their safety, no doubt. She wants to keep the valkerax to herself—not out of selfishness but out of a desire to protect those closest to her. I can’t find it in me to blame her. I’d do the same. But the urge to tell Lucien and Fione this one truth still burns, even in the morning light. If I do, if Lucien and Fione even believe me, I’d have a hard time believing the crown princess would be pleased. And she holds my heart in the palm of her hand, literally.
If Fione does bring me Gavik’s journal, it’s not safe to tell her the truth. But she deserves that much, and my two inclinations war with each other even as I teach the valkerax for the day. Yorl pushes me hard—we try the serum three times, and I die three times. But the valkerax has other plans: namely, lying there on the ground and wheezing. It doesn’t even move to snap at me. It doesn’t answer me, except to mutter nonsense once more—about sky-homes and earth-homes, about flying below the sun. My unheart feels like a pincushion as I listen to its labored breaths, and right then it finally hits me: it’s not going to last long. All of Yorl’s warnings were easy to ignore when it wasn’t collapsed in a heap on the ground. But now, listening with my own two ears as it struggles to live, I brutally understand.
It might die for this.
It will die without my helping it to Weep. It will die because I wasn’t fast enough or correct enough in my teaching.
And the most naked truth: I might not get my heart back.
even at the end of all possibility. The hunger sneers at me. selfish to the last.
I bask in the low, late afternoon sun aboveground, trying not to think. But it’s all I can do; if I don’t get my heart, where does that leave me? As a pawn for Varia for how many more years? Will she make me fight in the war?
A shadow catches my eye in the sparse South Gate crowd. Beneath the eaves of a hat shop, a dark figure in all leather leans against the wall. Lucien. What is he doing here? I turn and hide my face. Being alone with him again isn’t what I need right now.
but it’s what we want, the hunger insists, lolling its pitch-black tongue.
Suddenly, something black and small catches my eye. A flower? No, a rose. A black rose. It’s held by a leather-clad arm, and my eyes meet Lucien’s cowled face, his eyes full to the brim with detached amusement as he holds the rose out to me. My twisted mind tries to celebrate—he’s offering me a gift.
don’t be naïve. The hunger laughs. the little prince is already naive enough for the both of you.
“A beautiful rose for a beautiful lady,” he says. A pair of noble women passing by looks me up and down, giggling madly and clucking their tongues in equal turn. A rose given to a noble lady by a commoner is scandalous in the extreme. Lucien holds the rose out more insistently when a flustered courier boy walks by, and I tempestuously fight the urge to take the flower. There’s only one place in Vetris black roses grow—in front of Y’shennria’s manor. This is a ploy. He’s trying to remind me of my mistakes, of my lie of pretending to be an Y’shennria—a Firstblood noble. Any gift from him isn’t because he particularly likes me—we established that in the tower. He must be doing this to get to me. To hurt me.
you lied. you deserve this pain—
I smile as I take the rose, careful not to touch his gloved hand. I look at the soft petals for a moment, enjoying the familiar scent that tugs at my unheart, and then throw the rose over my shoulder, directly into a muddy puddle.
“A terrible gift for a terrible gifter.” I smile at him lightly.
There’s a moment where I think I can see the true Lucien—hurt running across his face. But it evaporates like a raindrop in the sun. He half sighs, his eyes now amused again.
“We have things to clarify.”
“Do we have to clarify them here, in front of everyone?” I ask.
“How improper of me,” he drawls. “You’re right. A true thief never does business in the light. My hiding holes are, of course, your hiding holes.” He motions to an alley behind the hat shop. “This way.”
Half wary, I trail after him over the cobblestones, thick with grime the farther we get from any main road. Is he guiding me to a setup with Fione and Malachite waiting again? He leads me through a dizzying pattern of turns: betwixt barrels and crates, beneath laundry lines, and around wells and giant water-spewing snake statues, and finally to a derelict building in a forgotten square—still standing, but molded and nearly eaten by termites, the doorframe remaining on what seems like toothpicks as we duck beneath it.
