“Milady Zera. How long it has felt, and how joyous it feels now. Are you well?”

“Well.” I nod, my smile so big it feels like it’ll split my face. “Better. I’m doing—” I look back at Lucien, at Fione and Malachite. “So much better.”

“I am very glad to hear it. I was muchly worried when we had to leave you behind in Vetris.” He looks down at my chest, as if searching. “Lady Y’shennria told me you are still Heartless.”

“Yeah. But I chose it this time.” I smile. “Turns out, it’s far easier to stop a valkerax incursion when you’re immortal.”

“And the hunger? It does not call to you?”

“It does still. But Lucien’s doing everything he can to keep it quiet. And I’ve learned to—not accept it, per se. But work with it. A little.”

Reginall looks at the prince and then back down at me, the crow’s feet in his eyes crinkling. “I see.”

“There’s so much I have to tell you,” I blurt. “I Wept! I did it, just like you taught me.”

“Ah.” He waves. “I hardly taught you anything. I merely told you snippets of rumor.”

“But it worked!” I insist. “I did it. I can do it now. Well, not now, because I’ve changed witches again. I’d have to be cut by a white mercury blade, but Fione has one and—” I smile wider at the confused look on his face. “It’s a good thing, I promise. I even taught a valkerax how to do it, too.”

“A valkerax.” Reginall breathes, eyes going wide. “Well. It seems we have much to talk of indeed. But first, a refresher for the lady.”

He offers me a tangerine cordial with an overdone politeness, and I take it with equally overdone politeness, and the two of us chuckle uncontrollably at the stringency of it all.

I whip my head around. “Is Fisher here?”

Fisher, the man who drove me around in Y’shennria’s carriage in the before times. Before I was exposed as a Heartless. He’d been my only companion, my only source of kindness some days.

Reginall shakes his head. “He went home, south. Back to the Empire.”

I grin ruefully. “As long as he’s safe, then.”

Y’shennria’s cook Maeve is in the kitchen, stoking the witchfire as she hobbles about and stirs varying pots of bubbling goodness. She squints up at me and pats my hand when she recognizes me, a missing-tooth mumble of here again, the strange thing as she turns back to the pots. Perriot—dressed in silk stockings and looking much cleaner than I saw him in Vetris—suddenly bursts into the kitchen trailing two other children.