“That is no concern of yours!” Varia snarls the moment I translate the sentence. “I know what it means. I know what it will take. And I am willing.”

“The other chimes were just as willing.” Evlorasin laughs, drool forming a puddle on the floor from its tongue. “They let out such sweet noises before they slept their last.”

“It is not your place to determine what I am capable of, beast.” Varia’s voice goes quiet again, every inch backed by steel. “You will tell me where the Bone Tree is, or you will not be cut today. And you will never Weep. You will give me a blood promise—”

“The Laughing Daughter invokes ways that are long lost to the darkness.” Evlorasin closes its mouth finally, clicking its claws as it circles Varia menacingly with its titanic bulk. “We are the ones who laugh at her.”

Evlorasin stops circling her and comes to curl itself around and behind me, putting its head on its paws just at my feet, its five eyes lazily blinking at Varia as it settles in like a hound before a winter’s fire.

“You are Starving and she is Laughing,” Evlorasin says to me. “Why do you help her seek the Tree?”

Shame burns hot at my gills, and I keep my eyes away from Varia’s as I say, “She’s promised me my heart.”

Evlorasin is quiet, as is Varia, watching the both of us sharply with her obsidian eyes like she’s tensing, waiting for something to happen.

“Ah. This is why you are the Starving Wolf.” The valkerax finally exhales a puff of slow air at my feet. “Because your hunger will consume the world.”

“Tell it.” Varia points at my confused self suddenly, her wooden finger glimmering stark in the mosslight. “Tell it I will not allow—”

The valkerax suddenly explodes next to me, languid one moment and lunging forward in a blink the next, mouth open and teeth bared right at Varia. Yorl makes a shout and I fling myself toward her (not her, if she dies I die), but there’s a flash of black light and then the smell of singed fur. It happens so fast I barely see it, but then Evlorasin’s reeling backward, pawing at its smoking mouth and whining. Varia’s panting, her robe heaving as the void-like blackness that preludes spell casting for witches fades from her eyes and the skin of her hands.

“Your gods have torn you apart,” Evlorasin hisses between pawing. “The Tree tore one god into two, and you will not make them whole again by taking hold of its branches.”

Its rambles aren’t nonsense anymore. The Tree tore one god into two. Evlorasin means the Old God and the New. It knows that the invention of the Trees is what tore Old Vetris apart, just as I do.

Varia bellows at me, her hair mussed and her eyes burning furiously. “Translate! Now!”