24
Of course.
The king was in my village. Of course he would go there. He knew I would follow. He knew I would do anything to stop him from hurting my Da, the bastard, even if it meant letting him chop me up and use my heart to cure all the rest. Angry tears burned my eyes, but I scraped them away with the back of my hand. There was no time.
The horses surged forward. They seemed even faster than before, as if their muscles had been waiting in that strange limbo and itching to gallop again.
We sped across country as fast as they could carry us, which, as it turns out, was blindingly fast. I couldn’t look out the window at the moonlit landscape streaking past or I would have been sick, so I kept my eyes determinedly turned downward. Sylvester did look better, with some color returning to his cheeks, but he still seemed weak.
“Can you use even a little heart magic to heal yourself?” I kept asking him. “Just a pinch. Just a sliver. Or however you measure it.”
“No,” he kept saying. “We can’t afford to use up even a little more. I need everything I have.”
Would he still be able to fight the king in this state? We were already badly outmatched by the king and his small army of sorceresses, and what had to be a burgeoning supply of new hearts.
My thoughts went round and round like one of Cornelius’s mice. Speaking of Cornelius, he was curled up small as an inkblot, and his frantic purr told me he was still in pain.
I felt so helpless—the only one in the carriage unharmed and completely unable to help the others. Completely unable to speed our journey, also. I longed for Sylvester’s power, to whip the magical horses into even more of a frenzy, but all I could do was sit there and hope we would reach the village in time.
Despite myself, I dipped in and out of a restless, involuntary sleep, like someone bobbing for apples in a barrel. I didn’t want to sleep—I couldn’t afford to sleep—but my body disagreed.
Whenever I woke, I first grabbed Sylvester’s wrist to feel for the throbbing of his pulse and then Millie’s. I don’t know what manner of heart the king had installed in his “children” after removing theirs, but it appeared to beat strongly and regularly in both.
Millie remained unconscious. Sylvester slept too, for the most part, breathing shallowly through his mouth. Occasionally, his breath would be silent, and then I would panic and wonder if he had died while I dozed. When I was feeling for his pulse for perhaps the twentieth time, he woke and took my hand.
“Foss,” he said gently. “I am all right.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
Still holding my hand, he pressed both his and mine against my chest, where what was left of my own heart ticked away rapidly. “Strong as ever,” he said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I whispered.
“I am bound to you as much as you are to me,” said Sylvester. “I don’t think I, or my sisters, ever fully understood heart magic, even though we practiced it. I don’t think even my father fully understands it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We saw it as harvesting. Taking what was ours by rights, as a farmer pulls potatoes from the ground. It affected those whose hearts, or part of them, were taken, but we believed—we, the magic-workers—that it affected us not at all. But we were wrong. It is not like picking crops at all. When we take a heart, something of ourselves is left behind in its place. That is what keeps the heartsick alive, I believe, until that little piece of magic runs out.”
“But the sorceresses take hundreds of hearts, piece by piece,” I pointed out.
“Yes, and hundreds of pieces of themselves are left behind,” said Sylvester. “It gives them power, but it also leeches something away. Some ... human essence. I have felt it coming back, with you. And because you have a resistance to the magic, and it takes effect on you so much more slowly, more and more of me has become tangled up with you as the spell endures.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “So, what does that mean?”
“I can only guess. I doubt any such bond has been tried for as long as ours. But I believe that while you are hale and hearty, you sustain me also.”
“I don’t want to test that theory. I’d rather we both stayed alive as long as possible. All four of us, in fact.”
“We are tougher than we look,” said Sylvester. The talk seemed to have tired him. He let his head fall back and his mouth drop open again in sleep, the involuntary kind that pulls you under when your body needs the healing. Even as he relaxed into slumber, though, his hand held fast to mine.
I stayed awake and thought and thought. I was starting to form a plan of my own—one that Cornelius and Sylvester certainly wouldn’t like, but perhaps the only one that could save us and halt the king’s destruction ... without using the seal to kill Sylvester along with the rest of his family. Which now included Millie. Possibly she was far enough along in her transformation that the spell would kill her too.
