by Sara Wolf
“Is this Lord Y’shennria’s handiwork, by any chance?” I ask.
“Indeed. Father thought it was so clever, he had Lord Y’shennria build one in each apartment of the Serpent Ward. They all lead to various parts of the city—mine is the only one that leads outside the wall, and only the royal family knows about it.”
Belatedly, I realize these passages must be how Lucien escapes the palace and slips into the common quarter as Whisper. Thorns curl around my unheart at the thought of him. I’m never going to see him again, am I? My hands start to shake at the thought. The Bone Tree. I let the sight of it in my memory—so lonely on top of the mountain—grow huge and consume the idea of Lucien whole.
The two of us hit the bottom of the trapdoor’s shaft, and Varia leads me along a thin tunnel barely wide enough for my shoulders. To illuminate it, she lights her wooden finger with fire, and I follow the dancing flame through the darkness. The crown princess is so close to me, I can practically hear my heart beating in the bag beneath her cape.
“Do the witches know about the Bone Tree?” I ask.
“Only the High Witches,” she answers. “And they think it’s better to leave it alone.”
“I know it might be a little late to propose this, but they could be onto something.”
Varia gives a withering scoff and continues forward. My voice is the only thing that breaks our silence.
“Lucien won’t forgive you, you know.”
She doesn’t speak, but her footsteps start moving quicker down the tunnel.
“He told me I’m his enemy now. Does that mean you are, too?”
This, and only this, makes her pause. She whirls on me, the firelight illuminating her black glass eyes. She gazes at me steadily and then turns back around and starts walking at a blazing speed, her words ringing among stone.
“I’ve spent five years preparing myself to be his enemy.”
…
The tunnel eventually lightens naturally as it slopes upward, and Varia finally pushes open a trapdoor. Dirt and pebbles and grass rain down on our heads as we exit into a bright blue sky. When I emerge, Varia pushes the door closed behind me with a hard click—the door covered in grass so flawlessly, it looks just like a curve on the side of the rolling hill.
“Finally,” Varia breathes out. She turns to me. “Give me your hand. And whatever you do, don’t move.”
I put my hand in hers. It’s cold and smooth where her wooden fingers are, at odds with her warm human palm. Just like Nightsinger, her eyes grow black from corner to corner, the wood of her fingers staining dark and void, completely colorless as she casts the spell. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out, in that usual silent prayer to the Old God that accompanies magic.
One moment, the two of us are surrounded by grassland and an impeccable azure sky, and the next time I blink, the warm air turns blisteringly cold. White appears everywhere—fresh, untouched snow—and I shade my eyes to block out the sun reflecting blindingly off it. It’s been so long since I’ve experienced real magic for myself that I almost laugh at how incredible it is. I look around only to see Cavanos far below us now, green and distant. We’re on a peak of the Tollmount-Kilstead Mountains, thousands of miles up and away from Vetris.
Varia looks nonplussed. The snow crunches under her boots as she immediately starts walking, though much slower than she was going in the tunnel. I try to keep up.
“This is as close as I could get us,” she says. “Stay near to me, and if you see any wildlife, I’m relying on you to kill it.”
“Why? Have you run out of fireballs?” I ask lightly, striding ahead of her.
“I’m saving energy,” she answers. “For the Tree.”
Without Father’s sword at my hip, I feel naked. I’ve kept the new blade and old hilt in a bag around my waist but unassembled, they’re mostly useless. Giant condors, bonemoths: those are the only two animals I’ve heard of living so high up here. I could use my teeth to kill a giant condor or two, but a bonemoth is another story. I keep my head on a swivel and my hearing sharp.
The sun beats down on us relentlessly—no relief anywhere for miles, as there aren’t any trees, and few rock formations tall enough to throw shadows. I can feel the sunburn begin to crawl over my shoulders, and I can see it happening on Varia’s nose as a bridge of red. But other than discoloration, no real dangers present themselves. I’m totally unprepared for snow, but wet boots can’t bother me anymore—not with my heart so close.
