Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,158

was gone.

And so was she.

But he wouldn’t accept it. Not until he went back to the First Root and saw for himself.

It was a fevered journey. Malachite was the only one who stayed with him—Varia had come to fetch Fione. He was glad to see his sister, truly, more whole and healed and free of the bone choker, but even she couldn’t pierce the steel around his mind. She was no longer witch. Her magic had gone.

The First Root was gone. Buried under rubble so far down, not even Malachite’s strength could get very far. They dug until they hit a crevice, and then another, and then one incredibly deep and right on top of where she would’ve been. The hot glow of magma at the bottom cauterized his heart shut.

Somewhere between the days and nights that passed of his crying beneath the boughs of the white tree, Malachite found the jewels—her necklace and her bracelet. But not the ring. And that gave him the only hope he could cling to. Her ring—she still had it, maybe. She had said to wait for her.

So he would.

He would, until the end of the world again.

Her heart had disappeared, but so had every other Heartless’s heart. Every single witch lost their Heartless at the same moment he lost her—every bag, every jar, every box. All of them, emptied out in an instant. Every heart magically teleported back into its body, rendering each Heartless human again, the flower-shaped scars on their chests like badges of joy.

“Luc!”

He quickly stuffed the jewels back in the burlap bag and looked up, Varia’s smooth voice ringing over the garden as she caught up with him. Her cheeks were flush with spring and happiness, her black hair long and lustrous as always. It’d taken years for her to recover to this state—to have enough flesh on her bones again to walk, to talk, to laugh. And he was glad of it.

She was still thinner than she had ever been before, a gauntness to her cheeks, and she couldn’t breathe as well as she used to. Her wooden fingers and leg still remained under her gauzy green dress. All traces of her own magic had been wiped away the moment the earthquake happened. She could no more spell a fireball than she could a pebble, and her wooden prosthetics had been unfeeling, drained of her magic. At first, the loss was devastating. She was happy to be with Fione again but seemed listless, and struggled to eat well or sleep well, the loss of magic deep in her.

It was harder still when she had to teach him, struggling and without the ability to demonstrate, how to forge a wooden hand of his own to replace the deadened one, and how to reanimate it with a constant low hum of magic. He figured out the latter mostly on his own, with Nightsinger’s occasional help, and together, the two of them finally managed to breathe enough magic back into Varia’s wooden parts that she could move them again—not nearly as well as if it was her own magic, but enough. That seemed to cheer her, if only a little.

She wasn’t the same, but then again, no one was. They were all new people, in a new world, learning. Magic still remained in Arathess, but different. It was not quite the same dark whisper, but it was there, nonetheless. It was more difficult, deeper, harder to pin down, and all witches in the world had to readjust accordingly. It would take years, perhaps decades, to return to the status quo of magic again, but he knew it’d be better this time. Truer.

He’d refused Varia’s idea of making him a glass eye that moved, too—he wasn’t particularly partial to glass anymore. He preferred his eyepatch, if only because it gave him an intimidating edge in negotiations with foreign lords.

“There you are!” Varia breathlessly smacked her wooden hand on his shoulder, and he staggered at the force. “How did the Pendronic meeting go?”

“Awful. They tried to marry me again.”

“Bastards, the lot of them,” she determined breezily. “Where are you off to?”

“More importantly, why do you need me?” he drawled.

“Because you’re my beloved baby brother, baby brother.” She laughed, head back, the indent marks of the Bone Tree’s choker now nothing more than faded, whitish scars on the skin of her throat.

“Speaking of babies.” He blinked. “How’s my nephew?”

“Oh, fine.” Varia sighed, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Just fine. They tell you the twos