A Harvest of Hearts

17

Stupid. I should have run when I had the chance, dealt with the heartsickness. Then, even though I would never have been healed, I would at least have been able to see Da one more time before I succumbed. And it had been such a faint hope, taking a heart to the Weftwitch—even fainter now that I had seen the state of them.

I made a convulsive movement, thinking to at least attempt to run, but there was a spell upon me that had me frozen to the spot. I felt even more of a fool standing there in my mobcap and apron, and the underdress beneath, in front of the richly dressed magic-workers. I wondered again where Cornelius had gotten to.

I had a feeling the king had known I had been here all along and had let me see what I had seen deliberately. To what end, I had no idea.

“And here she is,” he said.

The sorceresses glared at me collectively, like one creature with many limbs and eyes—a malevolent spider. The thralls moved nary a muscle. I tried desperately to will myself into the Other Palace again—but of course, it didn’t exist here in the Room of Hearts, and there was nowhere to go.

“Clever of you, my dear, to find a way out of your bonds,” the king said to me, “but I am aware of all that goes on in my palace. All the layers of it. It will not work again. I’m afraid I need you. You are going to prove crucial to the kingdom’s survival, if that is of any comfort.”

I glared at him. Glaring was about all I could do, as it didn’t require movement.

“Of course, first your heart has to be extracted. Clarissa has volunteered. In fact, she seemed eager for the task.” The king smiled at her, exposing those terrible teeth again.

Where was Sylvester? I wondered again. Was he slumped in his throne room, playing with some frivolous magic? Did he know what was happening, or even care? Clarissa smiled at me, more a baring of teeth than a true smile.

“I will return when you have finished, my dear,” said the king, letting one hand rest on the smooth slope of her shoulder. She shuddered a little under his touch, but did not drop her gaze from mine.

They all rose from the table. When the king and his personal servants had filed out, followed by the sorceresses and their thralls, the room felt even more vast than before. Only Colin remained, and he stood expressionless as Clarissa walked over to me.

After a moment, she reached out with those long fingers and I flinched, but she was merely releasing me from the spell. I couldn’t help flopping over when I was freed. My bones felt like they were made of ice that had suddenly melted.

She let me sprawl there and nodded to Colin, who came over to me and heaved me up from under the armpits, in an odd reversal of our position from the day before. I muttered, “That’s gratitude for you,” but I wasn’t sure he even heard me.

Clarissa sashayed over to the storeroom. Colin walked me over to a large, slanted board fixed to the floor with metal struts. There was some kind of mechanism beneath it, perhaps to adjust its angle, and metal cuffs placed where hands and feet would be. It didn’t take much imagination or intellect to figure out where I was about to end up. Colin lifted me onto the board and clicked shut the cuffs. Nearby, an assortment of unpleasantly sharp and pointy instruments were laid out on one of the long tables, and Clarissa busied herself with them.

“What are those for?” I bit out. “I thought you’d just pluck my heart out with your fingers.”

“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” said Clarissa without looking at me. “Your heart requites more precision, however, now that we know its worth.”

“So, what’s going to happen to me?” I asked. “I’m going to have the heart carved out of me and stuck in one of those smelly jars?”

“Not quite that crudely,” Clarissa answered. “But, essentially, yes. Eventually.”

My stomach lurched.

“It isn’t that bad,” she said. “You won’t miss it.”

Part of me wondered if this was true. After all, my heart hadn’t been much use to me since Sylvester came along. Perhaps having the whole thing removed would take away whatever pain was left and stop me yearning after him. It might be worth ending up like Dav, who had about as much life now as one of his own dead fish, in exchange for being rid of that tugging, shameful pain. Clarissa saw me considering it.

“It is not so dreadful, what we do,” she said. “It keeps all of you safe, for a price. You have no idea of the horrors beyond our borders. The invaders we beat back. The armies we keep from your doorstep.”

“So, our hearts are taxes, then?” I argued, trying to keep the quiver from my voice. “Why not cut off our fingers and toes while you’re at it? Why not dice up our livers, or pop the noses right off our faces?”

“So dramatic,” she murmured. She reached out to stroke one of the jars. “With these many hearts, you can summon armies of which no other kingdom could dream. Or at least you could when they were whole and well.” She licked her lips, as if unconsciously savoring the flavor of such a heart. I recoiled.

“They are so powerful, in fact, that we have to store them as you see—in these jars, and then in this room with thick stone walls, and powerful wards placed upon it. Even then, despite our best efforts, some of the power still radiates out.” She looked around her.

