Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts) Page 5

  “Your Highness—”

  His reaction is instant, arcing his tall body around and into me, his lips burning hot against my mountain-cold ones. A gentle insistence of skin, and a sly sweet promise of things to come. When he finally pulls away, each bone in my body is limp, at a tender ease.

  “Every time you call me that, I’m going to kiss you,” he says. “Perhaps then you’ll break the habit.”

  “Th-That’s, that plan—” I start. “Considering how many of the best polymath tutors you’ve had, that plan’s a scathing disappointment. It won’t even work.”

  “I know.” He smiles.

  “I’m going to slip up on purpose,” I threaten weakly.

  He puts his forehead to mine, his murmur soft. “In all honesty, I’m hoping you will. Many times.”

  I’ve felt so many quiets in my life. So many silences that lingered, in different ways. Some crash, some burn. Some fall slowly, like snow, and others pelt heavily, like rain. But this one is strange and new.

  This one trembles.

  What comes next? I know what comes next. I know, as he leads me back to the inn tower, to the blazing of the hearth melting the snow on our eyelashes, both of us dripping water and laughter up the stairs.

  Boots are awfully pointless, aren’t they?

  Your cheeks are so red, you look scrubbed raw.

  I do not!

  If you go any faster I won’t be able to keep up.

  Teleport a little, then, Sir Witch.

  We barely make it past each torch before I pull him in to me, over and over, searingly desperate to make sure this is real and not some figment of my Heartless brain dying somewhere, on some forgotten plain. Some gift from the gods in my final moments.

  Dreams can feel real. Dying dreams most of all.

  And then I’m back, standing in the tower room I woke up in halves ago, a hand in mine and a smile mirroring my own. With slow movements, Lucien peels my snow-wet covering off, kissing a deliberate line down my neck. The near-dead embers in the hearth have nothing on the glowing blaze that starts to lick at my insides—

  he could command you to do anything, and we would be powerless to resist.

  —and then all at once, it vanishes.

  “Lucien.” My voice sounds small in the stone room. I try again. “Luc—”

  He straightens in a blink, eyes roaming over my face. “You’re pale. What’s wrong?”

  “I—” I swallow. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  I watch his expression, ready for disappointment. But there’s none, just a wry smile where it should be. He backs up, putting a slice of thoughtful space between us.

  “All right.”

  “Aren’t you—”

  “No,” he cuts me off. “What you want, you shall have. What you don’t want, you won’t have. It’s that simple.”

  All the fear in me drains, and it feels like I’ve taken a physical step away from some unknowable cliff’s edge. His warm hand moves, achingly, to tuck a strand of blond hair behind my ear.

  “That’s better.” His smile widens (that sunrise smile, the beginning of it all). “Some color back in your cheeks.”

  “Being undead doesn’t mean we should strive for unbeauty.” I flip the rest of my hair over my shoulder, and Lucien’s laugh echoes as he seats himself on the bed, pulling off his boots.

  “You’ve never once been unbeautiful, Lady Zera, and you know it.”

  “Hey!” I bend to unlace my own boots. “If I can’t call you Your Highness, you can’t call me Lady Zera!”

  “Says who?”

  “Me! Your Heartless!”

  “My Heartless,” he repeats, and the words suspend in the air. I almost regret them, regret reminding us both of the power imbalance, until he says, “I never did ask—how long do you intend to stay my Heartless?”

  I say it without thinking: “For however long you need me.”

  Dark hawk eyes cut over to me, his fingers undoing his shirt buttons freezing. “That’s not an answer, Zera. What do you want?”

  It hits me like a runaway carriage—silent road and then thundering all at once. No witch of mine has ever asked me that question. Not even Nightsinger, the most temperate of the past two. It was an implicit understanding with Nightsinger; she saved my life, and she didn’t want to be anywhere but the Bone Road forest. With Crav, Peligli, me. She wanted us there with her. To protect us from the outside world that was so cruel to children most of all.

