Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts)

by Sara Wolf

  The guards look us up and down, and one says, “And what credentials have they?”

  Malachite steps up, thumbing his nose languidly. “I’m Olt’reya Malachite.”

  The guards looked shocked through their visors, hands tightening around their spears. I clench my fists, ready, Lucien’s body going stock-still in that way it does before he magics. But Lysulli squeezes between us.

  “At least let them in so the council can decide the defector’s fate,” they insist.

  The guards move slowly to the door, eyes on Malachite the whole time as they winch it open. This whole “outcast” thing must be a huge deal, with the way everyone’s looking at him like humans look at a Heartless. I almost feel bad we came to Pala Amna, but it’s fleeting. We had to. Malachite knew that, too.

  The steel screams as it parts, the embossed valkerax on the doors beckoning us into shadow with their stylized claws and teeth.

  “Any advice?” I lean in and ask Malachite. He’s not the type to be comforted by a held hand or a touched shoulder, but standing at his side feels right. And it helps; I can tell in the way his posture goes soft even as his whole face hardens with something like pain.

  “Don’t let them make you feel like shit for being you,” he says. It’s a sentence with the weight of years behind it, but I don’t dare ask.

  “Noted.”

  There’s a pause, our shoes clipping on the polished stone floor as we walk through the entranceway heavy with precious gems.

  “I like you,” I start. “For being you.”

  “You’re the only one down here who does,” he says, his smirk lazy. “And the only one who matters.”

  It’s a moment of sweetness before the bitter reality sinks in. The gems of the entranceway expand into solid emerald walls shot with gold, bands of lapis lazuli and topaz glimmering here and there in a trenchant pattern. I’m half expecting the council to be encased in glass like the High Witches, eerie and suspended. But thankfully there’s a stone table in the center, and the ancestor council sits at it in old stone chairs, their robes overflowing long on the emerald floor.

  “For a moment, I was worried it was glass,” Fione whispers to me when she sees me staring at the floor.

  I nod emphatically. “Me too.”

  “Mind yourselves,” Lucien warns, and I look up to see the ancestor council’s frozen in their talks to stare at us.

  I’ve never seen old beneathers before—just Malachite, and he’s young. The council, though, is elderly, their faces so heavily wrinkled it’s hard to see the slits of their eyes; still ruby, but with massive pupils, nearly as big as Yorl’s were in the Dark Below. They’re much smaller than I thought they’d be, too—human-child-size, like Crav. Beneathers must shrink drastically as they age. Their ears are just as long as Malachite’s, but pierced and hung with heavy garnets.

  “Who approaches the durance of the ancestors?” the elderly beneather at the head of the table croaks. Despite how small he is, his voice booms like a drum in the near-empty room. Lysulli steps up instantly, making a rigid salute in their bone armor.

  “Ancestor,” they start, “these upworlders claim they have information for the spiral. And one of them is—”

  “Olt’reya Malachite,” Malachite says, stepping forward with them.

  The ancestors at the table raise their wild white eyebrows, clicking their ringed fingers in their earrings as they glance at one another knowingly and unhappily.

  “Outcasts return on punishment of death,” the head ancestor croaks out. “They have been torn from the spiral and deemed unusable. Is that why you have come? To die?”

  I flicker my eyes to Lucien. Would they really kill him?

  “I’ll happily put my head on whatever chopping block you’ve got.” Mal lifts his chin. “After you hear what my friend the prince of Cavanos has to say.”

  He motions at Lucien, and Lucien approaches the table carefully. Lysulli’s face falls, and they snaps their eyes accusatorially to us, as if asking why didn’t you tell me he was a prince in the first place?

  “He has the look of a d’Malvane,” an ancestor agrees in a birdy, high-pitched wheeze as they look Lucien over.

  “Do we have time to entertain him?” another ancestor asks in a guttural growl. “He offers nothing. Vetris is lost, their armies ravaged, and so shall we be if we do not finalize these battle plans.”

