Bring Me Their Hearts(5)
“Quick!” I exclaim. “Before I start to mold!”
With a bird’s version of a sigh, she hops around my body. Usually when I smartly try to climb a very tall tree and break my legs, or cleverly stumble onto a wolf mother den and get torn to shreds, I heal on my own. Well, if you call my heart encased in a jar over my witch’s fireplace siphoning magic from said witch to heal me “on my own.” But tonight my witch is right here. I feel the sting of a feather’s edge in my raw wound, and I bite back another swear. The crow says words, but I can’t understand them. No one can, save for her and the Old God, who responds by gifting her magic. Or something. The workings of a witch’s magic are beyond me, but the results aren’t. The pain fades instantly, followed by the strange sensation of my wound closing up like a stitched blouse in a seamstress’s hand. My fingers dart to it, finding only smooth skin and scraps of fabric.
“Would it kill you to ask the Old God to fix my dress, too?” I struggle to my feet.
The crow fluffs her chest out. “Perhaps.”
“Ask him right away, then.” When the crow just blinks at me, I clap my hands. “Let’s go! Hurry now!”
“My death means your death. You’re bound to me as my Heartless,” she says. “You know that.”
I groan and collapse on the grass next to the muddy road. “Life isn’t worth living if I don’t have a fabulous pile of silk and satin to strut about in.”
“It wasn’t even your dress. You stole it,” the crow says.
“Why do you think I liked it so much!”
The crow lets out an exasperated sigh again. Her brethren wait for her in the trees, and I wave to them.
“It’s an honor, sirs and madams! I hope your witchery is well tonight!”
The crow on the ground hops to my shoulder, talons digging into my skin. “Did you determine who sent that Waveborn to kill you?”
Waveborn—what the witches call celeon. A witch’s magic spell went awry a long time ago, and the wave of it washed over a small continent to the north. It transformed the celeon from feral beasts into sentient creatures. Most celeon consider their sentience a curse, a deviation from their intended nature, and so they hate witches with a fiery passion.
“Here in the third era we call them celeon, Nightsinger. It’s less ragingly offensive to them,” I insist. “And no. Not a peep.”
“Firewalker”—Nightsinger motions with one wing to another witch-crow—“tells me his Heartless are being attacked in much the same way. Anonymous assassins sent to kill without being told who the target is.”
“What the target is,” I correct.
“Precisely.”
“They’re not after witches?”
“For once, no.”
I cradle my chin in my hand. “So someone is paying a lot of assassins to kill Heartless. Without telling them their targets are Heartless.”
“Yes.”
“Why? And who can afford to waste that much money in this economy?”
Nightsinger fixes a single red eye on me; I know that look. It’s the let’s be cryptic and vague about important issues for an infuriatingly long amount of time look. Witches love that look. I love that look—love to hate it. Silently, of course, because what magical thrall in her right mind would hate it out loud to the witch in total control of her fate?
“I should return to the meeting,” she says finally. “And you should return home. Have you the herbs for dinner?”
I motion to the basket I’d long discarded behind me, brimming with snowdrops and basil.
“Good.” Nightsinger ascends, wings beating hard. “I left you dinner. Try not to slop it everywhere this time.”
“No promises,” I say, watching as she rejoins the flock. They rise as one, eerily coordinated in their every swoop and glide. Nightsinger tried to explain witch meetings to me once, and thanks to my awe-inspiring intelligence I understood a whopping none of it. It’s apparently only safe for covens to gather during the Diamond Moon—when all three moons are full. They exchange information and magic, but since witches live isolated and hidden to keep away from humans, they gather as crows—able to fly long distances and connected wordlessly by their minds. It’s a small mercy witches who transform into animals are always an unnatural white, or none of us would know when they were around.
With the murder finally gone, I breathe a sigh of relief. No matter how long I’ve lived around it, the thought of magic still makes me ill. It’s bound me to this life of Heartlessness, after all.
I put my hand over my unheart and listen to the emptiness in my chest. After three years, I can barely remember what it feels like to have a heart anymore. I recall warmth and a tugging sensation, and if I reach far enough back in my memory, I find pain. Pain like lightning, sudden and sharp and devastating. Pain like the end of the world. If I pay attention to it, the pain only grows. So I don’t. I wander the woods. And when wandering stops working, I don my cloak and a ragged mask and steal from the nobles who travel the Bone Road—jewels, dresses, anything. Anything beautiful. Anything that, when I wear it, makes me feel like a human again.
I pick up the basket of herbs and turn back to the woods, letting the shadows of the trees devour me. They are pretty, in their own sable, pine-scented way, but they’re still very much the bars of my prison. That’s one of the less-than-ideal perks of being a Heartless—I can’t go very far from where my witch keeps my heart: a mile and a half at most. If I try, the pain rips me apart and reduces me to a useless, screaming mess.