by Sara Wolf
“Yeah.” I frown. “And we’re trying to stop it.”
Evlorasin cocks its head in an almost humanly confused gesture. “The chime? Or the Tree?”
“The Tree.”
“The Tree has many roots, buried deep and long. T’would be easier to stop the trill of the chime.”
It means killing Varia. I feel the old guilt settle in, the old rankling. “I know.”
Evlorasin thinks, puffing out rancid clouds into the crisp salt air. It starts scratching at the dirt suddenly, and Malachite, staring at it warily this whole time and very probably fighting his instincts to kill the valkerax, likes none of it.
“What exactly is it doing, Six-Eyes?”
“Ev,” I start, running my hand over one of its talons. “What’s wrong?”
“One cannot destroy a Tree. It will only grow back from the other. I worry your fight will become the dust of nothing.”
I think back to all that time I spent with it in the arena. The story-speech of the valkerax is a lot more coherent now that Evlorasin can resist the call of the Bone Tree with the Weeping I taught it. But it still smacks of chaos and nonsense. Trees growing back from one another?
“Do you mean…” I trail off, thinking desperately. “If we wanted to destroy the Bone Tree, we’d have to destroy the Glass Tree, too?”
I can see myself reflected in Evlorasin’s milky, pupilless eyes, the sixth one on the bottom a vast mess of browned scar tissue. It watches me for a long moment, and then thrashes its tail around.
“Destruction and creation are blood kin held fast in one body—they can never be separated. As the Trees were never meant to be.”
I feel my whole face wrinkling with confusion. I know asking it to clarify is pointless—it’s not what Evlorasin’s saying that’s the problem. What it’s saying is true, and real. It’s the fact I can’t understand it. The concepts, the words. I can’t understand them like it does. Another language. No—another perspective entirely, one that’s been around for far longer than I have. One that knows so much more about how Arathess works at its very bones.
My eyes roam over the valkerax’s pale stretch and catch on something far down its body, by its back leg. An injury. Unlike the shallow scratches of the glass roots nicking its scales, this injury is deep, dark red, and still healing. The scales are all peeled away, rotting, scabbing replacing them. I slide down and touch the edges of the wound tenderly.
“Ev, where did you get this?”
“Blood kin,” Evlorasin grunts, its flank trembling with even the slightest touch I give on its exposed flesh. “My own blood kin turned against me.”
“They bit you?”
“Teeth on flesh. I fled. They followed. They have my blood, now.”
My mind screams soundlessly—something sitting unright in its words, off-center. But whatever it is, it hangs just out of my grasp.
“What’ll you do after this?” I ask. “You could come with us. Always handy to have someone who can fly.”
“Your cause is noble,” Evlorasin agrees. “But I am changed. I listen to the sky. It is what I will live for, and what I will die for.”
“Well.” My smirk goes crooked. “Great. Just try not to get all morbid about it too quickly, okay?”
The humor is lost on the valkerax, like most of the meanings of its words are lost on me. An even trade.
Evlorasin moves its paw, pulling me back to its face with the curve of its massive talon, like a shepherd’s hook pulling back a sheep. I know what that means, what it wants—body language, even with a valkerax, is far easier to understand—and I throw my arms into its mane and hug it close.
“Be safe,” I mutter into feathers and fur. The valkerax snorts, a cloud of dirt displacing around my feet.
“As blood flows between you and I, we will exist together.”
“Thank you, again.”
“What is gratitude,” the valkerax says softly, “but a promise made whole?”
And with that, it pivots and winds its serpentine body through the trees, slithering loud, cracking young trees and old branches, and disappears as quickly as it appeared.
“Good riddance.” Malachite waves it off.
“It saved you, you know,” I blurt.
“And it’d sooner turn around and kill me, too,” he drawls. “Daft thing.”
I watch the last of Evlorasin go with a sadness welling up in the cracks of me—a sadness I know isn’t my own. Or, it is. But it’s more than that. The sadness is both of ours, Evlorasin’s and mine. Connected to each other through the blood promise it gave me.
