A Harvest of Hearts

10

When we returned, I felt despair settle on me like rain as the black House engulfed me once more. After having been outside, I was more aware than ever how alien the place was, how alien he was.

The he in question spoke not a word to me upon entering, just strode off down the long corridor, muttering to himself and rifling through the herbs in his pockets. Cornelius appeared and wound himself around my ankles, purring. I gave him an absent-minded pat.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. I might have a way to find my heart. I’m not sure yet. I have to go and talk to someone tonight about it.”

“Be careful,” said Cornelius, giving me a gentle nip on my ankle.

I was in the middle of cleaning the kitchen, ready to prepare the evening meal, when I heard it—a sound like a great wind. Then the floor started to shake beneath my feet. I grasped the stove to keep my balance.

“What’s going on?” I shouted to Cornelius above the noise. He had flattened himself beneath a cabinet, and all I could see were two glowing yellow eyes.

“I don’t know,” he mewed.

I made my way on unsteady feet to the kitchen door and looked out into the passage. The whole House trembled, and a greenish light flickered from one end of it. I raced toward the light and noise, my feet scrambling for purchase on the black floor.

Cornelius had more sense, hiding from the commotion rather than running toward it. But any sense I had fled with the thought that the sorcerer might be in danger. What I planned to do about it, gods only knew, but I ran until I reached the doorway to his room of cabinets and bookshelves, from which the green light and terrible banshee wind emanated.

Sylvester was spread-eagled on the wooden table, gripping the edges as if either holding something down, or keeping himself from blowing away. All his discarded papers spiraled around him in a whirlwind, and some detached part of me observed that I would probably be cleaning up the mess later.

“What’s happening? What’s wrong?” I shouted above the roaring and screeching.

“Get out!” he yelled. I didn’t take it personally, though, because I could see the strain on his face. The greenish light was coming from beneath him, as if he were holding closed the trapdoor to hell. I struggled forward into the room, clutching at my skirt as it swirled around me.

“A spell,” he panted. “Gone awry.”

I was close enough to see now that he was putting his whole weight on an open book on the table, and the light came from that book. It shuddered and twitched beneath him as if trying to escape.

“There’s nothing you can do! Take the cat, and get out of the House!”

So he was about to blow the place up, it seemed. It might have been more sensible to do as he said, and take my chances on the ensnaring spell dying with him and setting me free, but my heart wouldn’t let me.

I forced my way through the hurricane of papers to the table. Don’t ask me what I was thinking; I hardly knew. I just knew that I had to get to him, somehow; touch him; do something to keep him from coming apart. I reached out to where his hands gripped the table on either side and put my own over his, as if that would do much good.

Amazingly, it did.

As soon as I touched him, every swirling piece of paper in the room froze and hovered in place. The green light blazed once, so brightly that it left an imprint of the room behind my eyelids, and was gone.

And then it was just the two of us, him still flat on the table and me clutching at his hands, and the papers floating peacefully down to the floor like a swarm of moths. We stayed like this for a moment in the sudden, ear-aching silence.

“What did you do?” Sylvester whispered, more expression on his face than I had yet seen. His hands trembled under mine, just a little.

“I don’t ... I didn’t ...” I stared at my own hands. They were the same old hands, chapped and work-roughened, the nails sensibly short.

“You did something,” he snapped.

“I didn’t! I ...”

He straightened up, pulling himself away. The book lay on the table, inert now, but steaming a little.

“What was that?”

“You did something,” he muttered, ignoring my question and leafing through the book. “You must have.”

“I ...”

“Please. You have to let me think.”

I stepped back over the threshold, and a gust of magical air slammed the door in my face.

After that, I was more eager than ever to visit Basil and find out whatever esoteric knowledge he had to share with me. I prepared carefully for my escapade that night, knowing I wouldn’t have long outside the House and away from Sylvester before the heartsickness set in. I wanted to make the most of my time as a relatively sane person.

I dressed myself in my old clothes—the new ones, though warmer and richer, were too conspicuous. With luck, the sorcerer would never know I had gone. I had taken him his dinner as usual, so he should not be looking for me. I had made the blandest meal I could, as I obviously wasn’t feeling very charitable toward him that evening.

“You’re coming back?” asked Cornelius as he watched me fasten my cloak. He had been hovering about me anxiously ever since I had returned from the market.

“Yes, I promise,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice.”

When the time came, I walked down the corridor as casually as I could, headed for the front door, as if I was on my way to nowhere special, but I wasn’t fooling anybody. The House didn’t want me to leave.

