He could be lying. But why would he? He’s lost his memories. He’s lost everything. Is this some bid to make me pity him, to get his heart back eventually? I killed him, for the gods’ sakes. He should be consumed with revenge and fury toward me, but this… Is he truly that scared? Scared enough to beg?

And if he’s this scared, then shouldn’t I be, too?

I shake him off my boots like a slug.

“Don’t you dare ask me for favors,” I growl down at him. “Not after everything you’ve done.”

I leave him in the alley, his song ringing eerily in my head.

The tree of bone and the tree of glass, will sit together as family at last.

Two trees. Not one, but two.

My nightmare was about two trees. Running through the broken shards of the palace’s stained glass Hall of Time, the shards ripping at me, my hands reaching for two rosaries with naked trees on them, like the one Y’shennria carried. I remember it as if it were real. I remember it for the terrible certainty it made me feel.

A certainty that, if I didn’t reach those twin rosaries, something horrible would happen.

If she finds the Tree, it will mean disaster.

Ido my best to keep Gavik’s unsettling words out of my work. Wine helps, but working with the valkerax is better. It’s easy to lose a scared archduke’s nonsense within more nonsense. But my questions still linger, my nightmare still lingers, unsettling me down to the bone. Gavik said he had the urge to keep a diary coursing through him, and he seemed convinced on our first re-meeting that he’d have written about the Bone Tree somewhere.

On one of the rare nights Varia returns to her apartments, I lean in the doorframe of her bathroom. She’s languishing in a full silver tub of rose- and violet-perfumed water spiked with goat’s milk, the petals swirling in the murky white.

“You…wouldn’t happen to have Gavik’s things on hand, would you?” I ask. “I want to frame some of them for posterity.”

Varia sighs, leaning her head against the tub so her sheet of wet hair hangs over the lip.

“Fione and I agreed it would be cathartic for her to burn it all.”

“Everything?” I try to sound as uninterested as possible, but Varia catches on. She sits up, turning to look at me with mild irritation.

“You expect a girl who’s been abused by her uncle to keep even one thing of his?”

“No,” I blurt. “Obviously not.”

Now I look like the horse’s arse for asking. Of course I wouldn’t deny Fione her catharsis about Gavik’s mistreatment of her. But I still can’t keep myself from feeling disappointed. a friend only in name, wishing for her pain over your curiosity. The hunger laughs.