I want to be human.
With Varia, I wanted to be human.
What do I want now? With Lucien? With myself? A witch who cares about me is still a witch, and—historically—they haven’t been all that generous with me.
I try to smile at a little girl passing with her father, her wool covering dyed bright orange and pink. She just stares and stares. But not at me.
“They’ve never seen a beneather before.” Malachite answers my unasked question.
“Can’t imagine many beneathers make the journey from the deepest depths to the highest peaks very often,” I tease.
He smirks back. “I’m the special-est of cases.”
The cold bites at us, propelling us forward. It’s supposed to be summer, for Old God’s sake! It’s incredible what the people of Helkyris have done with such a small space—barely any ground to walk on, and they’ve built an entire city! Terraces are their ingenious solution, carved into the sides of the three ridges to make more space for people to sit on stone benches, to take in the view of all-green Cavanos from low iron fencing, to linger around market stalls propped up here and there selling hot spice drinks and warm baked treats. It’s a city of levels, of steps, and by the time Malachite leads me to a massive dominating tower of quartz-flecked brick, I’m puffing my lungs out.
“This is the sage tower,” he says. “One for each Helkyrisian city. Center of local politics and social news. Fills the same sort of role a New God’s temple does for Cavanos villages.”
I stare at him. “Did you get smart while I was knocked out?”
“No.” He laughs. “Lucien. His whole prince-encyclopedia-brain thing.”
“Ah.” I open the heavy wooden door for him, and he ducks inside. This tower is cavernous, open, lined with benches and tables and the staircase tucked neatly in a corner, spiraling up into an endless column of misty, incense-choked air. The tower’s so high, you can barely see the roof, the top of it, darkness all the way up until a pinprick of glass lets light in. The walls are lined with doors, with alcoves of packed bookshelves built into the stone. I’m used to oil lamps, expecting them, but instead there are white mercury lamps.
Or what I think are mercury lamps. These are burning far too brightly and too purely to be the ones I’ve seen in Cavanos. Just one or two are needed to light an entire area. It’s possible the polymaths here perfected them—possible and absolutely jaw-dropping. If Cavanos had this sort of technology, it wouldn’t need all the white mercury it ships in from Avel and goes through like water.
“This way.” Malachite points at a far room. Our footsteps echo on the cold stone floor until we reach the door, and he knocks in that pattern he always does for Lucien. Three raps, then two.
“Come in.”
At the sound of Lucien’s voice, all the little hairs on my arms stand up and start to burn. My witch. My prince. Mine? No. My witch, but not my prince. The people’s prince. He’s only ever belonged to his people.
My unheart spasms with the realization he’s lost his sister. Again. This time to power, not faked death. This time she chose to leave instead of being driven out. He must be devastated.
Malachite pushes the door open, and the smell of cinnamon and clove bulls us down. Rich tapestries frame a round meeting table at which stands a half-bent elderly walnut of a man dressed head to toe in emerald green and gold, and Lucien, dressed in light blue and the softest smile when he sees me.
“Zera.”
He makes a polite half bow, excusing himself to the old sage man, and walks over.
It’s just one word. It shouldn’t make me so happy. It should take more than just one. It should take books, endless epic poems, a bard’s monologue to make me feel this hot, this strong, this quickly. It’s not fair. It’s not fair he can do this to me.
it’s not fair we’re still the monster.
The room is dim, but my eyes catch every fold of cloth on him, every freckle, every inch he crosses in his boots to reach me. My witch. Their prince. His eyes—I’m so used to seeing his eyes as hard onyx shards. Betrayed onyx shards. Bitter onyx shards. But now, right now, they’re spills of ink. Liquid, gentle, reflecting the scarce light of the room and my own nerves back at me.
He stops right before the danger. Right at the border of my space and his. He knows. He can sense it, just like I can—the two white-hot rings that radiate out from us, pressing, waiting, watching each other’s every move.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asks. “You were out for so long—”
“Fine.” I smile, tense. “Perfectly fine, Your Highness.”
“You—” Lucien’s eyes flicker. “That’s—you don’t have to call me that anymore.”
“You insisted.”
“And now I insist on taking it back.”
There’s a buzz that starts in my veins, and I can’t tell if it’s the smell of his skin I know so well by now or his magic that keeps me alive.
the only thing that keeps us alive. he’s our one tether to life; he holds our life in the palm of his—
A bag. It’s shoved at me so quickly, I don’t understand what it is until I see the stitching. Haphazard, poor needlework in fine gold thread that reads: Heart.
It’s so close and tantalizing, it almost distracts me from my first thought: a bit unoriginal, isn’t he? Varia, at least, wrote Traitor on mine. But his is just a label for what’s inside. Plain. Simple. Maybe that suits him. Maybe he’s the sort of witch who values simplicity.
“Here.” Lucien holds my heart out to me, the bag faintly beating, faintly lumpy.
My brain throbs. Echoes no one else can hear emanate from the heart bag—echoes of memory, like imprints of a body in the snow I can’t remember the face of. Who was here? Someone. My parents, maybe. My past, certainly. I can almost hear words, laughter, the smell of cinnamon.
I don’t dare to dream. To believe. I want to—I want more than anything to believe he’s the sort of person, the sort of witch, to give me my heart back instantly. But I’ve met too many witches to fall for it again.
“You’re letting me hold it?” I tease. “Awfully nice of you.”
“It’s yours,” the prince insists. Iron shavings eke their way into his ink eyes, hard and sleek. “If you want it.”
It’s too good to be true. He’s too good to be true. Nobody moves in the room—not the old sage man, not Malachite, not Lucien, not the thousand-year-old stones of the walls. So I decide to, walking a slow perimeter of the round table and running my fingers along its surface.