Bring Me Their Hearts(51)

“Milady.”

I sigh. “I’m done throwing a tantrum. There’s no need to convince me to come out.”

Reginall opens his mouth, then closes it. “I am glad to hear it, milady.”

I’m quiet. Y’shennria sent him instead of coming herself because he’s an ex-Heartless. She thinks he knows me better than she does. Or maybe she’s too scared of me to approach herself. I slide on a pearl bracelet, marveling quietly at the rainbow sheen it gives off in the sunlight.

“I can’t let anything get in the way of taking the prince’s heart,” I say finally. “Not my emotions, not the hunger. Nothing.”

“Are you having trouble, milady?” Reginall asks. “With controlling the hunger?”

“You’ve clearly forgotten how hard it is to control to begin with.”

Reginall is quiet, and then: “Perhaps I have. It’s been many years.”

“You are impeccable with a duster, and a fearsome force of nature with a polishing cloth,” I say. “But your burning questions face could use work.”

“There was a way long ago, milady—a way we found in the war to suppress the hunger.”

“Oh, I know how to suppress it,” I assure him. “Devouring a hundred or so still-bleeding things usually does the trick.”

“I apologize, I misspoke.” Reginall strokes his mustache patiently. “I meant suppress the hunger entirely. Completely.”

I swallow. The sky is blue. The Twisted Ocean is made of crystal. The hunger cannot be suppressed entirely. These are all true and clear realities. The hunger is so powerful and pervasive, always. It haunts my dreams, my waking hours. But if that’s true—if there is such a way to subdue it—I could feel human again. Whole.

“How?” I demand.

“It takes much practice, milady. And the results—” His voice catches. “There are unintended side effects.”

“Like what?”

“The hunger doesn’t…prefer being subdued. You bleed from your eyes until you lose control, and the hunger resurfaces.”

I breathe out. “Bleeding? Like when we eat human food?”

“Yes. Both are such cases of the hunger rebelling against our actions. Eating human food, suppressing it. The pain feels as though it’s meant to break us, doesn’t it? As if it’s a warning to stop what we’re doing.”

“You speak of it as if it’s a living thing.”

“I don’t know if it is, milady. I know only what I have felt and seen. For brief moments, those Heartless who learned to suppress the hunger had minds running clearer than a winter stream. No matter how hard a witch commanded them to fight, no matter how hungry they were, they could resist. Not for long, but for long enough. It was a sight to behold, milady.” Reginall’s eyes light up from within. “Seeing them on the battlefield weeping, resisting—they instilled a great hope in the rest of us that we could fight our fate. Hope that we were still worth saving, no matter what we’d done under the banner of war.”

My breath comes shallow. The mere idea of it—of living for one moment free, free of this gaping emptiness as I haven’t been in three years, has my head reeling.

“You can teach me.” I stand from my chair and grab his weathered hands. “You can teach me to weep as they did!”

“You’ll have your heart soon enough,” Reginall insists. “And your freedom. I’m sorry to say—but taking the prince’s heart would be much easier than learning the ways of Weeping.”

It takes a moment for the all-consuming lust for freedom to cool, but when it does, his words ring true. Weeping sounds like a bare shard of freedom, but I can have the whole gem if I do what I came here for. Reginall pulls his hands gently from mine.

“It’s better that you don’t learn anyway, milady. There are certain…dangers associated with it.”

“Dangers?”

He knits his lips beneath his white mustache. “The witches didn’t take kindly to the Weeping gaining independence, no matter how fleeting. If they were discovered, if another Heartless betrayed them, their hearts were shattered.”

Shattering. Shattering without a hope of ever becoming human again. Dying as a tool, with only the hunger at your side as you leave this world. It’s my worst nightmare, second only to living forever Heartless. I shudder, Reginall’s faint voice as he bids me good night barely registering. The thought haunts me as I get ready, haunts me even as I descend the stairs, my makeup arranged just so for tonight’s banquet. Y’shennria quirks a brow.

“Where’s your corset?”

“I tried it on,” I assure her. “Five minutes of not being able to breathe was enough, thank you.”

“It’s the fashion,” she insists. “From Helkyris.”

“Well now it’s the fashion from Helkyris that’s in the garbage can.”

Y’shennria snorts. “You’re being difficult again.”

“And unless you’d like me to pass out in my bowl of soup instead of getting any socializing with the prince done, I suggest you let me continue being difficult.”

She takes in my face and the makeup on it—a red lip tint, and a three-line black pattern beneath my eyes, the little triangles like the fangs of a wolf. Y’shennria wears a deadly sleek black dress, her voluminous dark hair netted down with an intricate nest of silver cords. In the sunset light of the hall I can see exactly how breathtakingly beautiful she was, and is. Her own midnight lines drawn on her cheekbones are small yet elegant, like the tips of tiny bird wings. She wordlessly turns and walks out of the manor to the carriage.