Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,119
in the face of so much importance. We’re talking about the final battle, the last stand, and all I can do is give platitudes. All I can do is stay awake, stay strong, stay ready. I have to be ready for the moment, because it will come in all the chaos, and I have to snatch it from between the fingers of my well-meaning friends.
because you did this, the hunger whispers. you freed the valkerax. all those cities, all those people—dead because of you, wolf.
That beach running red. All those valkerax dead because of me. Lucien’s grip tightens. He’s skinreading me, I know it. The horrible guilt is a more effective armor for my intentions than even the songpoem of the wolf who eats the world.
Not me. I didn’t do this. This horrible web was spun long before I was even born. The Old Vetrisians, the witches. Decisions were made by scared people, by power-hungry people, by people. I didn’t do this; we all did. All of us fed into it and out of it, like a constant polymath machine. A cycle. A cycle that feels too big and too ingrained to ever break. Breaking it would mean breaking the world apart, throwing every previous rule into chaos. The end of the world.
No—the end of this world.
And the beginning of a new one.
A new one for Lucien, for Fione and Mal and Yorl. For Varia. Varia was wrong. We can’t just carve the world into a shape we want. That’s not how things change. One person can’t hold the chisel. There’s no point in holding the chisel at all if what you’re trying to carve is the bare tip of the iceberg.
The whole iceberg has to break for the river to flow again.
I am not a chisel. I won’t use a chisel. Not like everyone else. Maybe it’s the valkerax blood promise in me, but even my littlest thoughts are clear and certain and like poetry, like songs—my mind moves like a song and I finally understand Muro. His words. Evlorasin, too. Everything the valkerax ever said that sounded like nonsense becomes so clear.
Two hungers are in me, and they drive me forward. I was born to starve. I lost my parents to starve. I was brought to Vetris to starve, I fell in love with Lucien to starve, I killed those fourteen men to starve, and my hungers drove me to my friends, and my choices, and they drive me now to the river, and the iceberg, and the end of all things.
True names are true.
I am the Starving Wolf.
And I will eat the world.
26
THE WOUNDED
It’s the nights that are the hardest.
But I always knew that.
In Nightsinger’s woods, the deep cold and the deep darkness ate away at you. They gnawed like the valkerax gnaw, like the Bone Tree gnaws at Varia even now. I’d stay awake, listening to Crav and Peligli breathing in their unneeded Heartless slumbers, their cheeks and eyes puffy with childhood. A childhood suspended in midair, like a dewdrop off a tree branch.
Remembering how I used to watch them sleep, I understand. I understand the witches of Old Vetris and their desire to freeze their beloveds in time. To never have them age or grow sick. To have them by their sides, always. But isn’t that cruel? The witch would die eventually, taking all the Heartless with them. Wouldn’t it be so cruel, to ask people to tie their fate to yours like that?
Looking around the ship at night, at Yorl serenely in the crow’s nest with his tail hanging and Lucien and Malachite at the prow talking, I realize it’s not unusual. Isn’t that what friendship is? When you become friends, you ask one another to stay. To tie their fate to yours, until that same fate rips you apart.
So when, I wonder, did Heartlessness become a tool for war and not love? Was it ever love? Did inflicting the hunger on a loved one make them love you more? No. Less, surely. Living with the hunger is not a fair exchange, ever. Not even for immortality. And those who became Heartless in the more peaceful days of Old Vetris still would’ve lost their memories of being human. They would’ve forgotten the very people who made them immortal, their family and friends. They would’ve had to start over.
Love doesn’t take things away. It gives. I know that now.