A sudden thought flashes through my brain, in Yorl’s voice of all voices. Yorl, the celeon polymath genius Varia put in charge of finding the Bone Tree. He knows the most about valkerax of anyone in the world, thanks to his grandfather’s research. He was there with me every step of the way, and he’s here with me now, in cold, clear logic. He could help us.
“It’s called a blood promise, Zera, not a blood moment.”
He’s right. Mine and Evlorasin’s connection has endured.
“You know where the Bone Tree is. You will always know. Now and forever. Until the very moment your human body dies for the last time.”
The dreams.
“Mal.” I pivot, only to see Lucien staggering to his feet and toward Fione.
“Is she breathing?” he demands.
Malachite puts his fingers to her bloody throat and shakes his head. “Nothing.”
My unheart squeezes painfully. So wrapped up in Ev’s mystic Tree shit, I forgot who needed help. “Is she—”
Malachite looks up to Lucien. “You could…you have another glass shard, right?”
“No!” I blurt. “Mal—no. She has to choose it. We can’t force her into it.”
“Nightsinger forced you,” he points out. “It’s to save her life, Six-Eyes.”
“No. Zera’s right,” Lucien manages, limping over to Fione. “It has to be chosen. We try to heal her.”
“There’s no pulse to heal, Luc—”
I race over and drop to my knees. “What do we need?”
“Water,” Lucien croaks, rolling up his sleeves. His own neck is bloodied so badly, it looks like a butcher shop, but he ignores it. “So I can heat it. And a rabbit, if you can find it. She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Uh, why a rabbit?” Malachite asks.
“Less talking.” Lucien pulls off his covering and drapes it over Fione’s blue-lipped body. “More doing.”
Malachite and I share a look.
“Dibs on the rabbit,” I say.
“Always giving me the boring jobs.” He sighs, both of us splitting off in a blink. It doesn’t take long for me to find a burrow, and it takes even less time to dig into the earth with all my claws.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
When I get back, Malachite’s already there with the water, his drinking skin bulging as he offers it to Lucien. The prince’s fingers turn dark as he holds it, and a small trail of steam suddenly wafts from the skin’s spout. He tears his shirt and offers me the cloth.
“Wet it with the water and clean her wounds, if you would. Gingerly.”
I nod. My fingers work as fast as “gingerly” will let me, and my eyes roam over Fione’s face. Her skin is sallow, her breathing so thin, I barely hear it. She’s not awake, thank the gods, because Lucien cuts her wrist with his blade out of nowhere.
“Shit!” Malachite snarls. “She’s already lost enough blood! What are you—”
“Rabbit,” Lucien demands from me, and I hand it over. He slits the thing’s broken neck, his fingers deep midnight up to the knuckles as he holds the wounds together—rabbit to girl, skin to skin.
It happens slowly at first and then quickly, like all magic. The blood from the rabbit oozes out like a hedging worm, like a thing burrowin
g out of winter to peek at spring. A pure liquid-red worm, thick and long, moving without spilling a drop. It almost seeks Fione’s wound—drawn by the blood—and when it finds it, it burrows. With a sickening squelch and a slow pump, the rabbit’s blood empties into Fione’s cut, but not without cost. Lucien makes a snarling noise, his brow dripping sweat onto the ground.
“Can’t—can’t you just heal her?” Malachite asks.
“Sh-She needs blood first,” Lucien says. “Or her body will reject the spell.”
“Use a human’s, maybe?” I offer. “I have plenty—”
“Do you see any humans around here?” he snaps.
“You—”
“I’m not human anymore. I’m witch. You’re a Heartless, Mal is a beneather. All incompatible.”
“Are you—” I gulp, watching the rabbit blood move into her arm, writhing like a live thing just below her skin. “Are you turning the rabbit’s blood…into human blood?”