Varia stutters once, her foot catching in the deep snow on a sharp incline, and I bend my knee and motion to my back. “Hop on, Your Highness.” I smirk. “Zera’s carriage service, at your, well, service.”
“I can get there on my own two feet,” she snaps, her d’Malvane pride raising its quills in defense.
“With all your energy intact?” I lilt. Her brows furrow, and after a glare from her, I feel her pressure on my back, and I lace my arms around her knees. Despite being physically older than me, she’s not anywhere near as heavy as I am. It could be the prospect of the Tree being so close, or it could be the way I can feel her heart—or is it mine in the bag?—beating against my spine, but no matter how tiring it is, I manage to haul her up the incline. My legs ache, my fingers and toes starting to lose all feeling, but instantly I sense Varia’s magic healing me of the frostbite.
“Hey,” I demand. “Cut it out. Save your energy.”
“As if I have a choice,” she scoffs down at me.
“Why did you bring just me?” I ask. “What about Gavik? He could protect you, too. You’re so far away from him—he’s probably screaming in the middle of Vetris somewhere right now.”
“Gavik is superfluous,” she says. “I need only you to find the Tree.”
“I’m flattered,” I grunt. The sweat beading down my neck feels like a trail of ice, my skin prickling as the wind howls louder and rips faster across the snow the higher we go. My ears are open for anything condor- or bonemoth-sounding, so when the blistering crack of ice happens, I brace myself immediately and turn my head. Yet there’s nothing at all—not in the sky, not on the ground. We are the only ones in this lonely white space. But I swear I heard—
“Why are we stopping?” Varia presses, nudging me with her knees. “Hurry up—it’s just over that rise.”
I can feel her five years of want burning through her blood and into mine. I peer over the stony edge of the peak and to the abyss below us—there, standing tall against the snow, is the web of bridge-connected towers. The scholar-city of Breych, Yorl had called it. But with the way I saw the Bone Tree in my memory, I was looking down on the city from a much higher angle. Steeling my thighs, I carve up and through the mountain snow as fast as I can without dislodging Varia.
The farther up I climb, the stronger the wind howls. The flying snow goes from kissing my cheeks to stinging them ferociously, each flake like a blade of ice. And then suddenly my feet find a flat expanse of rock, and I blink away the frost from my eyelashes.
Something white looms before me, swaying gently in total anathema to the raging wind.
The Bone Tree.
It looks so much more frightening up close—far more massive, so tall I can barely see the top of it. The wicked claws at the ends of the branches scythe the air idly, as if they’re just waiting for someone with flesh to pass by. Varia stirs on my back, climbing off and staggering through the snow toward the Tree with an enraptured gaze.
“The Tree,” she whispers, the white of the bones gleaming in her fervid onyx eyes. Each bone is so huge, the ivory eerie in its seamless perfection. There’s a faint darkened aura around the Tree—noticeably dimmer than the high noon sunlight beating down on us from above. Valkerax bones suck in light, Fione had said. This isn’t a tree made sloppily—every bone has its place; every one fits to make the tree a titanic whole. Its spindly shadow stretches as long as the peak, and the air aro
und it—the closer I walk to the undulating bone roots of the tree as they clack together, the heavier the air gets. It’s the same sort of feeling I used to get walking up to Nightsinger’s room, some undeniable weight to the atmosphere around me.
But this…this weight isn’t some light, ominous reminder. It is crushing. It feels as if it’s trying to grind me down into nothing.
The crown princess clambers up the rocky peak, her hands out in front of her as she walks beneath the Tree’s massive branches. I can barely hear myself panting over the howl of the wind, so I climb after her, the air pummeling my empty chest.
“Your Highness,” I shout. “I brought you to the Tree. It’s time you hand over my heart!”
She doesn’t move an inch, her gaze fixed on the bones of the trunk, her hand hovering just above as if she’s afraid to touch it.
