Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,156

burned portraits of a family made suddenly much smaller. Lucien had started to forget their faces halfway through year two, his father’s face last, his mother’s first, nothing left behind of them but their blackened skeletons in their beds. They had been terrible rulers but kind parents. Forgiveness, and longing, and gratitude that they were gone enough for him to undo the damage they had done. His family had become but a dust devil in his busy mind—a tremor of a memory.

Lucien was glad, at least, that the ashen smell had gone.

The valkerax were a distant concern in the aftermath. Many had died at the explosion that occurred at the Tree of Souls, and the earthquake afterward. Scattered to the wind after the Bone Tree’s disappearance, it was hard to say what had happened to their remnants. Some people said they sunk down to the bottom of the ocean. Some romantics said they flew up to the sky, to the Blue Giant, and were living on the moon now. In the distant corners of the Star Continent, it was whispered a valkerax with five eyes could be seen flying high on particularly starry nights. But sightings had been few, few enough that it would be years or more before any real threat came of the valkerax, if at all.

Perhaps they’d learned, as Lucien had, to forgive.

“Watch it!” a workman snapped at his fellow, the beam they were attempting to set in the ceiling wavering. Lucien threw out his hand, the fingers instantly black, and the beam righted itself into place.

The workman looked down and waved. “Much obliged, Your Highness!”

“It’s ‘sir’ now,” Lucien insisted up at him, smiling.

“All due respect, sir.” The man chuckled. “You’ll always be ‘Your Highness’ to me.”

“Plucky little shit.” Malachite scoffed. “What do we even pay them for?”

“For their hard work, Mal,” Lucien said patiently. “Now do me a favor and leave me alone for a bit.”

“Depends on where you’re going.”

“The streets. For some air.”

They stopped at the grand front doors of the palace, the entrance hall coated in plaster and ladders and discarded tools. She had walked through this place once, hadn’t she? She must’ve thought the former decadence all so ridiculous.

“Are you going this year?” Malachite’s question rings.

The work-flurry sounds dulled in Lucien’s ears. He meant Rel’donas, again. After the end, Lucien found himself visiting the island once a year, welcomed heartily by Yorl. Lucien gave them information on how he was forming New Vetris each time in exchange for two days’ allowance to roam the Black Archives, though roaming wasn’t solely what he came to do.

He came to count the thirty-second door on the left, in the west hall, facing the ocean. He came to open the door, to dust off the floor and chairs and table, to leave fresh flowers on it. He came to sit on the cot, and watch the ocean, and remember.

Sometimes, in the light, he could still catch the ghost of her scent.

“Maybe,” he answered Malachite. “Maybe not. Depends on how busy I am.”

“You always find time for it,” the beneather muttered. “Somehow.”

Words failed the former prince, sadness succeeding them, and he walked down the steps and out to the lawn.

To call it a lawn still would be a disservice. Where once nobles spent leisurely time walking among the thin, artisanal waterways carved into immaculate grass, a garden had replaced it. The waterways made only to impress now provided great irrigation to a dozen acres of vegetable gardens, flowerbeds, grain fields, and fruit orchards. After he’d entered the ruins of Vetris, after he’d cried enough and shouted enough and stared long enough at the last memories of his childhood, it had been the first thing he converted—a food supply for his people. The fish of Vetris held what survivors he gathered well enough until the first sprouts of quick-growing sugarleaf began to blossom, and then followed the young beans, and the red lentils, and even the weeds between the garden gave them sustenance—bitter dandelion greens and pithy butterbur filling grateful, hungry mouths.

He could scarce believe, somedays, the bounty such a garden had become. He remembered shoveling barrels of manure, of what horses still lived, into fertilizer until his whole body ached. He remembered pulling water up from the broken irrigation channels, carting bucket after bucket under the sweltering sun, Malachite and Yorl and every refugee citizen healthy enough to work at his side. He remembered most keenly the moment they’d realized they had grown enough greenery to supplant the