by Sara Wolf
“Yorl’s the exact same,” I sigh. I slip one last liver in my mouth and stand, picking up the clay jar of honey tea on the table. “Right. Operation Rescue the Bookworms, begins!”
Malachite makes a facetious salute and heads the charge, Lucien walking beside me. His hand is back, and his eye, and while I’m numbed by the illusion of normalcy, knowing he’s using magic to make them seem there churns my guts. He doesn’t want Malachite to know, for anyone to know but me. And I can keep a secret—I’m just not sure I want to.
I watch the beneather’s broad chainmail back walking ahead of me. Malachite’s devoted his whole life to protecting Lucien. He’s tortured people, killed people for him. He deserves to know about Lucien’s state more than anyone. Malachite, of all people, would unite with me if I told him Lucien’s self-sacrificing strategy. I’d feel better having someone on my side, someone other than me guard-dogging Lucien’s willingness to throw himself away for his sister.
If Lucien dies, what will Malachite do?
What will any of us do?
I don’t want to think about it. I can’t. It yawns like an open valkerax mouth, thousands of teeth and all of them promising mind-bending pain. Not right now. I raise my head and grip the warm clay jar for any shred of comfort as I walk.
Thankfully, Malachite is much better at navigating tight, dark corridors than we are. He leads us to the same door we left Yorl and Fione in yesterday, and knocks his pale knuckles against the wood. The sounds echoes, and we wait anxiously for one beat, two, before the door creaks open. One periwinkle-blue eye peers out from the dimness inside, the skin around it ashen. Fione.
“Oh,” she croaks, voice hoarse. “It’s you.”
“Pardon the insult, Your Grace,” I push into the room before she can shut us out. “But you look like shit. How about some warm tea?”
I take one step forward, my shoes crinkling paper. It’s so dim, but I squint to see the floor entirely covered in parchment—some crumpled, some flat, layered on top of each other like thousands of nonsense-scribbled cream leaves. They’ve closed the shutters, blocking out the daytime light so that a single white mercury lamp on the table is the only thing struggling to illuminate the room. And the table—Yorl’s bent over it, yellow mane peeking out from behind towering piles of books and scrolls, the sunny color the one bright thing in the pale-washed room.
His ears are drooping, tail not so much as twitching—a clear sign he’s tired. I bite my tongue to stop from bombarding him with the fact I saw his beloved grandfather roaming around last night. Not now. Not when he looks so haggard.
“Gods,” Lucien breathes into his sleeve. “It smells terrible in here.”
“Acid-wash,” Fione blinks, gratefully gulping the bowl of tea I pour her. “To remove the lacquer decomp on the book’s untreated pages. We couldn’t see the letters through the stains.” She looks at Lucien. “The phrases you gave me on the ship helped immensely, by the way. Thank you.”
“Anytime.” The prince tries a smile. “Zera’s right, though. You look exhausted.”
“Almost done,” she insists with as few words as possible and shoves the bowl back at me before walking to the table and sitting down again. She looks over at Yorl. “The four-point remedy?”
“Close,” he says back, voice even rougher than usual. “Need a second adjudicator on the sentence structure.” I pour another bowl of tea and offer it over his shoulder, but he waves it off. “No. Can’t risk the papers getting wet.”
“Oh, c’mon. One little drop won’t hurt ’em,” I insist. “But one drop could do wonders for you, Sir Large Brain.”
He glares up at me with emerald slits, then down at my boots. Those are Muro’s eyes, through and through. No wonder everyone can tell he’s Farspear-Ashwalker by just looking at him.
“Move. You’re standing on Willem dal-Braal’s verb-transfer theorem.”
“Well, Willem dal-Braal will have to wait for a bit, then, won’t he?” I shove the tea bowl under his broad nose. “Go on. The price for me moving is three sips.”
Yorl’s glower is far worse than any valkerax’s. His ears lay flat as he snatches the bowl with his claws and barely puts his muzzle to it.
“Big sips, mind you,” I singsong.
