by Sara Wolf
I gnaw my lip, careful to close the bag in such a way that the splinter doesn’t pierce my heart.
“I prefer bags for their…personalization.” She laughs, and my eyes fall on the threaded words on my bag and Gavik’s.
“What’s the purpose of that glass splinter?” I demand. “It could pierce my heart in there—”
“It never will. The splinter is what enchants Heartless containers so. It’s what gives them their magic. It preserves your heart and connects you to your witch. It essentially gives you your immortality.”
I think back to the glass jars in which Nightsinger kept Crav’s and Peligli’s and my hearts. That glass—each of those jars had a splinter melted down into it? Where did the splinters come from in the first place?
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter how I’m kept a prisoner. All that matters is getting out.
“Lucien’s asking about what I’m doing at South Gate,” I call. “Aren’t you worried I’ll tell him?”
“Worried?” Varia muses. “Why should I be? No one who works for me will tell him; I’ve seen to that in numerous ways. And you, certainly, won’t tell him, because he would try to stop us. And that would only imperil your chances of getting your heart back.”
I glare at the fancy carpet. She’s put in words what I’ve always known. I’d keep quiet about the valkerax forever if it meant getting my heart back. But Lucien’s stubbornness alone isn’t the biggest problem.
“They’ll find out what you’re doing,” I insist. “They’ve learned a lot about sussing out secrets while you were away. He has the know-how and Fione has the sheer cleverness to sniff out any plot you might have.”
“If that’s true,” Varia says with a sigh, “why haven’t they done so already?”
Because they’re enamored with you, I want to say. They love you like a sister, like a lover. They look up to you.
Except Varia knows that already, doesn’t she? She’s using their love to her advantage. She’s using everyone’s love, utilizing the past like a smokescreen. I must be the only one in Vetris who doesn’t think the utmost of her. It’s the only thing Gavik and I will ever have in common.
I turn on my heel and leave the room. Before I reach the door, Varia’s voice rings out from the bathroom. “Lucien will recover in several days time. If you cared to know.”
Warm relief floods me again, for the second time. “I didn’t,” I call back.
From the fading apartments behind me, I hear something that sounds faintly like a weary snort, and then, “Juvenile.”
The next morning, I wait for my carriage on the balls of my feet. It doesn’t take a polymath to realize that the number of guards stationed in the palace has soundly tripled now that a war has been officially declared. The watertells around both the palace and the noble quarter are constantly going off, spewing great sparkling fonts into the tense air as messages are passed back and forth. The nobles themselves are strangely absent from walking the palace’s gardens, and that disturbs me more than anything. They’re creatures of habit, no matter how bad things get. If they’re restricting their decadent, unaffected selves, the war must truly be here.
When the carriage comes, I watch the preparing city out the window. The ornate tailoring and jewel shops of First Street are closed, the lights off. The bakeries still deal in bread, but in a hushed way, as if they are irrationally afraid that making too much noise will summon the witches from over the wall and straight to them. The smithies and the temple are the only ones who dare to make sound above a whisper—the blacksmiths pounding mightily on their anvils and the priests crowing about the justice and retribution of the New God.
It’s there on the temple steps that I finally find the nobles, clinging fervently to the priests’ robes, begging their reassurances that they’ll be safe in the coming war. The commoners, meanwhile, are bidding their enlisted children and spouses and siblings tearful, hard goodbyes. I try not to think about their faces bloodied by my kind, scarred like Y’shennria has been scarred.
But they will be. It’s only a matter of time.
teaching this valkerax to Weep is only a matter of time, the hunger speaks.
South Gate is effectively abandoned, cold and ashy. The perimeter of the witchfire has been cordoned off by the lawguards, nervous lines of them tracing the fire’s scars. It’s at least a three block radius, encompassing what must be forty buildings at the minimum. The few caravans that are normally here in the mornings are gone, and yet the two lawguards guarding the door in the wall are still present. The devastation curdles my stomach, but I force a smile as I approach.
“Still hanging in there, gentlemen?” I ask. Neither of them responds, but one of them obliges to nod at me. They’re clearly on high alert with the war, and concerned only about business, so I give them the password and go in.
Yorl greets me with a sword when I walk into the brassy innards of the great wall. And not just any sword. The blade is pure white, and unmistakable. It’s Varia’s white mercury sword.
“We will retain the sword here, in the lab,” Yorl says. “You may ask for it whenever you see the need.”
I raise a single brow. “No payments with interest or anything?”
He snorts and starts walking. I follow him, dumbstruck, as I look the white mercury blade over. It’s one of only four blades in the world that were ever smithed with pure white mercury—a tricky process no one’s ever been able to replicate, though Gavik tried. The polymath who forged them disappeared before the Sunless War thirty years ago. White mercury inhibits magic, and pure white mercury even more so. If I cut myself with it, the link between Varia and I would weaken enough for me to Weep again, to regain just a little bit of control over myself.
I hover the blade over my forearm, but the command rings. “You will not allow yourself to be cut with a white mercury blade.”
I nearly throw the sword into the darkness before I remember just how precious it is. I need to cut the valkerax with it for it to learn how to Weep properly. If I can do that, I’ll have my heart back, and my own Weeping will become a moot point.
