I don’t make a habit of responding to the hunger, that darkness that lingers inside me, reminding me always of my mistakes. I like to ignore it, push it away with my own voice, with whatever joke or thought comes to mind. But tonight, standing on a precipice, I stride forward and answer it with a whisper.
“Then maybe it’s time to build a brighter fire.”
2
The Iron Lady
I approach the carriage at a jaunty pace, plumes of hot air from the horses’ noses floating up into the cold night.
“You’re my new partners in crime, then?” I ask the man who waved his hat at me. He descends the carriage, all lanky limbs and long face and nut-brown wrinkles. He’s so thin and tall he looks like a scarecrow without all the stuffing. His warm smile is much heartier than his body.
“Indeed, miss. I’m Fisher Jell, Lady Y’shennria’s driver.” He extends his hand in greeting but retracts it suddenly, wiping it on his trousers and flashing an apologetic smile at me. “S-Sorry.”
“For what?” I blink.
“You’re a— Well.” He clambers over himself to finish his sentence.
“Don’t force yourself, Fisher,” a clipped voice comes from the carriage window. “She’s a Heartless, not a human. There’s no need to be terribly polite.”
A woman leans out of the window ever so slightly, her dark, fluffy hair amassed atop her head and pinned back discreetly with amethyst jewelry. The purple lace dress she wears accents her dark skin beautifully, the high neck of the collar somehow making her sharp hazel gaze look even more imperious. Her face is smooth, yet so well taken care of that you can barely see the creases of age at her eyes and mouth.
She looks me up and down appraisingly. Her nose wrinkles at my bloodstained dress, my scuffed and many-times-mended boots. This is definitely the Lady Y’shennria the witches mentioned. She oozes regality so much I’m almost intimidated. Almost. I lay awake at night for three years vowing I’d do anything for my heart when the time came—I can’t back down now.
I clear my throat and say, “I’m Zera. Second Heartless of the witch Nightsinger—”
“I’m aware,” Y’shennria sighs. “Why else would I be here?” She opens the door with one gloved hand and raps it. “Get in. There’s much work to be done and little time in which to accomplish it.”
I climb in and settle on the plush seat across from her. She immediately tucks herself in one corner like she’s afraid of catching something from me.
“Haven’t you heard? Heartless can’t carry diseases.” I flash her a smile. She ignores me.
“Take us home, Fisher,” she says out the window. Fisher tuts at the horses, and the carriage lurches into motion, the steel-plated wheels cutting through the muddy road with little effort. This is the first time I’ve been inside a carriage since I was human, and the first time ever being in one so fancy. The whole cart smells like cinnamon and roses, though maybe it’s just her.
“In public, you will address me as Lady Y’shennria,” the noblewoman says abruptly, eyes glued to the passing woods. “In private, you will address me as Lady Y’shennria—”
“That’ll be a tough one to remember,” I drawl.
She breezes on without acknowledging anything. “You are, from this moment forward, Lady Zera Y’shennria, my stepbrother’s bastard daughter and the last living relative I have.”
The last living relative? I study her face—up close she looks even more elegant and refined, yet now I can see the massive scar reaching down her jaw and to her throat: three distinct slashes that her high collar barely hides. I’d recognize those anywhere. Jagged teeth marks. A Heartless tried to kill her a long time ago. There’s a tense, stretched-out silence.
“What—” I swallow. “What happened to them? Your family?”
“They were killed,” she says curtly. “Do you see that castle in the distance?”
I squint at where she points—a dim shadow lurking on the horizon my mile-and-a-half radius never let me see before. She rummages in a silken bag at her hip and shoves a brass tube at me. I lamely stare at it.
“Do you want me to swallow that, or…?”
“Try again.” She holds the brass tube away from my grasping hand. “Politer, this time. I know it isn’t so in those lawless woods of yours, but in Vetris we respect our elders.”
“All right. Let’s give uppity a go.” I inhale and put on my best haughty air. “Pray tell, what is that thing, Lady Y’shennria?”