“An unfortunate side effect of our work is that the presence of so many human hearts stored for magical purposes here in the city stunts the growth of our plants and animals. So, we grow our food elsewhere, and bring it in. That has been becoming more difficult, lately, as the blight has been spreading to outlying villages as the hearts decay, contaminating the food. We have had to use more magically-created to compensate, but the human body needs more than we are able to create, long-term. Obviously, this is not a state of affairs that can be allowed to continue.” She sighed, and rolled her shoulders a little, as if to relax them. “You’ll understand, then, why the king finds you so interesting.”

“Not really,” I said.

“No? Finding out what exactly causes your resistance to our magic would be invaluable to us in protecting other hearts in our store. Perhaps in healing some of those already affected, as well. That should please you.”

“Where is Sylvester?” I asked Clarissa, as I had asked her father. Maybe someone would finally give me a straight answer.

She snorted. “Not here,” she said. “And he probably never will be again.”

My stomach roiled. “What do you mean?”

She rolled back her sleeves in a businesslike manner, and picked up a strangely-shaped knife from the table. I strained against the bonds, but they held fast. I could not even try to escape to the Other Palace—this room existed in an entirely magical place that I hadn’t been able to reach from there, and there was no comfortingly mundane human dwelling concealed beneath it.

“What do you mean?” I asked her, louder.

“Sylvester has disappointed Father,” she answered. “Grievously.” She shrugged. “It was clear he was a lost cause. Luckily, we have already found a replacement.”

Millie. I thought of all the king’s experiments—each one a human child, to be dissected and stitched back together into an abomination. I didn’t know how exactly he went about creating a sorceress out of a street child, but all the ideas with which my imagination supplied me were horrifying.

“What’s going to happen to him?” I said sharply.

“He will be disposed of, like all the other experiments that fail,” she said lightly. “Poor boy. I tried my best.”

I allowed a little venom to spill into my voice. “It didn’t sound like you and Sylvester parted on the best of terms.”

“My brother is stubborn,” she said, “and tender-hearted. He gets ... attached to things. It is my job to remind him that we cannot afford attachments not in our position.”

“The position where you rip my heart out? No, I suppose not.”

She smiled a gentle, sympathetic smile, wide and sweet. It took all my effort to resist her magic and remind myself that she was a monster, not a mother.

“I think he was a little sentimental about you,” mused Clarissa. “Well, he is very young, after all, and still a little squeamish about our work.”

She was moving toward me, slowly, speaking softly, as you approach a horse you don’t want to startle. Her wide skirts swayed like the sound bow of a bell, rustling and releasing a faint, teasing perfume.

I couldn’t get any further away from her without melting into the planks. All the skin on my front felt like it was trying to crawl round to the back, as far away as possible. It was an interesting sensation that I didn’t care to have repeated.

“Come,” she said. “I will make it quick and painless. It will be better than living here and longing for him, day after day.” Her gaze flickered from my head to my toes. “He would never have touched you, you know.”

“I know that,” I said, too quickly.

“We do use our thralls that way, sometimes. Colin is one such. We keep them, for a little while, before discarding them, in almost the same manner that we keep our servants ... although with other, sweeter duties. I’m sure my brother would have availed himself of that little perk with one of his thralls, some time or another. But it would not have been with you, poor thing.”

Her voice was warm, sympathetic. Loving. The voice I would have wanted my mother to have. The voice I had imagined my mother having. I had felt guilty thinking about her, a little, because my Da had tried so hard to be Mam and Da both for me, but a girl can’t help wondering what her Mam would have been like.

For a moment, the sorceress seemed like everything I had wanted: a kind and beautiful woman who loved me and wanted the best for me, giving me the best advice she could, even though she knew it might hurt me to hear it . . .

No. I shook my head a little, involuntarily, to clear it. She was not kind. She did not love me, nor want the best for me. She was a sorceress who wanted me harvested, gone, dead , and she was coming closer, and I had stood frozen by the glamor in her voice for too long.

She was barely an arm’s length from me now. Almost close enough to reach out and touch my chest with one of her long, painted nails.

“Get away from me,” I said, although my voice shook. She halted and seemed a little surprised, and then smiled.

“I cannot charm you as easily as I would another, it appears,” she said. “Perhaps it is your much-lauded resistance to magic—or because you have already been taken up by my brother. Interesting. Still, we have other ways.”

I could smell her perfume. She had a wide, warm smile on her perfect face. I could have bitten into that smile like a cool slice of melon. I would have done anything to make that smile appear again and again. Even now, I found my own lips twitching, desperate to return the smile, to please her. Such was their power.

