by Sara Wolf
Cavanos. Cavanos directly and miles below us. It’s a terrifying and decadent floor of a room, but the only other things in the space itself are stone walls and torches. I blink into the nighttime gloom; there’s something like rows in the very back walls, carved deep and lined with an unmistakable upright pattern in fading colors. Books. Just a handful. A whole room, and just these books.
“Those look important,” I lilt.
“Yeah, but that’s—that’s a long fall!” Malachite gulps.
“It might be a trap,” Fione says. “Can you teleport us across, Lucien?”
“Not without alerting the High Witches to exactly where we are,” he says.
“Don’t they already know?” I press, but the prince says nothing. “Could you fly across it as a crow?”
“A solid plan,” he agrees shortly. “Until I needed to bring a book back with me.”
“Let me check the perimeter for trap switches—”
“There’s no time,” Lucien interrupts Fione. “We have to move, now.”
Lucien tries the glass floor with one boot, and when it stays, he instantly darts across, pulling me along. I can hear Fione’s boots following us, but Malachite hedges.
“Luc, seriously—”
“If it makes you feel better, Sir Bodyguard,” I call out over my shoulder, “you pass out before you ever hit the ground.”
“It doesn’t, actually,” I hear him mumble and draw his sword, but the unsteady clip of his shoes joins us across the glass. Fione is the first to reach the books, skimming the spines with her fingers.
“Written in Old Vetrisian,” she marvels. “These—all of these are at least a thousand years old.”
“Can you translate what’s inside?” I ask.
“With Lucien’s help.” She nods. “Some words and structures are passed down only through the royal family.” Her little fingers reach for a book, pulling it out gingerly and opening the cover. “Remarkably well-preserved, too.”
“Magic,” Lucien asserts, head tilted as he reads other spines, “tends to do all kinds of remarkable things.”
While they peruse, I watch the glass beneath our feet warily and the clouds writhing below that. It feels like the clear panes should drop away at any moment, but they stay strong. Maybe it is just a floor—just an Old Vetrisian marvel made for show. Maybe I’m being paranoid. But the way Lucien keeps looking over his shoulder, to the walls, of all things, makes me uneasy.
I put a hand on his arm and lean in. “What’s wrong?”
His throat bobs. “It’s in the walls.”
“What is?” He doesn’t say anything. “Lucien—”
“Something hungry,” he finishes, fingertips dawning midnight.
“Valkerax?”
“No.” He goes still, voice lowering to a bare whisper. “Something older.”
us, the hunger cackles. But that’s impossible. The hunger is for Heartless only. Why would it be outside, made flesh, made real, where others can hear it? Unless…
On the opposite side of the glass floor, deep in a wall, something moves.
The granite swells.
“We have to go,” I chirp to Fione, trying not to betray my nerves. “Posthaste.”
“I still don’t know which one to take.” She frowns. “I can barely translate the titles.”
“Then take them all.”
“Not advisable.” Fione frowns and points up to the bookshelf, where runes are carved into the stone. “That means ‘large warning,’ and that means ‘one item,’ and I don’t have to know the rest to understand the gist.”
“This one.” Malachite points with his free hand to a green-bound book with faded silver inking. “Take this one.”
Fione raises a brow. “How would you—”
“I know that symbol. It’s the same in beneather runes. ‘Tree.’ And ‘destroy.’”
“‘Destroy,’ or ‘create’?” Her rosebud lips frown deeper. “You have to be precise—they have nearly the same shape order, but different occulants over the verb—”
I look at Lucien, but he hasn’t moved—his whole body still as a deer, his onyx eyes wide and searching the walls frantically, as if seeing something I can’t. And then he looks up.
And so do I.
Above us, the granite wall swells, cracking with hairline fractures.
“We don’t have time,” I blurt. “Just take the gamble and the godsdamn book.”
