The Shadowglass (The Bone Witch #3)(28)

“I don’t know yet. The Willows are waiting for something.” Mykaela frowned. “And that’s what’s been nagging at me—I don’t know what they’re waiting for. But whatever they have in mind, we’ll fight them. What do you wish to do now?”

“I think,” I said, “that I’d like to take Empress Alyx up on her offer and pay the oracle a visit tomorrow.”

“Good.” Mykkie sighed. “I miss Polaire. She always had a plan.”

“I wish she were here too,” I whispered. Polaire and Mykaela had performed the Heartshare as well, and Mykkie had been with her in her final moments. I couldn’t even begin to know what that loss must have felt like.

“I swear I can still feel her sometimes, at the oddest moments. Heartshare is both a blessing and a curse. I haven’t had my heart back long, but I struggle to know whether this is my heart, whole and true, or if there remains in it parts of her that she left behind.” Mykkie smiled sadly. “Somehow, that brings me much comfort.”

The conversation turned to other matters, and soon it was time for the others to leave, Fox opting to remain behind. “Is Kalen staying with you tonight?”

I nodded. “I told him it wasn’t necessary.”

“Of course it is. I doubt he’d choose a warm bed in the barracks while you’re here.” He paused. “But I can tell you’re worried, and it’s not about that.”

“There is something you need to know about me,” I whispered, dreading my confession.

Fox’s puzzled expression cleared, giving way to worry as I told him about the black specks on my heartsglass, the spells and zivars I’d used to hide my desperation.

“Darkrot?” he asked, giving voice to my own fears.

“I…I don’t know. I mean to tell Mykkie soon, once this is over.”

“Letting her know now would only give credence to the elder ashas’ accusations, will it?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“But you can’t keep this secret. Surely Mykkie would keep quiet, as would Althy.”

I thought about Illara, the girl before me consumed by darkrot, the Dark asha Mykkie had slain. “She would give me over to the association without a thought, Fox, if she didn’t kill me first. She loves me, I know that—but her views on darkrot are uncompromising.” Mykkie killed her charge long before the black showed in her heartsglass, Althy told me. It was the only way.

He was angry, as I had feared. “This is your life we’re talking about. The strange emptiness between us back when you were in Istera—it was your heartsglass and not our distance, wasn’t it?”

“I…don’t know.”

“Something happened in Istera, didn’t it? I know it did.”

“I might have nearly jumped off a tower without realizing it,” I whispered. “And I…saw Kion on fire, in a vision.”

“Tea!” I could feel his panic. “You know what happens with darkrot! Do you seriously want to allow yourself to get worse before you get better?”

“Give me a few more days to sort myself out. Just give me that long. Please?”

My brother closed his eyes, still mad, but willing to compromise as I’d offered a deadline. I could feel the fear he was trying to hide from me; he’d heard Mykkie’s stories of darkrot and madness, and knew all too well what would happen should I fall under the same curse. “Fine. I’ll give you three days, Tea, and then I’ll help you make them see reason. No more delays.”

? ? ?

Fitful dreams plagued me later that night. I dreamed that I was inside the Ankyo cemetery, the moon staring down at me with all of its judgment and none of the sympathy. Polaire’s grave stood before me in the quiet. I was barefoot and dressed only in my nightclothes. The cold was a cutting knife, its blade skimming against my skin.

A harsh, grating sound broke the silence. The ground underneath me moved. Something had been disturbed in its sleep and now struggled for a way out.

I tried to leave, but my feet refused to obey. The noises grew louder until the earth before me broke apart, freeing its prisoner. The corpse that crawled out looked worse than human. Bits of brown hair clung to the base of its head, but its hollow sockets and yawning mouth gaped back at me from a grotesque skull in the final stages of a great and terrible decomposition. Strips of decay that were once skin dripped from its bony fingers, and remains of yellowed teeth that looked unnaturally bleached against the darkness dotted the remains of a jawline. Ironically, her dress survived when the rest of her had not—a white hua, tattered and stained from dirt and death, the embroidered crest of House Hawkweed still visible on her breast.

The corpse staggered toward me, and I could do nothing but wait, petrified, as it brushed its rotting face against mine.

“Your heart is the key,” it whispered in Polaire’s voice. “Love’s blood soaked through, in a tinsel of sparkled black. Do not let them take your heart.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I cried, terrified. The winds around us picked up, my hair whipping around as we stood in the center of a forming tornado, us at its eye.

The corpse took my heartsglass in a skeletal hand. I looked down to see a swirling miasma of black instead of silver. “No,” I choked out.

“You cannot hide who you are, Tea, my poppet. There is black in all our hearts. We hide it well enough and bring it out on harder nights, when we think no one sees.”