I felt anger boiling up beneath my awe and worship. I managed to draw enough saliva into my mouth to spit as forcefully as I could. It hit her cheek and trickled down.

“You stupid child!” she shouted. “You don’t understand anything. None of you do. You sit there in your little huts and think that the world turns for your benefit.”

“And you believe it turns for yours?” I retorted.

“Of course it does,” she said. She came closer to me and smiled directly into my face. Despite myself, I smiled back. Then she thrust her hand into my chest, the one holding the knife.

It was a thousand, thousand times worse than the heartsickness, worse than anything I had ever felt. Not only did it hurt, but there was a terrible sense of violation, of wrongness, as if she had opened up the top of my head and rummaged about in my thoughts, then spread the worst and most shameful ones out on the ground for all the world to laugh at. Her knife-wielding hand had passed through me like a ghost, leaving the skin of my chest unblemished, but I could feel it moving about beneath my ribs.

My whole body cringed and shrank. I could not have spoken even if I had the words—my tongue had grown fat and sluggish in my mouth, and it was as much as I could do to force air into my lungs.

Clarissa pulled out the knife, which was somehow as unbloodied as before, and tossed it onto the table. Then she reached into my chest again, stirring up all that sickness and shame once more, and when she removed her hand once more I saw what looked like a perfect half of my heart in her grasp. I gagged. She turned the piece of heart over in her hands, each touch a torment.

“Please,” I managed to say.

She put my heart down into a little dish on the table. I collapsed, almost sobbing. It was a relief, to no longer feel myself held by her poisonous hands, but now I felt cold and exposed.

Whatever that oil was in which the hearts floated, it obviously guarded the original owners from feeling the full pain of the missing heart, and it preserved and protected the hearts themselves, or the Snagged would have been in constant torment. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear it.

“It’s very interesting,” she said conversationally, leaning in to examine it.

“What are you going to do with it?” I whispered.

“Merely look at it, for now,” she said. “This process will take a while. I’ll need to examine the other half too, of course, once we have a better understanding and can risk taking it out. And then the king will do the same.”

“And you expect me to just lie here like a lump while you do so?” I gasped, still barely able to speak.

Her lips turned up in a maternal smile. “There’s very little you can do about it, my dear, as you see.”

She took out a little jar on a chain, full of oil, from one of her voluminous sleeves and shook it gently, then dropped the piece of my heart inside it. The agony eased immediately, but I felt my throat close with longing and revulsion.

With each pendulum swing of the jar on its little chain, the rest of my heart in my chest gave a violent lurch to one side or the other, whether from suggestion or from a real connection to my half heart, I did not know.

I kept my eyes fixed to the winking glass, terrified that she would drop it. If the jar smashed, would the piece of my heart flop about on the floor like a dying fish? Was it still alive?

“The curious thing,” she said, watching it pass back and forth in front of her face, “is that there is no corruption on this at all. Not a speck. Not one spore. By now, living with Sylvester for this long, you should have been ...”

“... In a green puddle on the floor?” I supplied.

“You put it more colorfully than I would, but essentially, yes. Longer exposure to the magic-worker seems to hasten the process.” She stopped swinging the jar and clasped it in her long fingers. “Interesting. You display a remarkable resistance, even now.”

She shook it a little. I twitched involuntarily.

“You want it back?” she said. “It won’t do you much good. Once it’s out, it’s out.”

“There’s no way of mending it?” I asked. I didn’t really expect an honest answer, but I felt I should ask anyway, just in case.

“I’m afraid not,” she replied. “And we need it more than you do, frankly.”

I doubted that. But she seemed transfixed by the sway of the jar on its silver chain, peering at the bisected heart within. I didn’t realize Colin was beside me until I felt the cuffs at my wrists click open, followed by the ones around my ankles. Startled, I slid off the slanted board and to the ground, landing with an undignified “ oof ”—but I was free.

Clarissa’s head snapped up, but Colin had moved toward her with astonishing speed, and grabbed her by the forearms in what I suppose was a last burst of his personhood before he succumbed to the magic forever, wresting her away from the table.

He would have been no match for her usually, but she was taken by surprise, and they struggled, moving farther away from me. I had time to back up against the instrument table and let my hand starfish out behind my back, hoping for something, anything, to fall into my fingers.

Something cold and sharp insinuated itself into my palm. I moved my fingers a little, and felt the familiar, comforting heft of a meat cleaver. I closed my hand about the handle and moved around the table to stand between it and one of the tall shelves, bracing myself for a fight.