  But I’m not a child anymore.

  I’m Zera Y’shennria, first Heartless of the witch Black Rose, the Starving Wolf, Six-Eyes. I helped Laughing Daughter obtain the Bone Tree, and with it, the power to destroy everything. Wherever you’re flying right now, Evlorasin, you were right. Even in madness. Especially in madness. The Starving Wolf’s hunger for her heart opened the gates that held back the end of the world.

  “I opened the gates,” I say. “So I should close them.”

  “Not obligation, Zera. Not selfless sacrifice.” Lucien’s voice gets harder as he stands, shirt swaying open to reveal skin under firelight. “What do you want?”

  Breathing’s hard again. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted. To make up for what I’ve done.”

  “And how does one do that?”

  “Protecting you,” I say. “Stopping Varia.”

  “And?”

  “And.” My throat tightens. “Making graves.”

  “For who?”

  My smile feels small, undeserving. “Will you help me tomorrow? Before we go to the sage’s meeting? There’s something…something I have to do.”

  He walks over, honey and spice, and puts a kiss to my forehead.

  “Always.”

  The bed is warmer tonight. Warmer than it’s ever been and stranger. But easier, too. Lucien catches me looking at him on the pillows, and he smirks.

  “You have my permission to stare at me all night.”

  “And why would I do that?” I fire off a half-downy mumble. “I’ve already memorized everything on you.”

  “Well.” His smirk grows unmanageable. “Not everything.”

  Since when is he the one who seduces, instead of me? My face fills red.

  “Princes aren’t supposed to have roguish manners.”

  “And ladies aren’t supposed to sleep in beds with unmarried men.”

  “Only married men, then.”

  He hefts up on one elbow, tracing my hand under the covers. “What are you implying, Lady Zera?”

  “Go. To. Sleep.” I pause. “Your Highness.”

  The kiss comes, as I knew it would, breathless and enmeshed in each other, and I’m the first one to pull away and the only one to roll over in faux grumpiness, Lucien’s laugh rumbling the mattress.

  I try to sleep—try so hard to play at being as human as he is—but I fade in and out, waking up in the odd hours to reach over and feel that he’s still there. Still real.

  Still with me, despite everything.

  Despite how many mistakes I’ve made.

  4

  THE FIRST

  DREAM

  The dream. Again. The one where I have a heavy, heart-beating chest.

  The dream where I’m not myself but Varia. I see through her eyes, her dark bangs on the edges of my—our—vision.

  But where my head is full of the hunger, full of the yawning void of hunger, hers is screaming. Again. Always.

  DESTROY.

  It burns against my mind, like sticking my hand into a pile of embers. Like the witchfire that killed me in Vetris—Lucien’s. It sears, it melts, it obliterates. I can just barely hold on to my thoughts, and it’s not even my body. I’m just a visitor.

  How am I visiting? How am I having this dream again, seeing through her again?

  I try not to think abou
t that as Varia turns her head, unbelievably overcoming the mind-bending screaming with sheer willpower. Enough to blink, enough to move.

  We’re standing in grass, the flowing grasslands of central Cavanos. The night wind ripples through it, caressing it peacefully. The only peace we can see, can sense. Everything above the grass is fire—all we can see is fire. This place has been on fire before, many times. Innumerable people have died here. Will die here.

  DESTROY IT ALL.

  Varia looks up, holds out her night-hued wooden fingers. I can’t feel the spell, even though I’m in her body. But I can see what it does—shimmering the air just before her, a low, soundless hum, and then a violent popping noise as someone materializes from the wavering air. Someone with long white hair, with ice eyes once cruel, now hollow, and dressed in a gray robe that covers his head.

  Gavik. Fione’s uncle, Varia’s first Heartless, and the man who tried to kill her so long ago. Who drove her out of Vetris because he feared her, feared the Bone Tree that called to her in her sleep. He’s the man who tried to kill Lucien, too, and who succeeded in drowning hundreds, if not thousands, of witches. He was once the most powerful man in Vetris, in Cavanos, one of the most powerful people on perhaps the whole Mist Continent.

