by Sara Wolf
His massive green eyes narrow, ears flattening. He lowers his voice and finally leans in. “We’ve realized there might be a leak in our unit.”
I swallow. “Like, a spy?”
“Someone leaking information,” he corrects tactfully.
“Okay, yes, I’ll admit it; I had to tell Malachite there was a valkerax—”
“Not that sort of information,” Yorl interrupts. “More detailed than just the existence of a valkerax below South Gate.”
More detailed? I knit my lips before starting, “Who are they leaking information to?”
Yorl won’t meet my gaze, but he sniffs and rolls up his finished parchment. “We’re not sure. But we’re so close to having the valkerax Weep, it hardly matters much. If we move with haste, this nuisance will become nonexistent. Which is why Varia is pushing us so.”
He’s being evasive. “I helped you bring Ev back, Yorl!” I stamp my foot. “I think I deserve a little more than a hand wave! Paw wave. Whatever!”
The celeon nudges his glasses higher on his nose. “We have a job to do. Varia wants us to cut the valkerax today and be done with it.”
As he passes me a second vial, he gets up and heads toward the gate. I stare at the clear vial in my palm, the mosslight from the wall reflecting into the liquid as a sickly violet. Yorl is being evasive. He thinks…they think I could be one of the possible leaks, don’t they? I would be evasive with the person I thought was a leak, too. But I haven’t told anyone anything. I’ve been true to my word—my every command—both with and against my own will. I stayed strong, even when Lucien and Fione and Malachite were questioning me.
Yes, Lucien somehow knew about Weeping, but he didn’t find that out from me. I never said a single word about it aloud. I told Fione about the valkerax but not about what we were doing down here. I gave Lucien the diary page, but that was after he already knew about the “Hymn of the Forest,” and therefore about the Bone Tree. No one knows Varia is having me teach the valkerax to Weep specifically to find it. No one.
I get up slowly, pulling the white mercury sword from the ground where Yorl laid it beside me.
The other chimes were just as willing. Evlorasin’s words whirl in my head. I’m kicking myself now for not asking Varia what any of that meant, but if she thinks I’m a leak, there’s no possible way she’ll tell me. I’m simultaneously the crux of her operation and a potential threat to it, even if I still don’t understand how.
Yorl orders the gate to be opened, and we duck inside. The heavy breathing of Evlorasin is audible the second we walk in, and its rancid breath heralds its approach. My hands are shaking around the white mercury sword, and I feel dizzy.
My skin tingles hot with Evlorasin’s heat behind me, and I turn to it.
“Where do you want the cut?” I ask. “It should be somewhere that penetrates down to the bloodstream easily.”
“The throat of the river is the weakest part,” Evlorasin says. “Where earth and water mix.”
I feel blindly, Evlorasin guiding me with the occasional push of an undulating whisker to my back. I grope for the throat skin—much thinner and slicker than its scales.
“Evlorasin will need to eat a lot more often,” I announce to the darkness, to Yorl. “And if it loses control completely—”
“We have failsafes in place,” Yorl cuts me off. Failsafes. He means ways to kill it if everything goes wrong.
“We will control the song,” Evlorasin insists, as if reassuring me. I’m quiet, my thoughts loud enough for the both of us.
Evlorasin isn’t ready. I’m not ready. But we have to be.
I place one hand on the valkerax’s breast, holding the blade there. Once I do this, Evlorasin might Weep, and it might give the Bone Tree to Varia. She will hold command over all the valkerax in the Dark Below. The book Lucien gave me—its pictures flash through my eyes, thousands of skeletons, charred to ash. There’ll be no going back. Am I just sending Ev to a new, horrible master?
Am I just sending Varia to the death she seems to want so badly?
“The Starving Wolf is sad,” Evlorasin rumbles. “Do not mourn. Flesh will always meet bone.” When I don’t say anything, it hisses, “When we are Weeping, taste of our living blood.”
This gets me out of my own head, and I blink up at it. “Why?”