Clarissa finally managed to wrest her arms free from her servant and then thrust them both into his chest up to her elbows, as easily as if she were plunging them into water. He bent backward in an unnaturally perfect arch, like the shape a salmon makes while leaping, and then dropped to the ground.

I could tell immediately that he was dead. His chest looked like ground meat, a mess of blood and offal. Clarissa’s arms were bloody to the elbow, as if she were wearing red evening gloves.

She turned from her fallen servant and advanced on me. I leaned back involuntarily against the shelf, setting the jars rocking.

“Don’t be foolish,” Clarissa hissed. But the jostled jars had given me an idea. I might not be able to run or stop her from doing what she was about to do, but I could make it more unpleasant for her at the very least. Thanking the powers-that-be for my butcher’s muscles, I swiped my free hand along the length of the shelf, toppling all the jars that stood on it.

I can’t begin to describe the noise. There was the shattering of glass, yes, but also a stomach-turning, wet, plopping, sloshing sound as the hearts slid free from their jars and flapped onto the floor like netted fish hauled into a boat.

Clarissa cried out, as much for the gooey mess on her fine dress as for the lost hearts, I imagined, and in that small moment, while she was distracted, I turned and ran for the door, skidding on the slimy golden liquid and trying not to look down as I heard the squish and splat of hearts underfoot.

The poor hearts had done no harm themselves, but their soft and flabby forms, partly dissolved and bleached pale by the liquid, furred with the green gray mold, made vomit rise in my throat again.

“Stupid girl!” yelled the sorceress. “How far do you think you’ll get?”

Power started to swirl around her. Hearts in nearby jars disintegrated into dust. I could taste the metal tang of magic in the air, like a coming storm, and I turned to look behind me.

She had stretched out one arm, gorgeously sleeved and bejeweled, the bones of her wrist delicate and perfect in construction, an intricate little piece of machinery, her hand and many-ringed fingers the culmination of some genius creator’s art. That gorgeous hand: the nails red and hard-lacquered, fingers spread and ready to reach.

She released the full force of her enchantment on me again, and helpless, hapless, I felt it take me, and I froze. She moved toward me with long, graceful strides. Everything became golden and sweet as honey. She would take the rest of my heart as a fine lady reaches into her canary’s cage and lets it perch on her finger, listens to its song. It would be painless, almost beautiful. It was what I wanted.

No.

I shook off her glamor again and remembered that I held a cleaver, and that she was close enough now for me to use it. I closed my fingers tight around the handle, and just as her hand touched my breast, I struck.

I struck at her, and at the same time, I struck at every pretty girl who had ever laughed at, sneered at, or pitied me, and I struck even at the pretty girls who had done nothing to me at all except exist in their prettiness.

It was a mean, petty hatred that added its strength to the thrust of the cleaver, added its strength to the plain old terror and rage, and gave it just that little extra heft and distance, enough to pierce the sorceress’s own heart, or whatever it was that they kept inside those dainty chests.

My long-nursed resentment, that I had been born the way I was and not like the other village girls, had directed my hand to the perfect spot. Well, almost the perfect spot. A cleaver is not for precision work, no matter how skilled the hand wielding it, and I hadn’t done a precise job on the sorceress’s heart, but it did the trick.

It was very different, cutting into a human (or a humanlike creature, because I still wasn’t sure about the magic-workers being human), from cutting into a slab of meat on the butcher’s counter. I knew it would be, of course, because a steak can’t move or answer back, but I wasn’t really prepared for how very different it would be.

Even slaughtering is different. Not pleasant, but different. There is a purpose and an honor to it, killing for food. There was no honor to this. There was a lot of blood, viscous and syrupy and dark, spreading from the knife across her jeweled bodice and down the handle of the cleaver onto my hands.

That beautiful bodice! I felt a twinge of dismay at ruining the expensive fabric, slicing up that masterful bosom-swelling structure of whalebone and stiff cloth, because it was easier to feel dismay at that than it was to look into the beautiful, startled, dying face.

I don’t think she had expected me to fight back at all, despite what she had said about being unable to charm me. She had trusted in the power of her beauty and charisma to keep me frozen as she reached for my heart, and she looked surprised as she died, surprised and irritated, as if I had performed some indignity as mild as tripping and spilling something on her gown.

She stayed upright for a moment, staring at me, at the cleaver sunk into her up to the handle, then sagged to her knees, the complicated upholstery of her golden gown collapsing around her. Her skirts were so wide and billowing that it looked like her torso was reaching up out of a yellow sea as she drowned in it, hoping for someone to pull her out.

