Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,86

another ever so slightly. Most of them stare straight forward, and I can’t help but wonder where Yorl is in all this. The woman herself doesn’t so much as blink.

“And what knowledge have you brought to replace the knowledge you will take?”

I see Fione take a deep breath, steadying herself. She unlaces the strings of her pouch with deliberate slowness and pulls out the green-backed book. She opens it to a page, holding it out so the woman can see.

“An Old Vetrisian book. It speaks of the Trees.”

The woman steps closer, pulling a monocle out and peering at the writing, and then at the writing on the spine. She straightens quickly, eyes hardening on Fione and her monocle dropping on its chain.

“We have this book already. The rough draft, to be more precise. What we will gather from your book will be too slight a repayment for what you seek.”

The line of silver robes suddenly speaks all at once, scaring me out of my skin: “So it has been deemed.”

And just like that, the line turns. The woman makes a soft bow, the goodbye sort—utterly dripping with finality—and Lucien looks at me and I look at Malachite and he looks at Fione but she’s frozen, hands trembling on the book cover.

“Magic?” Malachite snaps at Lucien. “You could tell ’em about that skinreading shit. It’s rare, right?”

“Not rare enough.” He shakes his head. “Surely you know a few tricks about hunting valkerax, Mal. You could tell them—”

“No way. Every kid in Pala Amna knows—”

With each step the silver robes take, Fione’s face falls further, deeper into a pit of despair. I can see it happening right in front of me. In her mind, in our reality, Varia is slipping further and further away.

“Wait!”

I shout before I think. The silver robes pause, the woman looking over her shoulder with a decidedly anticipatory aloofness. Waiting. I settle mentally, deep in the sand, sinking to the bottom of the ocean of stillness inside myself. The hunger falls away, down into darkness. When I open my eyes again, it’s six worlds. Six views of the world, of the woman’s gray gaze going wide. Hot blood tears sluice down my cheeks, one from each eye.

“Weeping,” I say. “I can tell you about that.”

Next to me, I see Lucien watching me. Nervous, and yet proud. There’s a beat before the woman walks up to me, pressing the monocle into her eye and looking me over. I feel like a piece of meat hanging on a butcher’s hook as she circles me slowly.

“We already know of Weeping,” she says tersely. “We know of the valkerax who Weeps, we know of the Heartless who Weeps, and we know of its mechanisms. This was our newest initiate’s kingsmedal project.”

Yorl. She must mean Yorl. He detailed it all, it’s true—my every interaction with Evlorasin, my every thought about Weeping and how to do it. The whole time he was scribbling in that dungeon arena beneath Vetris, he was signing the death warrant for this moment. Even through the perfect emotional peace and stillness, my chest deflates. My one advantage, gone. Just like that.

Fione darts forward. “Please, whatever I can do, the book, my uncle’s white mercury research—”

The begging sounds wrong in her voice. Unnatural. Fione is sweet, she’s smart, she’s determined. But she’s always had her pride. Until now. Until her hope and her love for Varia were cut away all at once with this woman’s words. The woman doesn’t look at her, doesn’t so much as acknowledge what she’s said. She turns, and it’s a decision. A rejection. The sound Fione makes at my side tears me in half—like a lone wolf dying on a winter’s night. She sinks to her knees, her tears splattering on the volcanic glass. Lucien’s posture sags, the hope draining from him, too. Malachite’s face twists and his mouth opens but he never gets the chance because the woman speaks again, clear.

“However, our newest initiate failed to mention a Heartless with six eyes like a valkerax.”

Fione’s head snaps up, gaze glimmering fiercely through her tears. Lucien helps her to her staggering feet, and she juts forward instantly, voice breaking. “Does that mean—”

The woman turns to face us, extending her hand to me. In her palm is a black-glass medallion, etched with a dizzying gold and silver symbol of some sort, like a flower opening or a star exploding.

“You may enter,” she says coolly to me. “And you may learn from our books. As we may