My mind skitters around itself as I think. Heartlessness and what the valkerax have gone through might not be the same thing, but they are similar. Not being able to speak, being in pain—it sounds like when I tried to run from Nightsinger at the beginning of my Heartless life. I moved more than a mile and a half away from her and my mind went blank with pure agony. I couldn’t think or move or feel anything but the thunderous pain throbbing through my body. It felt like hours passed before Nightsinger found me and brought me back into her radius.

But Nightsinger isn’t my witch anymore.

Varia sweeps her black eyes to the gate, the firelight on her finger kissing the steel just enough to see the massive outline, and then she turns back to me.

“I saw you Weep in the clearing, Zera. It took me a great amount of sleuthing and wheedling, but when I lived with the witches, I managed to get one of the older ones to explain it to me—it lets Heartless have control over themselves again and brings them clarity, even if they are in their monster forms. You will teach the valkerax to Weep, and when it can control itself and speak, it will tell me where their bones are.”

I frown. “Their bones?”

“The Old Vetrisians realized controlling the valkerax one by one with thousands of witches wasn’t economical,” Yorl says softly. “Or statistically possible, for that matter. The valkerax outnumbered the witches greatly. So they gathered as many valkerax parts onto one intensely magical object as they could, to make an attempt at mass control.”

“A tree,” Varia clarifies. “It’s a tree, greatly magical, made entirely of valkerax bones. And entirely lost to time. But the valkerax know where it is. They can feel its presence always, commanding them to remain in the Dark Below. It’s what keeps them there.”

A tree of bones that can be used to control every valkerax in the world. Varia, who insisted in the clearing she has to stop the war. Suddenly it all falls into place.

“You…” I look to Varia, my eyes working up her legs, her cloaked torso, to her firelit face at last. “You want to control them.”

Varia’s smile widens. “But whatever would I do with them, my cleverest Zera?”

The insult barely pierces through my disbelief. “You’re going to use them to force a standstill. An army of valkerax, poised between the humans and witches. No one would dare to fight.”

“No one would dare to fight,” she repeats softly after me. “Indeed.”

“You’re mad,” I blurt.

The princess’s eyes go cold, but her smile warms. “No, Zera. I’m simply realistic.”