“I don’t have time.” I fold my arms over my chest.

“We have all the time in the world,” he mutters. “After all, we are immortal.”

“I’m going to teach the valkerax how to Weep as fast as I can. It’s starting to learn. Varia will have the Bone Tree sooner than you think.”

“You can stall,” he says. “You can stall for just a few hours. The command doesn’t let me do anything but hand out bread until sunset.”

“The valkerax is wasting away,” I insist. “It’s dying much faster than anyone thought, and if I can’t teach it, I don’t get my heart—”

“You hate me,” he asserts. My frown is deep, and I watch his hand dart into the basket and offer a loaf to a ragged passerby almost automatically. The passerby takes it, but Gavik’s watery eyes never leave my face. “I hate you. But we are both bound to one person. That person has our leashes. We have a common enemy, Zera, no matter how much you wish to deny it.”

“She’s going to give me my heart,” I argue. “She has a sense of morality, unlike you—”

“That doesn’t mean she is innocent,” he says resolutely.

I burst out in cruel, frigid laughter. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take you seriously, considering this is coming from the man who drowned innocents.”

“Something is not right,” Gavik snaps. “I know that. I know that the same way I know that one and only line of the hymn. I can prove it to you. A few hours, that’s all I ask. I know you don’t trust me; I don’t expect you to. But at the very least, you should know what kind of person your witch is before you go handing her the key to a valkerax army, don’t you think?”

“She’s just going to use them to force a standstill in the war.” I fight with everything I have against his logic—I don’t want to agree with a genocidal coot.

“I can assure you, as someone who spent his life chasing power,” Gavik says, “when absolute power presents itself, there are no ‘justs’ anymore. It is all or nothing.”

He’s not wrong. He’s not wrong and I hate it. My heart is all that matters, right? So why am I even entertaining the idea of stalling out the valkerax teaching for him?

Varia’s thrashing in her bed. Her voice murmuring about the Tree. My own nightmare. Lucien’s worry on his face and Fione’s denial on hers. The coincidences, piling on top of one another.

If something’s wrong with my witch, then where does that leave the people who love her? My friends?

former friends, the hunger corrects oily.

This. This can be my parting gift to them.