Yorl won’t meet my gaze, but he sniffs and rolls up his finished parchment. “We’re not sure. But we’re so close to having the valkerax Weep, it hardly matters much. If we move with haste, this nuisance will become nonexistent. Which is why Varia is pushing us so.”

He’s being evasive. “I helped you bring Ev back, Yorl!” I stamp my foot. “I think I deserve a little more than a hand wave! Paw wave. Whatever!”

The celeon nudges his glasses higher on his nose. “We have a job to do. Varia wants us to cut the valkerax today and be done with it.”

As he passes me a second vial, he gets up and heads toward the gate. I stare at the clear vial in my palm, the mosslight from the wall reflecting into the liquid as a sickly violet. Yorl is being evasive. He thinks…they think I could be one of the possible leaks, don’t they? I would be evasive with the person I thought was a leak, too. But I haven’t told anyone anything. I’ve been true to my word—my every command—both with and against my own will. I stayed strong, even when Lucien and Fione and Malachite were questioning me.

Yes, Lucien somehow knew about Weeping, but he didn’t find that out from me. I never said a single word about it aloud. I told Fione about the valkerax but not about what we were doing down here. I gave Lucien the diary page, but that was after he already knew about the “Hymn of the Forest,” and therefore about the Bone Tree. No one knows Varia is having me teach the valkerax to Weep specifically to find it. No one.

I get up slowly, pulling the white mercury sword from the ground where Yorl laid it beside me.

The other chimes were just as willing. Evlorasin’s words whirl in my head. I’m kicking myself now for not asking Varia what any of that meant, but if she thinks I’m a leak, there’s no possible way she’ll tell me. I’m simultaneously the crux of her operation and a potential threat to it, even if I still don’t understand how.

Yorl orders the gate to be opened, and we duck inside. The heavy breathing of Evlorasin is audible the second we walk in, and its rancid breath heralds its approach. My hands are shaking around the white mercury sword, and I feel dizzy.

My skin tingles hot with Evlorasin’s heat behind me, and I turn to it.

“Where do you want the cut?” I ask. “It should be somewhere that penetrates down to the bloodstream easily.”

“The throat of the river is the weakest part,” Evlorasin says. “Where earth and water mix.”