by Sara Wolf
“Lucien?” the king demands of Malachite, searching the beneather’s face as my struggling lungs collapse on themselves. Lucien was by South Gate. I just saw him there—
dying. The hunger laughs. he’s burning alive without ever knowing how you feel about him—
“Not in the palace,” Malachite responds. “I’m going.”
The king nods, the whole exchange clipped and with much unsaid. Malachite immediately turns on his heel, sprinting with his long gait out of the cavern.
“W-Witchfire?” Sarcomel stammers.
The Minister of the Blood and the Minister of the Brick share a tense look. Gavik’s witchfire around the temple of Kavar two weeks ago was fake. But this? Gavik isn’t able to orchestrate such a thing anymore, and the Ministers look too shocked to have done it. Varia would never let Gavik do it again, and she would never do it herself and draw all that attention.
Which means the likelihood it’s real witchfire is…
I turn to King Sref. “Your Majesty, I’m going, too. I’ll come back for the inquiry, but Lucien—”
“As long as I draw breath, Lady Zera, I will never allow one such as you to be his bride,” King Sref murmurs, so close I can see the crow’s feet wrinkling his serious eyes. “Even so, you would protect him?”
“Yes,” I blurt. The king burrows his gaze into me, like a burr stuck beneath skin. I can feel every movement of his eyes like a polymath’s scalpel slicing inside my body. And then, when he’s torn me to pieces, he nods.
“Then go. Do not let my son come to harm, or it will be the last mistake you make.”
I spin and leave his cold threat lingering behind in the colder throne room.
I hear the chaos before I see it.
The footsteps of servants rush about frantically, all of them gathering to press themselves against the north-facing windows of the palace. Their chittering is hushed and wobbly, the words witches and the war dancing frantically in the air. The crowds are so dense and tightly packed along the hall windows that I couldn’t worm my way into any of them even if I wanted to.
I can’t afford to stop and gawk, regardless. Lucien is down there.
Was it Varia? Or have the witches launched the first attack of the war? The lawguards of the palace seem to believe the latter, and we brusquely sidestep one another as they rush to arm themselves and establish a perimeter. It’s been thirty years since any Cavanosian has fought Heartless, and only the elder ones seem to be able to keep their heads, walking calmly.
I hear several younger guards in passing as I race down the hall.
“—barricade the doors and windows?”
“Barricades don’t stop witches, fool, they teleport right in—”
“—the full army hasn’t arrived yet. If they brought enough Heartless, they could overrun us—”
“Get yourselves to your posts!” a commanding officer suddenly shouts, and the chittering lawguards all scatter like well-armored flies.
I finally make it to the palace entrance and freeze.
From the steps of the palace, the height of it, it’s easy to see where exactly the witchfire is—smoke billowing up in huge plumes from the area near South Gate. The plumes are so high they dwarf the magic-detecting Crimson Lady in the middle of the common quarter. If I squint, there, against the ominous crimson sunset, I can see the barest lick of a dark, shadowy flame flickering among the wooden rooftops. I quash panic and try to think. Do I even have time to find Fione or Varia? Would either of them even be able to make a difference? Varia could teleport us to South Gate, but anyone seen doing anything slightly magical at this particular moment would probably be beaten to death. I have to go alone.
If Lucien dies…
I swallow cold fear and move my feet faster down the palace steps. He won’t die. I won’t let him get in the way of my heart. But neither will I let him die.
Taking a carriage isn’t the right move; too much panic will clog the streets. The lawguards at the bridge crossing between the noble quarter and the common quarter likely won’t let anyone through either way. Which means the only viable option to get to Lucien is the one Y’shennria showed me—across the aqueduct pipes of the river that separate the quarters. I race down the steps and over the palace grounds, heaving by the time I reach the riverside.
