Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,71

eyes and mutter one last prayer to Y’shennria.

“They’ve reinstated the cloaking magic,” Lucien says, glancing behind him.

“So fast,” Fione marvels.

“It’s impressive,” he agrees. “Considering how big the island is. But having met them, I know it’s more or less child’s play to the High Witches. All seven of them, incredibly strong and working together. There isn’t much they can’t do.”

“Except get out of those glass prisons, apparently,” Malachite grumbles.

The road opens up over the course of the day, gradually melting from grassland to coastline. The smell of salt wafts stronger, the grasses fading yellower and rooted in much drier, sandier soil. The birds turn from crows and sunbirds to gulls and seafalcons nesting in the rocky cliffs that’ve started to poke through the horizon. Fione consults a map briefly at a crossroads, pointing us to the southwest, to where the port town Dolyer—and hopefully our passage to the island of the Black Archives—awaits.

“Do we even have money?” Malachite asks during a water break.

“We can pawn something if we must,” Fione insists, then looks to Lucien. “I could’ve sworn the Breych sage gave you a pouch of coin.”

“Graciously,” the prince agrees. “The majority of it went to the villagers we rescued, but we have enough for a charitable boat.”

“A shitter, you mean,” Malachite sighs.

“A local charmer,” Lucien corrects.

Camp that night is quiet, all of us exhausted after three days walking on the road. It’s a bone-deep exhaustion, plagued with cold and wet all because Malachite saw a few very large and very fresh valkerax tracks in the silty mud and deemed a fire unsafe. Lucien offers to warm us with magic internally, but Fione and I won’t have it, insisting he keep up his energy.

“‘Warming internally?’” Malachite scoffs. “Please, heartbreaker. Save the innuendo for your girl.”

Lucien and I go rigid in our seats, neither of us looking at each other.

“Malachite-whatever-your-family-name-is!” I half shriek, half hiss. “Shut. Up!”

“Save it for the giant squids, rather,” Fione chimes in and saves the day. “It’s spawning season, and they oft mistake the underside of boats for other squid.”

And that settles that, raunchy rib forgotten as we all chew our jerky in disgusted-expression tandem and imagine a squid trying to mate with the underside of a boat.

Thanks and no thanks to Malachite’s comment, Lucien’s and my shared covering-slash-bedroll tonight is more awkward than usual. Every part of him burns like a brand, too close, too radiating. At some point in the night he sits up, both of us still wide awake.

“I can sleep somewhere else.”

“Don’t—” I reach for his shirt and tug him back down. “Don’t be silly.”

“I can’t help it around you.” I can’t see his smirk in the dark, but I hear it. It’s strange. Neither of us smells very good—mud and acidic valkerax blood and the layered sweat of travel—but my body doesn’t care about any of that. It wants to touch him, forever, always, no matter what. Now most of all.

“You know now,” I say.

“Know what?” he murmurs against the shell of my ear.

“My choice. What I’ll choose, always.”

“To help me?” he asks.

“To be with you,” I say. “In death or undeath.”

His arms finally dare to snake around my waist, pulling me close to his chest.

“So dramatic. What do you think about talking less about death, hmm? How about you be with me in life?”

My laugh is small, but the bloom in my chest is sweet. “I can give it a shot.”

It isn’t easy to peel myself out of Lucien’s arms in the morning. And, looking back at his peacefully sleeping face that cracks one eye open to find me and smile, I hope it never is.

Dolyer comes into view around lunchtime, and all four of us couldn’t be happier to see smokestacks, buildings, wells full with water, and an inn bustling with an open hearth. The idea of a bath might be the most distracting, but the docks are what’s most impressive about the town—sprawling and webbed over the water in pale gray salt-soaked and barnacle-encrusted wood. Everything in the village is made with gray—gray skies meeting furious gray sea, gray sands meeting gray grasses, gray buildings, and grayer horses.

But the gray only makes the splashes of color stand out more—the red of the fish gutting, the blue of the westbound ship sails and the maroon of the southbound sails, the jade green of Cavanos lawguard uniforms dotting the browns and golds of the sailors and merchants and stray dogs. The town moves and breathes in boxes—boxes being made by old