The war just above my head—curling like a viper ready to strike—will become a moot point.
A thousand valkerax, fangs dripping, crawling over the white wall of Vetris.
Straightening my shoulders and shaking off the terrifying image, I cling to Yorl’s paw as he leads me down the pitch-black steps. Our breathing echoes, joined by the valkerax’s deeper, louder, much slower breathing, like the respiration of the world itself. The clank of armor resounds as Yorl orders the gate opened.
“Don’t come in with me this time,” I lilt to him, downing the serum in one gulp. I feel his tail thrash in the air.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says.
“Please.” A celeon guard to my right wheezes. “J-Just go in. Before I drop the gate.”
They can lift five times their own weight, there are two of them, and yet they’re struggling—the gate must be incredibly heavy. I duck under it and hear Yorl’s claws scratching the dirt as he ducks into the arena after me.
“If you die, can I use your pelt as a cape?” I ask lightly.
“If you die, can I use your skin as a shirt?” he fires back.
“Afterlife yes,” I hiss. “That sounds so fashionable. Three caveats: wear a ruffle collar with it, dye it bright pink, and flay it off when I’m not-alive.”
“No promises,” Yorl grumbles. The great, deep breathing all around us suddenly gets closer to me, and the sound of hard scales slithering across dirt stops in front of my feet. It’s breathing properly—none of the weak gasps I’ve gotten used to.
“Starving Wolf.” The valkerax’s booming voice rasps over my ears. “You have made safely the journey back.”
I’d shift my gaze to Yorl if I could see anything at all in the darkness. Is it addressing me? If so, it’s a vast imp
rovement from the four days of nothing but aimless thrashing and speaking in nonsense.
“Yorl,” I swallow and call out. “Did you—”
“Focus, Heartless,” he barks. I inhale hugely.
“I’m going to keep returning every day, my good valkerax,” I chime, smiling into the utter blackness. “Until you learn how to Weep!” I hold up the white mercury blade. “See this? This is the physical part I was talking about. You’ve gotta be cut by this for the Weeping to work.”
“This small thing, like a spear made of snow—” A gust of hot, rancid air blows over me, concentrated near my hand holding the sword. “With a scent of dying stars. This is the blade we will hold to the throat of the song?”
“Yeah. The song will be louder, almost too loud to resist, but it’ll also be prone to your control. Which means I have to teach you how to go into the silence first.”
I pause and shake my head. I’m the one who sounds mad now. There’s a quiet, the chitter of Yorl’s quill scratching madly on his parchment pad faintly interrupting.
“The chime,” the valkerax says finally. “We heard a chime above us yesterday, when the sun was moving to meet the sea.”
Chime. The valkerax has blabbed that word enough for me to know what it means for sure: a witch.
“A chime above you?” I freeze, staring into the dark. Could it mean the witch that started the witchfire?
“How? How does one silently cut the throat of a song?”
I snap out of my own thoughts. Whatever unnerving coincidence is going on, it’s not as important as teaching this thing, as getting the warm memories in my heart back.
“All right.” I sit on the dirt. “First, you should relax.”
“A mountain-task made for the smallest rodent. A rodent without a loudly screaming voice within.”
“We’ll take it slow. That’s the whole point.” I think back to that jump across the pipes, to the moment in the clearing before I transformed into the monster and defended Lucien. “That’s how you get silent. You can’t think about many things at once. It has to be just one thing.”
“One,” the valkerax repeats. “One root, not the whole plant.”
A little thrill runs through me as I realize it’s getting what I’m saying. This is huge, compared to the last few days. “Exactly! Think of just one thing, and let that one thing become your whole world. Your whole reason for being alive.”
“A purpose of being.” I hear the valkerax curl around itself. “To defy the song that sings of barren immortality. This, we understand.”
“Great. Well, that officially makes you the smarter one, which means I’m the pretty one. Um. Not that your giant fangs and claws aren’t pretty. Because they are.”
I swear from the other side of the arena, I hear Yorl smack his paw to his forehead.
Reginall made it seem so easy when he first taught me. I tell the valkerax to listen to its own breathing, to focus on the places in its body where it feels an aching emptiness. There’s even a moment where it lets me approach, and with tense awe and fear, I run my hand along the smooth white scales of its chest, below the tuft of lionlike mane, to find the breastbone. It’s so incredibly big—one scale is as large as my entire palm. And it has thousands. The smell of it is no less rank up close, but feeling it for the first time after only hearing it flail and gnash its teeth for so long is incredible.
After a few misses in which I almost lose an arm for touching the wrong spots, we narrow down exactly where the valkerax feels empty—its left back leg. That’s got to be where the Old Vetrisians took a bone from it to add to the Bone Tree. It’s grown back since, but it feels thinner somehow.
I pan my hand back up its body, and my fingers catch on something wet on its ribs. The valkerax’s muscles twitch below my skin as I gingerly run over the spot one more time—it’s a hole.
