“And just two eyes,” Malachite adds with a smirk.

“Thank the gods,” I exhale. “Do I look like the sort of girl who has the time to put makeup on all six of them every morning?”

“Absolutely not,” Lucien agrees, swooping in to help me sit up with one arm around my shoulders. He anticipates the question in my half-open mouth. “We lost a dozen polymaths.”

I quirk a brow. “A dozen? I was expecting far more.”

“The matronics are machines capable of terrifying power,” Fione says, looking me over for wounds with a polymath’s sharp eye. “But even they were being overwhelmed by the sheer number of valkerax. We would’ve lost the entire Archive if they hadn’t stopped.”

“‘Stopped’?” I blink. “What do you mean ‘stopped?’”

Malachite shrugs one shoulder. “Halfway through the battle, all the spiritsdamn valkerax just froze. Jaws open, tails thrashing, but no hostile movements. Varia was sitting pretty on a flying valkerax, circling the whole place, but Fione saw her freeze up, too.”

I glance at Fione, whose hand nervously moves to the brass seeing tube hanging from the chain around her neck.

“She was just…staring,” the archduchess murmurs. “Just staring at nothing, her jaw slack, like she was—”

“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.