“Fine,” I bark. “You have your day. Make sure you don’t waste it.”

Evlorasin doesn’t want to talk today. It wants to be in the silence. And so do I, frankly, but we all have jobs to do.

I distract it as best I can without really damaging its teachings up until now—I ask it all sorts of harmless questions. What it’ll do when it’s free, where it will go. Evlorasin wants to fly, mostly. It loves flying. I’m a little surprised—I didn’t know they could fly, and I spend an exorbitant amount of time grilling Yorl about it when I die for the first time. It works like a charm—at least for a while. He gets so caught up in telling me about every Old Vetrisian text that talks about them flying that he nearly forgets to give me my next vial. He remembers eventually and snarls at me for distracting him. I apologize profusely, and we walk into the arena again together.

“What did you mean?” I ask Evlorasin. “When you said the tree of bone will always call out to the chime strong enough to be its roots?”

The valkerax thrashes its tail, clearly irritated that, for the third time in a row, I’ve interrupted its silence.

“We are like the river over stones; we say many things that are true and do not recall them.”

“You were in a lot of pain,” I agree. Evlorasin snorts out a violent breath of air through its nose.

“Pain is nothing and everything. The Starving Wolf knows this, too.”

I feel the valkerax move the air as it circles around me, a puff of hot breath wafting against my shoulder. There’s a long, heavily breathing pause, and then Evlorasin speaks.

“The song that calls to us comes from the tree of bone.”

“Right,” I say softly. The song means the hunger. The hunger that forces Heartless and valkerax to obey commands, that feeds on our own doubts and fears.

“A tree cannot grow without the sun or the rain,” Evlorasin hisses. “The tree of bone is no different. Sun is not its food. Water is not its nourishment.”

“Then,” I murmur, “what is?”

“Power.” The wyrm’s whiskers beat the air. “Power all around, floating like clouds and falling like earth. Power that cannot be held by a tree without hands. A chime must hold it, offer the cup of it to the lips of the tree.”

I knit my brows in the darkness. A chime must hold it. By power, Evlorasin means magic, doesn’t it? Which means the Bone Tree needs magic. Magic from a chime—a witch.