Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,157
mulch with vegetable chaff. A luxury, truly, that had now become almost laughably commonplace.
He breathed deep the smell of ripening cherries, almond blossoms, swathes of young garlic and green onions and the honey of the beehives just beyond the vegetable garden. Potato flowers grew thick and white, covering the ground in spring snow, and rows of sweet radishes and strawberries had begun to shamelessly peek their rosy countenances out for all to see.
From the scorched soil of hopelessness, they’d together made New Vetris bloom. And so did his heart learn to heal. To move, when it wanted not. To beat, even if all it desired was to stop. What kept him moving, shoveling, eating, breathing, was the thought she’d chide him for thinking such things.
You have a heart in that handsome chest of yours, and you don’t want it? So terribly ungrateful!
He smiled at a daisy, the words coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. But he didn’t want them to stop. They’d be with him for the rest of his life, of that he was sure.
Of that, he hoped desperately.
His fingers wandered of their own accord to the breast pocket of his vest, in which he kept the empty bag. He pulled it out, studying the rough burlap and, most importantly, the golden threads that sloppily stitched out the word Heart on it. The mere sight of the bag and the word brought back a flood of memories, held by the tenuous dam of time and work and distraction.
But the jewelry inside, he had no dam for.
Lucien took them out now: a bracelet of amethysts in the beneather funerary style, and a golden heart locket embossed with stars and the three moons. The locket was so familiar and dear to him, like seeing an old and wonderful friend. The bracelet was a sadder friend, one spoken to in whispers and tears.
He’d found the jewelry on his return to the Tree of Souls. After the great quake subsided, after the surviving valkerax came pouring out of the earth and flew in all directions, freed at last, he’d been the first to lead a party down again. Down to the massive crater that yawned into darkness. Malachite and Fione had convinced him to rest for only an hour, but eventually caved and went with him. Yorl opted to stay with Lysulli and patch the wounds of the surviving soldiers. It was a long trek, and a furious one on his part. He didn’t remember any of it, or even how he navigated, but he remembered how it felt—the searing rush of terror, the frantic praying unending that went through his mind until he stepped foot yet again on Pala Orias.
Or what was left of it.
The ground was still unstable, and Malachite had to hold him back. The bottom of the massive crater was so deep and wide that only the faintest suffusing of light managed to illuminate the destruction. Rock. Nothing but rock, and stone, and dust, for miles in a ruined radius.
But through it, in the center of it, the Tree of Souls still stood.
Tall white branches splayed out, greedily soaking in the light, the sun, as it hadn’t for maybe thousands of years. Magic pulsed beneath its snow bark, rainbow flashes of light traveling up and down and back again. Only the highest golden flowers still peeked from the rubble, white manes and white bones of valkerax crushed beneath.
He’d tried to reach out, to use the Tree’s great imprint of magic to teleport himself to its roots, to the First Root. But it wouldn’t let him. There was a block, an iron door closed between tree and witch, now.
So he tried to walk.
He took four steps, then collapsed from the exhaustion. Malachite hadn’t taken nicely to it, and with Fione’s help, they took him to Pala Amna and rest. In the following weeks of his recovery, and even after, they tried to get him to leave each day—to return to Vetris, to rebuild. After all, Fione said, there was no chance anyone survived. It was just miles of rock, miles of earth.
And besides, her heart was gone.
He’d noticed it the moment he teleported every soldier and friend back to Pala Amna, at her desperate request. The burlap bag in his breast pocket was suspiciously light. And when he opened it, it was empty. Not even the glass shard of the Glass Tree still remained. There was nothing. Not a smear of blood, not a single bit of flesh.