Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,148

is, but with it surrounded on all sides by the giant canyons and headed off by the monumental, ghostly Tree of Souls, it looks no more than a toy. A string. Something quaint and small, until it darts in closer, its five white eyes catching golden-flower light and glimmering in the darkness and all of a sudden it’s huge and everywhere.

“Starving Wolf,” Evlorasin says in its calm, guttural voice. “I’ve come to aid you.”

“Fire!” Lysulli yells.

“No!” I spin on my heel, wrenching a beneather’s bow out of their hand. “No, no! It’s friendly! Stop!”

But the line doesn’t listen to me—only to Lysulli. They nock their bows, and I watch in horror as a hundred archers pull, tense, and then fly loose their arrows. Some tranq, some not, but they all soar toward Evlorasin’s exact location, exactly at its five white eyes and undulating whiskers—

And then they stop.

The hail of arrows stops just before Evlorasin, who slithers fully out of the darkness, white scales and long halberd claws on display, its wolflike paws pattering down the earth in heavy thumps as it nears, leaving prints the size of horse wagons on the canyon floor.

“Didn’t you hear her?”

The voice seems to boom around the stone, and Yorl and I watch in shock with the archers as a white crow flies to the front, hovering just before the wall of unmoving arrows frozen in space.

Lucien.

The crow’s feathers meld to his armor, his cape, his smirk as he looks back at us.

“This one’s a friend.” The arrows suddenly bunch into one dense knot in the air, floating back toward the line of archers and landing softly on the ground just before them. He’s so powerful. This place…it’s made him a giant. That’s supposed to make me feel happy. Satisfied.

But all it does is terrify me.

will he be strong enough to stop us?

Lucien just throws me a small grin. “Always wise to save ammunition in a time like this, isn’t it?”

“Prince!” Lysulli booms. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? The thing’s next to you—”

Evlorasin slithers just behind Lucien, and joy pierces me as the prince turns to pat it on the nose.

“See?” He looks at Lysulli. “Gentle as a rabbit.”

“It’s the one I told you about.” Malachite sprints over to Lysulli far easier than I with his beneather agility. “The one Zera tamed.”

Yorl hems and haws. “‘Tamed’ isn’t really the correct phraseology—”

I push through Yorl’s words and the firing line and dash toward Evlorasin and Lucien, half-real gold petals scattering as I throw my arms around the prince and then bury myself in Ev’s chest mane.

“Thank you,” I mutter. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I felt the yearning of you,” Evlorasin rumbles. “And so too did it become my yearning.” The great wyrm narrows its five eyes at the firing line, the beneathers clearly jumpy and still ready to attack at a moment’s notice. “Will they have me?”

“I’ll make them have you,” I laugh, teary.

“Any bit of help is welcome,” Lucien says, a twinge of uneasiness to it as he tries to speak directly facing the valkerax. He can’t hear it speaking like I can—to him it’s just hissing—but he must be guessing how the conversation is going based on my words.

Evlorasin blinks down at Lucien, slowly and scrutinizing, sniffing the air around him intently. “This is your mated?” Ev snorts. “It seems rather…small.”

My laugh bubbles up, and I hug the beautiful beast closer.

It takes more than a little negotiation on all our parts to get Lysulli to stop ordering the archers to keep constant aim on Evlorasin. Especially when it breaches the firing line with me and circles my body like a lazy dog assuming its place before the hearth. But somehow, between Malachite’s cajoling at Lysulli and Lucien’s fearless, careful touching of the valkerax to communicate its friendliness to the battalion, we make it. None of the beneathers looks happy about letting the valkerax through and behind them, constantly checking over their shoulders as it curls up on the rubble and waits with us.

Lysulli won’t even approach closely, shouting from the firing line instead. “If it kills my men, I kill you!”

“Fair enough!” I shout back, and then put my hand on Evlorasin’s velvety wet nose. “You’ll have to be careful when the fight breaks out, Ev. They won’t be able to tell you from the rest.”

“Then I will battle deep.” The valkerax thrashes its tail. “Where arrows cannot reach.”

“You have to be careful! There’s a lot more of them that can