Bring Me Their Hearts(9)
As mundane as the cage looks, it’s magic. Even slipping something between the bars is impossible—some invisible barrier is woven there. Nightsinger won’t even let us kill ourselves.
Like I told the fox. It’s complicated.
Peligli’s heart is the smallest. Her jar is old, scratched, and fogged with age. Crav’s jar is sea glass, etched with ivy vines. His heart is a little bigger than hers, and currently beating fast like it’s exerted. Probably from all the running he’s doing. I’ll apologize to him in the morning with a long, uninterrupted sparring session. He’ll like that.
My heart is in the middle of the two. Elizera—or Zera for short—no family name I can remember, second Heartless of the witch Nightsinger. Sixteen years old at the time of her death. Her heart is the largest, and rests on the bottom of a curved red jar. The books say witches make the jars themselves, though some prefer bags or boxes. It’s a magic they practice from a young age, becoming progressively better as they grow older. Nightsinger’s progress—from Peligli’s simple jar to Crav’s elegant one—shows her prowess clearly. Ten, twenty years from now, how many more jars will sit beside ours? I pray to any god listening that my heart won’t be there at all by then. I dread the thought of seeing a jar more beautiful than Crav’s.
The door at the top of the rickety stairs creaks open just then, a beam of light shafting across my face.
“Zera?” Nightsinger’s voice calls. “Could you come up for a moment?”
“I could,” I lilt. “Or I could stay down here and not get stuck with a chore.”
She laughs. “Scaring off mercenaries is hardly a chore for you.”
“You’re right. It’s a breeze. But it’s a breezy pain in my arse.”
“No mercenaries, I promise.”
“It’s a hunter, isn’t it?” I groan. “Hunters are way harder to chase off. And they all have stories about starving kids they need to feed. Remember that one you tried to give the boar to, and he almost shot you in the head for being a ‘heathen’—”
“No hunters, either,” she interrupts smoothly. “Just a talk between you and me.”
I heave a sigh and ascend the stairs, my stomach dancing. I always get nervous when I near her room—it’s something about the smell of it, lilies and sandalwood—that puts me on edge. Or maybe it’s the magic emanating from it; it turns the air heavy, as if I’m breathing fog.
I push the door open and adjust my eyes to the thousands of glass flowers throwing light around the room. It’s Nightsinger’s favorite hobby—crafting plants from glass. She keeps them in dozens of vases, in baskets, while some of them simply float in midair. Delicate, impossibly detailed orchids and roses glitter with transparent petals, capturing the candlelight and fracturing it into a thousand points of diamond brilliance. There are flowers I don’t know the names of, flowers that glow of their own accord or spiral slowly in on themselves and back out. Some exhale and inhale as if they’re alive, spreading crystal pollen on the wooden floor like snow. I’ve seen her use them to “see,” sometimes—the flowers showing her images of certain areas in the forest. My best guess? They’re attached to the trees that hide us, somehow, but that’s as far as my magic theory-crafting goes.
Nightsinger sits in the middle of the flowers, on a simple wooden chair. The room is empty save for her crystal creations—no bed, no dresser, not even a desk. Out of her crow form, she cuts an impressive figure; a full bosom all but bursts from her usual white dress, her waist and arms strong and thick. She’s so tall she has to duck beneath the doorways of the cottage, and though she could easily change the height of them with magic, she doesn’t. A mane of tawny hair descends along her back, always glossy and curled just so at the ends. Her lips are sensuous, her fair, plump face decorated with hazel eyes sharper and full of more wild secrets than that fox’s.
She stands from the chair and sweeps over. It’s her movements that mesmerize me the most—fluid, as if her feet don’t really touch the ground. While Heartless can still pass for human, anyone looking at her would know instantly she’s not human in the slightest. She was born a witch—raised to believe making Heartless was as natural as breathing. And she isn’t the worst of them by far; I’ve read enough to know Nightsinger turns only children killed too early, children who deserve another chance at life. There are—or rather, were—some lovely witches in history who turned just to see humans suffer. Some even did it as a status symbol; only witches with powerful magic could sustain many Heartless at a time; the more you had, the stronger you looked. Most of them died in the Sunless War. Nowadays, the few left choose their Heartless carefully and less often.
“There’s some news, Zera, that we must share with you,” Nightsinger starts. In that moment, I see the two white crows sitting on the far corner windowsill. “If you would, my friends.”
The crows fly onto the floor, glowing. The brightness shifts, unfolds into two large human shapes, then fades. Two witches stand before us, radiating power; a pale, bald man in an immaculately pressed gold-threaded suit and a woman with short, impossibly blue hair and a flowing, gauzy dress that hides little of her midnight skin. Both of them are so tall— though not as tall as Nightsinger—and with that same eeriness about them that gives me goose bumps.