A Harvest of Hearts

24. 2

“Let my Da go!” I cried, hatred turning my voice hoarse. “You can have my heart. I will come willingly. Just let my Da go, and let Sylvester live.”

“Foss ...” protested Sylvester, but it was an effort for him to speak.

“You have to release him first,” I shouted.

“With pleasure,” said the king, and with a flick of his wrist, Da’s bonds were gone, which is what I had hoped would happen.

Da rushed over to us, seeing me buckling under the sorcerer’s weight, and threw Sylvester’s other arm over his shoulders. We were both so much shorter than him that, even in that tense moment, I was aware of how comical it must look—two squat stakes propping up a willow tree.

The king turned away, back to his daughters, brushing his hands briskly together like a man appreciating a hard job well completed.

“Come on, girl,” he said to me over his shoulder. “That was the bargain.”

“Let me say goodbye, at least,” I snapped at him. “One more minute is no skin off your nose.”

Sylvester released me and stood, swaying a little. Da kept one hand on his shoulder, to steady him.

“There must be something else we can try,” Da whispered urgently.

Sylvester shook his head. “I am too weak,” he said. “I am sorry. And even if I could fight him without the advantage of surprise ... I have only a handful of hearts left, all near corrupted, and he has half a kingdom’s worth. It was a fool’s hope to begin with, but we had to try. Without a good heart, I’m no better than a hedge-witch telling fortunes.”

I squeezed my eyes tight shut. Despite the heartsickness, my pain and exhaustion, I had traveled across two kingdoms, murdered a magic-worker—as Cornelius had pointed out—won the heart of a sorcerer, and, overall, done more than I had ever thought was possible ... And it still was not enough in this last, crucial moment.

“Sylvester,” I pleaded. “We have to try. Please. Just one more time. Use all the hearts we have. We have managed impossible things together before.”

“I don’t have the strength,” he said.

“Yes, you do ,” I snapped . I grabbed both his hands in mine. “You said our connection is powerful. Use it. Use whatever we have left. We have to try, even just once.”

He looked at me with those strange, light eyes and nodded.

“What are you doing?” asked the king, but it was too late, because Sylvester had already begun to weave a spell. It wrapped around us like ivy. I felt the power of all the hearts we had salvaged start to glow and burn in my veins. I looked up at Sylvester, and he looked back at me with his usual cool, blank stare.

“I ... I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said, and smiled. Then he reached for me, embraced me, and I felt the coiling magic flow away from me and into him. Whatever was pulling at me, tugging at me, using the power left in my poor heart, reversed itself and started flowing back toward him. I tried to clutch at it as you would clutch at a rope slipping through your fingers, but it squirmed beneath my touch and wriggled free.

“Sylvester. No.” This wasn’t the plan. “What are you doing?”

“We’re not meant to be here, Foss,” he said. “Any of us. But you are.”

The words died in my mouth. Sylvester’s eyes were wider and darker than I had ever seen them.

He kissed me, a fierce kiss with goodbye spoken silently in every second of it, and then he pulled away, and I saw that he was clutching something in his fist. I thought at first that it might be one of his magical toys, but it was too small.

Dread came over me. I felt for the seal in my pocket—its familiar smooth sides and carved top. It wasn’t there.

“Sylvester, you idiot!” I yelled. He smiled a wide, heartbreaking smile, just for me.

“I heard you talking with the Weftwitch. I know what this is. I know what I have to do.”

“No! No, I was never going to use it! Sylvester! Don’t you dare! ”

“I know you never would,” he said. “Which is why I must.”

His gaze reached out across the small distance between us, as it had the very first time we met, and like that first time, I felt it pierce me like a thorn and open me like a flower.

It was already too late, I knew. Sylvester had whispered his intentions to the seal, and its terrible, inexorable work had begun. The Weftwitch’s magic was sure and swift. Terrible pressure built in the air around us, and the sky turned black as a bruise. The Other Kingdom’s revenge was powerful.

