“I thought you of all people wouldn’t want to slow down,” I say to her. “Rescuing Varia is, theoretically, more important than a bath.”

Fione’s blue eyes catch on her glove as she takes it off finger by finger. Her other hand clutches the waterproof sack where she keeps the book we stole from Windonhigh.

“Your little speech made it clear to me,” she says over the inn’s din.

“Uh…it did?”

“My choice,” Fione murmurs. “Everything I’ve done until now, and everything I do going forward, is my choice. But from what you’ve told me, and what the High Witches added, Varia doesn’t have much of a choice anymore. The Bone Tree infects her. Consumes her.”

With a dim sadness, I follow her to the only free table. A gaggle of sailors starts a sea shanty, and Fione leans in so I can hear her better.

“We’re her only hope. And if there’s any scrap of the Varia I love left in her, she knows that, too. We’ll be together, always. She promised me that. And I choose to believe her.”

There’s a flash of iron behind her eyes—that determined iron that laced her every breath in Breych right after it all happened. But it doesn’t stay this time. This time, it lightens, evaporates, as she smiles small.

“Besides. Thinking strategically becomes rather difficult when one has to stop every ten minutes to sample their own reek.”

“Oh so true,” I agree sagely, motioning to the tavernkeep for service.

Fione takes her bath first, upstairs in a small room, and I decide to guard the door, what with all the drunken sailors about. I sit against it, the smell of steam and wild lavender eking out from the crack under the door, and I watch the sun spin silver in the sea clouds through the window.

Varia doesn’t have a choice.

She’s like me now. She’s maybe experiencing firsthand what she did to me as her Heartless. But I can’t be happy about any of it. There are witches all over Arathess, and plenty of them use Heartless. Plenty of them treat their Heartless well, but plenty others treat them badly. I know that now. I know, deep in the flesh of me, that it’s wrong. The hunger’s made that so crystal clear.

Something is wrong, this world with its Heartless in it. The wrong I feel now, and the wrong I felt in my dream of the two trees, the two pendants, the Glass Tree lonely, that feeling like if I didn’t bring them together something horrible would happen…it’s the same. The same wrongness.

Maybe all I’m feeling is nebulous instinct. Maybe it’s remnants of the Bone Tree. Maybe it’s the hunger, or maybe it’s magic. All I know is it’s real, this feeling.

I want to destroy the Glass Tree, too.