Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,40

pleasant of springs in the city.

Because, despite the fact it’s dripping with magic, it is still a city.

Sandstone paths carve inward to the city center, dividing the sky-land up into four quadrants—not entirely unlike Vetris. They’re all named after the four animals witches can shift into—Crow, Bear, Deer, and Fox.

Fox is mercantile—stalls and shops tucked into sandstone corners and down little alleyways, brilliant banners of crimson and gold strung from every eave. The crowd is a mix of all ages, all skin colors, all hair types, but their clothes have a theme—flowing, robe-like things, cut in what Vetrisians would consider odd places to show skin and shoulders and knees.

Y’shennria trained me well—no piece of bone or brass jewelry escapes my eye. Piercings are very popular in Windonhigh, it seems, all manner of lavish studs lined over brows and jawlines and on collarbones. We get strange looks, the witches doing their daily shopping looking at Lucien most of all. It’s like they can sense his magic, that he’s one of them. They stare, whisper, trying to figure him out, and he has all their attention. Or, most of it. The rest of us are just his curious window dressing.

The only ones who don’t openly stare are what my thief instincts assume are lawguard equivalents—witches in black armor, spiked all around the shoulders and collar and boots. As if they didn’t look intimidating enough already, their mostly smooth, small-horned helmets encase their entire face—dark and reflective—and yet somehow they can see, tracking us as we walk. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but it’s one I’m used to.

The Deer quarter is the housing area, where the tall stone spires wind around one another seemingly into infinity. They loom up into the heavens, near touching the sun and ribbed with long curlicue lengths of stairways and dotted with proud balconies. Nightsinger explains they’re mostly empty due to the Sunless War. There aren’t nearly enough witches to fill them anymore, and suddenly the towers I thought looked grand now only look lonely.

But witches wash their clothes in the nearby river, fingers black as they spell the water to move in tight, cleansing whirlpools, and others lay out vegetables and salted meats to carefully dry on blankets in the sun, and a few older witches cradle babies to sleep with creak-voiced lullabies, and life indelibly goes on.

It goes on around glass, because deep in the riverbed, I catch the glint of it. Thick, clouded, and raw. Raw, jagged glass seemingly…growing from the riverbed. Embedded. Emerging. Not little pebbles or discarded shards. This is so thick it’s like glacier ice, big enough to be boulders. Why would—why would glass just be sitting there? In the open?

I shake it off quickly. Magic is magic. Who knows what purpose it serves?

Crow is the quarter for farming and art, and by “art,” I mean “extremely magical art.” To be completely godsdamn honest, I had no idea magic could look anything like this; on the edges of small plots of farmland, there are incredible sculptures of glass—thin, refined glass—filled with living lights bouncing around inside, like trapped fireflies. When we get too close the sculptures move, and I let out the ugliest yelp of my life. Malachite almost beheads one with his sword, but Lucien pulls him back at the last second.

The glowing glass sculptures roam around Crow’s grounds—prides of wildcats, snakes slithering underfoot, jellyfish floating in midair as though it were water. It’s so surreal to see witch children running around, playing among and with the living sculptures, transforming in a blink into little fox kits, little bear cubs, and back again, their laughter ringing all the while as they chase one another.

“The sculptures look best at night.” Nightsinger smiles placidly.

“What are those?” Fione points. I follow it to what looks like another clump of solid, raw glass, this time jutting out of the grass and looking decidedly out of place in the midst of so many refined glass sculptures. There are more of them, scattered about and stabbing up from the ground in variable heights and shapes. Obelisks, almost. The children don’t go near them, giving them a wide berth as they play.

I watch Nightsinger’s eyelashes flicker. “Nothing of import. Please, let us continue.”

There are mushroom gardens, some of them as tall as trees and as little as sewing needles, a few oozing beads of fluorescent sap and others curling tendrils in and out like breathing, and some belching forth puffs of great glittering gas when footsteps approach. Fione