Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,20
“The one no human has ever found?”
“Precisely,” the sage asserts.
“My sister’s been there,” Lucien says.
“Then surely,” the sage leads, “you must hurry. If Windonhigh does know how to stop the valkerax, it will be the first place she destroys.”
“Uh, hello?” Malachite frowns. “Breaking the valkeraxes’ bond with the Bone Tree means they’d be let loose on the world. You know, the whole reason Old Vetris banded together in the first place?”
“We hold on to it, until we have a better plan,” Lucien says.
Malachite shifts uncomfortably on the wall. Fione stares down at her notebook intensely, her still quill blotting an ever-expanding dot of ink in the center of the page. My dream bubbles up—the fevered one I had when I blacked out from the fall, the one this morning. I’d been Varia. I had her hands, her arms. Her body. I was in her body, seeing through her eyes. And the voice in my head, worse than the hunger, wanted to destroy everything. But it wasn’t hers. They weren’t her thoughts. Fione was superimposed on the destruction. Fione was the only thought she still had that was her own. And if the rest wasn’t hers, then…
“The Bone Tree wants this.” I break the quiet. “It’s urging her to destroy.”
“How would you know that?” Fione’s voice is instant and biting. Understandably so. How dare I presume to know what Varia’s thinking, feeling? I’m not the one in a relationship with her. It’s time to tell them. No more secrets. Secrets are what drove us apart in Vetris.
“When we fell, I blacked out,” I admit. “And I had this dream. I was with her. I saw through her eyes. And this morning, I had the same dream. She was—”
“She’s alive,” Lucien says, an assertion, not a question.
I nod. “The valkerax fell on her, but she cut through them. I could hear something screaming in her head, like the hunger screams in mine. But hers was louder. Untempered by witch magic. It wanted ruin indiscriminate. It was fury and fear and pain, all at once. And the only way she was keeping sane was by holding on to the idea of—”
My eyes skitter over to Fione, and I feel suddenly raw with the awareness of what wounds I’m testing the stitches of. I clear my throat.
“She killed Gavik.”
Fione has the same reaction her love did—she doesn’t flinch. Lucien exhales, just barely, and Malachite rolls his eyes.
“Fuckin’ finally,” Mal says. “Good riddance.”
I inhale sharply. “The Bone Tree wants her to destroy. Anything. Everything. But she’s fighting it. She’s trying to keep it in check so she can accomplish her goals. It got softer when she killed Gavik, but it didn’t go away. It’s so godsdamn powerful, like nature itself—”
“She can,” Fione interrupts me. “She will.”
Lucien glances over at me, then her. “Of course she will.”
Their faith in her is ironclad. Or maybe they just want it to be. Belief is sometimes the only thing you can hold on to. But I’ve felt it. By some arsed-up twist of dream-magic, some echo of Varia being my witch once, I’ve felt what she’s feeling. What she’s going through. And no mortal would be able to keep strong against something like that for long. Worry runs taut threads through the room, between Malachite and Fione, between Fione and Lucien most of all.
Windonhigh. If the sage is right, the High Witches have to know something. Some spell, some information to help us separate the valkerax from the Bone Tree. But no human’s ever found Windonhigh—not even Nightsinger ever mentioned it to me.
And then it hits me: the letter. The one Y’shennria sent me while I was still Varia’s Heartless. I scramble in my pockets, pulling it out from the little bag I keep the fragments of Father’s sword in—blade and hilt, disassembled. The bag made for me by Lucien.
“Here,” I chirp, flattening the letter on the table as everyone bends over it. “Y’shennria sent me this when I was in Vetris. She said to come to Ravenshaunt when I got my heart back.”
“And?” The old sage wrinkles his nose. “How does this help you young ones find Windonhigh?”
“Y’shennria is an Old God family,” Fione interjects. “She conspired with the witches to steal Prince Lucien’s heart, but when she failed, she fled.”
“She was confident she’d be safe,” I say. “On the night of the Hunt, when she sent me off to take Lucien’s heart, she assured me she’d be fine, that the witches would give her asylum.”