He makes a snarl and chugs, shoving the empty bowl back at me. “Begone, you irritating mother hen.”
“He’s proud of you, you know.”
His eyes snap up to mine, confusion there for just a moment before he realizes who I must mean. His grandfather. Message sent, Muro.
I smile cheerily and hop off the parchment. Yorl unfreezes and shakes his head, deciding I’m talking nonsense again. He leans over in his seat to scoop the paper up, comparing it to the book page under his paw and muttering quietly to himself. I shoot an exasperated eye roll at Lucien, and he smiles with the bare corner of his lips back at me.
“So what’s our time estimate for some answers? Because I’m pretty done with this place.” Malachite sits at the only other open chair at the study table, managing to prop his boots on the paper-strewn surface for just a half second before Fione instantly raps her cane against his shoes and he lowers his feet back down.
“You can’t rush this process,” the archduchess says wearily, and it’s then I notice both her and Yorl’s voices are more even than I’d like. Even in a way that shows no enthusiasm. At first I chalked it up to them being exhausted, but the lack of a single inflection in their tone starts to worry me. Yorl looks like he’s far along in the book, almost done with it. The fact they got so far in such a huge book in only two days is mind-blowing. Then again, they are the two smartest mortals I know.
But that means it’s almost over.
The ultimatum is almost here.
The hairs on my arm stand up straight, hot with nerves. Whatever they’ve found thus far probably hasn’t been good news—or they’d be way more chipper. Fione especially. I send her a meaningful asking glance, but she won’t meet my eyes. Another bad sign.
“You’re in here, you know.” Yorl looks at me and waves his paw at the green-bound book.
“Little old me?” I blink.
“At the end of the world, there will be empty-stomached wolves,” he recites. “Didn’t Evlorasin say your name was Starving Wolf?”
“The High Witches said something like that, too,” Malachite grunts. “When they questioned her.”
“‘Questioned.’” I make air quotes. “It was more like one of your torture interrogations.”
“You don’t even know what those are like,” Malachite drawls, and then adds, “yet. There’s still time.”
“This all certainly feels like the end of the world,” Lucien murmurs. “Helkyris has fallen. Cavanos is…” His voice catches, but he straightens. “Avel will be next. And then the rest of the world after that.”
“Someone will stop it,” Malachite assures him.
“And that someone is us,” Fione asserts, exhausted voice unfurling a little stronger.
“Surely the beneathers are mobilizing.” Yorl looks at Malachite, and he nods, long white ears bobbing.
“Definitely.”
“But they’re mobilizing to kill the valkerax,” I interrupt. “Not the source. Not the Bone Tree. They’re gonna throw themselves at everything but the root of the problem.”
“Literally.” Lucien makes a pallid grin.
“Literally,” Fione brushes past the joke and agrees. “Because as far as we’ve found from the book, our best bet is something called the First Root.”
“What is it?” I ask.
She motions to Yorl. “He’s finding out, right now.”
“Then we wait.” Lucien moves to me, taking my hand in his and stroking his thumb over mine. There are moments when two people share a look, and then there are the times when everyone in the room shares a look, and it ripples through us now. Red eye
s, periwinkle eyes, green eyes, black eyes, and my pale gray-blue ones. An unspoken hope, passing among all of us.
Malachite settles against a far wall, chin down in his armored collar, the same pose I always saw him with in Vetris: his intimidating waiting pose. Fione sits across from Yorl sipping more tea, her bowl ever so slightly shaking as her fingers do. Nervous. How could she not be? The fate of her beloved depends on this last bit. The fate of the world, maybe, depends on it.
Lucien and I sink against the wall, sitting with each other and against each other, our hands intertwined tightly. It’s so quiet, so dim, a moment suspended in time. I wonder if the history books will talk about this someday. If we succeed, if we destroy the Bone Tree or the Glass Tree or both and change the world, will the books talk about this still, gray moment—the moment before everything changed? No. They’ll talk about everything else—the battles, the struggles, the deaths, the rise and fall of kingdoms. But not this. This will be lost to history.