The crowd swayed like so many ears of corn. The king staggered, his face fixed in a grimace of rage and confusion.

Sylvester floated a little way off the ground, his cloak swirling around, the seal in his open palm blooming like a black rose as its poisonous magic spread to encompass us all.

Well. I should have been terrified, but instead, all I felt was a great boiling annoyance at him and his ridiculous desire to sacrifice himself.

That annoyance rose up in me, all tangled with love—both the bespelled love and the real—and then that in turn tangled with the powerful magic of the seal and Sylvester’s own wild, erratic powers, until we were both knitted together again, even more strongly than before.

My own feet rose off the ground until I was right opposite him, staring into his perfect face and his startled eyes.

“Foss . . .? What are you . . .?”

This time I kissed him, putting all of that mess of power, anger, and longing into it, even as I felt the Other Kingdom’s spell start to drain his power away, unmaking him from the inside out.

Live, you idiot, live, I thought as forcefully as I could. It was working. It had to work. I would not let him go. He kissed me back, finally, and I felt his smile. When we broke apart, I tore my gaze away from him to look down and watch the Other Kingdom’s spell work its devastating power on the magic-workers.

Sylvester’s sisters dropped, one by one, like a line of elegant dominoes, to lie beautifully pale and disheveled on the stones. A poisonous mist the king had summoned blew away like dandelion fluff, just as light and just as harmless.

And then I watched the king double over, as comically jerky as a marionette, and then try to right himself, and then fall to the ground as suddenly and heavily as if a giant palm had flattened him there.

Somewhere else in the kingdom, I imagined a great storeroom full of hearts was crumbling too, or perhaps finally succumbing to the mold, as the king’s last protections fell away. I hoped the vicious mist was melting, slowly opening our borders, welcoming us back to the wider world, and freeing all the souls trapped within.

The seal had worked like a charm, it seemed, and no one but Sylvester and I—and Da—knew what had happened. We lowered to the ground again as the magic unspooled around us, snatched away by the wind like leaves blown from a tree.

I almost laughed in relief and waited for him to laugh with me—but I knew the moment he died, the very moment, because his lips grew still and lifeless as wax against mine. He slumped to the ground. Da rushed over, and as he did, I felt the sorcerer’s spell lift off me—for good this time, and with none of the joy and lightness I had felt in the Weftwitch’s wood. He had done it—the noble, maddening, ridiculous fool—given his own heart in exchange for what remained of mine.

The dregs of the enchantment passed through me like a swift fever, burning me up and turning my bowels to water, and then it was gone, leaving me weak and bereft.

I was free, but I did not feel free. “Sylvester, you bastard!” I yelled through a raw throat—or tried to yell. My voice was hoarse and cracked and drowned out by someone else’s shout: “They’re dead! They’re all dead!”

The crowd, freed from the spell, surged forward, parting around me and Da where we crouched next to Sylvester’s body as if we were a rock in a rushing stream.

They ignored the king—who in death had seemed to shrivel and pale even further, curling up on himself like a corn husk left in the sun—and rushed to the corpses of the women.

As the last of the magic-workers’ spells passed, the villagers touched the sorceresses’ smooth cheeks and closed the lids over their still-shining eyes; let their silken hair trickle through their fingers, soft as water; fingered the fine clothing tentatively, hushed and awed by bodices and skirts that were worth more than our entire village put together.

I saw people slip rings from dead fingers, and snip locks of hair and swatches of rich fabric. There was an odd worshipfulness to the way they touched them, and a greed, a hunger, an impossible desire to consume the beauty that lay lifeless before them.

There was grief, too, and I understood it. There is sorrow whenever a lovely thing dies, no matter how dangerous it may have been in life.

My grief was of a more specific, personal kind: my own precious sorcerer lay dead. I shielded him from those who would have prodded and poked him as they were doing to the others, snarling at them like a dog. Da rested his big hand on my head, stroking my hair as he had done when I was a sprout.