In a wink, walking down the black corridor became as difficult as trying to climb back up a throat when you’d been swallowed. The floor stretched out endlessly underfoot, doors ranked on either side as far as I could see. I could feel the House’s sulk all around me, as thick as if I were wading through water.

I had treated it like a sort of disobedient but basically eager-to-please dog up until that moment, ordering it around and scolding it when it misbehaved. As it showed me its temper, however, I felt a little afraid of it, and the fact that I was afraid of it made me furious and therefore a little less afraid. I stopped dead.

“Listen, House,” I said. “I’m leaving, but not for long. Let me go. I’ll come back.”

The walls rippled. Silence. I felt a creeping along my spine. The House wasn’t a person. It didn’t have the same thoughts or feelings as a person, if it had either at all. Whatever was listening was not human.

The walls seemed to inch a little closer. The floor felt unpleasantly alive and warm even through my sturdy boots, as though I stood on a giant tongue. If I showed it I was afraid, I thought, I would never have any chance of getting out. I had to stand up to it.

“Let me go! ” I said, and stamped my foot.

And then, just as suddenly as it had closed around me, the House released me. I staggered forward, legs buckling. The black corridor stretched before and behind me at its usual length, docile and still, as if it had never moved.

I listened for the sorcerer—surely he was aware of all this commotion? I still didn’t know if he ever slept—but heard nothing. I took a wary step forward, but the floor was solid beneath my feet, and the door allowed me to open it. I staggered across the black courtyard and flung open the door to the street.

Outside was just as much of a shock as it had been earlier, but the nighttime smells were different from the day’s—at once stronger and more mysterious. I took a cautious breath. Despite bracing against it, I could tell already the heartsickness was setting in.

Not too badly, as yet. I could feel it nagging at me, like a child tugging at my skirts, but it was ignorable, not the all-encompassing, whole-body ailment it had been back in the village, thank the gods. I had a little time before it would set in again in full, it seemed.

I unfolded the paper. Oyster Lane. I had no map of the city and no way to find my path other than to ask the strangers who passed me in their hundreds—even at night, the city was bustling—and so I summoned up my courage and did so. I did not tell them the exact house for which I was searching, for fear it would have meaning to them, but I found that the street I sought was down in the lower reaches of the city, by the river, where the beggars sprawled against the outer walls.

Part of me enjoyed this expedition—and liked this new Foss. The sheer variety of faces that filled every street and alleyway made me realize how little feeling like the plainest girl in my tiny village mattered. I was just one more face in a crowd, and though far from the best of them, I was also a long way from being the worst.

It made me wonder whether I was really as bad as I had feared, or whether the whispers about my mother’s death had made me feel ugly and wrong out of proportion to the reality of myself.

Here, where no one knew that story, I in no way stood out from anyone else on the street. I found I liked being away from the gossip and the stares of people who had known me since I was a sprout, who knew every detail of my history and my family’s history, who thought they could predict all my movements and see my life spooling out ahead of me as clear and inevitable as a fairy story told so often that your mouth finds its shape without thought.

Here, no one cared anything about my life, much less had any visions for it. At home, all I’d had to look forward to was working in the shop and taking care of Da until he finally passed on, then running the place myself until I was too old and gray and had to take on an apprentice—or perhaps marry a widower who had passed the age of being fussy about trim figures and pretty faces, and only wished for someone to make his tea of an evening.

I shuddered to think of it, and then immediately felt guilt twist in my gut. How could I feel this surge of gladness at a life away from Da, who had loved and cherished and protected me since I was born? Aside from a wet-nurse right after my mother passed, he had refused to take on any help to care for me and did it all himself—all the nappies and nighttime wakings, all the hair-braiding and bandaging scuffed knees that came later.

And now I was enjoying a life without him, while he worried about me? I should be ashamed of myself.

I did not want to walk for too long, lest my time run out, and so I paid for a pony cart to take me down. The driver set me down as close to my destination as I dared, since I did not want anyone to know exactly where I was going.

I found myself almost by the city walls in a dank row of houses beside a river that smelled as badly as old Dav’s fish stand.

The heartsickness was a larger presence now, twisting my guts as though I had eaten something that disagreed with me. I hoped that my relative closeness to the sorcerer would keep it from becoming debilitating before I had a chance to learn what I could.