Fione breathes in and darts her hand out, pulling the green book from the shelf. Like snapping out of a trance, Lucien grabs my hand and darts for the staircase, strides so long and fast I can barely keep up.
The sound comes first—screeching. Not valkerax screeching, not anything alive or organic. Not anything with a tongue, or teeth, or a voice box. It’s a sound made without flesh, the screech of something dragging slowly, achingly across glass. The walls all around us swell, dozens of bulging rounds of stone pushing at the seams, straining.
The explosions come second.
Glass.
Raw glass bursting from the walls, cloudy and thick and moving like fast river water. Like vines alive.
Like roots.
The tips are ground down instantly as the roots burst through, the shattering sound of a dozen glass vases being dropped and infinitesimal shards sparkling out in clouds, raining down on the glass floor and our hair, our skin, our clothes. Blood.
“Spirits!” Malachite snarls, trying to brush the glass off, but it digs deep, the shards embedding in his face and nose and long ears. Fione’s barely better, having just covered her eyes in time—her mouth bleeding and hanging open, her scalp oozing red. Shit—did she inhale? After all the pain I’ve endured, the faint burning and scraping as the glass shards work their way all over my body is almost nothing, but it’s enough to make me wince. Once.
“Lucien!” I turn to him. The glass caught his neck, blood oozing down his throat, his collarbone, his covering halfway soaked with it. But his eyes are clear, hot, and focused on the enormous glass roots now writhing readily all around us. His fingers blossom with midnight up to the knuckles, and he throws his hand out, a massive fireball exploding from the tips and sucking in all the air as it flies, smashing into a glass root. The thing recoils like it’s alive, melting rapidly into nothing more than a flailing stub half peeking out of the wall. The pool of red-hot glass pours down on the glass floor, eating a hole into it. The night rushes in, wet with rain and cloud and the thin smell of high air.
A beat. Glass undulating around us like a nest of vipers. And then the roots strike all at once.
12
AS THE
WYRM FLIES
Malachite snarls and flings the broad of his blade with power, a brutal arc, and the shriek of glass on metal resounds as two of the roots deflect off it. Lucien thrusts his palms up, completely dark now, and a wall of animate witchfire springs to life in front of him, blazing hot and giving the roots pause. They writhe slowly just in front, looking for an opening, angling for weakness.
Fione makes a gasping noise beside me, and I lunge to her.
“Did you inhale it?” I ask. Her blue eyes dart up, withering with pain. It’s all the confirmation I could want. She needs healing, and fast.
“We have to get to the door!” Malachite bellows. “You three move, I’ll watch the flank!”
“You’re coming with!” I snap.
“Obviously!” He deflects another root with a powerful swing, the brutal impact skidding his low stance backward. Our escape route is the way we came in this morning: the little island west of Windonhigh, connected by the cloudbridge. Lucien assured us it was a magically charged space; it would be a simple matter for him to teleport all of us down to the ground from there without exhausting himself. But how are we going to make it? These roots—they’re vicious. Attacking viciously, as if in ironi
c retaliation for the tree we uprooted.
you invaded, the hunger insists. invaded where no one should, with your human pride and your human blood…
And then it hits me. Varia is the Bone Tree. If Varia can control the Bone Tree’s power while being eaten by it, then the High Witches being eaten by the Glass Tree…can they control their tree? Are they the Glass Tree? Is that why Lucien was afraid of being overheard? The raw glass all over Windonhigh…can they listen through it? All that raw glass…is that them?
Is this seven High Witches, combining their power to stop us all at once?
Cold fear hardens my face. I pull Fione to the left just in time as one of them pierces in from the side, around Lucien’s witchfire wall, and he snarls, the fire extending around us even farther in a deep semicircle. The black-purple flames reflect frosty in the glass, like candied violets with a particularly furious bloodlust.
Next to me, Fione makes an awful gurgling noise, sticky trails of blood sloughing out of her mouth and down her clothes. If the fine shards lodged in her mouth or her throat, she’ll live longer. But if they got in her lungs, we’re running on extremely borrowed time.
