Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,68

hand and grimaces. But when I turn away, I swear I see a flash of a contented smirk.

When Lucien and Fione wake up, I tell them. Gathered around the remains of last night’s fire and a breakfast of freshly picked summer blackberries, I tell them everything I saw in my dream last night—the valkerax attacking Windonhigh, the valkerax flying, Varia’s boot, and the glass and bone trying so desperately to meet.

“She knows where you are? All the time?” Fione presses.

“Maybe? I got the feeling she’d know if she touched me in the dream.”

“Either way, we should think about leaving shortly,” Lucien dryly muses. I catch him mid-eating, and he flashes one of his golden smiles at me, flooding warmth into my whole body. My return smile feels goofy almost. Blissful.

what have you done, to earn this?

Pity rabbit organs are so small, I retort back to the hunger. Otherwise you’d be much quieter.

“Why would the Glass Tree and the Bone Tree react to each other like that?” Malachite frowns. “They’re two different things, right? Two different Old Vetrisian inventions.”

“Not entirely,” Fione corrects him, daintily consuming a berry with crimson-stained lips. “The Bone Tree is certainly an Old Vetrisian invention. But the Glass Tree is a witch thing. Barely any polymath contributions in it at all. Which means it’s essentially pure magic.”

“And that means?”

“It’s more unpredictable than the Bone Tree, certainly,” she says. “It has fewer rules. Or rather, the rules are not defined by any polymath terms, so I can’t begin to guess at what they are.”

“What about the Hymn of the Forest?” I ask. “The tree of bone and the tree of glass—”

“—will sit together as family at last,” Lucien finishes for me.

I nod. “They were trying to come together—the glass and the bone. Does it have anything to do with the Hymn?”

“But they’re two different things,” Malachite insists.

“The Glass Tree was made from a shard of the Bone Tree, right?” Lucien muses. “So they’re not entirely different.”

“Perhaps,” Fione muses. “It’s possible they… No—”

“We have the High Witch’s secret book. We head to the Black Archives and get you the reference material to translate it,” Lucien interrupts her. “And with the valkerax able to fly now, we should move as quickly as possible.”

“Spirits,” Malachite exhales. “Big teeth, big claws, big fire, and now big airborne. Perfect. Exactly what I wished for last Snowsum’s Eve.”

“Are you—” I look Lucien up and down. “Are you all right? From yesterday?”

His smile is small. “Of course.”

“Everything’s working?” Malachite looks him over suspiciously.

“Would you like to test me out?” Lucien makes a vague motion at the sword on his hip, and Malachite just rolls his eyes.

Packing up is easy when you don’t have much—no utensils, no rain guards. All we have to do is bury the coals of the fire and the bones of the rabbit, and we’re gone.

I’ve never seen the west coast of Cavanos, or if I have, I don’t remember it. My parents—traveling merchants as they were—probably brought me here once or twice. The biggest maritime trade route into Cavanos runs west-east, after all. But the roads are near empty. We pass the occasional trading caravan, dusty mules and creaking wheels and terse smiles from under wide-brimmed hats, but they’re few and far between. If the promise of war profit attracted them, the valkerax attacks surely scared them off.

Not to mention the ash raining down from the smoking island in the sky, visible today as it wasn’t yesterday.

We start to see it when the trees clear up and as the road widens—Windonhigh. Windonhigh looming far, far above us and behind us, not much more than a speck tinted faintly green and brown and—horrifyingly—gray. Ash blown by the fires flits down, filling the potholes of the road with feathery gray softness, smearing on our skin. Lucien grips my hand tighter, and I can practically feel his unsurety of what to say. But there’s nothing that can be said. All I can do, all I want, is to hold his hand.

Nightsinger has to be safe. Y’shennria has to be safe. Crav, Peligli. Safe. They have to be. That’s the only thought that lets me move forward.

“No corpses fell down,” Malachite offers during our water break. “That’s a good sign, yeah?”

Fione jabs at his ribs with the handle of her cane, and he lets out a disgruntled yelp.

My laugh is small. “It’s okay, Fione. I’m okay.”

Her face softens. “The fact the island is still in the air is a good sign. They must’ve fought off