“Arguing’s better when you walk,” he says. “Gets all the angst out through the legs.”

Fione finally breaks her gaze from Lucien’s face, and she starts walking after the beneather, cane stabbing the ground with remnant simmering fury. I reach out two fingers to touch Lucien’s hand—the left one. The unmoving one.

“You—” I swallow. “You’re important. To me.”

He says nothing, mouth tight and faced away from me.

“I’m the Heartless,” I say. “I grow back. Let me do the sacrificing, all right?”

There’s a moment where he pivots, looking as if he’s about to say something. But then his brow furrows. He thinks, tries to open his mouth again. The words are hard. They always are.

Sometimes, words aren’t needed.

I squeeze his left hand in mine, and he switches me to his right hand, the one that can squeeze back, and together we walk down the storm-shadowed road.

Optimistically, I never thought I’d see the Bone Road again. Maybe in the afterlife, in the final fevered death-dream of mine, but not in the flesh. Or the dirt, as it were. The same long twin ruts in the road, the same rabbit dens and long grasses swaying, the same Sunless War mass graves in the distance—graves that will swell to capacity soon—between boggy pools and throngs of fireflies. It’s the same, save for the minor fact that Nightsinger’s forest is missing.

Though “missing” isn’t the right word. When fire takes something, it takes violently and with scars—visible dark reminders. Swathes of black as far as the eye can see, crisped trunks of only the tallest trees all that’s left. If I squint, I think I can see the stone foundation of Nightsinger’s cabin, but it’s more likely wishful projection. More likely a lump of decaying plant matter. This massive scar, all that’s left of the place I spent three years of my life. Living. Dying. And living again. Fighting my first fight. Dueling my first duel. Learning to love Crav and Peligli, each in their own way. Learning to love Nightsinger, and hate her, and admire her all at once.

Learning how to live again, without a family. Without humanity. Without a heart.

Nightsinger and Peligli and Crav left before the fires. Y’shennria promised she’d warn them, and I trust that she did. They’re alive still, somewhere. But the forest is very much dead. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the woodlarks calling to each other, the crackle of branches as animals move through their daily ritual. The breath of the forest.

Gone.

The smell is decay and burned things. This is what it feels like to be empty. To miss something you never thought you would.

Lucien catches my stride as we walk past it. “This…isn’t this it? Varia told me—”

“Yeah,” I agree quickly.