I was no idiot, whatever else I might have been. Nothing going on in an alley like this could be good. But my feet were killing my lower half, and the exquisite pain in my chest from being away from the sorcerer was starting to niggle at my upper half, and I had to do something if I didn’t want to live in his House forever, making his meals and drooling over his pretty cheekbones. So I found the right door and knocked.

The man who answered was the scribe from the market—Basil.

“You came,” he said, as if that weren’t obvious. He darted a look down the street, first one way and then the other. I tried not to roll my eyes. If this was nothing more than some sort of secret society devoted to rumor and speculation about the magic-workers (I refused to give them capital letters, even in my thoughts), I would be tempted to turn on my heel and march back up the hill. My borrowed time was too precious to waste.

He creaked open the door to reveal a room that had probably been a tavern once, with a long, low counter and wooden stools around a handful of tables, the ubiquitous royal portrait glaring down from above the bar. Some of the stools had been drawn into a circle. On the counter were cups, a small pitcher of wine, and some plates of bread and dried fish.

Secret society, just as I had feared. If I had braved the possibility of another bad bout of heartsickness just for a gossip circle, I’d feel like a fool.

Basil indicated a spare stool, and I sat, happy to take the weight from my feet. The others stared at me. There was a sense of wariness, even of fear.

“This is ...” said the scribe and flapped a hand at me.

“Foss. Foss Butcher,” I said.

“Foss. She came to me in the market this morning. Came directly to my stall, as if she had been led to it ...”

Oh no. One of those. If he started talking about fate or destiny, I was out.

“... and asked me about the Magic-Workers, and what they do with the ...”

“ Hearts ,” someone else whispered. All the faces were frightened. It was an odd mix of people, old and young. One woman was very richly dressed, richer even than my House-made clothes, while one youth was ragged, and the rest ran the gamut. I counted nine people, in all.

“There are more of our number,” said Basil, indicating the group. “Not all could come tonight. There are certain ... restrictions that come from our ... shared condition.”

Questions were popping up in my head like bubbles in broth.

“What do you mean, shared condition ?” I asked. The older lady with the fancy clothing cupped her face in her hands and started to weep. And I do mean weep , not cry. Crying was a low-bred thing to do, but weeping was higher-pitched, and involved a lace handkerchief and small, ladylike sniffs.

“It is a terrible affliction,” said Basil, “and yet there are those worse off than us.”

“You must be similarly affected,” said the rich lady, raising her face to me. I saw her slight wince as she allowed her well-bred eyes to rest on my face. She settled on staring at my left ear as she spoke. “Or you would not have come here.”

“Afflicted? Affected?” I looked around. I felt a strange shame about the sorcerer—strange because it had been in no way my own fault that I was connected to him, nor was it my fault that I ... loved ... him, but everything in me rebelled against the humiliation of it. I wasn’t eager to talk to these strangers about it.

“So, you’ve all been ...” I let my voice trail off.

“ Snagged ,” said someone.

“Taken,” said another.

“Used,” said a third.

I leaned forward. “How does it happen?” I asked. “What do they do ?”

“You have to tell your story first,” said a motherly woman. “That’s the way it works.”

Nodding of heads. Murmured agreement.

“All right,” I said, and took a deep breath. I told them what had happened to bring me here from my village—the edited version, without my sweaty, imaginary tanglings in the sheets, although they probably knew all about those anyway. There was a knowingness in their gazes that wasn’t entirely comfortable.

“You live in his house ?” said someone.

“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You poor thing,” said the elderly lady, and everyone shook their heads in sympathy, exchanging significant glances. But was I imagining it, or was there a touch of envy in their gazes also?

“So, you still have it?” asked Basil.

They all looked at me intently.

“Have what?”

“Your heart , of course,” said the older lady. “How much is missing?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t think any of it is missing , exactly. It’s more, sort of, caught up. Like a fish on a hook.”

They leaned back and sighed. The youth with dirty clothes spoke up unexpectedly.

“I wish I had a piece of mine left! Just a piece! To mop the rest of me up with, like a scrap of bread mops up gravy!”

“There, there, Nat,” said the motherly woman, handing him a handkerchief. Not a frilled, lacy affair like the one the rich lady had, but a proper cotton handkerchief big enough for a nose like mine. He blew his, loudly.

“Thank you, Em,” he said, and seemed to brace himself to tell his story. “I were buying fruit,” he said. “The carriage stopped, and the pretty lady called me over. She looked like sunshine.”

