Chapter 4
March Ruvane
The Heart boy who loved glass.
He loved it—this much he knew. This much everybody knew.
Yet the feelings that went through him right now as he moved the rod were very different.
Dark. Slimy. Bad.
He might have been the Heart boy who loved glass once, but he wasn’t anymore. At least not in the way he knew.
Faces in front of his mind’s eye as the fire in the furnace burned and burned, the heat of it against his skin like a caress, the sweat beads falling down his forehead like old friends trying to remind him that he was still here.
Even though he felt like he’d drifted off with the wind long ago, he was still here, watching the glass forming at the end of the rod as the flames slowly licked it.
He didn’t know what it was that he was making yet—his hands were deciding for him, though he had an idea.
They’d been doing that a lot lately, his hands. Moving without permission. Reaching for things he didn’t need. Shaping glass into forms he didn’t quite plan.
He pulled the rod from the heat. Blew and shaped and turned—motions that were second nature to him now.
And when he held it up, just like he suspected, he found a heart.
Not your usual heart, mind you. At least not in his head.
It was a mechanical heart the way he envisioned it, with gears and cogs and pins that fit seamlessly into the shape. A heart he knew but didn’t. Just something that was in his head. The shadow of a memory—a very persistent shadow that refused to leave his mind.
With a sigh, he set the mechanical heart made of glass on the cooling rack next to the others.
The other five were already there, cooled, each new one better, with more precise lines and shapes than the last. He’d made one every night this week—the exact same thing, trying to get it right.
The problem was, the Heart boy had no idea what “right” really looked like. He just knew he wasn’t there yet.
“It’s three in the morning.”
His mother’s voice came from behind him, from the doorway that connected her studio to their home. He wasn’t surprised—he’d felt her there minutes ago, watching him. She used to come closer and ask him why he wouldn’t sleep, ask him why he was so restless.
She’d stopped about a week ago. Now she just came to remind him of the time and leave him food and pick up empty plates.
Lately, the Heart boy hadn’t left the studio at night at all. Slept only during the day, when his mother actually used the studio for her work.
“I know.” He pretended to be busy cleaning some tools. He still wanted to try to make something else before the night was over.
His mother stayed there and watched him for a little while longer, then took the empty plate she’d brought before midnight, and went back.
“Don’t turn the furnace off. It costs more to turn it back on an hour later,” she muttered, and then the Heart boy was alone.
Trying to figure out why he kept trying to make a mechanical heart—what a silly thing, something he was certain he’d never seen before.
Trying to figure out why the Spade girl from the arena occupied so much of his mind constantly, when he’d barely seen her for five minutes total before they were taken away.
Yes, she was perfection as he never knew something could exist. So beautiful the stars paled in comparison, and even fire lost its shine—with wide blue eyes, her skin a canvas for the most beautiful, scattered freckles, and her lips shaped like someone had taken hours and hours to perfect every line and edge and curve until they got them exactly right.
Just like the Heart boy was trying to do with that mechanical heart.
Only, whoever had made her had succeeded.
He sometimes wondered if he even remembered wrong because how could someone like that even be possible?
He remembered right, though. That memory was crystal clear, and the Spade girl was beyond anything he could imagine on his own—but still.
It was unreasonable to be thinking about her for so long, so often.
It was unreasonable to spend nights trying to guess what her favorite color was, what all her smiles looked like, what the shape of her tears and the heat of her skin and particular rhythm of her heartbeat was.
Unreasonable, yet he had been doing it for almost a whole month now. Every night.
Maybe it was to be expected. Maybe it came with having your mind wiped and your memories taken away. Nobody had dared to say a single word to him about what had happened, and people avoided him for that reason alone now, which suited him.
But he couldn’t even be mad about it because of something his mother had said the very first day he came back and demanded she tell him the truth:
“Tell me, if it were Vera…if it were me. Would you risk it?”
The answer was simple—no, he would not.
So, he’d never asked again.
Talking to his father would be futile, and he didn’t have any friends.
It was easier than to drag people into his family issues.
