“Good to know.” Malachite kicks a piece of unmentionable viscera down the road like a rock. “Except I already knew.”

“Indeed,” Lucien agrees. “You’re the resident valkerax expert, Mal. What’s the diagnosis?”

Malachite’s ruby eyes flash over to Fione and offers her his hand elegantly. “Shall we, milady?”

“Don’t try to do polite etiquette,” the archduchess requests. “It’s unsightly.”

The two of them circle the corpse, mirroring the crows as they look for signs, openings. I do my own investigation at the front—inspecting its wolflike maw, its six glassy eyes. No empty scar on the sixth socket. I knew it wasn’t Evlorasin in my gut, but the possibility was still there. But not-Evlorasin means one of Varia’s.

“Its mane is almost completely singed off,” Fione muses.

“They use those to fly,” Malachite asserts. “I saw Six-Eyes’s friend doing it like that.”

“It has a name, you know,” I press. “Evlorasin.”

“The day I use a valkerax’s true name in casual conversation is the day I cut my own ears off,” he grunts. “But thanks.”

“So the mane was burned off?” Fione frowns.

“That’s not fatal, though,” Malachite interjects. “Looks like the fall killed it, not the witches. But what do I know? Magic can get inside where you can’t see.”

“There’s no magic inside it,” Lucien confirms. “Only the outside. Fione’s right—on the mane. Witchfire, I think.”

“So the witches burned this one’s mane, and it fell,” Malachite muses.

“That’s the soundest hypothesis.” Fione nods.

“That caravaner must’ve poached some of the parts,” Lucien says.

“They sell pretty well,” Malachite agrees. “But that shit’s highly regulated by the ancestor council. Anything that doesn’t come from beneather kills is tagged as a ‘monetary threat’ to Pala Amna. He’ll be lucky if he can sell half of ’em before getting arrested.”

“Do we just…leave it here?” I ask. I can’t look away from the six glassy eyes staring into my soul.

Malachite looks around. “Didn’t die belowground, where it belongs. So all the old traditions go out the window. No rune carvings needed.”

“It feels wrong, though, to leave it without doing anything.”

The barest of Malachite’s glares flashes over at me. “It’s a valkerax. Don’t tell me you’re on their side now?”

“There are no sides,” I blurt. “It was a living thing, and now it’s dead. I’m just trying to be respectful.”

“Why?” He snorts. “S’not like you die.”

“Mal,” Lucien says, a sting to it. “Drop it.”

“I can’t, Luc.” He throws his pale hand out at me. “I trust her as much as you do. But she sees Varia in her dreams, right? She’s got valkerax blood in her now, right? What if Varia can—what if she can control Zera? Just like she controls the other valkerax?”