“It is better this way, sweetheart,” he said. “Whatever world we have without them will be better, even if it is hard for a little while.”

I only realized Cornelius was on my shoulder when he licked the tears from my cheeks. He was kneading my neck with a frantic, urgent rhythm, trying to provide what comfort he could. I reached up to touch him.

“I’m sorry, Foss,” he said.

“You can still talk!” I felt a surge of excitement. If the House’s spell still held, did that mean . . .?

“Yes. But he’s dead, Foss. I’m sorry. Look, the carriages are all still here, and the horses. It looks like some spells go on even after the ones who cast them die.”

My small hope faded. “And Millie?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“She is alive. Asleep, but alive. I suppose she hadn’t turned into one of them yet.”

Such a small relief, but it was something to hold on to as the grief threatened to overtake me entirely.

Gradually, the crowd dispersed. I had no sense of the passing of time, but it must have been an hour or more before the last straggler left, leaving the magic-workers’ bodies where they had fallen.

There would be talk tomorrow, and commotion, but today had been so strange and so world-changing that I imagined most would sit in their front rooms, perhaps with a comforting cup of tea, staring into space.

The village felt very gray. I watched as Aron’s parents helped what was left of him to his feet, their faces wet with tears, and led him home. He would have the dubious honor of being the last person harvested, then.

I wish we had been in time to save the hundreds of others the king had harvested that day. I wish that everyone knew what we had sacrificed. I knew they were shaken, for now, by the spectacle of it all and relieved to have survived.

Our kingdom had been made anew—freed—but thrown into chaos. There would be confusion and recriminations, some of them directed at me. I would have to talk and talk until I was sick of it, explaining.

I didn’t want to face it all alone.

It started to rain.

“Foss ...” said Da, touching me on the shoulder.

Once we were home, I knew Da would reluctantly leave me alone with my grief. He would light the fire, I knew, and fill the kettle, and start something roasting in the stove, because we were never short of good cuts of meat.

I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for the next part of my life to begin.

“Go home, Da,” I said. “I’ll catch up. Take the carriage, and Millie. She can have my bed.”

“Foss ...”

“Cornelius, you go too. I’m all right. I promise. I just want a few minutes alone ... with him. Before you take the body.”

“All right,” said Da. “I’ll come back with the cart in a bit. We’ll make sure he gets a proper burial.” He looked over at the carriages and the carts full of jars. “We’ll have to bury all those somewhere too. Somewhere respectful-like.”

I watched Da toddle off toward home, Cornelius in his arms, and then I stared down at Sylvester’s body.

He was quite unchanged. I stared for a long time. I do not know how long. The rain was so light now that the droplets seemed almost to hover in the air. A light mist of water draped around my shoulders like a shawl. It was comforting.

We had been bound together for weeks now, the sorcerer and I, closer than two sweethearts ever before. Who else could say that their beloved had their heart and really, truly mean it? A piece of my heart had lived in him, somehow, and had changed him. And he had changed me.

Cornelius wandered back after a while—an hour perhaps, although it was difficult to judge how much time had passed—picking his way through the wet grass and shaking off each paw with fastidious care. He settled himself by my feet and washed himself—a pointless exercise, as the misty rain kept on falling.

“Are you going to come home?” he said at last.

“Eventually,” I said. “I’m thinking.”

“I didn’t think he would do something like that.”

“He was very brave.”

“So were you,” said the little cat.

“I know,” I sighed. “For what good it did.”

We stared at the sorcerer’s body for a while. I thought for a moment that I saw his chest rise and fall, but it was an illusion of the still-falling rain that shimmered in the air.

“I’m going back again,” said Cornelius. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I won’t be long.”

He licked my wrist, a tiny, rough burst of affection, and trotted off, back toward the house. I kept staring at the sorcerer. Part of me was dead right along with him, I thought. Part of my heart lay there, waiting to be buried, and another part of it had dissolved to dust. What was left?