Even the noble quarter roads are frantic—carriages and lawguards on horses racing to and fro. But it works in my favor; no one stops me on my way. I slick my sweaty hair back to see properly and clamber down the side of the algae-covered wall, letting myself hang before falling onto a brass pipe. I follow the pipes as they intertwine, hulking and massive and rusted green, like petrified snakes.
I’ve almost made it across when I hear a lawguard from the noble shore shouting, “You there! No one’s allowed on that! Come back at once!”
“Gods, I wish I knew more than one beneather swear,” I mutter under my haggard breath, pulling myself up and onto another pipe. My eyes catch a far-set pipe on the common side of the shore—if I jump far enough, I could make it and throw the lawguard off. But it’s a massive jump, the river rushing furiously below. If I don’t make it, I’ll be swept away and lose precious time.
“Stop!” The guard’s shouting grows louder as he determinedly crosses his first pipe.
“You obviously don’t know me, sir,” I shout, pushing my sweaty hair off my eyes again. “I need at least three ‘pleases’ and one grovel before I do anything at all!”
Pivoting to face the pipe, I breathe. In and out.
Of the silence, in the silence.
Standing on a rusty pipe, fleeing a guard while running toward a boy I cannot possibly have is an awfully strange place to get a revelation, but I’ve never been one for normality. This is what it means to be silent, what Reginall, who taught me to Weep, meant—in the middle of cacophony, in the midst of the chaos of living, to find that moment where the only thing that matters is what one does next. The past doesn’t matter. The future doesn’t matter. All that has meaning is the moment.
This is what silence means—to live only for the next moment.
I brace my legs and shoot forward. My thighs pump with all my condensed might and the world falls away as I leap off the edge of the pipe.
The river churns and peaks white below me in what feels like slowed time, my arms and legs flailing as if they were submerged in sugar syrup, and then all at once my palm bashes into hard metal, my fingers giving off faint cracks as they break. My momentum swings me forward, into the curve of another metal pipe level with my chest, all the wind knocking out of me as my ribs shatter. The Laughing Daughter’s magic gets to work instantly, but pulling myself up with broken fingers and a fractured palm…the pain is blinding tridents of lightning pulsing up my arm, into my spine and back again. I inhale wetly and pull up blood from my punctured lung, but that breath is just enough energy for me to throw my other hand forward and pull myself up the rest of the way.
By the time I struggle to my feet, I’m healed. The smell of smoke burns my nose, the shouts and screams of Vetrisians ringing between every building in the common quarter. I get my bearings quickly—the Crimson Lady to the east of me means South Gate is down the next road.
My earlier hunch was right—the roads moving away from South Gate are entirely congested, men shouting as they elbow people out of the way, wide-eyed celeon with their ears flat on their heads and their hackles raised, babies bleating cries as terrified parents shuffle them farther from harm’s way, and lawguards trying to keep all the chaos from erupting into full-blown panic. I’m the only one moving toward the gate, and thankfully the lawguards are too preoccupied with preventing the imminent stampede to stop me.
My eyes frantically search the crowd for Lucien, but there’s no hint of a dark leather cowl anywhere to be seen. He can’t still be at the hat shop? I head toward it, the smoke growing thick as winter fog as I fi
ght against the current of people.
Unlike the roads leading into South Gate, the very heart of it is empty. The crackle of flames roars loud in my ears, waves of heat battering my exposed skin, and as I turn a watertell corner, I finally see it for the third time in my life.
Witchfire.
13
Prayer
Nightsinger kept a hearth of witchfire broiling at all times, the black flames keeping the three hearts of Crav, Peligli, and me warm in their jars. The hearts of Heartless must be kept warm at all times, by spell or by flame, or in Nightsinger’s case, both. Witchfire is a spell-flame. I watch the great gouts of shadowy black fire devour the modest wood of the Vetrisian buildings, cracking beams and scattering embers, knowing that no amount of water can douse them. Witchfire only ever stops burning when the witch who sparked it desires it, or if they die.
If Lucien is burning, he will never stop burning.
if he dies, he will leave you behind just as you so wish.
