He leans in, forehead to forehead, and gives a shuddering gasp. “I’ll help you. My magic is yours. Whatever you need, it’s yours.”

“I need you—” It’s my turn to swallow. “Just as you are, right now. Brave as you are. Scared as you are. Hopeful as you are. Just like this.”

Before now, I never knew an embrace between two people could feel like one trembling body, one trembling heart, one person made from two, made from nothing, made from chance and choice and love.

6

6

SERPENT
LIKE SALVATION

The news about Vetris spreads around the crew like the fire that’s consumed it.

Lucien stays at the railing for hours until the wind changes, east-northeast to south, or so the captain says. The smoke then clears, and we can finally see it. Vetris, in flames.

Vetris, ruined.

I kick myself. I should’ve told him—I should’ve told him I saw her near the grasslands in my dreams. I didn’t. I didn’t, and now…

your mistrust will kill them all.

I push the hunger down and breathe. Nothing to be done. There’s nothing to be done now. The fourteen men taught me this, and taught me it well. It’s the past. Lesson learned. I have to learn from it.

Even if I told him I saw her near Vetris in my dream—what could we have done? She’s so powerful. We can’t weaken the bond between the valkerax and the Bone Tree, not yet. What would it have done, other than cause him great grief?

The exact grief he’s feeling now.

Fione, with nothing left in her stomach and half recovered, pulls her weary self over by the railing and offers Lucien her brass seeing tube first. And then he offers it to me, his face stone and yet green on the edges.

The white walls rot gray with ash and smoke, the glistening palace’s spires are fragmented and broken, the body of two massive valkerax impaled on them and dripping blood down the palace’s marble walls. The Crimson Lady is torn asunder, its two perfectly cleaved halves crushing scores of houses below it. Vetris’s only hope against Varia’s magic, the entire reason I was sent into Vetris instead of a witch—now nothing more than red rubble. Red, strewn with long white shapes. Valkerax, dead. Dozens of them. But not hundreds. The dense army camps ringing the city are scathed by fire and craters and broken horses, dogs feasting on the remains.

Crows—black ones—wing in heavy murders over what’s left of the city.

Vetris lost.

Just like that. As easily as that. All the combined might of the polymaths, all of Cavanos’s army, the thing the witches feared so dearly—defeated. Vetris won the Sunless War thirty years ago, against the might of the witches and their Heartless and their magic. But against the valkerax…