Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,60

idleness,” Evlorasin interrupts. “If you would look up, you would see a problem.”

It’s hard with the wind, but I squint up—Windonhigh far above us. Not far enough I can’t see the green, or the bottom of it—a mass of dirt and hanging roots, and most terrifyingly of all, from the tiny glass-bottomed section that’s been peeled open, dozens of glass roots stretching out for us like tentacles. And moving fast.

Malachite looks with me. “Tenacious little bastards, aren’t they?”

“You have angered the Tree of Glass,” Evlorasin says. “Secure yourself and your comrades to my scales, with blood if you must. Quickly.”

I look at Malachite. “Stick your sword in it.”

“What?”

“The valkerax. Hold Lucien, and stick your sword in it!”

“Thought you’d never ask!” he shouts back, driving his broadsword into the scales. Evlorasin twitches but doesn’t recoil, and I bring my claws out—the smaller holes I make between its scales much less painful. Malachite wraps one arm around Lucien’s chest, dragging him close, and I do the same for Fione, making sure her book is sandwiched tightly between us.

Evlorasin starts to rumble-growl deep in its chest, the vibration shaking us as easily as marbles in a bag.

“We fly.”

The rainbow halo around its mane bursts to life, from pastel to vivid color, blazing like seven-colored fire and expanding to thrice its size. The flash sears my eyes, and I blink it away as fast as I can only to see glass roots whizzing past my ears, past Evlorasin’s tail and legs and whiskers, barely missing each time they thrust through the sky. Evlorasin twists and turns, lurching as my stomach lurches, coiling and uncoiling in split seconds, the glass roots nicking its sides, its feet. Even above the screaming wind, I can hear its excited voice like it’s right in my ear.

“Hold on!”

We dive.

The world falls away, nothing but white feathers and rainbow light and the instinct to clench, to hold, to brace for something I can’t stop. I hug Fione to me even harder, her bones pressing against my palms, and I know if I hold any tighter I’ll hurt her, but I’m terrified. Terrified she’ll fall off, human as she is. Broken bones are better than a dead friend, and I clutch, and clutch. A glass root shrieks over my head, and I press us as low and tight to Evlorasin’s body as I can.

Another one pierces the air just to my left, so forceful I can feel the vacuum in its wake. Something warm hits my face—blood. Not Fione’s throat wound. Fresh. Against the throbbing momentum, I raise my head and see Malachite’s biceps clenched around Lucien cleaved and bleeding in rhythmic spurts.

“Mal!”

“I’m fine!” he shouts. “Shut up before you bite your tongue off!”

The momentum of our fall starts to near critical, all the flesh on our bodies pulled back, away from the earth. I feel like a horse, teeth exposed, terror exposed, but no blinders. Nothing to dull the cut of reality. Just over Fione’s shoulders, I can see the trees of the ground loom up, and the sharper the details the more of a warning it is. Soon. Soon, we hit the ground.

The fall, and then the rise.

Evlorasin pulls out of the death dive, shearing off not five miles above a forest. Without the force of the fall, I can look up now and see that the glass roots are trembling in the air, hesitant again.

“We’ve reached the threshold,” the valkerax says. “They can go no farther.”

With aching necks, Malachite and I look at each other, pure relief coursing from him to me and then to the nobles held fast in our arms. We’re safe. For now.

Evlorasin flies an easy distance before descending to the earth, weaving between the trees big enough to accommodate it. It lets us off, bowed shoulders making the perfect stepping ramp down. I carry Fione to a dry patch of forest and rest her on my covering. Malachite manages to prop Lucien up against a tree trunk even with his split arm, and I feel a flash of anxiety run through me at all the tangled, still roots so close to him. So close to hurting him. Malachite seems to be thinking the same.

“Spiritsdamned trees,” he says through gritted teeth, tearing a bit of cloth and wrapping his arm.

I turn and look at Evlorasin, its mane-halo radiating fainter again, illuminating the dim forest in a gentle pearlescent circle. Its whiskers undulate as I approach, and its five milk white, bleeding eyes stacked on one