“Glass…” Fione trails off, taking mental inventory. Gods know how many books she’s read in her lifetime, and she must be scouring them all. “There’s a mention of a Glass Tree in the Hymn of the Forest, of course, but we all know that. ‘The tree of bone and the tree of glass will sit together as family at last.’”

“And there’s the stuff Varia told me,” I add. “The glass splinters in the Heartless bags—those are from the Glass Tree. That’s the key ingredient to making us Heartless.”

Next to me, Lucien reaches into his covering and pulls out the small sack stitched with gold thread and the word Heart. “You mean like this?”

I suck a sharp breath in when I see the sack move. “My heart.”

ours, the hunger oozes out of my ears. ours, ours ours. not his. take it. take it now.

I fight every scrap of human memory that comes clawing back, faint and fuzzy and smelling of cinnamon and feeling of home and calling hard and fast to me, like a key to a keyhole, a polymath machine piece to another, begging to be made whole, to work again, to become what we were meant to be all along, our natural state, our true self—

Lucien reaches into the bag and presses out the tip of a sharp, long glass shard. Not raw, refined. Transparent, not cloudy. Thin, but real.

“How did you get that, Lucien?” Fione asks. “That particular shard?”

“I woke up with it in my hand,” he says. “When I had that dream of the single dark tree, when it whispered my witch name to me. I woke up with magic in my veins and this glass shard clutched in my hand.”

“So it was given to you,” Fione muses. “By whom? The High Witches?”

“No. The tree gave me my witch name, and it gave me this shard. I’m sure of it.”

“So it was the Glass Tree, then.”

He shakes his head. “Neither glass nor bone. It was just a tree, glowing a little rainbow.”

The room goes quiet, all of us thinking.

Malachite rubs his white hair frustratedly. “Thinking’s my least favorite thing.”

“Likewise,” I say.

“I’ve heard it implied,” Lucien starts, flickering eyes over to me, “that the Glass Tree needs to feed. Would that make any sense, Fione?”

She muses it over, slowly folding a pair of fresh trousers into her bag. “If the Bone Tree needs a strong witch to feed off once every century, as the High Witches said…and if the Glass Tree is a replica made of the Bone Tree by the witches, then—yes. It’s not unlikely the Glass Tree needs to feed off magic, too. Witches, to be precise.”

“Seven of them,” Lucien says. “Encased in glass.”

“Is that why the High Witches were missing parts?” I ask. “Did the Glass Tree…eat them?”