The hunger’s words only spur me faster down the road. I refuse to even entertain the validity of what it says this time. He won’t die. He won’t.
He might not be mine ever again, but I refuse to live in a world without him in it.
Stray embers catch on my hair and on my dress, burning through cloth and skin—forever burning—but I ignore them and press onward into the sunset-lit alleys.
I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to forget me. That thought burns hotter in me than the witchfire burns on me. For all my insistence he move on, he hate me, I don’t want him to. I want him to be with me, for us to be together. I don’t want to lose him, even though I know I must, and it’s tearing me apart.
The thick smoke obscures my otherwise keen sense of direction, and the vague outline of the white wall surrounding Vetris looms into view above my head. I hurriedly look for any distinctive markers and find the very edge of the South Gate, the scaffolding sticking out of the smoke. I briefly glimpse the door leading to the valkerax, and pause. Yorl and the other celeon are too far down and surrounded by stone and metal—they’ll be safe.
The smoke is so thick now, it blears my eyes, my lungs struggling to breathe. I know I have only a sliver of time before I die from inhaling this much smoke, but so does Lucien. And he does not grow back. The heat slicks my skin with sweat, and I stagger as I draw close to the hat shop. The fire condenses here in a suffocating pit, the eye of the inferno. A building collapses as I pass, wood and tile crashing to the ground, and sharp screaming cuts through the fire’s roaring as people pour out from the building’s basement, led by a familiar figure in black leather.
He’s still alive! Thank the gods! My unheart soars, the hunger mocking it.
traitor.
“Go!” Lucien bellows, motioning to the open road away from South Gate, and not needing to be told twice, the people flee, aprons and coats clutched to their mouths and noses. Lucien’s cowl protects him somewhat but not enough, and I watch in horror as he immediately turns to enter another burning building. I dash up to him and pull his arm.
“Hey! Your Foolishness!”
Lucien staggers, his eyes widening. “You—what are you doing here?”
“Vacationing! What do you think?” I shout. “We need to get out of here!”
The black witchfire flickers off his darker hair. He says nothing, his eyes flat. He’s not wearing the princely mask or purposefully ignoring me, he’s…not seeing me. His eyes are unfocused, glassy. Before I can ask what’s wrong, he turns, going for another building on fire.
“Oh no you don’t!” I lunge for him, pulling him back by the arm. To my surprise, his body gives easily, with so little resistance he nearly staggers backward into me. He’s panting, sweating, and clutching my arm like it’s the last rung of a ladder dangling over a pit. How long has he stayed here, helping people out of the fire? He’s on the edge of exhaustion—his heart for his people bigger than his body can sustain.
“Hold on!” I shout, lacing his arm over mine and shouldering his weight as I lead him backward. We need fresh air, and fast.
“You,” Lucien murmurs, his face so close to mine I can see the sweat carving over his cheekbones. “Do you hate me?”
“Right, yes—because now is a great time to discuss our relationship! When everything is on literal fire!” I snap, dragging him over the cobblestones. “Where in the afterlife is a super-strong beneather when you need him?”
Through the loud cracking noises of fire-eaten buildings and the blood thrumming in my own ears, I startle at the feel of something smooth and callused on my cheek. A hand. Lucien’s hand, missing a glove and resting there lightly as his unfocused eyes focus on me all at once.
“Please—stay in my dreams, at least.”
My chest constricts with an irrational pain. He’s talking gibberish, and uneasily I fear he might be beyond help. His hand falls limply to his side, and my insides fall with it. No, no, no—
“Stay alive,” I shout at him, hysterics thinning my voice. “You hear me? I haven’t given you permission to die, Lucien!”
“Luc!” a sudden voice bellows. Malachite comes sprinting out from a wall of fire, the flames rolling off his skin and chainmail like water off oil. He grabs the whole of Lucien’s body from me and throws him over one shoulder, the prince’s deadweight nothing to the beneather. “This way!”
