and he laces our fingers together the whole way back to our guest apartments. Not saying anything, just holding. Just being here. Existing with me, beside me. And that’s all I need. But it’s not all I want.
I tell him what Crav said about the Glass Tree, the High Witches being eaten, and his face doesn’t move for a long while. Malachite and Fione walk ahead of us, until his bodyguard looks back.
“Something went on, Luc. At the dinner. You gonna tell me what it is, or do I gotta guess?”
Lucien looks up, dark eyes pointed. “It’s not safe to say.”
“Ooookay,” the beneather leads. “Then what’s the plan?”
“We dress for easy movement,” he says. “And you follow me.”
“Tonight?” Fione asks. “It has to be tonight?”
“The sooner the better,” the prince says. “Time is against us here.”
“You mean the High Witches are against us,” I say, and he nods.
“They’re tightening defenses as we speak, closing ranks. Against the valkerax, against anyone. Us included.”
“Infiltration it is.” Malachite opens the door to the guest apartments, and we all shuffle in. “My favorite. Miles better than torturing.”
“A night of rest sure would be nice,” I mourn. “We’ve been on the go since the airship. And you mortals tend to need sleep.”
I look pointedly at Lucien but he ignores me, packing a pouch full of medicinal herbs instead.
“And you immortal Heartless tend to underestimate us.” Fione’s eyes flash determined. “We do what must be done. Tonight.”
I know there’s no talking her down. She’s not going to budge—but I’m worried. Staying so strong must be taking a toll on her. She hasn’t shed a tear, or shown much emotion at all, since the village on fire. And I’m worried. She was such a tender thing when I first met her. She had—and still has—that backbone of steel. I’m worried she’s using it like armor against the world, and herself. But how can I even say that? How can I bring it up? Everyone has a different way of dealing with this, and who am I to tell her hers is wrong?
“Rations,” Malachite says, tossing Lucien an armful of flatbread and seed tack. “Enough fuckin’ cheese to last a lifetime, still.”
“We’ll take a quarter wheel,” Lucien says. “Not much room else—we need to move light. Be sure to refill your waterskins, too.”
“You gonna be okay to do magic, Luc?” Malachite asks.
“Fione, what do you know about the Glass Tree?” The prince ignores him.
“Glass…” Fione trails off, taking mental inventory. Gods know how many books she’s read in her lifetime, and she must be scouring them all. “There’s a mention of a Glass Tree in the Hymn of the Forest, of course, but we all know that. ‘The tree of bone and the tree of glass will sit together as family at last.’”
“And there’s the stuff Varia told me,” I add. “The glass splinters in the Heartless bags—those are from the Glass Tree. That’s the key ingredient to making us Heartless.”
Next to me, Lucien reaches into his covering and pulls out the small sack stitched with gold thread and the word Heart. “You mean like this?”
I suck a sharp breath in when I see the sack move. “My heart.”
ours, the hunger oozes out of my ears. ours, ours ours. not his. take it. take it now.
I fight every scrap of human memory that comes clawing back, faint and fuzzy and smelling of cinnamon and feeling of home and calling hard and fast to me, like a key to a keyhole, a polymath machine piece to another, begging to be made whole, to work again, to become what we were meant to be all along, our natural state, our true self—
Lucien reaches into the bag and presses out the tip of a sharp, long glass shard. Not raw, refined. Transparent, not cloudy. Thin, but real.
“How did you get that, Lucien?” Fione asks. “That particular shard?”
“I woke up with it in my hand,” he says. “When I had that dream of the single dark tree, when it whispered my witch name to me. I woke up with magic in my veins and this glass shard clutched in my hand.”
“So it was given to you,” Fione muses. “By whom? The High Witches?”
“No. The tree gave me my witch name, and it gave me this shard. I’m sure of it.”
“So it was the Glass Tree, then.”
He shakes his head. “Neither glass nor bone. It was just a tree, glowing a little rainbow.”
The room goes quiet, all of us thinking.
Malachite rubs his white