Fear means everything.
Fear is all I have.
I’ve never, in my entire life, been more afraid than the moment the words tumble from my lips.
“Laughing Daughter!”
2
HEARTS
BENEATH SNOW
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this wide world, it’s that time is the rebellious child. Like yours truly. It doesn’t act like you want it to, especially in crisis. Short moments feel long, long moments go by quickly, everything fragments and spins and comes in as feelings, scents, sounds when it should just be clear, concise thought.
The moment I say Varia’s witch name, the rebellious child tears apart the world.
I know for certain that two things happen: her incredibly dense magic tries to clench down on me one last time and then instantly lets go. Freefall. An iron hand, choking me one second and gone the next. I hear her scream, frantic in a way the crown princess of Cavanos has never once been.
“No, no no—Lucien, give her back!” she yells. “She’ll be your undoing! I know it! I can protect you from her—”
A tendril of her power shoots through my heart like an arrow, grasping. Searching. I gasp, choking on the feeling, but it’s short-lived. Something not-me pushes the tendril out instantly, resistant and insistent and hard in its decision. Final.
Lucien’s smirk is nearly too exhausted to exist, but he tries. A tinge of sadness there, almost.
“Even the mighty Bone Tree can’t go against the rules, Varia,” he says. “You should know that better than I. Much better. You had five years of formal training, after all.”
“Lucien!” Varia’s snarl turns keening. “Don’t do this!”
The falling line of valkerax comes closer and closer, the ground trembling and roars crescendoing. A line of writhing white cuts the high blue sky in two. The impact’s going to kill us all. I can see them now, their whiskers and their scales and their eyes—every valkerax with six ghost-white eyes and no pupils, and fear crystallizes into horror as I realize every single one of them is looking right at Varia. No matter which way their body is twisted, no matter how twisted or how fast they writhe, every massive wolf-maw head is focused dead on her. Like they’re going to eat her whole rather than obey her.
There are so many. So many more than I ever thought.
Time behaves badly again—someone pulls me away by the hand, and even through the clamminess of their skin I know the feel of those fingers, those callouses. Lucien. A flash of white hair as Malachite pulls us both away from Varia, and Fione’s broken sob as she raises her crossbow higher. Toward Varia.
The valkerax are close enough for me to smell their collective rotting breath.
Time slows. Impossibly slow, for all of one quick second. I turn my head over my shoulder, my neck bobbing at the force of Malachite’s simultaneous yank, but my eyes strain to stay on Varia. A Varia standing alone in a muddy wasteland, looking at us. Betrayal, anger—all the burning emotions on her face melt away to something quieter. Lonelier as we flee from her. From it. White feathers and scales from the valkerax rain down like animal snow.
A lonely princess stands there and stares as the world falls down on her. A single white feather lands delicately in her outstretched palm.
The shadow of the valkerax eclipses her.
Impact.
The first bodies to hit the ground break instantly under the others, flesh and bone and valkerax screams. Blood vaporized by sheer speed explodes out, a fine, hazy red mist hanging in the air for a split second. And then the earth heaves, force rippling the mud like waves, and all four of us are flung off our feet like rag dolls.
Someone reaches for me in the air, gripping frantically and curling around me. We hit mud, not hard ground, going skidding for what feels like miles. Malachite to my side, Fione on top of me, Lucien around me, and then the ground gives way, and we fall into nothing. Fione’s scream, Malachite’s beneather swear, and Lucien’s hand around my waist, his golden fingers turning black at the tips, up the knuckle, to the palm.
I know, deep down, that he can’t protect me. I’m the immortal one.
It has to be the other way around.
I twist my weightless body in the air, clutching him close, covering his skull, his chest, his abdomen with all of me. The vulnerable parts. If we hit ground, I’ll be first. I have to be first.
Bone and blood exploding, like the valkerax.
I have to protect him. I’m his Heartless.
No.
I’m his.
The wind whistles cold. Malachite shouts something. And then everything goes dark, the image of Varia standing alone with the white feather in her palm burned like an emblem on the back of my eyelids.
It’s not a dream. Not really. Not the way it’s supposed to be, floaty and out of place and certain. There’s the smell of blood everywhere. Darkness everywhere. Too real to be a dream but not real enough to be my reality.
I’m looking through someone else’s eyes—two eyes, and in my heart there’s an unshakable strangeness in seeing through only two. It’s supposed to be more than two. Far more. I’m being crushed—no, not me, the person I’m seeing this through. Weight everywhere. We have to escape. A hand in my vision—not mine—reaches out into the weight, gripping, summoning, and a hot blast of fire explodes from their palm.
Light.
Light pierces through the flesh-dangling hole, and we crawl out, inch by inch, until we flop into freedom, the sunlight. The crushing weight moves from our outside to the inside. To our chest, where our heart should be.
A heart.
I can feel it beating. This is definitely not me. A mortal. They look down at their hands, golden hands with midnight fingertips shrinking, the animate darkness retreating to smaller and smaller bits until it’s gone entirely. Human nails. Human skin. Half the fingers human, the other half wood.
Varia.
And the screaming.
Gods above and below, the screaming. Like broken bells, like metal on metal, like things dying and being born and dying all over again, an endless cycle of noise. We can barely hear, barely think. We fight vomit, collapsing to our feet and staring at the mud. Dirty. Unpleasant. Pointless. The world is spinning, and screaming, and sickening.
DESTROY.
The hunger? Here, in her, too? Witches don’t have the hunger.
DESTROY.
Not the hunger. Not my hunger. This is clear, not tamed by magic or freshly consumed flesh. This will never be tamed, never be lessened. This isn’t a hunger.
It’s a wound.
DESTROY.