His father tended not to take the Heart boy’s word for anything when he was younger, and when he came home from work, would go ask all his friends about where he had been and what he’d done.
So, he’d learned early on that alone was his best survival strategy.
Now it was easy—everyone had been staying away for so long even his classmates no longer considered it an option to try their luck and talk to him.
Because they wanted to. Now they did—he was a former Hand of the Turning Trials. A big deal. Famous and rich—and so perfectly empty the whole world wasn’t enough to make him feel full again.
He’d just grabbed his rod but decided to put it down again, to go out for some air, look at the night sky, at the moon, hope it would tell him something. Knowing it wouldn’t.
The world had gone…mad.
One second he’d signed up for the Turning Trials, eager to leave home, knowing that if he didn’t, he would do something stupid to his father, something that would inevitably ruin the lives of his mother and sister—not to mention his, as he’d be in prison forever—and the next…nothing.
There was just nothing there.
Except her.
Except the whispers.
Except the screams.
Outside, the moon hid, the clouds so dark he couldn’t even tell in which part of the sky she was.
Their front yard was only a few feet wide, but the main street was deserted, most of the houses of the neighborhood completely dark.
People slept. Why wouldn’t they—they hadn’t lost their memories like the Heart boy had.
He sat on the grass for a moment and breathed, tried to clear his head, tried to think. Tried to remember. They were bound to come back eventually, his memories. They were bound to come back at some point.
Or—he could get on a carriage and travel to Neverwhen, request a talk with the queens and get to the bottom of this once and for all.
A lot of lies had been spread. The queens had claimed that they’d be taking care of the former Hands while they recovered. They hadn’t. Nobody had even spoken to the Heart boy about it. Nobody had asked him a single question.
Better yet—while he was on that carriage, maybe he could skip Neverwhen and go straight for the Court of Spades.
He had no interest in the place, of course—only a girl with sky eyes and sunshine hair, an aura about her that calmed him down like nothing else.
Just the thought of her standing there, smiling half a smile, as confused as he was cooled his head, released all the anger he accumulated during the day.
“Ora.”
He said the name out loud like maybe he hoped the night would understand.
Then he saw the light.
It slithered down the middle of the cobbled street in front of his house far on the right, like it was the most natural thing to do.
Teal light, not liquid, but not quite gas, either.
Magic.
Something inside him squeezed, malfunctioned, groaned—an empty space that used to be full. He saw that same green-blue light in his mind, exploding on all sides at once, leaking out of hands that belonged to no one.
That same light that was now slithering its way up the cobbles like a snake, perfectly soundless.
The Heart boy didn’t remember standing up, but he was now slowly walking closer to the street as the light approached.
He lived in a fancy enough neighborhood—though most places in the Court of Hearts were considered fancy—so there were plenty of gold-painted lanterns on lampposts lining the street on both sides.
Plenty of light to make sure that he wasn’t just seeing things, that the teal magic was real.
Timekeeper.
The word popped into his head without an explanation. He made it all the way to the edge of his yard, stepped onto the sidewalk, looked at the light getting brighter, getting closer…
He felt the buzzing of it, too. Felt the magic, raw and warm. He couldn’t really do magic properly at his age, but for some reason he recognized that one more clearly than any back at home—even his own mother’s spells.
His hands fisted to the sides instinctively. He looked up and down the wide, clean street, the dark windows of the houses, the perfectly manicured lawns, waiting…
“Hello?” he called because magic didn’t just happen to slither up the street by itself.
No—if there was magic nearby, someone had brought it to life.
Unfortunately for the Heart boy, though, the man who had ordered his magic to distract him was not a friend. He was not here to chat nor to wish him good-timing.
Instead, he felt something behind him—right behind him, like the air suddenly charged, like a presence had materialized out of thin air without warning. His heart jumped, his instincts took over, his hands fisted tightly at his sides, and he was ready.
But he was no match for the piece of wood that hit him on his temple just as he turned.
The Heart boy ended up sprawled on his front lawn, cheek pressed against the grass blades, unconscious.