Bring Me Their Hearts(98)

“Wrong move,” I singsong. “The last person to have faith in me was my mother, and look what happened to her.”

Y’shennria’s gaze wanders out a window overlooking the black rosebushes, now in full bloom with a storm of fragrant, midnight petals. “My daughter’s name was Alyserat.”

Her daughter—the one she lost. I’d never once heard her talk about her before.

“It’s Old Vetrisian,” Y’shennria continues. “They liked to name their children after sayings—pretty warnings. Hers was one that always haunted me: ‘Fear the past, not the future.’ In my youth, my naiveté, I used to think I understood it. If you feared the past, you were incapable of moving toward a future.”

She looks at me, not through me or around me as she used to, but right at me, the full force of her hazel eyes knocking the breath from me.

“If you fear the past, it becomes your future,” Y’shennria says finally. “You’re locked in the past, eternally, by your fear. There’s no way to escape it. I think some part of me knew that—that’s why I hired Reginall. That’s why I agreed to shelter and train you. Even if it caused me pain.”

I flinch. “I’m sorry, Y’shennria—”

DoN’t apoLogizE to tHe pReY, the hunger cries.

“No. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Because it was you, I learned to feel no fear.”

I go still, and her graceful lips curl into a smile.

“Because it was the girl I knew, the girl I trained, the girl I’d watched blossom from an ungainly thing into a fine young woman—because it was you, Zera, I feel no fear at all.”

Her smile shines with pride, and my unheart wrenches around violently in my chest. To think she could be proud of me after all the doubts I’ve had, all the mistakes. In this moment she feels like the mother I can’t remember having. Someone who cares.

Y’shennria and I have gone over what she’ll do after I take the prince’s heart on the Hunt. We’ve gone over every detail of how she’ll escape out to the woods, where the witches have promised her sanctuary. Reginall, Maeve, Fisher, her stableboy Perriot—all of them are coming with her. The instant I lash out at Lucien, they will be traitors to their people.

And I will be a traitor to the prince. To Fione and Malachite. A liar and a monster besides. A monster who made yet another monster, all for her own freedom.

“The carriage is here, Lady Y’shennria!” Reginall calls. I tamp the fear threatening to rampage up through my throat and smile at Y’shennria.

“It’s time.”

She nods and helps me into the carriage. “Be careful, Zera. There isn’t much I can do for you beyond the city limits.”

“Relax, Auntie.” I make one last effort to tease her. “You’ve done enough for me. It’s my turn to repay the favor.”

With one last order from her to Fisher to get me there safely, the horses trot off. She waves good-bye to me from the stairs until she’s nothing but a brilliantly green smudge on the horizon. Watching her shrink, watching the manor grow small, I start to miss her, miss the home she risked so much to give me.

My forearm wound has finally scabbed over for good—though it still aches. The bruise from escaping the bathroom via the tree throbs on my ribs. It’s a small comfort, but I realize this is what humans feel—constant pain from a healing injury. This is me, lingering in the cool shade of being human again after so many years of unrelenting sun.

I watch the lawguards going through their drills on the lawn of the palace, their swords shining high as they stab them into training dummies. Do they joke that those dummies are witches? Heartless? How badly do they wish to kill me, and others like me? In a blink the dummies become flesh and blood—one of them has Nightsinger’s face. One of the dummies becomes Crav, his little body limp and broken, the other Peligli’s, scratched and bruised. Y’shennria’s bleeding visage on the last dummy.

I won’t let it come to pass. It’s not just my heart that hangs in the balance. I’d forgotten that, gotten so absorbed in my own selfish desire for freedom.

For Lucien. For happiness.

The dummy with Y’shennria’s face echoes her voice; A Heartless only ever burns for one thing—their own heart. And those who burn don’t easily blind.

I want to be human. But what kind of human would I be, without anyone to love? What kind of human would I be, having betrayed so many? I clutch at my locket and speak softly to the floor of the carriage.

“What if I’ve been burning blindly this whole time, Auntie?”



Once we’re out of the city, the beauty of the grasslands is a temporary salve on my wounds. We head in the opposite direction of the Bone Road—east instead of west. Farmers prune orchards exploding in sour cherries and pink plums; bulbous, lettuce-like heads of sugarleaf hang from branches. Storms of unseen cicadas in the grass click and groan at one another. I linger on the windowsill, eager for the wind to blow away the dark thoughts between my ears. We pass so close to a farm that one of children helping with the harvest runs up to the wire fence, handing me a sugarleaf.

ConsuMe her. SliT hEr throaT, mAke her bLEed, the hunger demands. Before I can thank her, she’s gone, deep in the fields again, leaving me to peel the fruit apart and nibble at it. It doesn’t do anything to quiet my hunger, but it helps soothe my nerves, even if I have to wipe away blood tears minutes later. I watch the land flash by—little villages and trading outposts full of dust and dogs, bleached ruins of settlements decimated during the war and abandoned after it. Mass graves stick out alongside the road, memorialized with moss-covered statues of Kavar’s eye. The scars of the Sunless War run deep here.