“Varia!” I shout, pulling at her arm. There’s an immediate sizzling sound in the air, and just over my shoulder bursts a flash of light and an intense heat. I fling myself backward, but the burning doesn’t go away, and my eyes find my cloak. A lick of black witchfire blazes on it, smoldering over the wet wool. Did she try to burn me?
I reach out and grab her arm again.
“My heart,” I insist, steeling my mind for another shock of flame. But nothing comes. The branches of the Bone Tree merely sway above us, the creaking sound identical to the creaking of ancient wood. My shoulder burns, the fire gnawing through my layers and down to my skin, but I hold fast to the princess.
“My heart!”
This gets her attention, and she whirls around. But her eyes don’t look at me—she peers into the snowstorm behind me, her gaze waiting and on guard, more owlish than ever as she searches for something on the horizon that I can’t see.
And then she grips my arm, her fingers digging like ice daggers.
“I still need you to protect me,” she murmurs, face taut. Fear? Why would the Laughing Daughter fear here, at the precipice of all her goals realized? At the cliff’s edge of becoming the world’s most powerful person, what is there to be scared of? I turn and look to where she’s looking.
Three shadows cut out of the ice and snow, their cloaks whipping in the wind. Humans. I expected leagues of bonemoths, thousands of giant condors.
“Just three?” I step forward and crack my neck leisurely. “This will take only a half, Princess. Keep my heart warm and ready.”
Varia says nothing, her whole body stiff. For a moment I think she’s frozen over, and then, as the shadows grow closer, she calls out, “You can still turn back.” Her words are almost instantly swallowed by the snow. The three figures show no sign of slowing, and she raises her voice. “Go back, now, and I will forgive you.”
My brows twist. Who is she—?
I don’t know who or what does it. It could be the Tree, or Varia herself, or the people approaching, or perhaps even merciful nature. Regardless, the wind suddenly dies. It doesn’t just stop—it keels over dead in its tracks, the snow flitting down in soft tufts once more and silence echoing in the wake of so much howling.
Without the storm, in the midst of the peak at peace, it is easy to see the faces of the three.
A girl with mousy curls on the left, her nose and cheeks like rosebuds, her hand gripping a valkerax-headed cane. A tall, white-haired, slender beneather on the right, his eyes gleaming crimson, like two pinpricks of blood amid the snow.
And there, in the middle.
Black leather. Black hair. Black eyes. A hawk, shrouded in shadow.
Prince Lucien Drevenis d’Malvane.
25
The Six Eyes
of the Wolf
and the Wyrm
The snowstorm has moved inside me.
It tears at my innards with razor ice, stupor freezing me in place and making me an easy target.
Lucien? Here? He followed us all the way here so fast? But that means—
The three come to a stop just before me, not close enough to touch but close enough to hear. Fione stares straight ahead, to Varia, Malachite staring at the Tree. And Lucien looks right at me.
“Do not,” the prince calls, his gaze never moving from my face, “put your hand on that Tree, Varia.”
“I told you to go back, brother!” I hear Varia shout, her voice wavering. “This is my responsibility, not yours!”
I watch Malachite slowly shrug his broadsword off his back, assuming that low battle stance I saw with the valkerax. But this time, he’s not looking at a white wyrm barreling down a tunnel. He’s looking at me.
Lucien says nothing, his stare burrowing straight into my core.
Fione is the first to move. She steps forward, voice clear. “No one has been able to control the Tree forever, Varia.”
“Oh, Fione.” Varia laughs, but the sound is uneasy. “The Old Vetrisians very much did!”
“A new witch, every month,” Fione holds out an ancient-looking scroll. “They cycled them in because the magic of the Bone Tree was too strong! It would…” She trails off. “The Tree will eat a witch’s magic—until it kills the witch, Varia!”
Her words tinge desperate on the ends, and guilt wraps its strings around me and pulls tight, trying to cut me in half.
I don’t dare look over my shoulder to see Varia’s face—not with Malachite and Lucien bearing down on me like this. The look in their eyes makes me feel like a rabbit standing in the middle of a snare trap, encircled on all sides by rope. I search Lucien’s face for any sign of warmth, of mercy, but he is stone. I’m his enemy. I’ve helped his sister find the Tree that will kill her. I’ve betrayed him again. But did he—? Is he really—?
