“And your father?” I run my finger along a dusty vase. “How does he feel about you becoming the most powerful person in the world? Have you asked him? Or is it just a given that he won’t mind, as long as you’re alive? Does he know how long you’ll be alive for? Does anyone?”

This gets to her. I can see the stitch in her mouth, no matter how desperately she tries to hide it. She’s close to her goal—the one she’s had nightmares about since she was small—and that’s making her sloppy. It would make anyone sloppy.

She pulls my heart, still in its bag, out of her breast coat, and grins like a hungry fox at me. My body goes on point in a split second, every hair standing up on my arms, my skin vibrating with heat and anticipation. My muscles twitch toward the bag, pulled like one of her eerie dolls on a string. I’ve never been more elated to see the word “traitor” in my life. My eyes roam over the stitching on the bag, over the way it thumps gently as my heart beats beneath the cloth.

Mother. Father. Human life. It’s all resting in that tiny bag.

“I still have this,” the crown princess reminds me. “So play nice, would you?”

I glower but say nothing. She might not be able to command me to tell her about the Bone Tree, but neither can I refuse her. We’re at a dangerous impasse, the two of us standing on the same knife’s edge.

It’s an hour that lasts longer than three days. Varia packs, she and Yorl going over details and minutiae. I sit in the only moveable chair in the room—a simple wood thing—positioning it in front of the sandclock on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. I wait one more hour after waiting for three years, watching the sand grains of the clock fall, each golden dot pushing me further from Lucien and closer to my heart.

“Will we be followed?” I hear Yorl ask faintly.

“There’s a possibility,” Varia agrees. “But only by a witch, and only if they’re familiar with my magic.”

“The rogue one in the city that started the witchfire,” Yorl says. “They may know.”

“No. It has to be a more intimate knowing, repeatedly exposed to it—”

I tune them out, my eyes fully focused on the clock but my ears wandering. Outside, through the open windows, I can hear the palace in a quiet uproar. The word “valkerax” drifts up, said with fearful nervousness, as if people are unsure whether merely saying the word will summon it to their doorstep.