Varia digs into my neck. I feel it happen, but she can’t stop my hands. I press with all effort, all breath, into my two palms, forcing the First Root’s wound flush against itself. My neck creaks, groans, resisting her force trying to decapitate me. Around her fingers buried deep in my neck, blood and life leave me, and I see her face. I see her expression—no, the Bone Tree’s expression—as she realizes I’m putting her together instead of taking her apart.

I’ve never seen joy. Not really. Not until this moment.

It’s a deep, old, eternal joy, the sort the New God priests crow about in the temples. Divine joy. Joy that makes moving mountains possible, that makes the sun rise and set and rise again by the buoy of sheer gilded ecstasy. She—no, it—looks at me, milky, shriveled eyes somehow filled with gratitude.

“Thank you.”

The bones sticking out of Varia’s choker and piercing into me suddenly retract, small and slender and like jewelry again. There’s a clicking sound, and the bone choker comes loose, one fang at a time, until it falls to the ground and disintegrates into white dust.

Varia staggers as if she’s been cut free from some string holding her, her knees tumbling to the ground and her body unmoving, her head on her chest. My six eyes start to blacken at the edges, but I force myself to focus on my hands, on holding. I can feel the Root’s wound starting to close, inch by inch. The tremors are worse now, great clots of dirt falling on our heads, cracks and crashes beyond the little cave as boulders fall and the canyon faces start to shatter.

“V-Varia, wake up,” I stammer, throat scraped raw and open. “Your Highness…wake up, please.”

Lucien’s magic can’t reach me—not anymore. He’s gone from the Tree of Souls, not a scrap of the power it was giving him to be found. He’s far, too far, so far my heart necklace can’t even help. I can feel the white rush of noise crawling up my half-broken spine, ready the moment I let my Weeping down to freeze me in place, keep me here screaming soundlessly for all eternity. He can’t heal me. He can’t help me. He’s gone.

Fione, Mal, Yorl. They’re all gone.

No—not gone. Safe.

I have to keep my promise to Fione now.

“Varia!” I gurgle. “Please! Get up!”

Nothing. The wound is closing in my hand, the First Root mending itself quickly and the pearl liquid coming to a stop. It coats my hands, makes them slippery, my own blood spurting out of my neck not helping, but I cling on, dig my claws in. If I can’t get her to wake up, she’s done for.

“HEY!” I scream. “ASSHOLE!”