Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts) Page 10

  Y’shennria’s home is even more ruined than I thought. Up close, you can see all the witchfire marks, black and deep, and the remnants of a battle. Massacre, really. Old, old bloodstains on scraps of rug and bookshelves, hidden from the elements by the ruined walls so well I wouldn’t know the brown marks were blood at all if the hunger couldn’t smell it. I shudder and try not to think of any of the bloodstains being Y’shennria’s. Or worse—her family’s. Her baby’s.

  This place is just a shell—barely any infrastructure left at all. Y’shennria’s hiding here? Maybe there’s a cellar sequestered away somewhere, because there sure as the afterlife isn’t a single room left intact. There isn’t even enough hall left to walk in, my shoes finding purchase in the titanic piles of stone bricks and wooden support beams bleached pale by the grassland sun.

  The thunderstorm hits right when I reach the top of one such pile, crackling lightning across the sky. This pile is the tallest out of the ruins and gives me a perfect view of everyone else—Lucien with his eyes to the ground, Fione tapping semi-intact walls with her cane suspiciously, and Malachite on his hands and knees, listening with those blade-long ears of his. A banner flaps beneath my feet, and I squat, pulling it up by its loose threads and admiring the washed-out emblem I can finally see—a raven with four wings taking off from a single tree.

  “Where are you?” I whisper to the emblem. “I miss you.”

  Something behind me crackles and I whip around, ready for the inevitable landslide of brick and wood I’ve created by disturbing the pile. But there’s nothing. No movement, or rather, a movement so small I barely see it at all. There, in the center of the pile and on the very top, something pokes up green from the dust and debris. It grows, bigger and bigger, before my eyes and only when it sprouts a bud and many fine thorns do I realize it’s magic.

  A magic black rose that blooms right in front of me.

  Y’shennria. The thickets of them in front of her manor in Vetris.

  I can’t contain my laugh as I walk over and peer down at it, half embarrassed. “You seriously weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “There you are.” I jump at Lucien’s voice so close all of a sudden. He’s standing behind me on the rubble, eyes riveted to the rose. “Gods above—emotion magic.”

  “Is that…a big thing?” I ask.

  “It’s difficult,” he asserts.

  “Oh? And how would you know? Have you been trying to spell emotions lately?”

  “For a while I thought I could get you to leave Varia using it,” he admits. “But it turned out to be far beyond my capabilities. And my conscience.”

  I ignore the barest swelling of my chest. “Right. So. What does this little thing mean?”

  “Someone who knows you made this spell,” he muses. “They knew you’d come here, and you’d feel a specific emotion in this approximate area. It’s tailored to you, and only you. Very delicate work—and a very powerful witch.”

  My heart hammers. “Nightsinger?”

  He pauses for a moment. “No.”

  “How would you know?” I frown. “You’ve never met her.”

  “I’ve felt her,” he says. “Through you. No, this is someone much more powerful. And with help from someone else, someone who knows you very well.”

  “Y’shennria,” I breathe. “This is her sign to me. Can you do anything with it?” I pause and give him a knowing look. “Something that won’t hurt you?”

  “Perhaps,” he agrees. “Go find Malachite and Fione, and I’ll think of something.”

  I have the creeping urge to refuse, thinking it some ploy to get me away so he can do risky magic again. But he just stares at me, and I know I have to go. I have to trust him. If we don’t have trust between us, we have nothing.

  When I get back with Mal and Fione on my heels, Lucien is sitting by the rose, stock-still, his hands folded in his lap. He looks comfortable, but there’s a sheen of sweat on his temple, and his grimace is one of pain.

  “Is he all right?” Fione asks.

  “He’s not doing that overexerting thing again, is he?” Malachite reaches out to shake Lucien’s shoulder when a voice cuts through the air.

  “I wouldn’t touch him if I were you.”