“ Sylvester ,” she ... Well, it is hard to describe exactly how she said it, through all the blood. Bubbled, or gurgled. Sounds that you would never imagine could come from that elegant, pale throat.

The words came out in gasps, and pink froth formed around her perfect lips. Her eyes looked almost human. She reached up one hand, impossibly, and grasped at my leg with improbable strength. “You must find him. The king will kill ...”

But she never finished, because I gave the cleaver a final tug, and freed it from the twin prisons of her ribcage and the stiff corset. With it came a gush of blood. I staggered backward and retched, still clutching the cleaver as tightly as I could.

I wasn’t sure if I could unbend my fingers from its handle, at that point. I thought I might have to spend the rest of my life brandishing a bloody cleaver at everyone I met.

Still holding it, I threw up a puddle of mostly bile on the black floor, then stood bent in half and panting until my head stopped feeling like it was about to detach and float away.

I leaned against a table to support my suddenly quivering legs, and, one by one, released my fingers from the cleaver until it fell to the black floor, ringing against it with an incongruously bright, appealing sound.

The blood. So much blood. On her, on me, and all over the floor. It had even landed on places that seemed impossible for it to reach, lumpy and viscous and bright as paint, thicker and stickier than anything that had come across Da’s butcher’s block.

My eyes stung with it. I wiped my arm across my face, and it came away red. It stank , too, even though it was fresh. Meaty. Metallic. It began to seem deliberate, as if the sorceress’s malice had liquefied and conspired to stain and surround me, creeping into every crevice.

I felt filthy, besmirched. The blood was so thick on me that it cracked as it dried and began to fall off my skin like scabs. Lovely. And my clothes were beyond salvaging; I would have to burn them.

I thought about these things to avoid thinking beyond them.

Clarissa’s face was so beautiful, even in death. I had half expected her to turn into a hideous old woman when she died, or to crumble into dust, like a witch in a fairytale, but she looked the same as ever.

Well, not quite the same. Without light in those leaf green eyes, she no longer seemed frightening or full of menace. She looked very young, in fact. Like someone’s daughter. Like Sylvester’s beloved sister. Like the child she might have been before, all those years ago, when the king had taken a little girl and made her into something else, then spent however many years since then filling her with his poison as she reached adulthood and became one of them .

I passed my palm over her eyelids, closing them gently. Her eyes were already drying out, and the skin rasped over them unpleasantly, making me shiver. I swung away from the sorceress’s body—and saw the king.

I do not know how long he had been standing there. I wished I hadn’t let the cleaver fall. I wished I wasn’t clothed in blood-stained rags, panting and panicky and barefoot in the spreading, sticky puddle of red on the floor. He was smiling, just a little, as if he enjoyed the sight.

“I felt it,” he said. “Did you not think I would feel it when one of my children dies?”

“They are not your children ,” I spat at him. “They are your puppets.”

He shrugged. “I fail to see much difference.”

“You love children,” I snapped. “They are not just tools for your benefit. You had no right to take children and make them into your playthings.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, still smiling. He walked past me, so close that I could smell his stale skin below the rich perfume, and bent beside his daughter’s body. He stood again, holding my heart in its little jar, letting it dangle from the silver chain. My heart. In my panic, I had forgotten to take it from her. I clutched at my chest.

“She performed her duty to the last,” he said. “My very best daughter.”

He straightened, and I took a step back. Here in this room, in the light of the faintly glowing jars, I saw him clearly.

He wasn’t human, not really, and not in the way that Sylvester wasn’t quite human. He was rotting from the inside, somehow, the soul of him, and it wasn’t from the creeping mold destroying the hearts in those thousands upon thousands of jars. He stank of corruption, seeping up from somewhere deep and secret inside.

“You saw the little girl, of course?” he said, with something like relish.

“Millie,” I said. “Her name is Millie.”

“Most inconvenient, of course, to have to make another right now, but twelve does seem to be the magic number when it comes to casting the most powerful spells.”

“Twelve?” I croaked through a dry throat. “With Sylvester, there are thirteen.”

He kept moving toward me, smoothly, unhurriedly, and I kept moving backward.

“Ah, Sylvester,” the king said. “Sylvester’s magic is ... chaotic. It’s a shame. I had high hopes for him. I tried over and over again to create a male magic-worker, but I’m afraid all my experiments had to be discarded.”

All his experiments. Each one a human child.

“Sylvester was the first one that worked,” he said. “Or seemed to work. He is certainly powerful but lacks the discernment and focus of his sisters. He seems squeamish about performing his duties, and his spells often go awry. Snagging you, for instance. Still, without him, I wouldn’t have you, so his clumsiness is good for something after all. We’ll have to see if he is worth sustaining after I have finished here, or whether it would be better for him to ... retire.”

