Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,50
proper blacksmith, I’ll have it remade. I promise.”
“Make sure they’re good,” he asserts. “And make sure they use a threaded bi-fold method to attach it, or it’ll come off the second someone tries to disarm you with a hilt twist.”
“Noted. Thanks, Crav.”
His blush is faint. “Whatever.”
Suddenly Y’shennria calls for us to come to the table, and we do, all three of us hand in hand.
“Crav’s teaching me sword stuff,” Perriot pipes up, cheek smeared with a bit of pheasant gravy.
“Oh!” I swallow a bite of the seasoned livers Maeve made for us Heartless. “Is he? That’s wonderful. He taught me to duel, you know.”
“Literally everything she knows is because of me,” Crav sniffs, pushing his liver around on his plate.
“Not bad, kid,” Malachite marvels.
“I’m not a kid,” Crav snaps. “I’m a Heartless.”
“Wait…really? You really taught her?” Perriot’s eyes go wide. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so expressive. He used to be so meek and quiet. He’s really grown, a few months older and away from Vetris. Crav and Peligli, on the other hand, have hardly changed at all. A symptom of being Heartless.
Do I change? Have I changed?
It’s the hardest question to ask oneself, and the hardest to answer.
“She’s pretty good at dueling, too.” Malachite smirks at me, his three mouth-scars I gave him stretching scabby-red. “Except when she faints.”
“That was one time,” I grumble. “And it was because of Lucien’s white mercury sword! Hardly something I could control.”
“I’m good at dool also!” Peligli announces, beating her legs back and forth under the table.
“More like drool,” Crav rolls his eyes.
“Would you—” Perriot swallows. “Can you show me, Lady Zera? A real duel?”
Malachite raises a brow at me. “You heard the whelp, Six-Eyes. Do you wanna?”
“Absolutely.” I smile. “Tomorrow you lose, then.”
“I’ll be referee,” Crav asserts, and I grin at him with a twinkle in my eye.
“I heard”—Y’shennria leans in over her sardine fry—“that there was a record number of girls clamoring for blademaster lessons from their fathers after your and His Highness’s duel.”
“Kavar bless me, for I have sinned,” I agree cheerily. “I’ve brought self-defense to the noblewomen.”
Y’shennria’s smile is short-lived, because she and I both realize it across the table. The whole of the dinner realizes it—Lucien most of all. Vetris is gone. The nobility, the common people—who knows how many of them are still alive. If any lived through the attack. We could be talking about the dead, for all we know.
Even the kids recognize the tension and go quiet, Peligli’s legs stilling. The atmosphere strains against itself until the prince breaks it.
“Lady Y’shennria,” Lucien starts. “I’m going to destroy the Bone Tree. It’s the only way to stop my sister.”
My unheart clenches. Destroy? I thought—I thought we were only going to weaken it, its spell over the valkerax. But one look in Lucien’s eyes and I know plans have changed—if the High Witches won’t help us interfere with it, then…then there’s only one thing we can do.
The scrape of silverware across dishes is the sole sound. Y’shennria’s hazel eyes glint keenly through the witchfire candles on the table.
“Forgive the extreme disrespect my words are about to incur, Your Highness,” she says. “But I know you value honesty. Would it not be easier to kill Her Highness? The Bone Tree is an Old Vetrisian artifact; there is no guarantee it can be destroyed, let alone—”
“No,” Fione says. “We’re destroying the tree.”
t’would be so much easier to rip out the throat of the Laughing Daughter, the hunger sneers.
Y’shennria’s knowing gaze flickers, and she looks at me as if for confirmation we’re truly taking the most difficult way. I nod at her. The only way.
“The High Witches will not offer us aid,” Lucien continues. “But we require knowledge. Of magic, of Old Vetris, of how precisely the Bone Tree works. They wouldn’t give us the spell—if there is any—to weaken the valkerax’s connection to the Bone Tree and subsequently turn them away from my sister. Which means only one path is left to us now. To destroy it.”
He doesn’t come out and say it. He doesn’t say, would you know where to find such knowledge in Windonhigh? but it doesn’t need to be said. Y’shennria thinks for a long moment and then looks up with a covering sort of smile. The kind she used to change subjects among nobles flawlessly back in the Vetrisian court.
“Reginall, I think we’re ready for dessert.”
She doesn’t answer the prince’s unspoken question. I expect Lucien to ask it again, or more clearly, but