“I didn’t say mock nobility, I said try to emulate it.” She narrows her eyes to thin slits. Not angry, just thin. Anger threatens on her face, but she doesn’t let it show through.
“I’m sorry, aren’t they the same thing?” I smile. Y’shennria’s having none of it as she draws herself to her full height.
“Do you want your heart or not?”
We stare at each other, neither of us even daring to blink. If willpower were an animal, it’d be a tiger, and there’d be a cacophony of wicked snarling between us. I’m not used to losing, but Y’shennria has me cornered, naked in front of the truth. I back off and hold my hands up.
“All right, you win. I want my heart.”
“You’ll ask to see this tube politely, like a noble might. Or the best approximation of one your feral mind can conjure.”
I inhale and put on a lighter voice. “May I please see that object, Lady Y’shennria? It interests me greatly.”
She watches me, those hazel eyes like green-gold slits of agate. Finally, she relents.
“You may have a kernel of potential after all. But that is all it is. From this moment forward, the only armor that will reliably disguise you in the Vetrisian court is hard work and effort. Remember that.” She hands the tube to me, and though she seems perfectly calm and collected, the hand she holds it out with is trembling. I get it, suddenly, why she keeps careful space between my boots and her skirts. She isn’t worried about catching something. She’s afraid of touching me. My stomach squirms. Disappointment. Shame. A hundred things claw at my insides, the hunger laughing at me.
Of course she’s afraid. You’re a monster. There’s blood on your hands.
I take the tube, careful not to let our fingers meet.
“Hold it to your eye,” she instructs. “Close the other, and point it at where you wish to look.”
With clumsy fingers and facial muscles, I do as she asks. What a delightful little human machine—I can suddenly see the castle in the distance with perfect clarity. It’s a crumbling, blackened mess of stone parapets and iron gates, but the sheer size of it is impressive. Crows darken the air above the ruins, and a tattered banner flaps in the wind, the sigil and color too worn by time to discern.
“Thirty years ago, that was my home,” Lady Y’shennria says. “Ravenshaunt. It was where my family and I lived for generations. Until the Sunless War took even that from us, too.”
Her eyes are distant, her voice unnervingly even.
“You must know the Y’shennria family history if you are to pass in court. Our family worshipped the Old God for centuries, but none of that mattered to the witches. We were human. We were the enemy.”
I swallow hard, words failing me. They don’t fail her, though, her voice strong, unwavering, as if anything less would be a crime to her family’s memory.
“I learned, that night, that you can outrun a witch. It’s their Heartless you can’t hope to escape. They never stop. They never rest. They hunger and they hunger, until there’s nothing left for them to devour.”
I suppress my flinch. “Why are you still an Old God believer, if the witches killed your family?”
“Why do you drink water, if a fouled stream poisons you once?” she snaps. “Because you must, to survive.”
“But—”
“Enough.” Her words strike like falling icicles in the dead of winter. “Let us begin your tutoring immediately.” She points at my wide legs. “A lady always sits with her knees together. Otherwise you distort your skirts, and the b
ulkiness is unsightly.” She watches me expectantly. I press my knees together. “That’s a start. Now, there are three types of nobility in Vetris—the Firstblood, Secondblood, and Goldblood. Care to guess which is the highest rank among them?”
“Goldblood.” I know how much humans love their precious metals. Mercenaries came into the woods willing to risk their lives to kill Nightsinger and collect a witch’s bounty. The bandits killed my parents for their gold.
“Goldbloods are the last on the social ladder,” she corrects. “They’re nobles who paid the courts for a position and title—merchants, mostly. Secondbloods have lineage, though they have no great claim to extraordinary wealth or power. Firstbloods are the highest ranking, with considerable history, land, and wealth. They are often assigned important political roles, such as the nine ministers of the king’s cabinet, and very commonly Firstbloods rise to power as kings and queens. It is the Firstblood family, the d’Malvanes, who’ve been ruling for five hundred years now.”
