Yorl and I share a long glance, our twin goals laced in the abject silence of dirty deeds, and then he turns wordlessly and descends back down the dark staircase, the door creaking shut behind him. I take a deep breath to clear the heaviness in my chest, turn on my heel, and leave the wall. I blink as my eyes frantically adjust to the bright, late-afternoon sunlight. Not as many people stare at me this time as I walk through South Gate’s crowd, entirely because I’m not covered in blood. The valkerax hasn’t had the presence of mind to speak two sensible words to me, let alone the energy to try to bite me again.

There was something the valkerax said today, though, that stuck with me.

The branches cry out in the night to those who will listen in slumber.

It had no context, blurted between bouts of pain, but it echoes in my head. It would be easy to write off such a sentence as gibberish if I hadn’t had that dream of the tree the other night. To listen in slumber—that could be dreaming. And there had been branches in my dream, covered in bloodstained glass. Glass that pointed itself at me when I tried to come near.

But Vetris is no place to dream for a Heartless.

The war, the valkerax, how to push Lady Tarroux at Lucien—I mull it over every hour of the day, barely falling into the mockery of sleep Heartless experience. Varia’s maids send a pitcher of wine to her room every night, and I find myself dipping into it more than is healthy, the wine the only thing capable of slowing my racing mind. But soon—like all places I stare at the walls of for more than two days—the palace starts to feel like a prison. And so I turn to the only place left to me—the city.

The looming war permeates Vetris as thoroughly as the stink of white mercury; the blacksmiths never quiet their anvils as they produce piles of swords and armor. The polymaths gather in groups, in taverns and on the cobblestone streets, gesturing wildly with their baggy sleeves at buildings and walls and arguing over how to better fortify them against magical attacks. The Vetrisian army trickles in from all over the country thanks to the king’s summons, gathering outside the white wall in little nodes of tents that rapidly grow to sprawl over the grassland.