“Yorl,” I start. “What’s a hole doing here? It’s like it’s missing one of its—”
“Scales?” Yorl offers, voice cool. “We removed a few and dropped them down Dark Below approximate shafts in order to stabilize the valkerax’s mind. The more of its body obeys the command, the saner it becomes.”
“Y-You—” I sputter.
“The war is here, Heartless, earlier than any of us expected. The world moves, and we must move with it,” Yorl insists.
“You sound like the valkerax now,” I mutter uneasily.
“What does the Ironspeaker say, Starving Wolf?” the valkerax asks.
Half disgusted at the valkerax’s wounds, my words come out short. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Those are the true names of you.” The valkerax pulls away from me, its body heat fading into the cold darkness. “You are the Starving Wolf. The warmblood watching us with many eyes is the Ironspeaker. True names hold your power.”
True names—didn’t Malachite say something about those? They were important to the beneathers, right? Varia’s true name was scratched into the pipe walls where she killed Gavik’s valkerax—the Laughing Daughter. That’s her witch name, too. Beneather runes always know true names and fill them in automatically, like magic. Old Vetrisian magic, to be more precise.
True names hold your power.
I simply thought Varia adopted that name as her witchname because she was pleased with how it sounded. But if it’s her true name, something she can’t choose…does that mean every witch uses their true name? Is Nightsinger’s true name Nightsinger?
“So you give these names—” I start.
“We do not give,” the valkerax insists, voice tearing with a growl on the end. “We merely read, but where the chimes can read only their own name when the time comes for them to find their power, we can read all.”
Is it saying witches can figure out their true name? Do you know how a witch becomes? I’d asked Fione that once, unknowing myself.
In the midst of my reeling, the valkerax continues in its jagged voice. “The script is large and endless and there is power in it, and always will we read, for it is our duty.”
“Duty?” I whisper. “To who?”
I wait on hooks, on needles. We breathe together in the darkness, and somewhere between breaths, I die.
Yorl is there at my bedroll’s side when I come back to life, the mosslight gleaming in his dilated eyes as he hands me another vial wordlessly.
“We’re getting somewhere, finally,” I say. His muzzle pulls into a sliver of a grin as he scribbles on his parchment.
“I could tell.”
I down the vial. “You look like a kid whose mother just gave him a whole year’s worth of sweetrounds.”
Yorl’s smile fades as he leads me back to the gate, but when I sense it lifted by the other celeon, I don’t hear Yorl immediately try to walk under it.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Yorl swallows audibly. “It’s— The valkerax is already waiting for us, just before the gate.”
Suddenly a hot breath billows out and over us—so close it could probably slip its head out of the gate easily. But it doesn’t. It just waits, and breathes, and then asks in its eerie voice, “Does it hurt, when the Starving Wolf dies?”
Yorl and I duck beneath the gate warily, and the celeon drop it closed with a frantic thump. The valkerax slithers back a little as I walk away from the gate, following behind me.
“Yes. But I’m used to it by now.” I shrug.
“We die only once,” it says. “But you die forever. That is your duty.”
“It’s a treat,” I agree, then realize sarcasm might not be the way to go with a valkerax, seeing as I can barely communicate with it at all. “Wait—why is dying my duty?”
The sound of something heavy whipping through the air, and then, “Life is a garden,” the valkerax insists. “In which death is required to flourish.”
mad fool, the hunger sneers. s
peaking of things it has no power over.
Bile rises in my throat, and the strangest part is I’m not sure why. Anger, confusion, sadness; all of it whirls in my head.
“Are you telling me I deserve being Heartless? That suffering is my duty?” I clench my fists. “That my mother and father deserved to die so that I could become one? Or are you just spouting nonsense again?”
There’s a long silence wherein it doesn’t offer anything else. I breathe in. No matter how incensed I am, this isn’t helping teach it Weeping. Priorities, Zera.
“Do you have a name? Something I can call you by instead of ‘Hey, valkerax’?” I ask.
There’s a moment of silence, and then, “Evlorasin,” it says, drawing the syllables out with its ancient, raspy voice.
“Evlorasin.” I try it on my tongue as I settle down in the arena cross-legged. I hear Evlorasin curl around me, long sinewy body circling over the dirt in all directions.
I breathe in, feeling the emptiness in my chest with every inch of my being. Lingering in this moment, and only this moment, clears out my head from the valkerax’s angering words. It’s nice, somehow, to practice remaining in the silence, even if it is gods-know-how-many feet below the ground and enclosed with a bloodthirsty valkerax barely kept at bay. To breathe and let everything else drift into the background—Lucien, Varia, the war—and just focus on the familiar void of my own unheart is the closest I’ve come to experiencing true peace in a long time.
I try to detail how to breathe, and the valkerax does the best it can while pained, and for a scarce moment its huge breaths even out completely, dulling to quiet inhales and exhales.
I’m so inwardly elated—we’re really, honestly getting somewhere!—that I barely hear the change. From between the silence, Evlorasin’s breathing collapses, and there comes a low growl. It reverberates into the ground, up through my bones, and into my chest. I faintly feel a shift in the still air of the arena—the valkerax isn’t curled around me anymore. It’s low, tensed, and I can hear its claws scraping the ground, rhythmic and impatient.