The late sunlight plays dappled beams of gold through the ruined roof and onto the creaking floor as Lucien crosses it, seating himself on the only sturdy thing on the premises—a stone hearth in the center.
He holds his arms out. “Welcome. You’re the first visitor I’ve had here. I’d tell you to take your shoes off, but at this point, a dirty boot would be the least of this place’s problems.”
“Does it have an ambush set up in it, too?” I ask.
Lucien shakes his head. “I know I might seem a little dense to you, after you deceived me about being human for two entire weeks,” he says. “But even I know not to use the same surprise twice.”
I tamp down the instant urge to flinch. He really won’t let me live it down. And for good reason. But still, he could be lying. Malachite could be behind any corner again. Half of me bleeds with the pain of not being able to trust him as he can’t trust me. He doesn’t owe me honesty, after all. Soft cooing makes me look up just then—a flutter of dove wings beating the air above the roof. I watch a white feather float down to the floor, and I reach out just in time to catch it. I can feel Lucien’s eyes on me, like two spots of uncomfortably hot fire, even as I stroke the soft thing for some comfort.
“That black rose,” I say. “Was it from Y’shennria’s manor?”
I hear him chuckle. “Obviously.” There’s another moment of quiet, and then, “On nights it was hard to be in the palace, I would stand outside the manor and watch the lights of your bedroom. The black rose bushes were always in my way. But over time, I began to feel a fondness for them. Seeing a black rose meant I was near you, near the one person who understood me.”
The sharp pain in my lungs makes my breathing ragged, but I recover. I have to recover.
“What is it we need to clarify?” I ask stiffly. “As you might’ve guessed from stalking me every day to South Gate, I’m a busy woman.”
Lucien swallows hard. “Very well.” He stands but keeps his distance. “The Tree.”
I snort. “That’s all anyone talks about anymore—”
“I knew about the Tree before anyone,” Lucien interrupts. “Before even Varia knew.”
I turn the dove feather over curiously. “What?”
“Fione told me Varia’s been having nightmares about the Tree. That you saw it last night. I was the first one to ever see her have a nightmare about it.”
I try not to betray the interest in my voice. “When?”
“I was seven,” he says. “She was ten. We were in the palace’s nursery.”
“That’s so young. She wasn’t a witch then, right?”
He shakes his head, the sun catching on his black cowl and illuminating the rich darkness. “No. But I reme
mber the night it happened for the first time. And it kept happening. Mother brought every polymath to her, desperate to diagnose her, to ‘fix’ her. It was the best kept secret in the palace—that Varia was ‘sick.’”
“Why?”
“Father was worried,” Lucien says, and cracks his neck leisurely. “You’ve heard of the assassins Malachite deals with, trying to kill me. The royal family isn’t liked. And the whole court knows the rumor that we are a witch family. Any display of oddness was Father’s greatest fear.”
“So he didn’t want rumors of Varia’s nightmares to get out,” I muse. “Because it would make the nobles uneasy.”
“Uneasy at best,” he agrees. “And at worst, it would give them cause to dispose of the d’Malvanes. Witches are never trusted in Vetris—no matter who they are.”
“So your mother brought polymaths to her?” I lead. He nods, shaggy bangs nodding with him.
“They all said she was mad. Father refused to believe it, but it kept happening. He used to order the servants to drug her with moonroot every night so she could sleep without hurting herself.”
I’m silent. Lucien isn’t.
“On bad nights, she used to sleepwalk.” His eyes get a glassy, far-off look in them. “I remember waking up and finding her on the balcony staring off into space more than once.”
I go still, my fist clenching around the feather. So that night…she was dreaming.
Lucien presses on. “I’d try to wake her, but all she would do is mutter about the Tree. They got worse, the older she got. She broke both of her wrists when she was thirteen.”
“Are they just nightmares?” I ask. “Or could they be magical?”
He shrugs. “I have no clue. The polymaths had no clue, either—they study magical symptoms in order to combat them, certainly, but they’d never seen anything like this. So we were led to believe they weren’t magical. They were just part of the way her mind worked in sleep.”