Too tired to question, I follow his long-eared, hazy outline through the smoke. The world spins, but I clutch at Malachite’s hot chainmail, looping my fingers through it as a lead even as it scorches my skin. There’s a break in the fire thanks to a stretch of old stone buildings, and by the time we get through it and into a street dotted with confused, wailing citizens watching the flames, my dizziness is gone.
Malachite puts Lucien into a waiting carriage and motions frantically for me. “We have to get him to a polymath! Hurry!”
I grant myself one moment of staring at Lucien’s resting eyes, his eyelashes against his cheeks, the outline of his slack body on the carriage seat. He wanted to save his people. He drove himself to this edge to get them out of the fire. He’s maybe died for them.
But me? I can’t die at all, and the fire still rages.
“Go on without me.” I wave. “Go!”
Malachite doesn’t need to be told twice. He slams the carriage door shut and the driver maneuvers around the crowd at an alarming speed. I watch them go, and then turn back, walking into the fire and the flaming buildings the prince was so worried about.
killing yourself for him, to the very end.
…
I manage to get four more people out of the top level of their buildings, drawing on what little I can of the hunger to push beams aside and pull grown men over the cobblestones. Finally, as the fourth person staggers away, I collapse in the entryway of a building, the smoke making the world go black. Faintly, through my dying eyes, I feel burning and see the black fire spreading up my legs, over my body. It burns. I can feel my hair burning up, blood and pus and fat baking beneath my skin.
“Fire…” I whisper. “For their thralls.”
The smoke doesn’t kill me fast enough, the fire consuming my sluggish body in a wave of agonizing heat I can’t even muster the energy to escape. My skin goes black, cracking like dried earth, my body twitching as the fire eats through my muscles and bone. Varia’s magic tries desperately to heal me, but the fire is never satisfied, roaring through my body as if it’s nothing more than kindling, energy for it to feed on.
Finally, a hunger greater than my own.
Sometimes, when death hurts especially hard, my mouth whimpers unbidden things, begging the gods for my mother. My father. Someone. Anyone.
The fire rages, consuming me, consuming my small, scared voice.
The last thing I see is the white wall surrounding South Gate, the brass door I walk through every morning taunting me. The
valkerax is down there. I’m so close to my heart, and yet still so far.
Finally, mercifully, I die.
It takes magic longer to heal a burned Heartless, but eventually, it does. I wake up to ashes surrounding me, the house I collapsed beneath now nothing more than a pile of black. The fire continues to rage, but it’s moved on, beyond South Gate’s immediate vicinity, eating up the roofs of distant buildings. My clothes are gone but Father’s sword is at my side, the metal hot and singeing my hands as I pick it up. The brass door that leads to the the valkerax still stands strong, taunting.
I stare at it as best my re-forming eyes can. I’ve died a dozen ways. And fire is, still, the worst of all. My head is reeling, my body tingling like it’s being stabbed countless times even as it heals. Someday, someday soon, I won’t have to keep dying like this. Someday, the agony of being brought back after terrifying pain won’t ever be a part of my life again.
“I’m coming, Father,” I murmur through my chapped lips, staring at his rusted sword in my hand. “For you and Mother.”
My body is nearly whole, and I stagger to my slowly healing charred feet and make for the road again before the smoke can kill me once more.
By the time I make it to the bustling street, every last bit of my charred skin is healed. A kind celeon sees me walking out of the flames and throws a blanket around my naked body. I stagger back to the palace among flying rumors, displaced families, and fearful, heavily armed guards harassing the populace. They beat down doors, loudly interrogating anyone who catches their eye. The Vetrisian soldiers from the army outside the walls trickle in to give support in the form of more intimidation and patrols wandering the streets, and between the waves of my exhaustion, my heart sinks—the knife’s edge the war has teetered on will come ever closer in the wake of this witchfire. Nightsinger, Crav, Peligli, Y’shennria—the danger of war and death is looming ever closer to them.