“The stairs,” I urge her. “C’mon. We can make it.”
She staggers, her grip on her crossbow cane white-knuckled and smeared red, her other hand clutching the book close like it’s the last thing left in the world. Lucien rotates with us, defending us from the front with his witchfire wall. It doesn’t stop the glass roots or destroy them, but it does make them hesitate, and that’s all we need to inch across the clear floor, step-by-bleeding-step. Bloody footprints across the glass, drag marks, dripped pools. We can make it. Every step, every ring as Malachite lets out a roar and deflects, the blazing crackle of the witchfire as it eats nothing—we can make it.
The stairs are so close when it happens.
And that’s what makes the fall so terrible.
The roots stop all of a sudden. Malachite pants; Lucien keeps the wall in place, watching and waiting. The glass roots all pull back at once, quivering, and then pierce down.
Into the floor.
Glass melding with glass. Glass roots squirming inside thinner glass, below it, peeling it apart like a pliable skin over milk.
We don’t even have time to blink.
The floor opens up, wind screaming, us screaming, my insides pressing up against my outsides, and all I can think about is him.
Lucien.
My eyes are watering too badly, the speed too much to keep focused on his outline for long. But I see his arms going dark, black eating gold up to the elbows, up to his bleeding neck, black below the red, and I know he’s going to lose himself. The part that deadens this time will be all of him.
fear.
Being immortal means you only have fear. But you forget what real, yawning, mortal fear feels like.
Until now.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair I can’t even shout at him to stop, the wind and pressure stealing all the words from my lungs. I can’t even reach him, the air battering my body around like a hated doll. He’s going to die. My immortality, useless. I can only watch. I can only feel my brain slipping into unconsciousness, into nothing, into death once and for all.
Black on gold on red.
And then—rainbow.
Soft fur tickling my face. Smooth scales beneath my hands. The smell of rot, faintly, quickly dispersed by the relentless whipping wind. Warmth, making its way into my body from something much larger than me, all over and under.
“Starving Wolf.” A voice rumbles in every one of my bones. “Here you are, and here I am.”
I catch my breath, my ribs aching. Fione’s hand in mine, still, her body unmoving and her other hand clutching the book. Lucien, passed out not far from her, and Malachite, struggling to sit up. All of us, on the finned white back of a valkerax.
And not any valkerax.
“Evlorasin!” I put my hand to its scales, feeling it to make sure it’s real. “H-How—”
“I told you. I will always be with you. This was not a lie.”
It’s so long, stretching out like a banner behind us in the sky, its back so wide that all of us can fit comfortably. Evlorasin’s mane flares out, all its feathers standing on end like a halo, and from that halo radiates a gentle circle of rainbow light. No wings—no wings like a flying thing should have, but lengthy whiskers beating air hard, and its lionlike paws paddling the clouds as if the stormy sky is calm water.
Words hurt, but I force them out steadily. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Are you talking to it?” Malachite rasps, clutching on his ribs with one hand and a huge pearlescent scale with the other. “Is this—is this the one that scared everybody in Vetris? The one we retrieved?”
“There is little time for idleness,” Evlorasin interrupts. “If you would look up, you would see a problem.”
It’s hard with the wind, but I squint up—Windonhigh far above us. Not far enough I can’t see the green, or the bottom of it—a mass of dirt and hanging roots, and most terrifyingly of all, from the tiny glass-bottomed section that’s been peeled open, dozens of glass roots stretching out for us like tentacles. And moving fast.
Malachite looks with me. “Tenacious little bastards, aren’t they?”
“You have angered the Tree of Glass,” Evlorasin says. “Secure yourself and your comrades to my scales, with blood if you must. Quickly.”
I look at Malachite. “Stick your sword in it.”
“What?”
“The valkerax. Hold Lucien, and stick your sword in it!”