The king needed my heart to stop the corruption. Even with his supply of new hearts, after his barbaric ride through the kingdom, he still needed it. The new hearts would be infected by the Other Kingdom’s corruption just as surely as the old ones, and apparently, I held the key to curing them.
If I bargained myself in exchange for the king ceasing to harvest—at least for now—then I could figure out how to escape him later. I knew I had the strength for it; I had proven that to myself over and over these past weeks. It was Da, Sylvester, and Cornelius—and now Millie—for whom I worried.
We reached my village as morning was beginning to gray the sky. It seemed deserted, unnaturally so, as the city had been. On a regular morning, a village such as this, surrounded by farms and full of those who needed to rise early to work and perform their chores, would already be bustling.
I hoped that the seemingly dead streets were due to the villagers still hiding successfully in the woods and not due to any more sinister reason—and I hoped above all that Da was all right. I had barely allowed myself to think about him, but now all my love and worry came back in a rush.
I looked around at my companions. Millie still slept, of course, concerningly pale and blue about the lips, but the infinitesimal rise and fall of her chest reassured me that she was still alive.
Cornelius woke and stretched. I could see he was a little stiff still, but otherwise he seemed back to his normal self.
I nudged Sylvester, who appeared to be sleeping as deeply as Millie. For a moment I panicked, thinking he would not wake up, but he opened his eyes at last, as if it were a great effort.
“We’re here,” I said gently.
His eyes stayed soft and unfocused with sleep for a minute, then cleared and hardened as he remembered where we were. What we were attempting to do.
“I hope the villagers made it to the forest,” said Sylvester, echoing my earlier thoughts.
“Do you think they would still be safe there?” I asked.
“No, but it might slow my father down a little,” said Sylvester.
The horses’ hooves rang loud and tinny on the cobblestones. We rounded the corner that opened up to the village square and realized at once that our hopes had been in vain.
It was crowded with people who stood unnaturally silent and still, pale around the lips, and ringed with the ornate magic-workers’ carriages, with a shimmering row of yellow gray mist behind those, providing a shifting, sinister backdrop to it all.
It could have been a theater performance, so carefully arranged was it, and I had the feeling that was exactly what it was meant to be—a stage set for our final meeting with the king, planned and orchestrated entirely by him.
He had known exactly when we would be coming, it seemed. We were already at a disadvantage, and the irony of facing the king in the place where I had met Sylvester for the first time was not lost on me.
“It is no matter,” Sylvester said to me quietly, seeing the worry on my face. “We knew we would have to meet him, after all. If he is expecting us, that changes nothing. And remember—he’ll want to keep you alive. You are useful to him.”
“Very comforting, thank you.”
I recognized villagers I knew, and some that I didn’t, but I could not see Da among them, no matter how I squinted. They were clearly enchanted—either that, or had been harvested already, because they had the glazed and passive look of the thralls.
I suspected, though, that the king would have left them untouched for our arrival, all the better to manipulate us. I suppose I was grateful I still had some usefulness to him, but the idea of those old hands getting anywhere near me again made my skin crawl.
As our carriage pulled up and halted, the sorceresses stepped down from their own carriages one by one. The array was quite dazzling. The initial impression was one of Beauty with a capital letter; Beauty times eleven; Beauty beyond comprehension.
It made you want to drop your gaze. It made you feel unworthy. And, as I knew, it made you long to uproot your whole life and follow them to destruction.
The final and most spectacular carriage, of course, held King Darius. Half a dozen footmen scurried to open the door and help him down the stairs. He cut an impressive figure, I had to admit, crown and all, despite his ugliness.
He gave a grisly grin. But worse than the gaudy line of sorceresses, worse than the wizened figure of the king in his puce robes that made his skin more corpselike than ever, were the carts hitched behind each of the carriages.
They were ornate, too—the magic-workers never missed a chance to spangle anything over with jewels and curlicues—but stacked high with jars full of that golden preserving liquid, and hearts.