A bubble of a thought rose in my head, so delicate that I was afraid to look at it directly for fear of bursting it. I let it float there, gently, and then I let it come to rest. It whispered a question:

If my heart had melded with his, if our bond had changed him as much as it had changed me, if we were muddled and mixed-up together, as he had said ... Was there enough humanity in him now to survive?

The magic-workers had been destroyed, yes, and whatever part of Sylvester had been created by the king was destroyed also. But that didn’t mean all of him had been destroyed.

I placed my hand against Sylvester’s breast. I felt the full brokenness of my poor, depleted, bisected heart, piecemeal in my chest, too deep and dark for tears. My heart was broken, all right, and I would have to drag it around with me for all of my days. Unless . . .

My hand tingled and grew hot. Beneath my palm, Sylvester’s skin began to warm, but he lay still, and there was no answering heartbeat to my touch.

I remembered what I had said to him, all those weeks ago, about how, in the old stories, a kiss would break the spell, and I leaned forward to press my rain-wet lips to his. His were heartbreakingly warm and soft, but there was still no movement. No breath.

“Live, damn you! Live!” I shouted into his face. I dug my hands into the earth and uprooted great handfuls of grass, then threw the clods as far and as hard as I could. Then I sank back, my feet in a puddle and my muddy hands over my eyes, sobbing so hard that the snot ran as freely as the tears. I’m sure it was a lovely sight.

And he stirred.

And he opened his eyes.

“Foss,” he said.

I couldn’t have looked any less romantic, wet, gaping like a frog and wiping my nose on my sleeve, but he was staring at me like I had hung the stars, as he sat upright and ran his hands through his hair.

I could hardly believe he was really back. The flush of life returned to his skin—and was it my imagination, or was his face a little less perfect than before? Still beautiful, but not inhumanly so.

The otherworldly quality seemed to be gone. His nose was a little crooked, as if it had been broken a long time ago and improperly set. There was a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheekbones that I had never noticed before—and the spell had made me memorize every detail of his face.

He held his hands palms up in front of his face and stared at them.

“You’re alive,” I said stupidly.

“It would appear so,” he said. He turned his hands over to examine their backs. “I feel ... different.”

“You look different,” I said. He took my hand, and even his skin felt more human—warmer, slightly damp against mine.

“Are they dead?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It worked.” The wide smile spreading across my face was almost painful.

“Millie?”

“She lived. We did it. She’s all right.”

“Are you still under the spell?” he asked.

“No.” I took a quick inventory of myself, to make sure. “No, I felt it disappear when you ... died. Or whatever happened to you. And it hasn’t come back.”

“So does that mean ...” He did not finish his sentence but instead leaned toward me, hesitantly, and I made up the distance between us and kissed him. He tasted of rain and simple human sweat, and he was warmer than he had been before.

When we parted, he smiled at me. One of his front teeth was very slightly crooked. He was no longer my sorcerer—he was just . . .

“Sylvester,” I said.

“How long was I ... asleep?” he said.

I remembered what he had done and hit him as hard as I could manage on his arm. “Why did you do that? You could have told me.”

He touched his arm where my punch had landed with a kind of wonder, as if he had never felt pain before. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “You wouldn’t have let me do it.”

“You’re an idiot. You couldn’t have done it without me.”

“I know that now.”

“You died. ”

I glared at him, then burst into tears again. I felt his arms around my shoulders and the warmth of him against my me as he pulled me close.

It was such a relief to have him here, to have him here to be furious with. He let me cry myself out, then waited as I very unromantically blew my nose.

“What will the world look like now?” he wondered.

“Well, for one thing, there’s no king,” I said. “Unless you’re the king now that your father’s dead. I’m not sure how the people will feel about another magic-worker being in charge, though.”

“I don’t want to be king,” he said quickly. “And I don’t think I’m a magic-worker anymore.”

I saw a familiar shape wading through the puddles toward us: Da, with Cornelius on his shoulder.

“We’d better go tell him that you survived, despite your best attempts,” I said.

“And that you are all stuck with me now.”