The way he said “retire” made me think he didn’t mean to a nice little cottage in the woods.

“What are you going to do with him?” I asked sharply.

The king did not answer me, but stood turning the little jar in his hands, smiling a little. “We will need to use both halves of your heart, eventually. Clarissa did a neat job of bisecting it, and the cross section is of course very useful, but not enough.” He enfolded the jar within one of his elaborate sleeves, and it disappeared.

“Give that back!” I shouted, but my voice rang hollow, and he knew it. I could do nothing. I felt the terrible miasma of his magic creeping around me—a sickening, head-muddling blend of fog and sharp-pointed malice slowing everything down, my heartbeat, my breath, my thoughts. It was worse than Clarissa’s magic—there was no dark beauty, no false hope in it.

I knew it was useless to run, but I ran anyway, as you run in nightmares, your legs heavy. With each stride, I slowed further. I heard the king chuckle a little as I passed him, and I felt his gaze on my bloodied back—a cat allowing the mouse to scurry a little, for sport.

I was almost to the door when it flew open. I flinched back, expecting guards, or another of the sorceresses, but it was Sylvester, with Cornelius perched on his shoulder, tail lashing.

Sylvester was wearing his many-caped black traveling coat, and it flew out about him in a wind I couldn’t feel, a wind that lifted the hair from his scalp and blew the hem of my underdress about my ankles.

“Sylvester,” said the king in a surprisingly calm voice. “Do not be a fool.”

I saw that Sylvester had a handful of jars of his own, hanging from his belt. He’s come to finish me off, I thought madly. He wants to be the one to do it.

“Let her go,” he said to his father. Then he looked past the king to the still form of Clarissa on the floor, and a flash of emotion I couldn’t quite identify passed over his face.

The king took advantage of that moment to raise his hands and send a pulse of sickness toward his son, a nauseating heave of air like the heave you give before you vomit. The air smelled of poison. I was now completely frozen, suspended in the fog, like one of the hearts in the golden oil, my limbs stiffening and losing their life even as I expended all my energy trying to force them to move.

“You will throw your life away for this peasant girl, then?” said the king. He swept a glance over me. “Strange tastes you have.”

“I have no life to throw away,” retorted Sylvester. “You took it from me long ago and left me with this poor semblance instead.”

The king huffed a laugh. “A poor semblance? You live in luxury of which none other of my subjects could even dream. You and your sisters command more power than anyone but me. If only you would just learn to use it properly, rather than wasting your time on silly toys.”

“I tried,” said Sylvester. By now I was completely frozen, my eyes fixed open and unblinking, and I could only stare at him through their clouding surface. “I tried to learn. I tried to please you. And gods know Clarissa tried to teach me, for all the good it did her.” Another unreadable, flickering glance at her body.

“Don’t be foolish,” said the king coldly. “Stop this nonsense. We have work to do.”

Don’t listen to him, I screamed silently through my paralyzed throat. Even my saliva had congealed in my mouth. He’ll kill you anyway, if you serve him or not. Clarissa knew it.

Sylvester pushed back one billowing sleeve, as Clarissa had just before plunging her hand into Colin’s chest. He thrust his arm out, calling the jars of hearts from his waist to his hands and holding them, hovering about his open palm.

The hearts flared in their oil and then seemed to turn to dust. A ripple of hot, metallic air passed through the room, leaving it shimmering, and then Sylvester let the jars clank to the floor and roll away.

The king dropped to the floor. His spell released me so suddenly that I collapsed, my body tingling with pins and needles all over.

“Did you kill him?” I panted, clutching my head as my blood jumped to life again and set it pounding.

“Come,” said Sylvester, stretching out a hand. And then more forcefully, “Come!” when I did not move. “I am not powerful enough to kill him. He is sleeping. Eventually he will wake. We have to go.”

“The room is full of hearts!” I cried. “Use them! Kill him!”

“It is not that simple!” said Sylvester. “Come.”

“He still has my heart,” I said.

We stared at each other for a moment, something unreadable flaring in the sorcerer’s eyes. Then I turned and ran as quickly as I could to the king’s side.

I flipped back the long tails of his sleeves and fished about in their velvety depths, wrinkling my nose against his too-sweet perfume, looking for the pocket where he must have hidden my jar, growing more frantic as I found nothing.

His skin slithered against mine as I searched, sickening me. Finally, I found a deep pouch, and pulled out a handful of jars, one containing my half heart. I recognized it immediately, as if it were calling out to the rest of itself. The king stirred a little and groaned, and I jumped.

