Bring Me Their Hearts(7)
“He wasn’t my enemy.”
“He tried to kill you!” Crav argues.
“That’s because he didn’t know what I was. Being ignorant isn’t a crime, Crabby, it’s a curable ailment.”
I pull the tapestry back from the door. The air of the cottage is always thick with the scent of herbs and spices, a fireplace dancing with flames against one wall. In the center of the room is a pit lined with river stone, in which the body of a deer torn open rests, glassy eyes staring at nothing and everything at once. The first time I came into the cottage and saw a similar deer, I just thought Nightsinger had terrible taste in decor. But I learned very quickly that it was a terrible taste in decor that served a purpose—eating raw meat is necessary for a Heartless to live. And by “live,” I mean “continue to function as a sentient being with control over our own actions.” We’re monsters, to be sure. But as long as we eat raw meat, we can be…lesser monsters. There’s a hunger that comes with our empty chests, settles there like a diseased pustule. It can never be satiated, and it never goes away. But as long as we keep eating raw flesh regularly, the hunger can’t grow, can’t spread its darkness through our veins and cloud our minds, turning us into something far worse.
Beasts. Berserkers. Abominations. So as much as I enjoy rebelling against any and all traditions, I eat disgusting deer organs like a good Heartless, every day, at the same time. Because I relish my sanity.
Because I’ve seen the beast inside me once. And I swore that day I’d never let it out again.
Five men dead because of you, you repulsive creature—
I shut up the dark voice by picking a strip of flesh off the deer and sprinkling a few herbs from my basket on it. I down it in one swallow and try to make my grimace as pretty as possible. Even if the hunger can’t be fully satiated with food, it does get quieter, much to my relief.
I wash my hands in the stone basin in the corner and settle on a cushion with Crav.
“So, how was your day?”
He pouts mightily. “You could’ve at least crippled the celeon for life.”
“My day was great, thanks for asking,” I chime and get up. “Where’s Peligli?”
“Sleeping? I’m not her babysitter.”
“Peligli!” I stand and shout up the stairs. “Dinner’s ready!”
The rustling of blankets precedes the slapping of tiny feet on the wood floor and a high-pitched chant of “Zera, Zera, Zera, Zera.” A mass of carrot-red hair rockets down the steps and into me. Peligli—the first Heartless of Nightsinger—looks up, her round four-year-old face pale and flushed, her eyes midnight black and sparkling. She’s excited to eat—all her teeth growing slowly into their pointed, jagged, razor-sharp state over her little lips. We can control the emergence of our monstrous teeth, but it gets harder the hungrier we are.
“Zera! You back! Did you get any shinies today?” she asks.
“No shinies. But I did do several terrible things, so it wasn’t a total loss.” I smile and thumb a sleep booger from her eye. Peligli squirms her hands in a way that means “pick me up,” and I hoist her on my hip and approach the deer.
“I like terrible things,” she announces.
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do!” she insists, kicking her feet to be let down immediately. I comply and watch her fly toward dinner. She picks out the deer’s eyes with her chubby fingers and pops them into her mouth like cherries, chewing happily as she chimes, “Terrible things are interdasting!”
“Interesting,” Crav corrects dully.
She smiles with bloodstained teeth at him. “Yeah!”
Peligli’s full name is Peligli, no more and no less. While Nightsinger turned Crav and me into Heartless because we hung on the verge of death, Peligli was turned of her own free will. She’d been an orphan on the streets of Vetris before the Sunless War, and when she saw Nightsinger she followed her, never leaving her side. Though she looks the youngest of us, she’s been a Heartless for almost forty years. She insists Nightsinger didn’t let her fight in the War, which is a small blessing. I can’t imagine war would be good for a kid’s mind—especially because she would’ve had to fight.
That’s what Heartless did in the Sunless War—killed. That’s what we do, what we exist for. A witch is just that—a witch, a singular person with magical power. And as it turns out, conjuring giant fireballs from thin air and turning into any animal shape you please tends to make you enemies. Or at the very least, it makes humans afraid of you. Because humans are afraid of everything—especially giant fireballs. Babies, the lot of them.
I look to the rows of ragged books on Nightsinger’s shelves—witch books, detailing their history and such. I’ve read them each a thousand times, because watching mud dry on a tree root gets surprisingly boring after the first month of doing it. The books told me Heartless exist to be soldiers for witches. Bodyguards. Cannon fodder, if we’re being generous. But cannons exist only in Pendron and they backfire all the time and—ugh, basically, we’re just meat puppets. Padding between a witch and her enemies. Why kill your enemy yourself if you can get an undying, magical thrall to do it?
Watching Crav and Peligli together reminds me just how close they hover to becoming killers. They love Nightsinger more than I do—too young to understand a kind captor is still a captor. They’d do anything for her—but I can’t let them become what I’ve become. I can’t let those small hands drip red. Every mercenary who comes looking for a witch’s bounty, I drive off. Every curious hunter who strays too far into the woods, I scare away, so Crav and Peligli never have to. And I’ll keep doing it, until Nightsinger dies and takes all of us with her, or until she gives me back my heart.