  But now his expression crumbles to nothing more than dust when he sees Varia.

  “Y-You? How did you— I was in Vetris. Did you… No.” His ice eyes widen. “The Crimson Lady wouldn’t let you spell me away—”

  “No one lets me do anything anymore,” Varia says softly. “Least of all a little tower stuffed with your precious white mercury.”

  His eyes dart to Varia’s neck, our neck, to the Bone Tree choker that I know is there. Made of valkerax fangs. Made of pure magic, pure power. I recoil at the terror that flashes across the former archduke’s face.

  “New God above. You’ve done it. That foolish girl helped you, didn’t she? You have it now, and now—” His throat bobs, and a strange calmness comes over him. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  She doesn’t even grace him with a yes or a no.

  A genocidal maniac. A religious fanatic. A fearful man, whose fear hurt and destroyed the lives of so many.

  DESTROY.

  Varia’s hate burns cold. Burns like winter, like Breych in the dead of night, like putting a hand to a block of ice and leaving it for eternity. Our hand pulls out a velvet bag, embroidered with the word leech.

  “No—I can help. You need me—”

  He doesn’t even get the chance to beg.

  She denies him the chance, like he denied so many witches.

  Her wooden fingers collapse, fisting around the bag. A second of resistance, of Gavik clutching his chest frantically, eyes bugging out of his skull, and then the give.

  The squelch, the blood running down her fingers, the velvet soaking wet and dripping onto the waving grass.

  I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard of it, feared it like a nebulous reaper far off, but I’ve never seen it happen in front of my eyes.

  But it does.

  Gavik’s chest implodes—ribs and flesh exploding, painting the grass with viscera in every direction. Wet splatters on Varia’s face—our face—but she never flinches. Not for a second. She watches every slow moment as Gavik’s knees buckle and his corpse falls into the grass face first. Horrified face first. No grave marker. No pyre. Nothing.

  And the screaming in our head lessens. The fire, the images of death—they start to fade. Like someone ushering the horrible orchestra into another room and closing the door. It’s all muted. I—we—can think again, clearer.

  We’ve destroyed.

  We’ve obeyed.

  And the screaming rewards us.

  I feel Varia’s face smile. A delighted grin as she wipes pieces of Gavik off her cheekbone with slow ease, as her fear of the screaming turns to calculation. As she realizes the rules of it, the requirements.

  “We don’t need anyone anymore,” she murmurs. “Least of all a maggot like you.”

  She turns. Gavik’s gone. I don’t mourn him—he was no one worthy of mourning. But Varia’s words, the coldness and calmness in them, I mourn that. I feel it, deep down. I feel her sense of betrayal, her wounded trust, her aching love. All of it. All of it sadness like thorns, pointed out at the world.

  And on the horizon of her mind, a roar. A roar, as the screaming comes back quickly, furiously, ravaging every thought in its path.

  DESTROY IT ALL.

  The morning breaks cold and snappish over Breych’s three ridges. Lucien wakes me, and I mumble my surprise.

  “You’re still here.”

  “For as long as you’ll have me.” He laughs. “Come now. It’s far past sunrise.”

  Past sunrise. How long was that dream? It was a dream, right? No—it was reality. I saw Gavik die. Just like I saw Varia crawl out of the valkerax pile, alive and whole.

  Do I even tell Lucien? His wound over his sister is no doubt still raw. And how can I tell him when I don’t even know why it’s happening? How do I tell him of the pain his sister is feeling, the betrayal?

  One thing at a time, Zera. We’re in a warm bed now, with a warm boy.

  enjoy this ease while it lasts, the hunger taunts. for it will not last long.

  I push out the lingering dregs of the dream and sit up with a groan. “Why did you wake me?”

  “Don’t we have something to do?” he asks.