I could only imagine the sound as they traveled—the jars knocking against each other, sloshing that liquid about, and sending the hearts flapping and slapping against the glass sides. It turned my stomach.
Sylvester was even paler than usual; he might as well have been a pen-and-ink drawing for all the color on him. Cornelius stood with his back paws on the seat and his front paws on the carriage windowsill, staring out, while his fur stood like the bristles of a brush along his back.
“You stay in here, Cornelius, and watch Millie,” I said. “You can slip away unnoticed if you need to. I doubt the king knows about you.”
“We’ll see,” said Cornelius grimly.
As we stepped out, we were able to look more closely at the assembled crowd. My whole village was there, but it wasn’t the only one.
There were hundreds of people, bespelled and harried from their homes for the harvest, travel-weary, dusty, and swaying on their feet in the square where we had once all stood and marveled at the sorceresses’ carriages as a pretty novelty and distraction from our daily lives—once a danger that brought us a pleasant thrill now and then, and little more.
I imagined that line of people snaking all the way back to the city—those who were unable to keep up with the unnatural speed of the magic-workers’ procession, but felt the irresistible desire to follow them anyway, to keep pace with those carts loaded with their clinking stock of jars and their obscene contents.
“Sylvester!” cried the king in a voice that carried unnaturally far. He did not seem at all surprised to see us. In fact, I could see the twitch of a smile at the corner of his thin lips.
The crowd stayed completely still and silent. I could feel my heart pulsing in my throat. Sylvester took my hand, and together, we walked toward the assembly.
Sylvester had never looked more regal: his hair falling in its dark waves across his white forehead, his gray blue eyes unnaturally light and gleaming. All the magic-workers seemed like actors in a play, and the rest of us were merely the audience lucky enough to gaze upon them. Only I knew that his teeth were gritted in pain.
“Father,” said Sylvester, and his voice had the same unnatural volume as the king’s. Everyone in every corner of the village could hear him, I was sure. We walked just far enough forward that everyone could see us clearly and stopped.
“That was a clever trick, putting us all to sleep,” said the king. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“You have never understood my powers,” said Sylvester.
“True, I suppose,” said the king. “You have never been consistent. Not like your sisters.”
“Which is why you always preferred them.”
“Preferred? No. I had a foolish desire for a son, despite my dislike for my own father. I made so many failed attempts! And it transpires that you are one of them, despite my initial hope. A problem easily solved, fortunately.”
“Perhaps because you killed your own father,” said Sylvester without expression. “That could lead to some trouble with sons.”
“You think I have a guilty conscience?” asked the king, smiling.
Sylvester shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“Ah, yes. They are still angry about that then, over there?”
“I think they are angrier that you are invading their borders year after year.”
“So you know all about my younger days, now,” said the king. “ You and your little housekeeper. And armed with this knowledge, you have come here to do ... what, exactly?”
“To stop you.”
“Do you really think I would create a child capable of defeating me? I made you. I know exactly what you can do.”
“No, you don’t. That has always frightened you about me. I see that now.”
“Frightened?” The king bared his teeth. “You do have odd fancies, Sylvester. Speaking of which. I still need the girl if we are to fight the corruption. And that’s what you want, after all, isn’t it?”
“What?” said Sylvester. “No. Of course I don’t.”
“I’m surprised. I thought your new, self-sacrificing nature would see the benefit of giving up your little housekeeper for the sake of saving a thousand others. If I stop the heart rot, we need harvest no more.”
“No.”
“Perhaps this will help.” The king gestured to one of the footmen. He opened the king’s carriage door and hauled Da out from within. I made an involuntary movement forward, but Sylvester held me back. Da was bound at the wrists but seemed unharmed. He tried to smile at me, and what was left of my heart twisted in my breast.
“Let him go!” I cried.
“Gladly,” said the king. “I will exchange the father for the daughter. A fair trade. Or rather, I shall trade the father and all these fine people for the daughter. Really, you are getting the better end of the bargain, even though her sort is rare.”