  All three of us whirl, Malachite’s unsheathing blade ringing, the rapid clicks of Fione’s crossbow cane unfolding, and my claws piercing out through my flesh instantly, bloodied and over-ready. I freeze at the figure standing on the pile with us, velvet purple cloak billowing around them. They lower their hood, and all it takes is seeing that gorgeous mass of fluffy hair pinned with amethysts to know.

  My claws jerk back in, my eyes wide. “Y…Y’shennria?”

  Her dark face with its high cheekbones lights up, softly and all at once. “Zera.”

  Her voice. It’s the same. Cool, precise. It echoes even now in my head as it always has, teaching me, reminding me of the rules.

  In Vetrisian court custom, one does not embrace. Unless one is family.

  I run, unthinkingly—scrabbling over the pile, bricks and wood flying, my arms reaching for her through the swirling dust.

  And she catches me, hands and all.

  Scarred neck and all.

  Smile and all.

  …

  “I must admit—you surprised me, Your Highness,” Y’shennria says, her arm laced in mine as we walk the perimeter of Ravenshaunt. “The rose’s spell was to bring me to Ravenshaunt should Zera return, but I didn’t expect to find you here—casting your own spell of all things!”

  “You find me just as surprised, Lady Y’shennria,” Lucien admits. “With all due respect, Father and his ministers had you branded a traitor. I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “On the chopping block, maybe,” Malachite offers.

  “Malachite,” Fione warns. “Manners.”

  Y’shennria smiles, her every step like air over water—all elegance and measured steps. “Oh, Your Grace, I hardly think that’s of much concern now, considering the position we’re all in.”

  Just having Y’shennria close, the ability to walk with her like this—it’s everything I’ve been wanting. To have someone who knows what I’ve been through is a silent source of strength. It’s strange to say, but even her lavender perfume relaxes me. Lucien, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. His posture’s completely changed—from Whisper-relaxed to Prince-straight. Y’shennria clearly reminds him of the court, of his position. Of everything he left back in Vetris.

  “Now then.” Y’shennria’s smile fades, her seriousness bringing the faintest of creases to her mouth. “I’d appreciate it greatly if you would tell me why you’re all here, and with Zera still Heartless.”

  Catching Y’shennria up on all of what’d happened after she left is easier than I expected—a lot of it she’d heard from secondhand witch sources inside Vetris. She’s already acutely aware of King Sref’s movements thanks to Windonhigh’s vigilance, so I don’t need to tell her about his army gathering. Or being destroyed. Evlorasin escaping was another thing she didn’t need to be told—the whole country knows a radiant, rainbow-sheathed valkerax had burst forth from under the city and flew away. Everything else is fair game—Varia, the Bone Tree, Evlorasin’s training. She wants to know everything. And, unlike nearly everyone else I’ve encountered, her dark eyes hold not a scrap of judgment for my choices.

  “You did what you thought was best for your own future. Albeit misguidedly.” She looks at Lucien with a small smile. “It sounds as if she’s given you enough headaches for a lifetime, Your Highness.”

  “Two lifetimes.” He sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “And it sounds as if you wish for her to give you more. Why else would you make her your Heartless?”

  “Necessity,” I blurt before he can say anything. “Varia didn’t seem keen on letting me go, even after our agreement.
”

  “You are very useful.” Y’shennria’s lip-twist is so small, I’m guessing only I notice it. I give her a casual shrug and a full-blown smirk.

  “And here I am, unable to admit to it because you taught me modesty above all things—”

  “Forgive me, Lady Y’shennria,” Fione interrupts. “But where have you been?”

  “The only place Old God families like me are safe anymore,” she answers swiftly. “Windonhigh.”

  There’s a beat as the four of us share a look. Y’shennria obviously notices it—she’s a master of social cues, after all—but she pretends she doesn’t.

  “I was planning on bringing Zera up to Windonhigh, should she come,” Y’shennria continues, glancing over at me. “Nightsinger’s there. And Crav and Peligli haven’t once stopped telling me how much they miss you.”

  A sharp pang runs through the center of my chest. “They’re safe?”

  “The safest place for them in Cavanos,” Y’shennria agrees. “Yes.”

