Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,63
but he doesn’t need to. Malachite and I go silent after that, our eyes meeting wide and watching in awe as Lucien’s entire hand goes void, as the sweat carves down his proud nose and over his lips. He gives a shuddering snarl again, pushing on something invisibly, and the last of the rabbit’s blood ekes out, and Fione’s wrist wound closes like a seam being zipped shut. Like Nightsinger used to zip shut my wounds. And then, Lucien puts his midnight hand on her throat, lightly, holding. The woods seem to go even quieter, the salt wind in the boughs dying away.
I pray like Ania Tarroux taught me. I pray like humans do. For Fione to be all right. For Lucien to be all right.
A shuddering gasp suddenly shatters the forest’s silence, and Fione sits bolt upright, throat pulling in air greedily and blue eyes wide. She scrabbles for something, and I thrust my hand at her. She clutches it, hard.
“The book.” Her voice is nigh tortured. “Where…”
“Fione! It’s okay. I’m here—you’re safe.”
“The book!” Her eyes scan frantically over everything, and it’s then I realize. She’s not worried about herself or if she’s safe. She’s worried about the book. About stopping Varia, above all. Even on death’s door.
I hold her close and whisper, “We have the book. It’s okay.”
Finally, her rigid body goes limp against mine. Next to me, Lucien wobbles, but Mal is behind him in a blink, supporting him. And the wound on Mal’s arm—it’s gone. Smooth skin where injury should be. Did he just heal everyone? The overexertion, the magic required to do that—
“Vachiayis, Luc,” his bodyguard swears. “If I knew we were showing off, I would’ve gotten that water with a little more aplomb.”
“Shut…up…” Lucien manages, lying bonelessly back in his arms, and Malachite smirks down at him, and then at me.
“Never ever.”
13
DESTRUCTION
From my personal experience, there’s nothing like a hot meal to lift the spirits. And a spirit. But alas. We’re stuck in the middle of the woods (just east of the Feralstorm coast, Malachite surmises after a jaunty scout), in which the only thing resembling alcohol at all is the single half-muddied puddle of deer piss not ten paces from our fire.
The rabbit’s blood is gone, but its meat isn’t, and I rotate the shoddily made spit on which it sits browning in its own juices. A stew would be better, to spread the nutrition around the three mortals, but we don’t have many options in terms of cookware, let alone a decent pot. Perhaps magic could conjure one up, but I dare not propose it what with Lucien looking half dead already. After he healed Fione, he rolled over and almost immediately went to sleep under a tree. The rest of us gathered around the fire are quiet, Fione most of all.
“Talking hurts,” she rasps.
“Then don’t,” Malachite asserts, wiping his broadsword down. “Just stare into the flames and think about deep shit. That’s what fires’re for, anyway.”
“How many nicks?” I jerk my chin at his sword.
The beneather frowns. “Way too many, considering those things were just made of glass.”
“Magic glass,” Fione croaks, and I hold up a finger to shush her.
“Don’t make me gag you, archduchess. T’would be a vastly unbecoming accessory with this season’s color palette.”
Fione huffs, a glimmer of that impertinent, impatient huff she used to make in the before-times, in the “innocent” days of Vetris court life, and grumpily goes back to staring into the fire. I look at the green-bound book sitting at her side—she hasn’t touched it, but neither has she let it out of her sight since she came back from the dead. Near-dead.
Malachite’s thinking it, too.
“We were gonna Heartless you,” he says without looking at her. Fione’s gaze darts to a sleeping Lucien, then back to the flames.
“That would’ve been the logical choice,” she agrees.
“But it wouldn’t have been what you wanted,” I say, then stop myself when she slashes a look over at me. “Not like I can know what you want, obviously. I was more worried you wouldn’t get to choose it for yourself.”
“Then…” Her lips curl in a tiny smile. “I’m grateful to you.”
“If,” Malachite starts. “If you did get turned Heartless, would your leg thing go away?”
“Mal.” I sigh. “You can’t just—”
“No, I’m serious. It’s like, a logistics question. The magic heals everything on a Heartless when they die, right? Would it heal that? Or does it stay? Did you have anything that went away when you got turned, Six-Eyes?”