“Father,” said Sylvester, “you cannot harvest all these people, and you cannot have Foss. Perhaps it is good that the hearts have become infected. It is time to try a different way.”
The king snorted. “You have been of age for only a few months. You do not understand.”
“But I do,” said Sylvester. “You don’t need hearts for magic. I know that now.”
“To help a cow with its milking and a hen its laying? No. But for anything more than that, we need them. How long do you think this kingdom would last without us protecting its borders with heart magic? Keeping invading armies at bay?” “The only invading army is you,” said Sylvester quietly.
“That was what they told you? You don’t think they covet our wealth? Our prosperity? Our crops grow lush and our livestock plump under my protection, and the kingdom is happy and thriving. For a hundred years, they have seen no war, no famine. Babies are born healthy and hale.”
“Not anymore.”
“And whose doing is that?” argued the king. “Any harm that has come to this kingdom has come from beyond our borders. Before the corruption spread, we took so few hearts. Snippets, here and there. Rarely whole hearts. A small sacrifice. If anyone is to blame for this harvest, it must be your friends over there.”
“It is not right, however few you take,” said Sylvester. “I have learned that, too.
“You have only the faintest inkling of just how powerful hearts are—and what I can do with them. You don’t care if your subjects are happy, or peaceful. All you want is the power their hearts give you and to push the borders ever outward. You want more, more, more. Always.” Sylvester shook his head.
“And again, I say, so? What does it matter if all I want from them is their hearts? Most of them will live their whole lives with their heart intact. They will never know about the world beyond their borders.”
“They are cattle,” said Sylvester.
The king shrugged. “Maybe. But if the cattle are content ...”
I looked around at the assembled crowd, bespelled into stillness. The mothers, the housewives, the greengrocers, the apothecaries, the doctors, the barkeeps, the wenches, the lawmen, the children, the farmers, the laborers, the drunks, the schoolteachers, the blacksmiths, the pretty girls, the plain girls.
I felt such a hatred for the king at that moment that I almost felt like a sorceress myself, with the power to reduce someone to a burning heap of ash.
“Camilla,” said the king to one of the sorceresses, and even in the midst of the horror I thought, Of course she has a name like Camilla . “Show them how gentle we are. Show them that they will not die. It is giving up a small thing, a very little thing, in exchange for peace and prosperity. Show them.”
The sorceress chose, of all people, Aron. Aron of the “Toad Wine.” There were many times I had fantasized about getting some sort of revenge for how he had treated me, but I would never have wished this upon him.
She just had to smile at him, and he moved toward her as if in a dream—I knew how that felt—and, when he reached her, allowed her to stroke his cheek and ruffle his hair, in a sisterly manner, while he swayed under her touch.
Then, as the whole village watched, she reached her hand into his chest, `and he arched his back, and his head tipped back, mouth open like the big lunk he was, and his feet seemed to rise from the ground. She released him, and he collapsed. Only for a moment, though, and then he struggled to his feet, dazed and dead eyed. The sorceress held up his heart to show the crowd—crimson and glistening—before dropping it into a jar at her waist.
“See?” said the king. “It does not kill you.”
After that horror show, I don’t think anyone cared. Aron was so obviously empty, so obviously doomed. You could feel the fear, like a wind passing through us all, even though they were bespelled. None of the villagers had ever seen a whole heart taken at once.
“You have no idea how much study and experimentation it took,” the king went on conversationally. “I started with animals, of course. Small ones. Then worked my way up. I found power my father could never have dreamed of.”
“Then face me with your own magic,” challenged Sylvester. “No hearts.”
“Why on earth would I do that? This isn’t a fairytale, boy.”
Sylvester made a sudden gesture as if to hurl one of his fireballs at his father but instead he staggered. I caught him as he started to wilt, ignoring the sorcerous tingle in the air and the overpowering scent of hot metal that magic seemed to bring with it. His eyes lost their unnaturally bright light and faded to their usual gray blue.
“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning on me heavily.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “You tried.”
He flicked his gaze upward to where his father still stood, arms upraised.