  It’s hard to know when you’ve been holding on to something until you finally let it go, or it leaves of its own accord. You can’t know how heavy it weighs on you until it vanishes, and all that weight is suddenly and wonderfully missing. I’d been carrying around so much worry for the three of them that only snowballed the more Vetris geared up for war, and now…

  Now there’s room to breathe.

  “Sometimes, the gods aren’t so bad after all.” I exhale.

  “We’re searching for a way to destroy Varia’s hold over the valkerax,” Lucien starts. “Is there any way we could accompany you and Zera to Windonhigh?”

  Y’shennria’s lips knit in a tight line. I know that look. It’s the “with conditions” look.

  “A High Witch made this rose for me, as a favor. I was to bring back only Zera.”

  “Y’shennria…please.” I turn to her. “I’ll beg if I have to.”

  She thinks on this, the wind rustling through her high hair, and then she turns back to Lucien.

  “You must understand, Your Highness. You may be a witch now, but you are still the prince of Cavanos. The enemy.”

  “There is no enemy anymore,” Malachite cuts. “Vetris is gone.”

  Fione and I both look to Lucien, but he’s completely still, even his hands slack.

  “Not entirely gone,” Y’shennria starts softly.

  “But debilitated enough they won’t be an issue for the witches,” the beneather presses. “Not for a long-arse time.”

  “You’d be surprised at the human ability to bounce back.”

  “And you’d be surprised, ma’am, at what little tolerance I have for pointless upworlder squabbling. The valkerax are here. And we have to stop them. Are your High Witches going to help or not?”

  Y’shennria moves from one foot to the other, her lavender silk dress swaying uneasily with the movement. Malachite won’t give an inch, chin high and eyes red spears.

  “I promise you,” he continues, hard, “that witch flesh and human flesh burn the same.”

  None of us says anything, Lucien not stepping in with a reprimand, nor Fione with an addendum. Just silence. Just Y’shennria’s hazel eyes flickering over each of us in turn, and none of us blinking.

  Finally, she exhales what sounds like a laugh. “I see you’re all very serious about this.”

  “And I see you aren’t as much,” Lucien says. She turns her eyes on him slowly. Tension winds the air like a bard turning his lute, tight and absolute. I can’t stand to see the two of them at odds, so I step in.

  “Everyone’s trying, okay?” I hold up my hands. “Y’shennria, just two days. Give us two days in Windonhigh, and we’ll be gone.”

  “‘Us?’” she leads. “So you’ll leave with them?”

  “I—”

  “What about Crav, Peligli? Nightsinger? And…” She trails off, looking at her own hands. “You’d be safe with us.”

  “I know.” I nod. “I know that. And I’m grateful for it. But I—” I gulp. “I have to finish what I started. Varia has the Bone Tree partly because of—”

  “Zera,” Lucien exhales the word, like a reminder I’m not at fault.

  “Because of me,” I finish. “She has it sooner, now, because of me. I enabled her power. And I’m going to disable her power. I’m not going to run from guilt anymore. I’m going to fight, like Reginall said—every moment of every day.”

  Y’shennria’s silent for a long moment, her brows tightening over her sharp eyes. I know she’s tabbing me up, calculating hows and whys. Finally, she gives a quick nod.

  “Very well. Two days.”

  “Let us go, then,” Lucien says. “Immediately, so as to inconvenience you as little as possible.”

  “It’s no inconvenience to me, Your Highness,” Y’shennria says, motioning for us to follow her over the rubble and back to the rose sprouting there. “It is the High Witches who will have issue with it. They are not the most trusting sort.”

  “Understandably,” Fione murmurs.

  Y’shennria gathers us around the rose and looks to Lucien. “You may have to contribute to the teleportation spell, Your Highness. They are expecting only two to return.”

  Lucien nods. “Right.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Malachite warns.

  Lucien shoots him a tired smile. “Yes, sir.”