  One of them scoffs. “We are in the spiral, but not so entrenched that we are empty of common manners for foreign royalty.”

  “Welcome, then, Lucien of House d’Malvane,” the head ancestor announces. “You bring us information?”

  “What is this ‘spiral’ they keep talking about?” I whisper to Yorl.

  He leans in, whiskers tickling my cheek. “It’s what they call the eternal fight against the valkerax. Everything goes to the spiral. Everyone who dies returns to the spiral. And so on.”

  “That explains the decor,” I whisper back, staring at the massive helix of carved emerald around the door.

  Lucien looks over at Malachite, and then bows to the council. “Your Honors,” he starts. “I would gladly share my knowledge, but I fear for Malachite’s safety. Would you consider sparing him his punishment?”

  The head ancestor shifts in his pool of a cloth robe. “Human word holds little sway in the Dark Below, Your Highness. Our laws are our laws, subject to no royal favors.”

  “Outcasts must be disposed of, lest they rot the spiral!” An ancestor’s wrinkly fist beats the stone table.

  The birdy-voiced ancestor speaks up. “Consider this, fellows; they bring a Farspear-Ashwalker with them—a great scholar who aided us many times before with the valkerax.”

  All eyes flicker to Yorl, his mane flaring a little in stress or pride—I can’t tell. He really does look like Muro. The birdy-voiced ancestor smiles, face melting into a pool of wrinkles.

  “If Farspear-Ashwalker’s information justly aids the spiral, as it has before, will we not consider mercy for a defector this once?”

  There’s a stretched quiet, the ancestors looking to and from one another. They murmur, but not in whispers—far, far lower than a whisper. A breath. I can’t hear a single thing beyond the slight hiss of air, but I’m sure with their long ears, they hear one another’s words perfectly well.

  Malachite shakes his head at the prince. “Don’t worry about it, Luc. I’ll be fine. Just tell ’em.”

  “I won’t let them kill you, Mal,” the prince insists.

  “Me either,” I agree.

  “I came here figuring it’d happen.” Malachite’s voice turns to granite. “Just tell ’em. We don’t have time to sit here and stop everything just for me.”

  Fione steps up then, cane tapping on the floor so loud, it sounds thunderous among the council’s soft whispers.

  “You will allow Malachite to walk free, or we will never tell you how to stop the valkerax coming for your last city.”

  The ancestor council’s huge black pupils focus on her perfect posture and gleaming brown curls, studying her as she defies them, defies Malachite’s insistence and the world’s insistence that we sacrifice people to make things better.

  I’ve never been prouder of her than in this moment. My memory flashes to her timid, tiny frame at the first banquet where I met her, and now, in contrast, she stands like an apple tree grown gargantuan, like a queen, like Archduchess Himintell.

  No.

  She stands like Fione.

  “We know how to stop them,” she continues. “For good this time. And you will trade this information for Malachite’s total exoneration from your spiral. He will never be executed by you. He will be allowed to walk free in his homeland for as long as he lives, and you will condone this.”

  “Insolent little—” an ancestor hisses.

  “The spiral you have bled and killed and died a thousa
nd years for,” Fione interrupts them like a glass cut, deep and precise. “This information can stop it. Forever.”

  Yorl’s brow twitches minutely, but the rest of us are stone-faced. Yorl knows she’s not following the script—splitting the trees again won’t stop the spiral. It’ll condemn the valkerax to the Dark Below again. Not as many of them, but most. That’s not stopping the spiral—it’s simply continuing it. He thinks she’s making promises she can’t keep, Malachite and Lucien, too. They just have the court training to hide it.

  But she’s not lying. She knows.

  Out of everyone, she knows what I’m going to do.

  And when I do it, there will be no more spiral anymore. The spiral will change. The beneathers won’t have to shoulder it alone—it will be everyone’s burden. Everyone’s fight. It may not even be a fight; maybe this time, without the Bone Tree screaming madness into their ears, the valkerax will be calm. Maybe this time, it will be different.

  This time, we can try again—without using the Tree to control them. To control anyone.

