Bring Me Their Hearts(50)

How dare she? How dare she treat me like a tool and yet praise Fione so lavishly? I’m risking just as much as Fione—more! Fury wells up in me, the hunger begging for me to lunge at her.

She’s already lost most of her neck flesh, it taunts. She wouldn’t miss an eye.

“You will work with Lady Himintell,” Y’shennria insists. “She knows much about the court and can help us in our goal.”

The imperiousness of it all—the way Y’shennria talks to me and the way she talks to Fione. Two different ways for two different things—a human and a monster. My eyes flash from Fione’s faintly smiling face to my own hands—hands that ripped the flesh from five men. She sits like a noble, I sit like a pale imitation of one. Her ladylike mask is impenetrable, and I can feel mine failing as we speak.

I bolt from my chair and march up to my room, slamming the door behind me as loudly as I can. Immature. I hear Y’shennria’s voice saying that downstairs, faintly. Apologizing for me, like I was the one who did something wrong. I didn’t. Nightsinger did, by turning me into this instead of letting me die.

You killed those men in cold blood. Men who were once babies. Men who were once alive. You killed them slowly. Painfully. You played God. You paid death and suffering back with more death and suffering.

You did everything wrong.

Minutes drag on, until I hear Fione’s saccharine voice excusing herself and the front door close. From between the lace curtains of my window I watch her get into her silver carriage, willing my despair to burn her as it’s burning me alive.



I dream furiously. I dream like a storm—flashes and howling. Darkness and coldness, and then it fades into a precise, perfect view.

I know this place. I’m in the Hall of Time at the palace, the stained glass all around me. But in this dream the glass moves, the battles depicted in the walls carrying on as if they’re happening all over again. Red glass blooms as blood flies, humans and celeons spearing witches through and Heartless splitting people open with their fangs and claws. Black witchfire glass flares, burning humans alive. Human fire, orange, charring the skin of the bestial Heartless.

And every glass figure is screaming as they die, a thousand tortured voices ricocheting in my head at once. The Hall of Time shatters with the force of the sound, clouds of glass shards twinkling brightly as they fall all around me, like rainbows made into a deadly snow.

Through the glittering, I see something made of wood. Two somethings. I begin to walk toward them, but pieces of the glass impale me, the pain somehow a thousand times worse in a dream. I know, with aching clarity, that this is a dream. But I don’t care. Something in me demands I reach those wooden things. I struggle, pulling my leg flesh free of the glass, pulling my arms from their rainbow spikes. My feet are bare, the glass snow litters the ground and slashes the bottoms of my feet, blood and agony. Still I walk. In shreds, in tatters, leaving a trail of blood behind, I reach for the wooden things—so close I can make out their shapes now.

Two rosaries, each with a tree pendant on the end. So simple. So small. And yet I know of their importance with a terrible certainty.

I reach for them with bloodied fingers, but just as I’m about to touch them, sleep leaves me, and I’m yanked into the darkness of my room again, cold sweat beading my aching body.



The memory of that dream—or should I call it a nightmare?—is quickly drowned by my reality. I spend the next morning trying on dresses in an attempt to avoid Y’shennria, to avoid my childish feelings of jealousy over Fione and her. Ruffles hide so much of my anger. Silk gloves do a perfect job of making my hands look clean, instead of the bloodstained sinners I know them to be. The mirror whispers I’m beautiful, even though all I can see is the twisted, malformed darkness of my unheart bleeding out of my every pore. I refuse to let Maeve in to bathe me, the old woman eventually tottering off with a tired sigh.

There’s a banquet this afternoon—I remember Y’shennria telling me about it. And instead of preparing for it, I’m locking myself in. I emerge from my room only to eat the livers in the kitchen, but Y’shennria doesn’t once acknowledge me or say hello. She remains in the sitting room, reading. But as I make my way back up from the kitchen, I spot her in the hall. She’s affixing something to the wall—a fire-calendar. A slab of rich mahogany wood, thin and yet sturdy, with the dates of the month carved into it in orderly rows. She raises a candle to a date on the wood, the flame barely licking the surface. The heat reveals a mark on the date, dark and implying that day is over. She goes down the line, eliminating the days that’ve already passed. All that’s left between today and Verdance Day is a measly week and a half.

When she’s finished, Y’shennria looks pointedly at me without saying a word and returns to her reading. Each dark mark seems as if it’s laughing at me, a deafening cacophony of my impending failure. I don’t have much time left, and Y’shennria is making that abundantly clear.

What am I doing? There are more important things than my tangled web of emotions. Crav, Peligli. They’re relying on me. My own freedom is relying on me. I can be a mopey sack all I want once I’m human again.

I arm myself with a dress worthy of court—red velvet and orange taffeta, like the most violent sunset. A knock at my door brings me out of my thoughts. I call for them to come in, Reginall entering with a sheepish look on his face.