This belongs only to the five of us.
Somewhere along the way as we wait and worry and wait, my head falls on Lucien’s broad shoulder, and, exhausted by thought, the embrace of sleep pulls me under.
23
BETRAYAL
LIKE DEATH
I know what this cold, salted darkness is now. The ocean.
In my dream it’s all around me, pressing down hard on every inch of my skin. In dreams I don’t breathe, but even so, I know it’ll be fine if I try. The water breathes for me, passing through slits in my neck I’ve made with magic.
Magic.
I look down, down into the murky darkness all around me, to see white beneath me. White fur, white scales, glowing softly against the depths of the ocean. I’m riding a valkerax. No—not me. A girl with wooden fingers is riding a valkerax.
Varia.
I’m in her mind again, the two of us connected by the blood promise and the Bone Tree and my dream.
Far and away in the water other spots of white scales glow, a rainbow tint valiantly radiating out from their manes against the crushing black. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of glowing white spots in the water, all churning in one direction. The current is strong, and sometimes the valkerax have to change course against its furor, but the goal remains the same. All of them, swimming toward something at once.
I—we—look over into the abyssal darkness, the flicker of rainbow light catching the visage of a massive fanged fish half as large as the valkerax. It scatters quickly, knowing danger when it sees it. Or perhaps it doesn’t see at all—the other lifeforms at the bottom of the ocean seem to have milky white eyes, much the same as the valkerax. Darkness doesn’t beget vision, but that doesn’t mean the ocean creatures don’t sense the incoming valkerax horde. A sawshark flees too late, caught up in the carelessly violent jaws of a passing valkerax. Black blood clouds in the black water. The skeleton ruins of old ships flicker past—wood and metal and a pearly material Varia recognizes as Old Vetrisian but I don’t. Massive crabs as big as bears sit on the ships, picking off fish and swinging claws menacingly to no avail—the valkerax slither past and swallow them whole as easily as blinking.
Varia and I both know the valkerax are comfortable, down here. Darkness is their home, depth is their home. The bottom of the ocean is perhaps the only place on Arathess anywhere close in scope and feel to the Dark Below. The water rushes past our face, past our ears, but our hearing is drowned out at all times by the Bone Tree’s hunger.
DESTROY. DESTROY. DESTROY.
anything, my hunger joins in. everything.
Ruination. That’s all it wants, and it screams that into Varia’s mind without ceasing, without a single second of rest. Her own thoughts and feelings are submerged in unrelenting pain and anger and lust for carnage, the same as mine. Louder, maybe, and more insistent. But the same intent.
Except I have the Weeping. I have a witch and organs to temper my hunger.
She has nothing.
She’s alone.
She bears the brunt of everything, alone.
But that was her plan all along. She thinks that, she knows that. To bear the worst of it, so others wouldn’t have to. So the girl she loves wouldn’t have to. So she can change the world for that girl, to make it safe for her.
The girl—what’s her name? Ruin? Destruction? No, she has a real name, and I can feel Varia’s mind start to claw out frantically for it, combing through the Bone Tree’s bloodlust, struggling to hold on to even a scrap of reality, of memory, of self. Her name. Her name, her—
Fione, I think, loud and intentionally and clear.
And just like that, we split. The dream-me peels out of Varia, and I can see myself floating beside her in the dark water, floating along with her speed as if I’m invisibly tethered to her, as if I’m one of the valkerax surging toward destruction, too. I can see the princess properly now that I’m outside of her—her long black hair streaming behind her in the water, the slits on her throat like gills on a fish. Her eyes are bloodshot, her gold skin bruised, and not just by the umber of the dark water. Great green-gray bruises have started to bloom on every inch of her body, as if she’s rotting from the inside. Is that the Bone Tree eating her magic? I think my voice—or Fione’s name—gives her a moment of clarity, because she looks up and right at me. Lucidly.
“You,” she speaks, her mouth moving but only bubbles coming out. Her black eyes go wild, furious, and I hear her voice more in my head. “You made the Trees touch in Windonhigh. They touched because they felt you.”