“Quickly,” urged Sylvester, who had been examining a row of jars on one of the shelves and pocketing those that seemed least affected by the mold.

“I’m coming,” I said. “Give me a pouch. A bag. Anything.” He threw me a cloak, much like my old one, that he had apparently conjured out of thin air. It was warm and clean, with several capacious pockets, into one of which I stuffed the jar.

“You have your heart. Now let us go,” said Sylvester’s voice from above me. He grasped my hand, and I nearly fainted as the spell did its work again and overwhelmed me with false feeling. I was alight with love. I wanted to drop to my knees and kiss his boots. It was horrifying and wondrous all at once.

I could not give in to it, though. I forced myself to stay upright and to move my cramped legs, one-two, one-two, until I was capable of breaking into a run alongside him. Cornelius stared at me from the sorcerer’s shoulder, eyes sharp and bright as tacks.

“Cornelius!” I wanted to hug him, but there wasn’t time. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“You too,” he said. “I found him for you.”

“I see that.”

“Come,” said Sylvester, picking up the pace. “We have to hurry.”

I wasn’t about to ask Sylvester any questions right then, although hells knew I had no idea where he had been, how he had gotten away, or why he had chosen to rescue me. I was just grateful to have half my heart left.

I did, however, want to know that we weren’t just going to run into the king’s guard and end up where we started. I stopped, chest heaving, and held myself up with one hand against the wood paneling.

“Oi,” I panted. “Aren’t they going to stop us?”

“No,” he said. Annoyingly, he did not seem out of breath. “I used all the good hearts I could get hold of for that sleeping spell. The entire palace will be asleep for a while. My sisters, too.”

“How long is a while ?”

“Long enough for us to get away, I hope,” he said with a ghost of a smile. “My carriage is outside.”

“That great shiny, black thing? The whole world and his wife will know where we are if we parade about in that!”

“We won’t be around long enough for the world and his wife to see us,” said Sylvester. “We can be out of the city within the hour and gone.”

A thought occurred to me. “Millie!”

“What? Who’s Millie?”

“A little girl. Your father took her. To make into a magic-worker. Like he did with you and the little boys.”

“Where is she?” he asked.

“She was being kept where I was. I don’t think I could find it again.”

“What did the room look like?”

“It was a dungeon, I think.”

I described it as best I could. He nodded and started striding down the corridor, his coat spreading out behind him, dark and iridescent as oil against the crimson carpet.

“Where are you going?” I asked, struggling to keep up.

“To find her.”

I was surprised. I hadn’t expected him to care, much less delay us to find her. I trotted after him, unable to match his long stride, and tried to remember the turns we took, but I quickly became confused. The place was almost worse than the House for twisting and turning.

“What will he do to her?” I puffed out. “What did he do to you ?”

“I don’t remember,” said Sylvester briefly, which I felt wasn’t entirely the truth. I wanted to know more, but this was hardly the time to press him, even if I had been able to catch my breath for long enough to do so.

He seemed to know where he was going, however, and after many twists and turns and flights of stairs, we reached the room in which I had been held. There were scuffs of dirt and ash where Millie had been sitting, but no Millie.

“It’s too late,” said Sylvester. “She has been taken.”

“Maybe she escaped in all the confusion,” I said. “When you put everyone to sleep. They didn’t have her tied up.”

I willed it to be so. I pictured her slipping out of the palace, barefoot, creeping back to her life on the street. It would be filled with horrors, of course, but they would be familiar, understandable horrors, the mundane kind that filled every city street—not the arcane and unimaginable fate that awaited her at the king’s hand.

Perhaps she could even be found and taken in by a kind family—why not, since I was already imagining an unlikely future? Sylvester, however, looked unconvinced. “No. They work quickly, as I said. She is probably already undergoing the ... process.”

“Your father talked about a process as well,” I said. “What is it?”

“We might still be able to find her,” he said instead, and strode away again. Cornelius looked at me over his shoulder and gave his little cat shrug.

I don’t know how long we had been wandering about the palace at this point, but probably longer than we should have been. Sylvester didn’t seem concerned that his spell would wear off yet, and so I kept my mouth shut and followed in his wake as best I could.

I took about seven steps for every one of his. It was like a beetle racing a daddy longlegs. Cornelius was lucky to be able to perch on the sorcerer’s shoulder—I wished I could have.

I didn’t tell him that my legs were starting to ache. Honestly, I was so happy to be back in his presence that I could almost ignore the pain. It was exasperating to find myself right back under his spell when I had hoped to be halfway home by now, but I couldn’t resist its pull.