He doesn’t confirm, but he doesn’t need to. Malachite and I go silent after that, our eyes meeting wide and watching in awe as Lucien’s entire hand goes void, as the sweat carves down his proud nose and over his lips. He gives a shuddering snarl again, pushing on something invisibly, and the last of the rabbit’s blood ekes out, and Fione’s wrist wound closes like a seam being zipped shut. Like Nightsinger used to zip shut my wounds. And then, Lucien puts his midnight hand on her throat, lightly, holding. The woods seem to go even quieter, the salt wind in the boughs dying away.
I pray like Ania Tarroux taught me. I pray like humans do. For Fione to be all right. For Lucien to be all right.
A shuddering gasp suddenly shatters the forest’s silence, and Fione sits bolt upright, throat pulling in air greedily and blue eyes wide. She scrabbles for something, and I thrust my hand at her. She clutches it, hard.
“The book.” Her voice is nigh tortured. “Where…”
“Fione! It’s okay. I’m here—you’re safe.”
“The book!” Her eyes scan frantically over everything, and it’s then I realize. She’s not worried about herself or if she’s safe. She’s worried about the book. About stopping Varia, above all. Even on death’s door.
I hold her close and whisper, “We have the book. It’s okay.”
Finally, her rigid body goes limp against mine. Next to me, Lucien wobbles, but Mal is behind him in a blink, supporting him. And the wound on Mal’s arm—it’s gone. Smooth skin where injury should be. Did he just heal everyone? The overexertion, the magic required to do that—
“Vachiayis, Luc,” his bodyguard swears. “If I knew we were showing off, I would’ve gotten that water with a little more aplomb.”
“Shut…up…” Lucien manages, lying bonelessly back in his arms, and Malachite smirks down at him, and then at me.
“Never ever.”
13
DESTRUCTION
From my personal experience, there’s nothing like a hot meal to lift the spirits. And a spirit. But alas. We’re stuck in the middle of the woods (just east of the Feralstorm coast, Malachite surmises after a jaunty scout), in which the only thing resembling alcohol at all is the single half-muddied puddle of deer piss not ten paces from our fire.
The rabbit’s blood is gone, but its meat isn’t, and I rotate the shoddily made spit on which it sits browning in its own juices. A stew would be better, to spread the nutrition around the three mortals, but we don’t have many options in terms of cookware, let alone a decent pot. Perhaps magic could conjure one up, but I dare not propose it what with Lucien looking half dead already. After he healed Fione, he rolled over and almost immediately went to sleep under a tree. The rest of us gathered around the fire are quiet, Fione most of all.
“Talking hurts,” she rasps.
“Then don’t,” Malachite asserts, wiping his broadsword down. “Just stare into the flames and think about deep shit. That’s what fires’re for, anyway.”
“How many nicks?” I jerk my chin at his sword.
The beneather frowns. “Way too many, considering those things were just made of glass.”
“Magic glass,” Fione croaks, and I hold up a finger to shush her.
“Don’t make me gag you, archduchess. T’would be a vastly unbecoming accessory with this season’s color palette.”
Fione huffs, a glimmer of that impertinent, impatient huff she used to make in the before-times, in the “innocent” days of Vetris court life, and grumpily goes back to staring into the fire. I look at the green-bound book sitting at her side—she hasn’t touched it, but neither has she let it out of her sight since she came back from the dead. Near-dead.
Malachite’s thinking it, too.
“We were gonna Heartless you,” he says without looking at her. Fione’s gaze darts to a sleeping Lucien, then back to the flames.
“That would’ve been the logical choice,” she agrees.
“But it wouldn’t have been what you wanted,” I say, then stop myself when she slashes a look over at me. “Not like I can know what you want, obviously. I was more worried you wouldn’t get to choose it for yourself.”
“Then…” Her lips curl in a tiny smile. “I’m grateful to you.”
“If,” Malachite starts. “If you did get turned Heartless, would your leg thing go away?”
“Mal.” I sigh. “You can’t just—”
“No, I’m serious. It’s like, a logistics question. The magic heals everything on a Heartless when they die, right? Would it heal that? Or does it stay? Did you have anything that went away when you got turned, Six-Eyes?”
“Not that I remember,” I say. “But that’s not really the point, is it?”