I’m quiet. She’s not.
“You’re trying to stop me.” Her voice is far deader than deadpan. Lifeless, even as her eyes burn. “If you make them touch, it will go away.”
She keeps one hand knit in the valkerax’s mane, but the other hand rises to her throat, to the bone choker strangling her. The Bone Tree, wrapped tight around her neck.
She traces it lightly, as if making sure it’s still there. “You’re trying to take it from me. So I’m coming for you.”
“All right,” I say patiently. Patience is what she needs, now most of all. She’s not herself. She doesn’t even remember what herself was like before the Bone Tree. But I’ll wait, patiently, and remember for her.
For Fione.
For Lucien.
For the girl who knows what it’s like to make a mistake you can’t take back.
“I’ve…I’ve killed them all.” Varia glances down at her hand. She means Helkyris. Cavanos. Everyone the valkerax meet. “I’m going to kill them all.”
“I know,” I say. She clenches her fist inward, nails biting. Blood in the water.
“They have to die,” Varia snarls. “All of them.”
“Is that you talking?” I ask softly. “Or the Bone Tree around your neck?”
Her wooden fingers move up again to the choker of valkerax fangs ringing her neck. Wringing. Her weapon. Her advantage. Her leash.
“The Varia I know had a plan,” I say. “And it wasn’t wanton carnage like this. She was going to carve the wood of the world, not throw it all in the fire.”
Her black eyes go wide, deep pools in the deep ocean, and she recovers, bristling.
“You are under my command—you will not speak! You will kill! You will kill them like I want you to!”
Something in me buckles, my unheart spasming. My blood thrums hot in my ears, every sensation suddenly very real and not dreamy in the slightest. She’s making me feel. I suffer everything intensely, no longer dream-detached, my body growing heavy and my mind becoming aware of my eyes, six of them opening on my cheeks—
“Varia, stop,” I plead. “Stop!”
Her fingers twist out at me, a cruel, delighted smile on her face. But it’s not her smile. It’s older than her, somehow. It’s lined with so much more pain than a mortal could experience—hundreds of aching years, not two decades. I watch
in horror as the bruises on her body start to throb, expanding in their discoloration even farther up her neck, her chest, her wrists and arms, as if they’re…consuming her. A bruise on her scalp moves to her eye, shriveling the white of it instantly, her socket bleeding bright and the shriveled eye hanging loose and useless, a mirror of her brother’s.
“You will destroy,” she rumbles. “For us. You will hurt them, as they have hurt us.”
This isn’t her. It’s the Bone Tree. I can hear it in her voice, her words. That’s not a witch, or a d’Malvane, or even a person. It’s a hunger. It’s something beyond life and death, beyond magic and machine and mortals. Something bigger and older and wounded. Lonely.
I just know.
I just…understand. Like Muro said, it’s that feeling. That feeling of wrongness I sensed first in my dreams. A feeling that isn’t mine, but is so sure of itself anyway. It’s that feeling I felt in my dreams sent to me by the Tree of Souls, according to Muro. It wells up now, aching.
“Are you…lonely?” I manage through my squeezing throat, through the hunger’s sudden urge to rip and tear and consume.
Varia’s eyes go wide again—her withered one bleeding profusely with each inch the lid moves up. A trail of red blood banners behind her, curling around her stream of black hair. I swallow hard and fight to hold on to my thoughts—with how strong the urge to destroy is, I don’t think I can Weep, but the principal of sinking into myself helps keep my mind above water. Or below it, in this case.
“You sound lonely,” I press. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re alone.”
Two rosaries, two trees, and the feeling that if I didn’t put them together again, something terrible would happen. That wrongness. The Tree covered in stained glass, and the aching feeling of loneliness it exuded just before all the shards stood on end to stab me. It’s the same. Varia’s face now—no, the Bone Tree’s face—it’s the same loneliness.
And the same stabbing.
I’m sure of it.
I understand now.