Sunshine? I wondered if it had been Clarissa, with her golden mane of hair.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She called me into her carriage,” said Nat, “and then reached right in and popped out my heart, like we pop peas from their pods. She wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it away somewhere. Worst thing was, I wanted to give it to her. And I told her me mam were waiting for me, and she said she wouldn’t be more’n a minute. Said she didn’t usually let children into her nice carriage, but that I was a special boy. She put me out after that, but I came after her. Walked all the way to the city. I would have followed her anywhere.”

“Were you in love with her?” I asked.

“No,” he said, looking at me as if I was mad. “She was pretty, that’s all, and smelled good. Me own mam did nothing but scold me and pinch my ear.” His mouth twisted as if he were about to cry. “I’d give anything to be back with her now, though.”

“There, there,” said the motherly lady again—Em. “You sit quiet for a while.”

This was news to me. I had always assumed that all the sorceresses’ victims fell in love with them, but it was more insidious than that—it seemed there were other ways they could snag their victims.

“Tell them about yours, Em,” Nat sniffed.

“They only took a piece of mine,” said Em. I got the feeling that these were stories they had all told many times. There was a comfortable rhythm to them, despite their gruesome content.

“Just a piece!” said a middle-aged man with a protruding belly. “Lucky!”

“Fenn,” said Basil in a reproving voice. “We have all suffered. We do not compare our suffering. Let Em speak.”

This, too, sounded like something that had been said often.

“Carved it out of me with a spell as easy as you’d winkle out a clam,” said Em. “Two pretty ladies, and they didn’t have enough magic left to ride their carriage home as quickly as they would like. They told me a crumb of heart would do, that I wouldn’t miss it. Well, I would have given them anything, wouldn’t I? So beautiful they were. I didn’t think. ‘Twere like a maze were on me. I didn’t feel a thing, until afterward. And then I had to follow them here.” She glared at me suddenly. “And before you ask, yes, I was in love with them, all right?”

Taken aback, I said, “I didn’t ...”

“I spent my life raising babes and caring for a house,” she said. “I was a good wife, and a good ma. I did my duty. My children were all grown. And I never so much as looked at another man or woman after I was married, until they came along—and I could have! I had plenty of offers! Well, I lived with one of the ladies for a while, until she tired of me, like Nat. It’s always the way. They use us up, then cast us out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.

“I was not seduced by any promises,” said the wealthy-looking older lady. “I offered my heart freely.”

“You ...”

“I needed their magic. My daughter was sick.” She pressed her lips together and dabbed at her eyes with her lace handkerchief. “There was no other way. And I couldn’t bring myself to buy a heart on the black market. I was not ,” she said vehemently, “going to have anything to do with that sort .”

“Still. Your own heart!” I said.

“She lived, and that was all that mattered,” said the old lady. “I have not seen her in a long time. She lives with other family now, and I am here. I do not want her to see me like this ... And I do not have long.”

I was ashamed of myself. I had dismissed her as a snooty old bag. Of course, she was a snooty old bag, but that wasn’t all she was.

“They took a piece of your actual heart?” I said, turning to Em. “Your real, live heart, out of your chest?”

“As I said.”

“And your whole heart?” I said to the boy. “The whole thing?”

“Right,” he said.

“But ... then how are you walking around? Talking? I don’t mean to be rude,” I added quickly, as Em bridled. “It’s just ... Take the heart out, and you take the life out. I don’t mean to be rude,” I repeated to the roomful of eyes staring at me.

“It’s magic, innit,” said Nat.

“Right, but ... There has to be something in there, to keep the blood going.”

“I don’t know how it works.”

“But you can’t live without a heart!” I argued. “It isn’t possible!”

Nat glowered at me. I appealed to Basil, spreading my hands. “I’m not doubting you. I’m just wondering what you’ve got in there instead, that’s all.”

“Oh, there’s something in there, all right,” Basil said grimly. “They want to keep you alive, I suppose, in case they can harvest from you again. Wears off after a while, though. Takes longer for some than others.”

“I were nineteen,” said another man who looked to be only a little younger than me, “when a sorceress came to my village. She looked at me out of everyone there and crooked a finger. At me. Not any of the big lads, nor the handsome ones. I couldn’t believe it. She took me into her carriage, and she promised me ... things.”

He blushed. The rest of the room nodded, as if in understanding.

My sorcerer had never promised me things .

“She brought me here,” he said, “and ...”

Em patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, Jol,” she said.

“I don’t remember it very well,” he said. “I remember it hurt.”

“What did she do?” I asked. I realized I was leaning forward on my rickety stool.