“So it appears,” I said, and he smiled and kissed me again for a long time.

As Cornelius had pointed out, many spells do not end when the magic-worker who had created them dies, as paintings do not disappear when the artists are no more.

The king’s barrier still shimmers around the kingdom, but without its steady diet of hearts, it has started to gradually dissolve and disappear, freeing a few of the trapped souls at a time as it disintegrates.

One day, all of them will be released, free to float off to wherever souls were meant to go before the king trapped them in his magical web. It gives me comfort to know that Dav and Colin and the rest of the Snagged will be at peace at last.

We were able to send messages through not long after the king’s death, to tell the Weftwitch and the rest of them what had happened. And now with the mist dissipated enough, many distant cousins were finally able to reunite after a century apart.

The kingdoms could be one again within my lifetime, perhaps. I still have some resentment toward the Weftwitch for her manipulation of the Snagged—and of me—but I understand her reasons.

I have promised that I will visit her, so that she can teach me more of what it means to be like us, and how I can put my particular magic-resisting skill to use as we rebuild.

We no longer had the relentlessly healthy crops and livestock that had seduced us into accepting the sorceresses’ rule, but we did well enough.

Most babies were born healthy, but not all, and death of the mother or offspring during childbirth became, not commonplace, but accepted. I never heard a peep again about being wrong or cursed in some way, once our kingdom learned the normal way of things again.

Millie stayed with us. We do not know yet what kind of abilities she has, since her transformation into a sorceress was interrupted, but we do not trouble her with questions.

She has very little memory of the time before, which is a blessing, and she is very occupied with the important business of being a child. She has my old room in Da’s house and is the great joy of his days—although he continues to hint at the possibility of more children in the future, giving Sylvester a wink that makes me blush every time.

Cornelius still has his voice, which he uses often and loudly. He still mews like a normal cat when fish is in the offing, but at all other times, he considers normal cat noises beneath him, and prides himself on his grasp of the human language and improved accent.

He and Da get along famously and often snooze together in the armchair in front of the fire, purrs and snores merging to become one contented, rumbling sound.

I work in the shop more and more now, as Da grays and grows more stooped, but I smile more than I used to, and the villagers curtsy or tip their hats to me as they would to a fine lady, despite my bloodied apron and the mobcap over my hair.

After a while of refusing to try, Sylvester found he could still create his little toys of flame and light, and he amuses the village sprouts with them, but performs no other spells. And magic seems to be creeping back into our kingdom—the natural, joyful kind.

Some of the new babies have grown into toddlers with little charms and magicks of their own. This startled their parents to no end at first, but it is quickly becoming usual. We are amazingly adaptable, it turns out.

We have all the jars of hearts that the king took in a big shed behind our house, and we work daily to see if there is a way to return them fully to their owners across the kingdom.

At least one or two of the Snagged trickle in to see us every day. Everyone in the village knows about the Snagged now, from that terrible day of harvest, and treats them well, offering them shelter and food for as long as they need it.

Sylvester has fashioned a sort of pendant that holds a piece of heart, and he devised a charm that allows it to connect again to its previous owner—taking inspiration from the magic-workers’ transformation process, in reverse—which serves to keep the Snagged alive and hearty while we work on a larger cure.

As for Sylvester and me, we wake together in the new room Da built on the back of the house, behind the shop, and we sleep together in a tangle of rough blankets at the end of each day, Cornelius snoring at our feet.

I look at the road to my future spread before me, and I no longer see it pockmarked and rutted with barrenness and the ravages of solitude.

Instead, I see my life stretching ahead, as rich and complex as any woman’s, even the most beautiful, because I know my strength now, and my worth, and nothing ahead can daunt me after what I have already overcome.

I might even stand before the holy man one day, with a basket of corn and wildflowers over my arm, and say the sacred words. And our children will grow to adulthood hearing tales of beautiful women who plucked hearts like apples and stole them away. But they will only be stories, and there will be no more need for fear.