“Thought you’d never ask!” he shouts back, driving his broadsword into the scales. Evlorasin twitches but doesn’t recoil, and I bring my claws out—the smaller holes I make between its scales much less painful. Malachite wraps one arm around Lucien’s chest, dragging him close, and I do the same for Fione, making sure her book is sandwiched tightly between us.
Evlorasin starts to rumble-growl deep in its chest, the vibration shaking us as easily as marbles in a bag.
“We fly.”
The rainbow halo around its mane bursts to life, from pastel to vivid color, blazing like seven-colored fire and expanding to thrice its size. The flash sears my eyes, and I blink it away as fast as I can only to see glass roots whizzing past my ears, past Evlorasin’s tail and legs and whiskers, barely missing each time they thrust through the sky. Evlorasin twists and turns, lurching as my stomach lurches, coiling and uncoiling in split seconds, the glass roots nicking its sides, its feet. Even above the screaming wind, I can hear its excited voice like it’s right in my ear.
“Hold on!”
We dive.
The world falls away, nothing but white feathers and rainbow light and the instinct to clench, to hold, to brace for something I can’t stop. I hug Fione to me even harder, her bones pressing against my palms, and I know if I hold any tighter I’ll hurt her, but I’m terrified. Terrified she’ll fall off, human as she is. Broken bones are better than a dead friend, and I clutch, and clutch. A glass root shrieks over my head, and I press us as low and tight to Evlorasin’s body as I can.
Another one pierces the air just to my left, so forceful I can feel the vacuum in its wake. Something warm hits my face—blood. Not Fione’s throat wound. Fresh. Against the throbbing momentum, I raise my head and see Malachite’s biceps clenched around Lucien cleaved and bleeding in rhythmic spurts.
“Mal!”
“I’m fine!” he shouts. “Shut up before you bite your tongue off!”
The momentum of our fall starts to near critical, all the flesh on our bodies pulled back, away from the earth. I feel like a horse, teeth exposed, terror exposed, but no blinders. Nothing to dull the cut of reality. Just over Fione’s shoulders, I can see the trees of the ground loom up, and the sharper the details the more of a warning it is. Soon. Soon, we hi
t the ground.
The fall, and then the rise.
Evlorasin pulls out of the death dive, shearing off not five miles above a forest. Without the force of the fall, I can look up now and see that the glass roots are trembling in the air, hesitant again.
“We’ve reached the threshold,” the valkerax says. “They can go no farther.”
With aching necks, Malachite and I look at each other, pure relief coursing from him to me and then to the nobles held fast in our arms. We’re safe. For now.
Evlorasin flies an easy distance before descending to the earth, weaving between the trees big enough to accommodate it. It lets us off, bowed shoulders making the perfect stepping ramp down. I carry Fione to a dry patch of forest and rest her on my covering. Malachite manages to prop Lucien up against a tree trunk even with his split arm, and I feel a flash of anxiety run through me at all the tangled, still roots so close to him. So close to hurting him. Malachite seems to be thinking the same.
“Spiritsdamned trees,” he says through gritted teeth, tearing a bit of cloth and wrapping his arm.
I turn and look at Evlorasin, its mane-halo radiating fainter again, illuminating the dim forest in a gentle pearlescent circle. Its whiskers undulate as I approach, and its five milk white, bleeding eyes stacked on one another watch me as I slide a tentative hand over its velvet nose.
“You really saved us back there,” I mutter.
“I saved you,” Evlorasin corrects softly. “The others are not blood kin.”
“Sure,” I laugh shakily. “Right.”
There’s a silence, the forest birds and forest animals too silent—as anything would go silent upon sensing something as large as Evlorasin. I don’t know what to say to the valkerax. “Your kind are ravaging Cavanos?” “Have you seen the destruction?”
“The Bone Tree has its chime at last,” Evlorasin speaks first, tail tip lifting like a roused snake and down again.