“Like I said, I don’t remember it well,” said Jol. “She kept me for a while, afterward. I don’t know how long. I lived in her house. I was happy, I think. She was kind to me. And then she sent me out to the market, and when I came back, the doors were locked. I waited outside for a while. Weeks. I slept on the stair like a beggar. But they never opened for me again.”

I felt a shiver of fear as I imagined the House closed against me tonight, Cornelius waiting, unknowing, on the other side of the door, for a friend who never would come home.

“And what about you?” I said, turning to Basil.

He fussed about with his collar for a minute, as conscious of his dignity as a cat. Two spots of high color showed on his thin cheeks. He was embarrassed, I realized, despite his air of officious assurance. We were all embarrassed, to have fallen in love so deeply and ridiculously, romantically or otherwise, and to have discarded our lives and families for the sake of that hopeless, helpless love.

“I met a Lady,” he said stiffly, giving the word one of his capital letters. “And the rest is much the same as the others. She did not take the whole thing. Just a part of it. I do not remember the actual taking, as Jol does not.”

“You do not feel it?” I asked. “You live, as normal?”

“It is different,” said Basil. “I have a portion of my heart left, and so I do not suffer as Jol does. And as others do.” He cast his gaze around the room.

“But ...” I clasped my hands together, struggling to understand. “I work in a butcher’s shop. I slice bodies up for a living. I know how they work, the machinery of it. It is not possible for anyone—an animal, a person—to live without a heart pushing your blood about. It just isn’t.”

“We do not know the manner in which they take it, or what exactly they leave in its place,” said Basil. “There are many who lose so little, barely a speck of a heart, that they can live a long life without missing it. But those of us who are called by them and follow—they carve pieces from us.”

“I remember jars,” Jol piped up unexpectedly. “Rows of jars, like someone was making jelly.”

“But you all survived it,” I said. “You all still live and work. And you meet here to talk about it. They released you. And if you stay close enough, you’re not in pain . . .?”

It’s not so bad , a soothing, lying inner voice said to me. You can stay with him. You can live this way, too. They do. It’s not so bad.

“I wouldn’t say we survived it,” said the elderly woman sourly.

“We were all taken in the last year or two,” said Basil. “That’s about how long we last. Afterward.”

“What do you mean, how long you last?”

“How long we last,” said the elderly lady sharply. “You’re one of us.”

“Whatever replaces our heart seems to wear out after a few years,” explained Basil in a village-preacher voice. “That’s why time is of the essence. For all of us. More so now than ever, as you’ll see. Some seem to live longer than others, which may be due to the varying severity of their harvesting, or to the relative skills of the sorceresses. Some of the Ladies may be more powerful than others, we speculate.”

“And then what happens? When it wears out?” I asked.

“We ... go away,” he said.

“Are you saying we die?”

“We don’t know,” said Basil. “Some of us have died, certainly, at our own hands, or from the inevitable heartsickness, but others just ... disappear, eventually. This ... society of the similarly affected has been in place for many years, and we have written records of all who have come here. Aside from those who, as I said, decided to take their own lives, we have never received any information about the hundreds who have come here for help and then vanished.”

“Hundreds?” I repeated faintly.

“Hundreds. And we have, as I said, been operating for a long time. There may, of course, have been others who were ‘harvested,’” he winced a little saying the word, as if it offended his delicate sensibilities, “of whom we don’t know, but they, perhaps, did not make it to the city, to their ... captors. We cannot be sure.”

“It’s not such a bad life,” said Em bravely. “We keep each other company. You know, for as long as we can. I have a job in the fish market. So long as I stay close enough to the sorceresses, it doesn’t hurt too badly. And who knows, I might have a good year left in me.”

“It is a bad life,” said Nat violently. “It’s no sort of life at all. And it’s getting worse.”

“Show her,” said Basil.

There was a stirring, a feeling of sudden, focused attention. Nat hesitated, then began to unbutton his shirt. I could tell this was for my benefit only—everyone else had seen this before. I watched, unable to imagine what might be there. My mind was numb.

When he had unbuttoned it far enough, he twitched aside the left-hand side of his shirt, revealing his chest. Which was ... missing. The left-hand side of his rib cage had caved in, exactly like the overripe peaches eaten out by fruit flies in our garden.

What was there instead? A furred cavern of mold. A hole in his chest, obscuring what would have been nipple and muscle. Ashen and rotten, and, I think, spreading. The veins that snaked out in tendrils from this hole were an unhealthy greenish black, and the very edges of the skin surrounding it were pink with sepsis.