We came to a door that looked exactly like all the others, but Sylvester paused his long stride when we reached it.

“Do you know this room?” I asked, panting again.

“Yes,” Sylvester responded, briefly and unhelpfully. He pressed his flat palm against the wood of the door. Cornelius jumped down from his shoulder and wound himself around my shins as he smelled the distinctive scent of magic.

Sylvester had his eyes closed, a frown knitting his dark eyebrows together, and I could see how taut he was holding his body, how the expectation of failure white-knuckled his splayed hand.

Without thinking too much about it, I reached out and placed my hand over his. I felt his slight start as my skin touched his, and his eyes flicked to mine, sending a shock through me like the first time he had looked at me, back in the village. I forced myself not to look away.

“You can do it,” I insisted, willing him to believe.

He took a sharp breath and turned his gaze back to the door. The wood curled away from his long fingers, turning from planks to coiling branches that twisted themselves into an opening as neat as a picture frame.

It was oddly beautiful to watch, and even though I knew we had to move swiftly, I found myself mesmerized. I had never seen the sorcerer do anything with his magic other than destroy or burn things, or create pointless toys, and I was surprised by how moved I was by the elegance of it.

I was so absorbed in watching the door that I did not realize my hand was still on Sylvester’s, our fingers now entwined on what had become a branch. I snatched my hand back. Sylvester looked at me, his expression unreadable.

“You just have to remind the wood what it once was,” he murmured.

“When you’ve quite finished,” interrupted Cornelius.

Sylvester stepped through the new doorway he had created, and after a moment, I followed. The dimly swirling air in this new room had that same metallic taste of magic, stronger than I had ever experienced it. I might as well have been sucking on a coin.

“There she is,” said Sylvester.

The only light in the room came from a tall glass cylinder that looked like one of the heart jars, just on a much larger scale—eight feet tall, at least, and a good two arms’ breadth around. A thick, honeylike substance filled it and glowed golden, giving an eerie cast to the room.

I could see little else: a long table, bare; a tiled floor that sloped to a drain; and an assortment of gleaming metal instruments hooked onto the far wall, too dimly lit to see in detail. The yellow light had a queasy, unsettling quality that made everything in the room seem like a bad dream.

“That’s Millie,” I confirmed. I took a few steps toward the shining cylinder and stopped just shy of it, my feet refusing to take me any closer.

The little girl floated in the honeylike liquid, naked, her toes pointed like a dancer’s, her arms outspread and drifting. The liquid’s slow movement transformed her floating hair into mermaid curls, coiling up from her scalp like the flame of a candle and forming graceful, mesmeric shapes.

I was so engrossed in the eerie beauty of her that it took me a moment to notice the pins—wide as my forearm—piercing her hands, her feet, and, impossibly, passing right through her neck. There was no blood or bruising, no sign of injury. If anything, the curve of her lips was slightly upturned, as if she were having a pleasant dream.

From each end of the pins, which were almost invisible for their fineness, delicate threads like silver hairs rose up to the top of the cylinder, as if Millie had become a madman’s marionette. Her heart, removed from her chest by some alchemy, floated a little way in front of her body, attached by another silver thread.

It was visibly beating, a solid, steady pulse, and looked almost indecently healthy for something that was not safely housed in her body, save for a blackening around the edges that was slowly creeping across the red.

It didn’t look like a disease or any kind of corruption, though—the heart was just as healthy and alive in the black portions. If anything, it seemed to pulse most strongly in those places.

I was struck by how small she looked, how young. A child, sleeping, with pursed lips and unblemished, almost translucent skin. She should have been tucked into a trundle bed with a ragdoll, not taken apart like a broken toy and displayed thus, indecent and pierced through.

“It’s too late,” said Sylvester from just behind me.

I couldn’t take my eyes from Millie. “It can’t be. We could break the glass ...”

“It would kill her,” said Sylvester flatly. “She is already transforming. There is nothing anyone can do now.”

“What is he doing to her?” I whispered. “What did he do to you ?”

The little girl’s eyes weren’t quite closed. There was a sliver of pale light showing under the shadow of long lashes. Her cheeks, despite her half-starved frame, still had some baby fullness.

“We can’t leave her here,” I said.

“We have no choice. Come.”

I did not move. Sylvester took hold of my shoulder, but gently. “Come,” he repeated. “We cannot help her.”

“Is that what he did to you? To the little boy, I mean?”

“Yes,” said Sylvester flatly. “And now we really do have to go.”