“Which are the Y’shennrias?” I inquire.
“Firstbloods.” Her back straightens. “But in name only. The war ruined Ravenshaunt, our only ancestral land, and because of our ties to the Old God, most families have shunned us. In thirty years, I haven’t been able to drum up a single offer to help us rebuild.”
“And so now you’re helping the witches,” I say. “To, what? Get back at the nobles?”
She looks me up and down, lip curling. “You are so young.”
I bristle instantly. “And yet here I am, apparently old enough to turn a prince Heartless for you.”
Y’shennria falls quiet, and then she speaks, voice cold iron. “I agreed to tutor you so I could aid in preventing another war.” Her hand flits up to her scarred jaw, where it rests on mangled skin. “This world has seen enough suffering. I have seen enough suffering. And I do not wish it on anyone else.”
The three heart jars over Nightsinger’s fireplace flash in my mind. Not another jar. Not another heart.
“I understand that much,” I say. “Not wishing your suffering on anyone else.”
Y’shennria finally turns her gaze to me. It’s guarded and thorny, a rosebush without a single bloom. I’m suddenly keenly aware of my Heartlessness—of the fact that someone like me destroyed her family and likely gave her that scar. She’s brave for even agreeing to this, for being in the same small carriage as the same thing that killed her loved ones.
Y’shennria inhales. “The most important thing you must know is this: I need your obedience. If you don’t do exactly as I say, all of this will be for naught.”
“I’m not very…good at obedience.”
I might imagine it, but Y’shennria’s mouth quirks up in the smallest of sardonic smiles as she says, “That makes two of us.” She pulls out a glass jar from beneath her seat and hands it to me. It’s a gorgeous work of art—pale purple glass, etched with a coiled snake and scattered stars. “The jar. For the prince’s heart. You will keep it until the time comes.”
I never wanted to see it, and yet here it rests, in my hands.
“How long do I have?” I ask hoarsely.
“His heart must be put inside within the hour, or so the witches told me.”
“No, I mean—” I swallow. “How long do I have to get his heart?”
“The Spring Welcoming requires the prince to choose a wife by Verdance Day—the summer equinox. Which means you have roughly—”
“Two weeks,” I mutter. Y’shennria nods.
“After that, whether he is engaged or not, all potential suitors will be sent home. This is the prince’s last Welcoming—he’s stymied the other three, and the king’s patience wears thin. There is talk that if he doesn’t choose a bride this time, the king will arrange a marriage for him.” Her eyes grow weary, her age suddenly showing in the hairline cracks around her eyes. “You could very well be the last chance we have.”
“And certainly not the best,” I chime, my voice quavering with my nerves. Fourteen days. That’s all I have to earn back my heart.
“I hope you realize how much is at stake,” Y’shennria insists. “If you fail, war is inevitable. If you get caught and die, I have no doubt the humans will find some way to twist your infiltration into an aggressive gesture on the witches’ behalf, and declare war.”
“I think war will be the least of my concerns if I’m dead.”
“Typical Heartless, thinking of yourself.” She scoffs. “If you fail, every man, woman, and child in Cavanos will be plunged into—”
“I get it,” I interrupt her. “I get that people will die, all right? I know this is important. The only reason I joke about it at least once a minute is because if I don’t, I might start puking.”
She says nothing to that, but the silence doesn’t last. It’s a half-day’s ride to Vetris from Nightsinger’s forest, and in that time she has me memorize the Secondblood and Firstblood families (Himentell, d’Malvane, Y’shennria, d’Goliev, Steelrun, Priseless), how to greet them as a peer (a half bow, not too deep, with only one hand behind my back instead of two). She gives me stock phrases to use when I’m unsure of what to say—things that are harmless and polite. She asks how my digestion works, though she clearly hates every word of my explanation: Alcohol and water are digestible, though anything other than that has to come out. When Heartless consume something that isn’t raw flesh, it’s digested instantly and painfully by the magic inside us, and our bodies purge the contamination the only way they know how—with tears of blood. The first time it happened to me was very soon after I was turned; so sick of deer, I tried eating one of Nightsinger’s wheat cakes. The agony was blinding, but the tears—my fingers reaching up to touch them and coming away bloody—were far worse.
