Pity rabbit organs are so small, I retort back to the hunger. Otherwise you’d be much quieter.

“Why would the Glass Tree and the Bone Tree react to each other like that?” Malachite frowns. “They’re two different things, right? Two different Old Vetrisian inventions.”

“Not entirely,” Fione corrects him, daintily consuming a berry with crimson-stained lips. “The Bone Tree is certainly an Old Vetrisian invention. But the Glass Tree is a witch thing. Barely any polymath contributions in it at all. Which means it’s essentially pure magic.”

“And that means?”

“It’s more unpredictable than the Bone Tree, certainly,” she says. “It has fewer rules. Or rather, the rules are not defined by any polymath terms, so I can’t begin to guess at what they are.”

“What about the Hymn of the Forest?” I ask. “The tree of bone and the tree of glass—”

“—will sit together as family at last,” Lucien finishes for me.

I nod. “They were trying to come together—the glass and the bone. Does it have anything to do with the Hymn?”

“But they’re two different things,” Malachite insists.

“The Glass Tree was made from a shard of the Bone Tree, right?” Lucien muses. “So they’re not entirely different.”

“Perhaps,” Fione muses. “It’s possible they… No—”

“We have the High Witch’s secret book. We head to the Black Archives and get you the reference material to translate it,” Lucien interrupts her. “And with the valkerax able to fly now, we should move as quickly as possible.”

“Spirits,” Malachite exhales. “Big teeth, big claws, big fire, and now big airborne. Perfect. Exactly what I wished for last Snowsum’s Eve.”

“Are you—” I look Lucien up and down. “Are you all right? From yesterday?”

His smile is small. “Of course.”

“Everything’s working?” Malachite looks him over suspiciously.

“Would you like to test me out?” Lucien makes a vague motion at the sword on his hip, and Malachite just rolls his eyes.

Packing up is easy when you don’t have much—no utensils, no rain guards. All we have to do is bury the coals of the fire and the bones of the rabbit, and we’re gone.

I’ve never seen the west coast of Cavanos, or if I have, I don’t remember it. My parents—traveling merchants as they were—probably brought me here once or twice. The biggest maritime trade route into Cavanos runs west-east, after all. But the roads are near empty. We pass the occasional trading caravan, dusty mules and creaking wheels and terse smiles from under wide-brimmed hats, but they’re few and far between. If the promise of war profit attracted them, the valkerax attacks surely scared them off.

Not to mention the ash raining down from the smoking island in the sky, visible today as it wasn’t yesterday.