“You have given us a ‘nicking-name.’ We will give you the blood promise. We will not give it to the Laughing Daughter. She is not the rain to our drought. But you, Starving Wolf, have tasted of our drought, our darkness. In you, the blood promise will remain true.”
Varia talked about a “blood promise,” and it was the point of contention in their argument earlier, but I still don’t know what it is or what it means. It sounds important.
“You should give it to Varia,” I insist. “She’s the one who—”
Evlorasin’s fangs clack against one another. “It is the Starving Wolf or nothing.”
I inhale, sharp. I can’t have nothing. How bad can it be? It’s just a little blood—it won’t kill me. Nothing can kill me. I give a slow, uneasy nod, and Evlorasin seems to relax, the clacking fading.
“Commence, Zera,” I hear Yorl say. “We are ready.”
22
The Song’s End
I brace myself against the valkerax and press, white blade first, into Evlorasin’s skin. I feel the thinner, more flexible scales peel apart beneath the sword as it moves. The valkerax doesn’t so much as let out a whine, standing strong as the metal slices its flesh. Something so small must be like a fly’s bite to something this big. Warmth oozes down my wrist, and when I pull away, Evlorasin’s voice rumbles.
“Now we are promised. We feel a tremor in the earth before it arrives.” There’s a pause. “The song is becoming louder and stronger.”
“You can’t let it overwhelm you.” I cling to Evlorasin’s mane, as if I have any control over the huge wyrm at all. “They’ll give you a lot of food, and that helps, but you have to practice. Now, before it gets too loud. You are of the silence.”
“We are in the silence.” The valkerax finishes the words we’ve practiced. There’s a growl deep in its throat that emerges from the depths, faint and only getting stronger.
“Focus!” I back up. “Just the blackness, nothing else. No thoughts, no feelings—just the silence.”
“Silence.” The valkerax chatters its fangs eerily again, breathing growing labored. Suddenly I’m shoved from behind by a massive coil of something—its tail? I collapse on the ground, my ribs crying out in agony. I can hear Evlorasin just above me, panting.
“It hungers.” The valkerax snarls. “It hungers for everything in this world!”
“You have to fight it!” I yell, each word knocking the breath from my aching lungs all over again.
“Zera!” I hear Yorl shout. “It’s going for the gate! You need to stop it, or else I’ll have to—”
“You want to be free, don’t you?” I scream out to Evlorasin, jumping to my feet and staggering across the arena to where I can hear it moving. “You can’t let the song win! You are the silence!”
“It is…so loud,” Evlorasin snarls, and a sudden earthquake jolts me to my knees as the valkerax throws itself against the gate, scales meeting metal in one powerful impact. Another quake, and the metal gate gives a mighty screech.
“It’s going to break!” Yorl calls out frantically. “Ready the greatlance!”
No—no, they can’t kill it.
I scrabble forward, following the scent of rotting things and throwing myself onto the valkerax’s body. I catch its back leg, clinging to the ankle as it moves—taking steps back, as if preparing to ram the gate again.
My mind flashes; what stopped me? Back in the clearing, what was I thinking just before I Wept for the first time? I had to protect Lucien. That’s the only thing I wanted. Everything boiled down to one thing, one moment;
the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world.
“Evlorasin! You want to fly!” I scream. The hind leg stops moving, and I blurt, “Above the Dark Below, in the sky-home! But you have to be silent!”
The hind leg suddenly swings around, my brain careening in my skull as the momentum almost flings me off. I dig in with my claws and hold fast.
We are not the hunger.
i am all you have, the dark voice seethes.
“The song only wants to consume!” My shouts are hoarse now. “It wants you to feed it, focus on it, obsess over it! But it’s not you! The real you wants to fly!”
“It hurts,” Evlorasin rasps. “The song is the ocean at full tide and it hurts. It will hurt us infinitely if we are silent!”
Doubt. Fear. Threats. The hunger’s trying to drag even this majestic beast down into the depths with it.
“You can see trees again, and—and the color of sunset, and feel the wind on your face! That’s what you want, isn’t it? More than anything? You told me! You told me that’s what you want!”
