Varia shifts, her silk skirts whispering as she folds one leg over the other. “Search high and low for it myself. What do you think I’ve been doing all these years in hiding—knitting baby clothes?”

“Then why haven’t you found it yet?”

The princess frowns, her full lips dour. Identical to Lucien’s frown, it hits my heart like unwelcome lightning. “The Bone Tree is…elusive,” Varia says. “The Old Vetrisians pumped it so full of magic, it’s developed some quirks of its own. It never stays long in one place.”

“It can move?” I marvel.

She nods. “It may look like a tree, but it’s more of a magical relic, really. That’s why I need a completely sane valkerax in control of itself. They’re the only ones who can tell me exactly where it is, when it is, with total accuracy.”

The carriage rumbles over the cobblestones of the familiar bridge that stretches across the common quarter to the noble quarter. I watch the river move like a lazy black-glass snake beneath the stone arch.

“It won’t just be Cavanos that fears you and your valkerax army,” I start. “It’ll be the whole world. Lucien. Fione. Your father. Everyone. You could use it to kill everyone.”

Varia speaks, staring placidly out the window. “You’ve read the Midnight Gifter, right?”

I’m quiet. Of course I have. A hugely popular book series, about a noble in the times of Old Vetris who steals from the rich and gives to the poor and dresses entirely in black. It’s the whole reason I thought Lucien, when I met him first as the leather-clad thief Whisper, was so amusing. The resemblance was clear.

“Book three,” Varia says. “Page one forty-five, line two. ‘That I could give the whole world of Arathess peace, I would. That there was some polymath contraption, some lever I could hit or button I could press that would give peace to all, know that I would die with my hand on it—’”

“‘And still in death my skeleton would go on, the bones moving of their own accord, and my flesh feeding its furnace,’” I finish. It’s not a common quote, but I remember it well because it struck me so deeply when I was younger. Varia turns to me and smiles faintly. It’s a smile different from the ones I’ve seen from her so far—something much gentler. Something that looks more human and less princess.

“I want my people to live in peace, Zera.”

It could be true. Her words, her tone, sound true. Still, I won’t let it go.

“The valkerax have had a thousand years to reproduce in the Dark Below,” I say. “We’re talking thousands of wyrms. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Can one witch really keep control over all the valkerax in Cavanos? By herself?”