Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,121
hold on to it even as—with every incremental sink of the moons and rise of the sun outside the little window—it slips like seawater through my fingers.
A wolf kisses a rose.
“What are you thinking about?” Lucien murmurs, his dark hair mussed and his eyes heavy. Just looking at him, every worry melts away from me. I smile at him.
“Nothing, anymore.”
He strokes my hair from my face, his return smile more glorious than moonlight. “Good.”
I don’t like to think of them as the last days. I can’t think of them as the last days, or Lucien will catch on.
So I think of them as the first days.
The first days of the rest of my life with my friends and with my love. The first days of my life in the new world we’re going to make.
Together.
together.
Sometimes, when I’m staring at the ocean depths, at the dolphins cutting paths beside the boat joyfully, I get sad. Not terribly sad. But a little sad that I won’t see the new world, that I won’t get to see what happens to it, how it moves, what it looks like in the years to come. And when I get too sad, I go to Lucien and he holds me, and I hold him, until both of us feel better. He asks if it’s about Varia, the Trees, and I nod. Because it is. That’s not a lie at all. I was done lying to him a long time ago.
Sometimes, Lucien’s presence doesn’t work. Going to him bandages the wound but doesn’t heal it. I think that’s the nature of love, really—no one can heal you but yourself. Your love for yourself is what is most important, above all others.
“I’ve gotten so wise in my old age,” I drawl to myself, bent over a parchment with a quill in my hand. Sequestered behind a crate spate in the cargo bay with only the brass-gleaming matronic as company, I write. Drafts and drafts of a letter, just one, for all of them. The words don’t come out right, or at all sometimes. But I try. I pull blood up from my veins, tears up from my eyes, and I write. It takes days, and many close calls of being discovered by Lucien and his thief-instincts and me-instincts, but I manage to finish alone. I rip up each draft when I’m done for the day, opening the waste shaft to drop them into the sea and be rid of them for good.
It’s not an easy thing, to keep a secret from a worrier like Lucien. But I try—he tries to stay up with me, but he’s still a mortal. Sleep claims him as it always does. He touches me, trying to skinread out of sheer concern, but all he hears are the faint whispers of the hunger, the wolf who will end the world, a poem orbiting my thoughts like a shield.
In the end, the hunger shields me.
we will protect ourselves and no one else.
The empty wine bottle makes a good hiding place for the letter, and a word to the helmsman polymath to deliver the wine bottle to Lucien when it’s over is all it takes.
It’s easier for me than most people not to sleep, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And on the sixth day of travel, I like it even less.
“Hi,” I announce as I walk into the mess hall and toward the table where my friends eat hot oats and syrup. “I’m grumpy.”
“What’d he do this time?” Malachite drawls, shooting a look at Lucien.
Lucien smugly takes a sip of his tea. “Nothing wrong, I can assure you.”
“Land ho!”
The cry is exactly the one we’ve all been waiting for. Our eyes flash up at one another in a suspended second of disbelief, and then everyone bursts from the table and we make one mad dash together up the stairs, crowding the railing for a better look.
“Ow! Stop stepping on my tail!” Yorl yelps.
“Quit putting your tail under my boot, then!” Malachite snaps.
Fione stamps her foot. “Both of you, behave, or I’ll put my heel in the two of you!”
“Heel time, heel time, heel time!” I chant. Lucien’s the only one not taking part in the cabin-fevered fight, his onyx eyes focused on the strip of green in the distance, his whole face washed by relief.
“Cavanos,” he breathes.
I watch it grow closer with him, my hand intertwining his on the railing as if to silently say, I know how much you missed it,