  Y’shennria has us clasp hands, the black rose centered in the middle of us. Lucien bows his head, his fingers holding mine going black. His left hand—it might not work, but the magic still eats at it whenever he casts. Maybe…just maybe, someone in Windonhigh can give him the witch wisdom he needs to temper his magic. To stop using it to destroy himself. That’s all I can hope for, because he hasn’t listened to me thus far.

  I swallow imaginary glass.

  if the boy you love destroys himself to stop his sister because you gave her the Bone Tree—

  My brain brandishes a white mercury sword against the hunger, the gloom.

  No.

  We’re fighting the guilt this time. To the teeth.

  To the death.

  The thunderclouds choose that moment to finally open up, a gentle pitter-patter pattering down harder until it’s entire sheets of water dumping on us, completely drenching the bleached and thirsty ruins. We wait, and wait again, a string of sick-wet moments, until my ears pop with that familiar nothingness, the world dimming to rushing blackness, and light and sound coming back in all at once.

  Thunder replaced by rushing wind. Not the sort I’m used to—through trees or bushes or the grasslands. Lighter than that. Freer than that. Wind without boundaries, unhindered, howling against and with itself. The light is the near-dying sort, the sun hanging low and silver on the horizon.

  But I see it clearly.

  Just the horizon. Just the sun, and stretched out before us are nothing but puffy white clouds. A quilt of them, as far as the eye can see. We’re high, so high. We’re standing and dripping water on a small platform of what looks like dirt and stone, overgrown with moss and grass. It looks like land, but it isn’t. It can’t be, because there are clouds simmering just inches away, the drop down hundreds of miles.

  “Windonhigh,” I hear Fione mutter next to me, and I turn to face her direction.

  There, on top of the endless sea of cotton clouds, is green. Green land, rife with trees, and between them sandstone spires like lighthouses, like the tallest lighthouses in existence, stretching so high they seem impossible. Impossible too in the way they’re twisted, smooth and hollow with hundreds of windows and yet bent around each other organically, like stone trees grown side-by-side. The stone spires end somewhere, the green trees end somewhere, sheer cliff-faces peeking from white fluff. The land looks like it’s been lifted from the ground, torn out, dirt and stone and roots dangling down into sheer blue sky.

 
A city.

  It’s a city in the sky.

  And the crows.

  White crows everywhere—in the trees, in the spires, flying and nesting and chattering. White deer, eating from the little meadows dotting the city. Pure white bears, sunning themselves in the afternoon light filtered through the trees, fishing in little rivers that start somewhere I can’t see and drip diamond water over the edge of the land and down into the sky.

  White animals, this many—witches. Witches shapeshifted.

  Hundreds of white crows streak by us, close enough to drop feathers, close enough to hear their cawing and see their black eyes watching. They tear through and by us, doing easy loops around my head, hairpin-turns over Lucien’s shoulder, swirling between Fione and Malachite in dizzying spirals. The cacophony blasts my eardrums, ringing wingbeats and scratching caws, and as quickly as the horde comes, they’re gone, only three crows hovering on the little shard of sky-land we stand on.

  And then they’re not crows at all. White feathers elongate, take on the color and texture of cloth, bird-legs turn to human-legs in a twisted flash, and three people stand in front of us, hair blown by the wind.

  Witches.

  A particular witch, with an awe-inspiring mane of tawny hair and the stature of a statue—thick arms, powerful waist, and a face like the roundest moon with the brightest smile.

  “Zera.” Her green eyes crinkle. “Welcome home.”

  8

  WINDONHIGH

  “Nightsinger!” I cry, the looming death-drop just beyond my feet forgotten as I launch myself at her. “I—I never thought—”

  “As did I,” she agrees softly, embracing me. Always soft, eyes evergreen. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for sending you off on such a selfish mission—”

  “It’s okay. Really.” I flash a smile. “We’re here now, and I’m starting to learn that’s all that matters.”

  Nightsinger’s nod is small, her smile wry. “Crav and Peligli are very excited to see you. You must have so much to talk about.” Her eyes slide over to Lucien as he steps to my side. “Ah.”