“What’s that?” I asked after a long pause. “Is that what you all look like?”

“No. Not yet,” said Basil. “Not all of us.”

He unbuttoned his shirt. I watched as if mesmerized. Was this what had happened to Dav? If so, I owed him a drink when I got back home, if nothing else.

When Basil opened his shirt, there was no gaping hole, like the boy’s, but a gray patch like a bruise. The same greenish black lines spiderwebbed out from it, and the skin between them was tender.

“This started a month ago. Maybe two—I remember the first faint greening of it,” he said. “Before that, you could see nothing from the outside. But now ... well, you see.”

“It has happened to all of us,” said Em. “We don’t know what it means.”

“We are afraid,” said Basil in his precise, dry voice, “that it might shorten our already decreased time.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked. I tried surreptitiously to peer down the front of my dress. I hadn’t noticed any mold sprouting there, but perhaps it had been obscured by the eerie light of the House.

“Some new spell, perhaps?” ventured Basil. “Or something going awry with the old one. We can feel it creeping in our veins, alongside the love we still bear our sorceresses. It is sapping what little strength we have.”

Everyone in the room nodded.

“We are so glad you are here,” he added earnestly, rebuttoning his shirt.

“Why?” I said cautiously.

“You are uniquely positioned,” he said. “You are inside a Magic-Worker’s house. You can find his store of hearts. You are closer than anyone else has been, after .”

I looked around at all the expectant faces. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I have been in every room in that place—or every room that it’s possible for me to enter, at least—and I have seen nothing. What do you want?”

“A way to get the hearts back,” said someone.

“And once you have them, then what?” I asked. I had wondered this myself. I had a vague hope that, if I found my heart, it would flutter back into my chest like a homing pigeon. But what if it didn’t?

“We have found someone who may be able to help us,” said Basil. “After much searching and studying. We have a network of Snagged all across the kingdom, and we correspond as best we can, sharing any information about ways in which we might free ourselves. One such Snagged on the border received a message from beyond our kingdom—from someone as powerful as the sorceresses themselves. Someone who can help.”

A wave of nods and murmurs around the room.

“This person feels strongly that they will be able to help us to repair ourselves, if we provide hearts that can be used as replacements. Of course, we understand that we were all taken by different sorceresses, and so might not be able to retrieve our own exact heart, but apparently that should not matter.”

“This ... person can use any old heart?” I asked. “Then why not just go to a butcher’s shop and buy a bagful? We usually give them to the dogs.”

Basil closed his eyes briefly against my crassness. “Not just any old heart, obviously,” he said. “But any human heart, taken by a Magic-Worker, and stored and preserved in whatever way they store and preserve them. Yes, she can use any of those. If you can find them, or tell us where to find them ... Well, it has the potential to save us all.”

There was someone who could help? Someone who could fix my heart and break the spell? I couldn’t help thinking that Basil had been taken in by a clever charlatan, but I couldn’t deny him—nor myself—the faint stirring of hope. Even if it did mean someone else’s heart would be banging about in my chest in place of my own. It was better than nothing.

“I can try,” I said. “I have to try, at least. But I can’t promise anything.”

“That’s all we ask,” said Basil. “That you try. Whatever you can find out will be more than we already know.”

There was hope in the many pairs of eyes that stared at me, but there was also greed, and that same shimmer of dark envy that I had noticed before. I shivered. On top of that was the unsettling feeling that they weren’t quite telling me the whole of it.

“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “To be careful of?”

“We have told you all we know,” said Basil.

“Hells, I don’t even know what they do with the hearts, exactly,” I said. “Do you?”

“Everything,” said the old lady, unhelpfully.

“Like what?” I prodded. “And not just guesswork and horror stories. What do they actually do with them?”

“We are not sure,” admitted Basil reluctantly. “But whatever it is, the city seems to run on it. The whole kingdom, maybe. The Magic-Workers are very deep in the king’s counsel.”

I took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll find out what I can, while I’m in the House. But ... None of you were harvested by my sorcerer? The sorcerer, I mean,” I added, remembering there was only one.

Shaking heads all around the room.

“I’ll try, all right? I can’t promise anything more than that.”

“That is all we ask,” said Basil. “Can you come here again? We are here most nights.”

“Yes,” I said. “I will return as soon as I know anything. Or have anything.”

There was a collective sigh and a feeling of relief.

“But right now, I have to go,” I said.

“You will come back?” said Jol.

“I promise.” I felt the weight of that promise settle on me like an iron collar on a cart horse.