Peligli passing out on the couch, drooling, is the first indication that the night’s grown too long. The second is Crav succumbing, too, Peligli’s little head on his lap and his book slipping from his fingers. I catch it just in time, moving to put it back on the shelf when Crav’s stunning turquoise eyes flutter half open.

“You’re not leaving again, are you?” he mumbles sleepily. I smile, but it’s the sort of brittle effort that breaks my unheart in two.

“I might have to.”

He thinks on this, eyelids too heavy to keep open for long. Emotional exhaustion is a more powerful narcoleptic for Heartless than anything, and the three of us reuniting was no easy thing.

“Will you come back?” he finally decides to ask, and I can’t help my laugh. I drape a nearby sheepskin throw over him, the fluff obscuring his chin.

“You still don’t pull any punches, do you?”

“Answer me.” He frowns over the fluff.

“I don’t know, Crav,” I admit. “I have to go do something pretty dangerous. I might not come back.”

“You’re Heartless,” he argues. “We always come back. Unless…” He swallows. “Unless your witch dies. That prince guy.”

This punch is more of a slam directly to my solar plexus, nearly winding me. But I manage a soft “yeah.”

“If he dies, you die together,” Crav mumbles.

“Yeah.”

A pause, the black fire crackling in the fireplace, and then, “He’s like the High Witches, isn’t he?”

I freeze. “What do you mean?”

“They’re missing parts. He’s missing an eye. And his hand.”

“How do you—”

“I’m a prince, too. Of the Endless Bog. I notice things.” Crav’s scoff is almost swallowed up by the sheepskin. “Things about parts used for battle most of all—you either notice or you die. Nightsinger took us to the High Witches when we first came here. And that prince guy feels the same as them.”

Lucien? The same as the High Witches? What does that even mean? Crav shifts under the sheepskin, getting more comfortable.

“They get eaten,” he mutters, sounding more exhausted than ever.

“What?”

“That’s what Nightsinger told Peligli and me,” he continues. “When we asked why the High Witches look like that. She told us they’re getting eaten, slowly.”

“Eaten by who?”

Crav slumps, and I lean in and shake his shoulder softly.

“Crav, eaten by who?”

He jolts awake and then falls into tiredness all over again, mumbling as he goes.

“…Some tree.”

All that raw glass, sprouting up from the ground, encasing the High Witches. The glass splinter in my heart bag Varia showed me. Archduke Gavik told me the witches made the Glass Tree to keep their loved ones alive. And thus the Heartless were born. The Bone Tree chose Varia to eat her power.

But that means…the Glass Tree has to eat, too.

11

11

THE GLASS TREE