“The valkerax nearly destroyed the world!” I throw my hands out. “They could break free someday and they’d raze it all over again! Even if you could keep control over this tree, over them, you’d be feared and reviled even more than witches, more than anyone—”

“Yorl.” Varia suddenly looks to him, breezing through my points like they don’t exist. “How soon can we send her in?”

“When the concoction is finished brewing.” Yorl squints into the darkness. “Which should be tomorrow morning.”

“I’m not doing this,” I snap. “I’m not helping you play with a power like this!”

“You will,” she says. That confidence again. I could rip it apart with my sheer anger, but I chew my lip and hold myself steady.

she holds us hostage like the last witch, the hunger whispers. I lift my chin.

“In no conceivable universe will I help you, Princess.”

I expect her to command me to help. But no words come out of her mouth, laced with the hunger or otherwise. With her non-firelit hand, she reaches into her cloak and pulls out something soft and pliable. It sags to one side in her wooden fingers. A bag—a small velvet sack, stitched with black letters; traitor.

Traitor. Just like Lucien called me.

It’s identical to the bag I saw Varia put Archduke Gavik’s heart in, though his read “leech.” She dangles it before me, her smile blazing hot and somehow ferocious on the edges.

“You will help me, Zera, because in return, I’m going to give you back the heart you’ve always wanted. The one you tried to kill and enthrall my brother for.”

My anger snuffs out as quickly as the bag in her hand moves, gently bumping into her palm in a steady rhythm. A heartbeat.

She slides the bag off, and there, in her fingers, rests a pink organ the size of a fist. That’s… Is that my heart? Just there, in her hands? The gap in my chest keens with an aching longing—the same one I felt each time I stared at my heart over Nightsinger’s fire.

She has it. Just as Varia took control of my reins, she’s standing right in front of me with my heart. No bars around it, no glass between it and me.

I can hear it beating. I can see every blue vein in it pulsing with my memories, my human life. The thing I came to Vetris for. The thing I suffered these three years and two long weeks for.

our heart, the hunger whimpers.

“My heart,” I whisper.

4

4

A Heart
Like a
Hunger

Before I can think, my hand darts out for it, but Varia’s command is instantaneous.

“Stand back.”