“Seeing something. Hearing something we couldn’t,” Lucien finishes for her. “They all were. We seized the advantage, and by the time they came to again, we’d killed more than my sister could stand. She turned tail and left when she realized how depleted her forces were.”

If they froze…was it because of what I saw, too? What I felt? That moment of the Bone Tree’s softness…did that freeze them? For one second, did the bloodlust fade? But why? All I did was say sorry. All I did was apologize. Maybe the Trees have never heard a mortal apologize to them. For what we did. For the horrible way we split them a thousand years ago.

Maybe that was the first time the hunger—the song—has ever heard an apology.

I lean against Lucien’s strong arms, grateful for the support. My blurry eyes catch on the ocean water—red. Not deep blue. The waves lap pink foam on the shore. I follow the red water with my eyes far down the beach, to another stretch of sand where hundreds of polymaths in silver robes are gathered around a hulking mass of white serpent flesh. The mountain of carnage bleeds rivers down the beach, the sand and sea stained red in a ring around what seems to be the entire island. The mangrove trees rejoice, their long roots in the shallow water soaking up the blood. So many valkerax, dead. My stomach churns.

“What a waste. They were too easy,” Malachite scoffs. “Not even a challenge. Almost made me sick, killing ’em when they couldn’t fight back like that.”

“I thought you lived to kill them,” Fione says.

“Yeah.” He frowns. “But in a legitimate fight. Beneathers train to be warriors, not butchers. We’re not meant to kill ’em brainlessly like that.”

“The polymaths didn’t seem to mind how they died,” Lucien mutters. “As long as the books were kept safe.”

“They want the parts,” Fione agrees, smoothing down a strand of my stray hair.

“Your Yorl friend wouldn’t shut up about all the parts,” Malachite insists. “Kept blathering on about how they’d be great for ‘making a cure’ for you, or some crap like that.”

I watch the polymaths, picking out a single one in the crowd with ochre ears and a swishing tail. Yorl’s so kind. Kind in that thorny way of his, but kind nonetheless. He wants to make a cure for my valkerax blood promise. A cure that will come too late, when I do what I have to. He’ll be fine, too, won’t he? The Archives are smoldering, the fortress of black volcanic rock crumbling and smoking in some places, but still mostly intact. He’ll have his books, and he knows my friends, now.

All my friends, united. They’ll be able to help one another when I’m gone.

“Fantastic.” I flash a winning smile at Lucien. “At this point, I’ll take anything that’ll make me more human and less warbeast.”