Y’shennria assures me most of my “meals” will be for show, but I’ll have to eat publicly (and discreetly visit the restroom when it becomes too much to bear) at the banquet the king puts on for select nobles. Banquets are a way of maintaining loyalty, Y’shennria explains. Feed them and they’ll have little time to plot rebellion, and even less inclination to do so when their bellies are full of cream and honey. It makes a twisted sort of sense. Even one’s clothes, Y’shennria explains, are picked for hidden reasons—a gaudy belt or low bodice, for example, take the eye away from the face. The more distracted people are by what you wear, the less they notice what you do or say. The more impressed they are by your clothes, the less they question you. She points out that I never once asked if she was Lady Y’shennria—I discerned it unconsciously from the way she’s dressed. And she’s right. Until that moment, I never realized how much power clothing had, and it’s terrifying.
Vetris sounds completely different from the relative simplicity of my life in the woods. I ate, I talked, I practiced the sword. In Vetris I’ll do all that, but in silks, and with a dozen variations for each action depending on who’s around and how high their rank is. I absorb as much information as I can, repeating Y’shennria’s every word after she says it. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to learn all of this in four days, before the Spring Welcoming. But I’ll do it, and I’ll do it perfectly.
Because if I don’t, my freedom slips from me like sand through my fingers.
I’m so bent on learning I don’t notice the sun rising until it shafts directly into my face through the carriage window. I flinch, adjusting to the gorgeous melon-greens and blush-pinks of the sky. The sun is a golden disc peeking over the horizon, incandescent in its shy beauty.
“—as for the prince, our goal is clear. The girls of the Spring Welcoming are called Spring Brides, and they…” Y’shennria’s voice grows cross. “Are you listening?”
“S-Sorry.” I tear my eyes away. “I’ve— This is the first time I’ve seen the sunrise since I was turned.” The sun rises in the south, and that direction was always impossible to see through the dense trees of Nightsinger’s forest. Y’shennria doesn’t demand I ignore it like I expect her to.
“How long ago was that?” she asks.
“Three years.” The sunrays blossoming through the clouds hypnotize me again, my voice hoarse. “How did I ever forget how beautiful it is?”
There’s a long silence. Finally, she asks, “How old would you be this year, if you were human?”
“Nineteen.”
“You were sixteen, then, when it happened?”
Memory clouds my awe of the sunrise. I stare at the carriage floor, working my fingers in a knot of fabric on the seat. I haven’t told anyone what happened. It’s been a dark shadow of a secret, threaded between only Nightsinger and me. But Y’shennria offered her own painful past. The least I can do is be honest in return.
“It was bandits,” I say slowly. “My mother and father were traders. We were poor, but happy. We traveled all over—Cavanos, Avel, even the desolate peaks of Helkyris. Or at least, I think we did. Becoming Heartless takes away your human memories—”
“And they reside in your heart,” she finishes for me. I don’t ask how she knows that. I just wade on through the cold, bitter waters of my past.
“There was a boy on the road. He was crying out in pain, begging for help. Father tried to go around. He was suspicious, but I made him stop. The bandits were hiding in the woods nearby.”
I don’t tell her how the bandits riddled Father with arrows, bits of his brain on the steel tips, or how they split me open from navel to throat and left me to die, to watch, as they did the same to Mother. The hunger gnaws at my edges, the memories like blackened catnip for it. Your fault, it whispers. You killed your own parents with your weakness. I shake it off.
“Nightsinger found me and turned me. And she was even so nice as to bring me the bandits, too.”
I don’t tell her about the blinding fury, the dark tidal wave of anger and pain and hunger that pulled me under, drove me to rip the bandits to nothing more than pieces. I don’t tell her about the monster inside that burst forth from me, killing everything in its path, relishing in the blood and death.