  “You.” The head ancestor points to Fione with one gnarled, tiny finger. “You will tell us, then. Tell us how you will stop the spiral—”

  Lucien steps up. “Your Honors—”

  “Alone.”

  The shift of the beneather guards behind us is clear by the sound—bone armor boots stepping to us over the floor.

  “Fione,” Lucien starts. “Will you—”

  “I will, Your Highness,” she agrees without turning to look at us. “Every last bit.”

  The plethora of guards hover, waiting without words, telling us to leave with just their towering body language.

  Lucien stares at Fione for one last beat, and then turns to us. “Let’s go.”

  Our footsteps ricochet down the entrance tunnel, bookended by the clamor of the guards, Yorl looking confused and Malachite looking uneasy and Lucien looking ahead. Just ahead. He wants answers. He’ll try to skin read me if I put my hand in his. I know that—I can feel that. I know him and how he works.

  But the answers are a song now.

  I put my hand in his and smile. “It’ll be all right. She’s going to tell them what we know.”

  He nods and squeezes my fingers close to his palm. He’s worried it won’t be enough to save Malachite’s life, to persuade them to help us, but it is. She’ll tell them what we know. What she and I know. What she knows I’ll do when we get to the First Root.

  I won’t split it. Not again. And she knows that.

  This is Fione and me—together—wordless and word full, working as one.

  In a way, it’s her telling me she approves of my plan. She’s telling me she’s chosen to trust me, that she’s done hedging between Varia and me as she did on the ship, and now she’s made a choice. She’s given me her trust.

  I smile at the floor and hold Lucien’s warm hand, hold the boy who’s trying to read my skin so hard, and I understand. Love doesn’t take. It gives.

  She’s given the wolf her trust.

  And the wolf will give her Varia in return.

  29

  AMETHYST

  Waiting’s far easier when you’re an immortal thrall with all of eternity ahead of you. The mortals, on the other hand, have it a little rougher.

  “I would’ve been just fine.” Malachite throws his hands up. “If you’d all kept your mouth shut and let them imprison me for a day. They woulda been distracted by my arse long enough for you to creep down to Pala Orias.”

  “And when we came back, you’d be beheaded,” Lucien finishes. “Like Vachiayis I was going to let that happen.”

  “It’s too bad only humans can be Heartless,” I mourn, batting my eyelashes at Malachite. “We’d do well suffering together, I think.”

  “Well?” Malachite arches a brow.

  “Stylish, at the very least,” I insist. “By far the most important thing.”

  Yorl’s claws click across the stone floor of the reception hall as he paces. What looks to be an entire valkerax skeleton encased in gold is suspended from the ceiling above us, vertebrae countless and serrated jaw dozens of feet in the air and yet still too close. Beneather guards walk the perimeter of the room, keeping careful ruby eyes on Malachite all the while.

  Lucien puts his hand to my forehead. “You must be exhausted.”

  “Just a little.” I smile at him.

  “With any luck, you can sleep soon,” he says. “And lure Varia to Pala Orias.”

  “If she isn’t on her way here already,” Yorl murmurs. “The Bone Tree having her cunning brain at its disposal is a terrifying thought.”

  “‘Cunning’ coming from someone like you truly means something,” Lucien interjects. Yorl looks over at him with massive, terse green eyes.

  “Don’t feign innocence, Your Highness. You d’Malvanes have cunning in excess. It’s how you’ve held on to power for all these generations.”

  “So we did,” Lucien agrees softly. Past tense. The King and Queen are dead, for all we know. If Varia dies, that means he’s the last d’Malvane. “And for what purpose?” he continues. “To lose the faith of our people? To tax them into starvation? To decide only the nobility worthy of care and respect? We were a family of a thousand years who did nothing but rot from the inside, who drove our people to kill one another in fearful wars of religious difference.” His laugh is drill. “No—that won’t be our lasting legacy. I’ll see to it.”

  “Lucien—” I start. He straightens, sword clinking at his hip.