“I know,” Varia finally answers Fione. “I’ve known what it will take for five years now. I’m not ignorant, Fi.”
“Then you’re mad!” Fione keens. “If you take the Tree, you’ll…” She chokes on her words, tears pulling them apart. “You’ll die!”
Varia’s voice is barely audible. “I know.”
“All of this—” Fione throws out her hands, pleading. “All of this to enforce some temporary peace—”
“No,” Varia cuts her off. “Not temporary. You’re right—I will have only a few months’ time with the Tree. But I will make every second count. I will reshape the world. Not just Cavanos, Fi. The world. I will make craters in Arathess that cannot be filled with earth and covered up again, or forgotten. I will make craters Arathess will be forced to build cities in, and roads around.”
Lucien’s gaze moves from me for a bare second, his eyes narrowing imperceptibly at his sister on the peak.
“It’s easy enough to destroy,” he calls out to her. “You can build almost nothing in a few months of absolute power.”
“No.” I hear the smile in Varia’s voice. “But I’m not concerned with building, Luc. I will destroy what’s in our way, and Arathess will build in the aftermath. They will build for me, in the exact grooves I have left in the world, like a child tracing their letters for the first time.”
death, she will bring. The hunger laughs. so much delicious death.
Malachite shakes his head, that tch sound ringing in disbelief.
“What would you have me do, Luc?” Varia snarls down at him. “What do you plan to do? Take the throne and mete out menial tasks until you die? Will helping the poor of Vetris really save them from dying in another war? The ministers, the nobles, that damnable deep-seated Eye of Kavar and its priests—all of them want war. They push us to the brink of it, again and again, and they will never stop.”
a wheel that turns eTERNALLY, the hunger insists. I can feel my claws beginning to press through the skin of my fingertips as the dread presses into my brain. Is Varia loosening the hunger inside me?
“Holding the world’s greatest power in the palm of your hand isn’t the solution!” Lucien bellows back.
“But it is, Luc!” she
insists. “The valkerax did just that! Because of them, Old Vetris was formed! Human and witch, come together at last, working together in ways never seen before. You know the songs—we made Vetris in three days with our combined power. We made this Tree, for the gods’ sake! I will make Old Vetris again—I will force the witches and humans to work together once more!”
The bones of the branches clack together placidly. As she speaks, the hunger in me has been growing steadily louder. It reaches a fever pitch now, and I struggle against it with all I have in me. I won’t fight Malachite, Lucien, Fione. Not them.
Not them.
ENEMY! the hunger screams. TRAITORS. YOUR ORGANS WILL MELT THE ICE—
Of the silence. Of the silence! I beg with myself, closing my eyes and sinking into the hollowness of my chest. I’ve had practice, so much more practice now, but the hunger sparks an inconsolable oil fire that rages through my mind. It’s stronger than anything I’ve felt before—stronger than it was even in the clearing. This urge to make blood run, to consume hot flesh and tight sinew, to rip and tear and leave the chaos of death in my wake—it’s not just a cloud of frenzy that surrounds me as it was the night of the Hunt. It’s an arrow, aimed right at me and struck true.
My teeth grow long, my breath puffing out as ragged white air.
The Laughing Daughter is urging me to kill. And Lucien is watching it happen. He’s watching me become the monster all over again. Not him. Not them. Fourteen men but not them, too, not again, not again, NOT AGAIN—
I crouch—please, don’t crouch, don’t move an inch—my muscles tightening as Malachite’s hand on his sword tightens.
KILL. The hunger becomes my thoughts, my very breath. ONE BY ONE, THEIR THROATS WILL BE OURS—
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Lucien’s voice cuts through my bloodlust, but barely. I flick my claws, the hunger tilting my head with bloodthirsty curiosity as I watch the prince move to stand next to Fione, his eyes squarely on his sister.
