I snap out of my own thoughts. Whatever unnerving coincidence is going on, it’s not as important as teaching this thing, as getting the warm memories in my heart back.

“All right.” I sit on the dirt. “First, you should relax.”

“A mountain-task made for the smallest rodent. A rodent without a loudly screaming voice within.”

“We’ll take it slow. That’s the whole point.” I think back to that jump across the pipes, to the moment in the clearing before I transformed into the monster and defended Lucien. “That’s how you get silent. You can’t think about many things at once. It has to be just one thing.”

“One,” the valkerax repeats. “One root, not the whole plant.”

A little thrill runs through me as I realize it’s getting what I’m saying. This is huge, compared to the last few days. “Exactly! Think of just one thing, and let that one thing become your whole world. Your whole reason for being alive.”

“A purpose of being.” I hear the valkerax curl around itself. “To defy the song that sings of barren immortality. This, we understand.”

“Great. Well, that officially makes you the smarter one, which means I’m the pretty one. Um. Not that your giant fangs and claws aren’t pretty. Because they are.”

I swear from the other side of the arena, I hear Yorl smack his paw to his forehead.

Reginall made it seem so easy when he first taught me. I tell the valkerax to listen to its own breathing, to focus on the places in its body where it feels an aching emptiness. There’s even a moment where it lets me approach, and with tense awe and fear, I run my hand along the smooth white scales of its chest, below the tuft of lionlike mane, to find the breastbone. It’s so incredibly big—one scale is as large as my entire palm. And it has thousands. The smell of it is no less rank up close, but feeling it for the first time after only hearing it flail and gnash its teeth for so long is incredible.

After a few misses in which I almost lose an arm for touching the wrong spots, we narrow down exactly where the valkerax feels empty—its left back leg. That’s got to be where the Old Vetrisians took a bone from it to add to the Bone Tree. It’s grown back since, but it feels thinner somehow.

I pan my hand back up its body, and my fingers catch on something wet on its ribs. The valkerax’s muscles twitch below my skin as I gingerly run over the spot one more time—it’s a hole.

“Yorl,” I start. “What’s a hole doing here? It’s like it’s missing one of its—”