“Then what is?” he fires.
“Gods. You always get so testy when Lucien’s injured,” I quip.
“Look who’s talkin’.”
We glower at each other through the firelight for a while, and then Fione’s voice interrupts quietly.
“Whether or not my leg would heal or remain the same, I would still be me.”
“Would you want it to go away?” Mal presses.
“No,” she says. “And yes. It’s not a simple answer. But it’s mine to give—and mine alone.”
Malachite studies her face for a long moment and then makes that lopsided smile, the triple claw-scars I gave him crinkling. He hefts off the root he was sitting on and goes to check on Lucien’s sleeping form.
“You haven’t read the book yet.” I nod at the green-backed thing. She makes a small frown.
“Of course I haven’t.”
“I thought you could read Old Vetrisian. Or, not without Luc’s help?”
“I need more than Luc’s help,” she says. “I can’t translate an entire thousand-year-old manuscript in a void. No one speaks Old Vetrisian anymore. It’s a dead language. I need reference materials, codices, Vetrisian-beneather generalized ciphers to scrape the barest sliver of information from it.”
“Then we get you those.”
“How? The only place that has such things is the Black Archive, and they would never—” She sees the glint in my eye. “No. Zera, no.”
“What? It’s just a little sneaking in and stealing.”
“Do you think you’re the first thief to think of breaking in?”
“No.” I laugh.
“Have you ever heard of a thief stealing from the Black Archives?”
I pause. “No.”
“And why do you think that is?”
“Because they’re not me. Because they’re bad.”
“Because they’re dead, Zera,” she says, hard. “They get killed.”
“I can’t be killed.” I scoff again. “And anyway, killed by what, dust inhalation? It’s just a library.”
“It isn’t just a library,” the archduchess insists. “Not like you’re thinking. The polymaths in the Black
Archives guard the information there with their lives. They’re highly skilled warriors, every last one of them, equipped with the best polymath machines and strongest knowledge in the world. They can stop a body cold with the tiniest of poison threads—and their mastery of white mercury is on par with Cavanos. They can fight with all the combined knowledge of three thousand years of honed techniques from all around Arathess. You can forget about stealing. The only way we’re getting any information from the Archive is if we have a kingsmedal. And those aren’t given out to just anyone—”
“We’re a prince!” I motion to Lucien. “And an archduchess!”
“Nobles.” Her voice softens. “Of a kingdom that may no longer exist.”
“I know somebody who works there!” I protest. “Yorl. He’ll definitely help us.”
“If he’s been accepted at the Black Archive, he’s theirs now. His loyalty is theirs. Besides, from what you’ve told me of him, I doubt he’d risk everything he worked for just to help us.” She looks up from the fire, blue eyes sparking. “There’s only one way to get a kingsmedal into the Black Archive.”
“And?” I press. “What’s that?”
Her fingers wander to the book and tighten. “The polymaths of the Black Archive deal in one currency: knowledge. You have to offer knowledge they don’t already have.”
It makes sense, in retrospect. That’s why Yorl did all that he did: trap Evlorasin beneath Vetris, torture it, send me in to die repeatedly and talk to it, teach it to Weep. He knew the valkerax research of his grandfather was special, unique—and if he could prove it with results, with a real and true controlled experiment, it was a golden ticket—er—kingsmedal—into the Black Archives. He did everything Varia said, every last sordid thing, all for a single kingsmedal.
Fione’s right. Even if Yorl and I did grow close, I can’t ask him to give up all he’s worked for—all of his grandfather’s lifework—just for me.
The way Fione falls asleep on the pine needles with the book wrapped tight in her arms makes me think she wants to keep it. It’s our only clue in the world to stopping the Bone Tree and saving Varia. And she’s afraid. Afraid she’ll have to give it over to the Black Archive in order to translate it. She could do that, but something tells me it’s not just about the information inside. She’s smart. She’d remember everything she’d translate, including how to destroy the Bone Tree. But to her, it’s the physical book that’s important, too. A symbol. A tangible object of hope in what feels like a hopeless situation.