The hind leg tenses, the titanic muscles condensing for a leap straight forward, a lunge that will surely puncture through the gate like an arrow through parchment.
“We are…of the silence,” Evlorasin pants, sounding every inch as if it’s struggling with an iron weight on its chest.
“You are in the silence!” I encourage. “You are in control. You are not the song! You are Evlorasin!”
“The song….isn’t us.” A pause, and then a strangled sentence. “Is…going…possible?”
“Yes!” I yell into the darkness. “Going is possible!”
I cling to Evlorasin’s hind leg, praying. Old God, New God, God or no God—help this one. Help us.
Suddenly there’s movement, the hind leg stepping forward as the sound of something huge cutting through the air follows. White light. I can see white light glowing faintly from behind my shoulder. Like I’m a rusted puppet, I turn my head to look.
There, looming inches from my face, are five white eyes fixed on me. Five white eyes, each bigger than my head and each glowing faintly, the veins gray and spidery. And in the dim light they give off, I can see the rivers below each eye. Five rivers of blood, falling and curling around one another as they wind their way down the valkerax’s scaled face.
Evlorasin is Weeping.
“Starving Wolf.” Its voice echoes calmly, none of the snarling hisses I’ve grown used to attached to it. The voice is smooth and even, clear in its bell-like reverberations and almost musical. “I am free.”
Not “we,” like it says always, not “us.” “I.”
Tears grow hot in my eyes, and the rush of relief is so heady, I laugh. It’s Weeping. All the pain, all the dying, all the sadness—it’s over. Evlorasin is Weeping, and that means it’s free. That means my heart is mine again.
“Ev,” I breathe. “You did it.”
All at once, the darkness in the arena evaporates, replaced with an ethereal rainbow glow that fills the room. My eyes adjust and I gape in awe at the light shimmering in ribbons as it winds through the stone arena. It hangs like a boreal mist, gently illuminating everything—Yorl’s stunned face, the dented gate, a massive spearhead mechanism built into the ceiling poised to thrust down on us, the aghast celeon guards perched on the tallest reaches of the arena, bows and sedative-tipped arrows beginning to fall to their sides.
My breath stops when I realize the light is radiating from Evlorasin itself, concentrated in its grand white feathered mane now standing on end, like a glowing white halo around its face. I can see the length of the valkerax properly now, in its full glory—so long it could circle the Temple of Kavar, so strong and mighty it could break any human in two with a single swipe. It’s power incarnate—beauty incarnate.
Claws as thick as halberd blades scrape the ground as it stares at me. “Drink of my blood. I give you this gift of myself, so that the Wolf might never howl alone again.”
Shaken down to my core, I force myself to blink again, move again. The words are caring in a macabre, twisted way, and the valkerax nods its massive head toward the white mercury blade in my hand. I raise my finger tentatively to the sword, dabbing my fingers in the blood and then to my lips. It smells like acid and honey all at once. I try it on my tongue, and it smacks of brass and salt going down—much stronger than the serums Yorl’s given me. Evlorasin’s long whiskers whip the air in what I think might be happiness.
“I am you,” Evlorasin says. “We sing the same and Weep the same. My blood is your blood. This is never-goodbye.”
The sudden numbness of the serum’s death creeps into my legs and arms as I smile wider and whisper, “Never-goodbye.”
The numbness forces my grip to retract, and I fall off Ev’s thick hind leg and land flat on my back on the arena floor, dust floating up all around me. I can hear Yorl yelling faintly, my eyes beginning to fail and blurring uncontrollably. With a heavy whump of air in my ear, something above me—long and white and glowing like a crystal refracting rainbow sunlight—starts to rise into the arena’s ceiling.
Shouting. The sound of stone cracking thunderously and metal crashing. And then, darkness.
I wake up to a lighted underground—on the same bedroll I always do. The oil lamps are lit again, the whole underground brightly visible. Yorl’s sitting next to me, tail curled around his feet and watching me like a hawk. Behind him, the celeon guards pass huge chunks of rock to one another, a chain working methodically to clear out the caved-in arena. My body’s a little dusty but whole, healed.
