“Have you even told her?” I snap back. “Have you told Lucien what you’re going to do with the Bone Tree, either? Or are you keeping that a secret, too, so they can suffer when you transform overnight into the world’s most powerful—most terrifying—person?”

There’s that brimstone flash in her eyes—the same as Lucien’s. I inhale hugely.

“I might’ve betrayed them. But at least I didn’t abandon them.”

She stands abruptly from the log, skirts swirling. “I’m protecting them!”

My mouth falls silent as Varia’s chest rises and falls with her furious breathing. She quips, she smiles, she deflects, but she doesn’t get truly angry. Until now.

“I am the one who will stop the eternal spiral of war in Cavanos,” the crown princess says, softer but with no less hard an edge. “Because it’s what must be done. But I will do it alone.”

“The world will fear you,” I snarl. “And take it from me, Princess—that always leads to hatred.”

“Then they will fear only me.” She raises her chin haughtily. “And they will hate only me.”

I almost blurt a laugh then. Bullheadedness must run thick and undeniable in the d’Malvane blood.

“You could call a truce,” I press. “You’re the crown princess and a witch. You’d be the perfect person to negotiate a peace talk, as an ambassador to both—”

“So that what, Zera?” Varia slices through my words. “So that some ignorant human in a village can ‘accidentally’ drown a witch one day, and Cavanos can go to war again in ten years’ time? No.”

“But…raising the valkerax—”

“I have considered everything,” she interrupts me coldly. “And this is the best option.”

“Best?” This time I do blurt a laugh, though it sounds half hysterical. “What madman would ever think commanding a ravening valkerax army is the best option?”

Varia’s quiet, the forest wind playing with her hair, and then, “This is what the crown princess must do for her people.”

The rising Blue Giant catches her face, lacquering her gold skin with pale azure. Her proud nose gleams, her brows knit, and fierce determination is etched in her every pore, and yet her eyes are piercingly lucid. Where Lucien is a hawk forever hunting, she is an owl—watching, waiting, a sentinel in the night.

I’m awestruck for a moment. I see her for the first time like a younger Lucien might’ve. I understand now why he looks up to her so much. Why he took up the mantle of Whisper to try to behold her ideals while she was away. Lucien grew himself in her image over the years she was gone. She is a pillar of conviction, a pillar lit with flame and blazing alone into the night.

The moment passes, and Varia covers her raw self with a lid of a smile.

“How was your first valkerax session?”