“She’ll be all right.” I make a smile. “I’ll wake her up if it ever gets too bad. You’ll wake her up at your place. Together, we’ll keep our crown princess unbruised yet.”

Fione’s expression crumbles, worry tingeing it. “Yes.”

The guards come in then and announce that my carriage to South Gate is ready. I resist the urge to hug Fione, to put my arm on her shoulder, even, and make a bow to her instead.

I watch the city flash by, the older parts of the common quarter bustling. Construction noisily tears down old buildings and erects new ones as barracks for soldiers, and more construction still happens between the streets and alleys as emergency barricades are put in place, in case of invasion. The Temple of Kavar is being particularly insulated by such barricades, a priest standing on the steps and blessing the workers as they haul wood and metal, his sermon ringing out as my carriage passes.

“The weight of living belongs to us all!”

“Indeed. But,” I murmur to the carriage’s ceiling, “what about the weight of unliving? Who does that belong to?”

The crown princess hasn’t told Lucien or Fione what she’s doing with the valkerax, for their safety, no doubt. She wants to keep the valkerax to herself—not out of selfishness but out of a desire to protect those closest to her. I can’t find it in me to blame her. I’d do the same. But the urge to tell Lucien and Fione this one truth still burns, even in the morning light. If I do, if Lucien and Fione even believe me, I’d have a hard time believing the crown princess would be pleased. And she holds my heart in the palm of her hand, literally.

If Fione does bring me Gavik’s journal, it’s not safe to tell her the truth. But she deserves that much, and my two inclinations war with each other even as I teach the valkerax for the day. Yorl pushes me hard—we try the serum three times, and I die three times. But the valkerax has other plans: namely, lying there on the ground and wheezing. It doesn’t even move to snap at me. It doesn’t answer me, except to mutter nonsense once more—about sky-homes and earth-homes, about flying below the sun. My unheart feels like a pincushion as I listen to its labored breaths, and right then it finally hits me: it’s not going to last long. All of Yorl’s warnings were easy to ignore when it wasn’t collapsed in a heap on the ground. But now, listening with my own two ears as it struggles to live, I brutally understand.

It might die for this.

It will die without my helping it to Weep. It will die because I wasn’t fast enough or correct enough in my teaching.