Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,5

in his chainmail back pocket and pulling out a hastily scrawled piece of parchment. He clears his throat excessively and reads: “‘Zera, I wrote this for you because Malachite likes to twist my words to his liking.’”

“Lucien.” I exhale a half laugh, leaning back on my pillows. Malachite trundles on with all the emotion of a carriage wheel.

“‘We’re in Breych. It’s a small Helkyrisian city just on the border.’” Malachite pauses, making his own addendum. “And is full of boring things like books. ‘Varia’s alive,’” he continues. “‘I’m sure of it. Fione and I are fine—I’ve gone to speak with the sage, and she’s conferencing with the local polymaths. We’ll be back soon with a plan. In the meantime, please rest. Yours, Lucien.’”

“Is he really fine?” I press, zooming my face into the parchment. “Is Fione—”

“Don’t ask me how.” Malachite grunts as he crumples up the parchment and lobs it smoothly out the thin stone-cut window. “But he managed to cushion our fall with whatever scrap of magic he unbelievably had left. And by some stroke of rune-crusted luck, we ended up hitting one of Breych’s many safety nets.”

“Safety…nets?”

He sighs. “Knowing you, you won’t get it until you see it for yourself.”

He stands from the chair at my bedside and heads for the window, and my perfectly healed body follows him, the holes and tears in my clothes funneling cold air onto my skin. It’s so bitterly cold—far colder than Cavanos ever gets, even in the dead of winter. The beneather motions with one long hand to the window, and I stick my head out.

“Vachi-godsdamn-ayis.” I breathe a white-cloud swear.

It’s the city of towers I saw on my hike up to the Bone Tree, but real and eye level. It looked so small when I had Varia on my back, like a toy set for a child, and now it’s looming all around me, on every side. Towers. Dozens upon dozens of towers, built straight off the stone of three mountain ridges, stately and yet placed in chaotic, half-baked rows. Some towers are grand and huge, with gargoyles carved in bone-moth likenesses and steeples of gold and lapis lazuli, while others barely look sturdy at all, their wooden supports rickety and their stone sills sagging with thick beards of moss, the roofs gabled simply in green and purple tile. Between the three close ridges runs a dizzying spate of rope bridges back and forth, some wide, some thin, but all of them connecting the towers. Sunset peeks out from between two towers, catching the diamond glass of their roofs.

And between the ridges? Between the towers? Nothing at all. Darkness. Hundreds of miles of drop, an abyss, yawning all around the city. I squint—not quite right. Threaded over the shadows of the crevasse I can see tawny strands. Woven. Purposefully. Huge beams of wood jut out from beneath the towers every which way, planted all along the stone ridges and supporting an intricate web of nets that spans the whole city, like a last halo of salvation, as if a massive spider’s carefully woven a web around it. The wind whistles viciously, and I pull my head back in to avoid the shards of ice.

“The people here felt the explosion,” Malachite says. “And the quake from the falling valkerax.”

“Were any of them hurt?” I blurt.

He sighs. “Do you two have to do that?”

“Do what?” I blink.

“Ask the same question right in the exact same spot. You’re either the same person or meant for each other.”

He means Lucien. Heat tries to tickle my cheeks, but I won’t let it.

“No one in Breych got hurt,” he finishes wearily.

“Fantastic. How long have I been out?”

“Seven halves.”

“Good!” I throw my hands up. “Not enough time to miss anything important. Where can I get clothes?”

“Here.” Malachite walks over to a dresser, throwing me a drab-yet-functional mustard dress and a heavy black wolf-fur covering.

“Ugh.” I wince. “The colors.”

“Bright, clashing shit seems to be the order of the day around here.” He opens his own leather covering to reveal a pink tunic with a mess of magenta ruffles. We both burst out laughing, the sound quickly swallowed up by the dour stone. The silence isn’t oppressive, but it’s there, echoing shards of reality back at us. A reality that’s changed so quickly, so brutally.

Varia’s gone. She has the Bone Tree. The valkerax.

I’m Lucien’s Heartless.

Fione is…

Malachite and I—

“I hurt you,” I say, reaching out to touch the edge of his face. Not the ointment-smeared wounds that must be agony