  “I’ll be a better king than any of them were—by being no king at all.”

  His words strike hard in the vaulted ceiling, in the bones of the valkerax. My unheart swells with that sweet pride, and Malachite looks at him with nothing but admiration.

  “I’ll help, Luc,” he says.

  Lucien’s rigor softens, and he grins at his near-brother, all-friend. “Who else will motivate me with their constant harping?”

  The stone slab doors slide open then, soundless save for the triple tapping of shoes and a cane. Fione walks to us slowly, gaze fixed to the ceiling and the valkerax there. Lucien’s the first to run up to her, Yorl’s tail swishing as I follow.

  “So?” Yorl presses.

  “Malachite’s sentence? Is he free? Did they agree to help us?” Lucien asks. Fione’s eyes move down to me, and then flicker away to Luc. I pray the prince didn’t catch it.

  “Yes,” she says. “They’re sending two battalions to escort us to Pala Orias.”

  “Just two?” Malachite grunts.

  “It’s all they could spare,” she says.

  “And Malachite’s life—”

  “His outcast status will be revoked,” Fione cuts Lucien off. “On the condition we stop Varia.”

  And put the Trees back together, thus freeing the valkerax to roam upworld, and simultaneously freeing the beneathers from the spiral. She doesn’t say it, but it lingers between us and only us. She promised them freedom, and it worked. She managed to convince the council. Of course she did—she’s Fione. And the beneathers have been fighting in the spiral for so long—they no doubt jumped at the chance to shuffle the valkerax responsibility equally onto the rest of the world, where it belongs.

  “Revoked?” Malachite’s pale jaw goes slack. “That’s never—that’s never happened in the history of—of ever.” He pauses, thinking. “What exactly did you say to them, Fi? We ain’t getting rid of all the valkerax—we’re just putting ’em back where they belong.”

  I tame my frown, unsure if it’s my rational human thought or my valkerax blood making me bristle at his words.

  “What does it matter?” I ask. “We have forces enough to make a stand at Pala Orias. Let’s focus on preparing for the impending bloody confrontation, shall we?”

  Fione doesn’t sneak looks at me anymore. Probably for
the best—Yorl and Lucien don’t need more fodder to doubt.

  “She’s right,” Fione backs me up. “The council gave us a stipend—we’re to take it to the quartermaster in this building.”

  “Fine. When do we depart?” Malachite sniffs.

  “By the tenth-half. They said the battalions will meet us at the River Gate.”

  “Spirits,” the beneather swears. “We better hurry, then. River’s across town.”

  “I’m going to need somewhere to lie down and take a quick one,” I say. “Eventually. No hurry.”

  “No hurry indeed,” Yorl agrees. “We must be absolutely sure every last one of our defenses is ready in Pala Orias before you lure her.”

  “And you gotta do it well,” Malachite presses. “Make her real mad, so she just comes for us and not anybody else.”

  Not Pala Amna, not his city. I nod reassuringly. “C’mon, Mal. When have I ever let you down?”

  “Constantly?” he offers.

  “And lovingly,” I tease.

  Our shuffling footsteps resound as Malachite leads the way down a corridor and into a huge saferoom reinforced with bars of what look like sparkling diamond. The light’s so fractured and pure, it hurts to look at it directly.

  “Metal in short supply down here or something?” I ask with a wince.

  “The valkerax destroy a lot of it with their fire breath,” Malachite points out.

  “And the digging of the valkerax routinely unearths large deposits of gemstones otherwise inaccessible to mortals,” Yorl adds. “Making it the primary source of the beneather’s wealth in upworld trade routes.”

  “It all goes to the spiral, anyway,” Malachite huffs. “Every last piece of gold.”

  “And it seems to be the main selling point of their architecture,” Fione marvels under her breath at the gems glittering in the ceiling.

  “Gaudy doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I agree, following Malachite past the guards and farther into the barred room.

  “You have no idea how long it took me to get used to the way humans ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the pathetically tiny gems in their jewelry,” Malachite snorts.