firelight. “What do you want?”
Breathing’s hard again. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted. To make up for what I’ve done.”
“And how does one do that?”
“Protecting you,” I say. “Stopping Varia.”
“And?”
“And.” My throat tightens. “Making graves.”
“For who?”
My smile feels small, undeserving. “Will you help me tomorrow? Before we go to the sage’s meeting? There’s something…something I have to do.”
He walks over, honey and spice, and puts a kiss to my forehead.
“Always.”
The bed is warmer tonight. Warmer than it’s ever been and stranger. But easier, too. Lucien catches me looking at him on the pillows, and he smirks.
“You have my permission to stare at me all night.”
“And why would I do that?” I fire off a half-downy mumble. “I’ve already memorized everything on you.”
“Well.” His smirk grows unmanageable. “Not everything.”
Since when is he the one who seduces, instead of me? My face fills red.
“Princes aren’t supposed to have roguish manners.”
“And ladies aren’t supposed to sleep in beds with unmarried men.”
“Only married men, then.”
He hefts up on one elbow, tracing my hand under the covers. “What are you implying, Lady Zera?”
“Go. To. Sleep.” I pause. “Your Highness.”
The kiss comes, as I knew it would, breathless and enmeshed in each other, and I’m the first one to pull away and the only one to roll over in faux grumpiness, Lucien’s laugh rumbling the mattress.
I try to sleep—try so hard to play at being as human as he is—but I fade in and out, waking up in the odd hours to reach over and feel that he’s still there. Still real.
Still with me, despite everything.
Despite how many mistakes I’ve made.
4
THE FIRST
DREAM
The dream. Again. The one where I have a heavy, heart-beating chest.
The dream where I’m not myself but Varia. I see through her eyes, her dark bangs on the edges of my—our—vision.
But where my head is full of the hunger, full of the yawning void of hunger, hers is screaming. Again. Always.
DESTROY.
It burns against my mind, like sticking my hand into a pile of embers. Like the witchfire that killed me in Vetris—Lucien’s. It sears, it melts, it obliterates. I can just barely hold on to my thoughts, and it’s not even my body. I’m just a visitor.
How am I visiting? How am I having this dream again, seeing through her again?
I try not to think about that as Varia turns her head, unbelievably overcoming the mind-bending screaming with sheer willpower. Enough to blink, enough to move.
We’re standing in grass, the flowing grasslands of central Cavanos. The night wind ripples through it, caressing it peacefully. The only peace we can see, can sense. Everything above the grass is fire—all we can see is fire. This place has been on fire before, many times. Innumerable people have died here. Will die here.
DESTROY IT ALL.
Varia looks up, holds out her night-hued wooden fingers. I can’t feel the spell, even though I’m in her body. But I can see what it does—shimmering the air just before her, a low, soundless hum, and then a violent popping noise as someone materializes from the wavering air. Someone with long white hair, with ice eyes once cruel, now hollow, and dressed in a gray robe that covers his head.
Gavik. Fione’s uncle, Varia’s first Heartless, and the man who tried to kill her so long ago. Who drove her out of Vetris because he feared her, feared the Bone Tree that called to her in her sleep. He’s the man who tried to kill Lucien, too, and who succeeded in drowning hundreds, if not thousands, of witches. He was once the most powerful man in Vetris, in Cavanos, one of the most powerful people on perhaps the whole Mist Continent.
But now his expression crumbles to nothing more than dust when he sees Varia.
“Y-You? How did you— I was in Vetris. Did you… No.” His ice eyes widen. “The Crimson Lady wouldn’t let you spell me away—”
“No one lets me do anything anymore,” Varia says softly. “Least of all a little tower stuffed with your precious white mercury.”
His eyes dart to Varia’s neck, our neck, to the Bone Tree choker that I know is there. Made of valkerax fangs. Made of pure magic, pure power. I recoil at the terror that flashes across the former archduke’s face.
“New God above. You’ve done it. That foolish girl helped you, didn’t she? You have it now, and now—” His throat bobs, and a strange calmness comes over him. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
She doesn’t even grace him with a yes or a no.
A