I move to lean against the wall. Yorl starts, his paws helping me up even as his brows furrow.
“It escaped,” he says, a tinge of marvel to his voice. “But you—I saw you lick its blood. It gave you the blood promise, didn’t it?”
“I don’t—” I massage my throbbing forehead. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Where is the Bone Tree?” Yorl asks.
The Tree? How should I know where it is? I’m not the valkerax. I’m about to laugh in his face when the throb in my forehead suddenly morphs into a keening pain, like a gargantuan bell rung once, but then it clears, and I can see something in my mind—in my memories. It’s not a new thought. It’s a thought that feels as if it’s always been here in my head. A huge, placid bend in a long river, a dense jungle of deep green palms and softwood trees heavy with golden fruit. On a sun-drenched stone by the river creak the branches of a bright white tree.
The Bone Tree.
It’s made up of thousands of smooth, bleached lengths, the trunk formed by interlocking giant bones of all shapes—joints, long leg bones, jawbones fitting neatly into one another like a puzzle. It keeps going, up and up, glowing like snow under the high sun. Its bone roots drape over the rock it sits on, gently undulating with a life of their own. The willowlike branches arc high and jut out in all directions from the trunk as loose, drooping ropes made of huge vertebrae, shin bones, and at the very ends of each branch—like a demented fruit—a valkerax finger bone, tipped with a giant, wicked claw that sways in the breeze.
It’s not just that I can see it. I’m there. I remember it—I know it. I feel like I’ve always known it.
I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face, the humid air on my skin, the shrieking animal cries as they emanate from the jungle nearby. And I know the tree. I understand its intent. It’s going to stay here until the sun hits noon, and then it will be gone.
This is the Bone Tree. And I know where it is.
My mouth opens to tell Yorl, his wide emerald eyes waiting. His very whiskers vibrate with anticipation—the culmination of all his efforts resting with me.
I could lie. I could. It would spare Varia—unless she could command me to tell her. It could spare Varia’s death, and Lucien and Fione’s future pain. It could spare the drastic political upheaval the world is abo
ut to experience at the hands of Varia and her valkerax army.
But lying wouldn’t stop the war. Keeping the Bone Tree in my head wouldn’t keep Crav and Peligli and Nightsinger safe; it wouldn’t put Y’shennria or the millions of Cavanos’s people—human and witch—out of harm’s way.
And it wouldn’t get me my heart back.
Lying wouldn’t get me Mother and Father, or my humanity, back.
“There’s a dense jungle, hot and humid,” I finally say. “Ten spans east of a long river’s biggest bend. It’s sitting on a rock. Waiting. Waiting until noon.”
Yorl leans back against the wall, his feline face lit up by the mosslight from the outside and with ease from within. I see him smile. Smile, really and truly, for the first time.
He puts his paw up to his eyes and massages them tiredly. “It’s done,” he whispers, sounding exhausted. “Grandfather…I did it. It’s done.”
“Why—” I reach over to Yorl and grab his shoulder. “What is this? What did Ev do to me?”
Yorl doesn’t say anything, his body limp and soft. I shake him.
“Yorl! Yorl, tell me, godsdamn you!”
He looks up at me slowly, his green eyes fluttering open. I’ve never seen him so relaxed, so soft. He always had some metal stick up his bum, but now…
“The valkerax know where the Bone Tree is at all times,” Yorl says.
“I know that!” I snap. “Varia was supposed to—she was supposed to ask the sane valkerax—the Weeping valkerax, so how do I—”
“The valkerax, before they were chained by the Old Vetrisians, communicated not with words as we do,” Yorl says smoothly, “but with blood. The concoction I gave you, that was derived from valkerax blood. You drank it; it let you understand Evlorasin. And then it killed you.”
“I know that,” I start. “Malachite told me—”
The celeon cuts me off, not sharply like usual but patiently. “That’s what ingesting blood that has been taken unwillingly from a valkerax will do to a mortal.”
