“Well.” My smirk goes crooked. “Great. Just try not to get all morbid about it too quickly, okay?”

The humor is lost on the valkerax, like most of the meanings of its words are lost on me. An even trade.

Evlorasin moves its paw, pulling me back to its face with the curve of its massive talon, like a shepherd’s hook pulling back a sheep. I know what that means, what it wants—body language, even with a valkerax, is far easier to understand—and I throw my arms into its mane and hug it close.

“Be safe,” I mutter into feathers and fur. The valkerax snorts, a cloud of dirt displacing around my feet.

“As blood flows between you and I, we will exist together.”

“Thank you, again.”

“What is gratitude,” the valkerax says softly, “but a promise made whole?”

And with that, it pivots and winds its serpentine body through the trees, slithering loud, cracking young trees and old branches, and disappears as quickly as it appeared.

“Good riddance.” Malachite waves it off.

“It saved you, you know,” I blurt.

“And it’d sooner turn around and kill me, too,” he drawls. “Daft thing.”

I watch the last of Evlorasin go with a sadness welling up in the cracks of me—a sadness I know isn’t my own. Or, it is. But it’s more than that. The sadness is both of ours, Evlorasin’s and mine. Connected to each other through the blood promise it gave me.

A sudden thought flashes through my brain, in Yorl’s voice of all voices. Yorl, the celeon polymath genius Varia put in charge of finding the Bone Tree. He knows the most about valkerax of anyone in the world, thanks to his grandfather’s research. He was there with me every step of the way, and he’s here with me now, in cold, clear logic. He could help us.

“It’s called a blood promise, Zera, not a blood moment.”

He’s right. Mine and Evlorasin’s connection has endured.

“You know where the Bone Tree is. You will always know. Now and forever. Until the very moment your human body dies for the last time.”

The dreams.

“Mal.” I pivot, only to see Lucien staggering to his feet and toward Fione.

“Is she breathing?” he demands.

Malachite puts his fingers to her bloody throat and shakes his head. “Nothing.”

My unheart squeezes painfully. So wrapped up in Ev’s mystic Tree shit, I forgot who needed help. “Is she—”

Malachite looks up to Lucien. “You could…you have another glass shard, right?”

“No!” I blurt. “Mal—no. She has to choose it. We can’t force her into it.”

“Nightsinger forced you,” he points out. “It’s to save her life, Six-Eyes.”

“No. Zera’s right,” Lucien manages, limping over to Fione. “It has to be chosen. We try to heal her.”

“There’s no pulse to heal, Luc—”