  “Yes. But I’ll have you know I’ve plucked out men’s eyeballs for far lesser crimes than this.”

  Whichever romantic poet forgot to mention how exceedingly impossible it is to get out of a bed with your lover in it owes me, and I take my payments in gold and endless praise, thank you very much. I manage to dress as he does, our backs turned to each other.

  “Is the prince of Cavanos trying to sneak a peek?” I tease. His fluster is immediate.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Likewise,” I chime.

  When we make it outside, the pure, fresh snow crunches underfoot like particularly stiff glaze on a sweetround. It’s my turn to lead—I pull Lucien gregariously around the early-morning stalls selling fabrics, beads, wire. A handful of little iron bells, in the Cavanos tradition. Red ribbon. White wood. It won’t be the usual pyre and metal orb carved with an eye placed in the mouth. It’s not the New God’s way. But it can’t be; I don’t have the bodies to burn. Only the memories. Only their faces, pressed like flowers in the pages of my mind.

  This is the old way to do things. The non-denominational way, the unfashionable way. The only way I know how, from reading the inscriptions on the mass graves near the Bone Road. The war graves. This is the only way left to me. I won’t be Varia. I won’t be Gavik.

  I will make graves for those I’ve killed.

  In a little teahouse, over steaming cups of chocolate, Lucien helps me, pulling the bundles of white wood sticks tight, wrapping them with red ribbon, and attaching a single bell to each silken strand. Fourteen bundles for fourteen men. Fourteen bundles for the years I didn’t know any better. Fourteen mistakes. Fourteen ignorances. Fourteen things I’ve done and can’t undo.

  Life. Life as equally important as death.

  And a Heartless, who took far too long to figure out that particular detail.

  Someday, someone will see the fourteen bundles of white wood wrapped with red ribbon, adorned with iron bells, set deep and well into the snow on the top of a distant ridge, accessible only by teleportation magic or flight, and they will wonder. They won’t see the girl setting them, one by one, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll hear her tears, echoing beyond the stone and out over the world.

  …

  “What took you two so long?” Malachite looks up when Lucien and I enter the sage’s tower. My steps feel the smallest bit lighter as I half skip over to a chair beside Fione and settle in.
>
  “Icicles,” I chirp. “All over our noses. You should’ve seen it—one sneeze and we were practically wielding swords on our upper lip.”

  Fione makes a catlike smile beside me, sipping her licorice tea. “Inventive as always.”

  “And this is before I’ve had my morning tea,” I agree, and take a sip of my own drink. Sitting beside her feels right, still. The dream lingers, still. Gavik’s dead. I know she had no love for her uncle, but I can’t bring myself to tell her. In doing so, I’d have to tell her I can see things from Varia’s eyes. And I know Fione would ask me to reason with Varia, to beg her to stop it all. I know she would.

  It would be giving her false hope, after I’ve given her real hope.

  “Greshoir étta.” The old sage croaks the Helkyrisian greeting as he enters, little arms full of books that Lucien instantly lunges to help him with. “Your Highness, I can—”

  “Just Lucien, please,” the prince insists, piling the books on the table.

  The sage sighs. “Very well. I hope you all slept decently.”

  “As well as can be, Elder.” I smile. “Any news?”

  “Unfortunately.” He nods, settling in an armchair by the fire and cupping his chocolate eagerly with knotty fingers. “I’ve contacted the Court of Five Violets with the news of Princess Varia’s decision. They’re moving to post the western armada along our shared border to monitor the situation. The rest of the fleet is mustering in Silvanitas, and every trade caravan from Braal to Trinito has been rerouted there.”

  “Translation?” Malachite looks to Fione and Lucien in turn.

  “Helkyris’s airship armada is the only one of its kind in the world,” Fione says, voice even. “Limited by the fact their engines fail over seawater. The unrefined white mercury they run on doesn’t react well to large amounts of salt vapor. But their intercontinental prowess is tremendous.”