Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,114

The same goes for the Heartless.” She looks pointedly at me. “A few will be freed from their witches.”

A few. Not all.

“We save Varia and stop the valkerax from being controlled by her,” Lucien murmurs. “It sounds like the best option.”

“The best—” I whirl around to look at him but go quiet at the expression on his face. He’s smiling down at me, at every part of me, with a faint look of hope in his dark hawk eyes, and all my anger drains instantly. I love him. I love all of them. They want so badly to save the people they love, to save the world they love. They know, now, what they have to do.

But so do I.

The Bone Tree helped me see. That moment under the water, feeling so sorry for it—I know what I have to do now. A gentle burn—a peaceful flame of surety. Maybe I’ve always known.

Maybe this is what I was born to do. The witches made old sayings about it. Evlorasin knows about it, like it knows so many other inexplicable things—my true name least of all. Muro said maybe the Tree of Souls knew what I’d become.

At the end of the world, there will be wolves.

A wolf to eat the world.

I can’t let it happen again.

we won’t be hurt again, the hunger whispers.

I flash a glance up at Lucien. Nothing. His smile fades, and he looks at me curiously. I don’t know when he does skinreading, but I know it’s not often. We agreed to that much during our walks in snowy Breych. But he will read me sometime, and I have to be prepared for it. I will be, so long as it’s all just a wolf eating the world in my head, mouth dripping with blood, eyes and fur luminous. If I make my intentions a valkerax story, a poem, a madness, he won’t understand. I breathe deep and turn to Fione.

“How do we split the Trees, exactly? I imagine we don’t use an ax.”

“No.” Her return smile is wry. “No axes. There are a few requirements. Firstly, we need to find the Tree of Souls. The book said the Tree itself disappeared after it was split from the Bone Tree, but the First Root remained. There are old stories as to its location: a city filled with flowers.”

“Pala Orias,” Malachite mutters. Fione looks over at him with surprise.

“You know it?”

“How could I not?” He snorts. “My grandma never shut up about it. I just thought it was a fire-brained story of hers: ‘a city of flowers?’ Sounded freakin’ ridiculous. There are no flowers in the Dark Below.”

“There used to be,” Fione asserts. “Before your grandmother’s time. Before her grandmother’s. A thousand years ago, it was called Pala Orias—the birth city. And it’s where your people came from. They lived in the Tree of Souls’ trunk for millennia.”

“Spirits,” Malachite breathes. “Your dinky book said all that?”

She nods. “It might be one of the last surviving records of your ancestors’ beginnings. The rest were destroyed by the War of White, weren’t they?”

He nods, scratching his pale hair absently. I look to Lucien for translation, what with his brain full of princely tutoring lessons.

“War of White—when the valkerax first rampaged and destroyed all the beneather cities,” he clarifies. “The beneathers lost most of their history.”

“There’s another requirement,” Fione speaks up again. “We need Varia to be close by the First Root to have any hope of splitting it again.”

“Why?” Malachite asks.

“At least one of the Trees must be physically present for a splitting to work. The Tree of Souls would work, but it’s physically disappeared. And considering the Glass Tree is being hoarded in Windonhigh by the witches, the Bone Tree is our only hope.” She looks to Lucien. “The book said it would act as a large-depth anchor for the splitting spell.”

Lucien muses this over, chin in his hand. “Right—because otherwise the cast radius would be impossible.”

we will not be split again, the hunger snarls soundlessly at them.

“If I’m understanding this right, we’re bound for the Dark Below,” I say. “And we have to lure Varia there.”

“Not without me.” Yorl’s voice. We turn to see him drying his paws on the bonfire. “I have my grandfather’s guidebook from his ventures there. I know the safest ways in and out.”

“I doubt that,” Malachite sneers.

“And you do, Mal?” Lucien looks at him with one brow quirked. “You haven’t been back for a decade.”

“A beneather never forgets the Dark, Your Highness.” Malachite drawls