“. . . will give her to you if you succeed.”
“That’s not what I want.”
That was Justice. His voice was quieter than Jagger’s, as if he were standing on the far side of the office.
I leaned forward, carefully pressing myself closer to the door. I kept my breathing slow and even and my mind as clear and calm as the surface of a glassy lake. Sometimes, I wondered if Jagger knew someone was close by sensing their fear or agitation.
“But it is,” Jagger drawled, using the voice that meant he was dangling a gift in front of someone. You didn’t reject Jagger’s gifts—even when they hurt you. “You forget, I saw you the night the rag man dropped her at our gate. Three years old, and you looked on her as if she were the sun in your dark, dingy world. All you’ve ever wanted is her. Succeed, and I’ll give her to you.”
There was silence for so long I wondered if Justice had nodded and accepted Jagger’s word. Maybe they were now only waiting for me to arrive.
But then Justice said in a cold voice, “I’d rather she were dead than mine by your will.”
I waited, breath held, expecting Jagger to erupt in a rage. To punish Justice. Instead, his rocklike laugh tumble through the door.
“She would be yours by my will, but she would still be yours. Don’t be so quick to reject my gifts, Justice. It makes me angry?—”
“What are we listening to?”
I whirled around at the loud whisper, my heart leaping.
Winnie was standing behind me, a knowing smirk on her heart-shaped face.
I pressed my hand to my chest and willed the frantic beat to slow.
I hadn’t seen much of Winnie since waking as a mine. It wasn’t that she avoided me like Griff and Justice—she just wasn’t in residence. She came and went as she liked, and no one, not even Jagger, said anything about it.
She was the monster that monsters were afraid of. She was the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the executioner’s tree. Tears swept through her leaves; weeping rattled her branches; death prayers soaked into her bark. Executions hold a lot of power and a lot of emotion—none of them pleasant—and Winnie’s tree drew them in like minerals from the soil. When her tree had died, she was born. When she spoke, it sounded like grief. Like the last dry leaves on a dying tree about to be ripped free by the wind.
Most creatures avoided her. Even Jagger. It was uncomfortable being around someone born from the pain of hundreds of deaths. Winnie had a way of looking at you like she’d seen all your nightmares and had already heard all the pleas you’d utter in your last breath.
I smiled, and her own smile grew.
“Are we eavesdropping?” she whispered.
“No,” I mouthed, shaking my head.
I wondered if she realized the conjurers were coming tonight. They’d be here in less than an hour. Would she stick around for the party?
“Too bad,” she said, her voice still quiet. “I love eavesdropping. You always learn things you wish you never had. It’s full of regret.” And then she added, as an afterthought, “Do you know how many people have regrets when they die?”
I shook my head.
Her eyes lit up, a frozen black expanse. “Almost all of them.” She took a small step forward and pressed her ear to Jagger’s door. “Oh. Justice is still alive. You didn’t return his knife. Huh.”
Winnie was small, as if the writhing mass of grief could only be contained in a tiny urn. Since she was hundreds of years old, I’d only ever known her as an adult. When I turned eleven and hit a towering four foot eleven, I surpassed her in height. She kept her black hair in a messy pixie cut and had wide-set dark eyes. You might think her adorable features put people at ease, but the opposite was true.
She frowned at something she heard and then shook her head. “That’ll come back to bite him.”
“What?” I whispered.
She waved off my question, listening through the wood. A slow smile spread over her face, hollowing out a dimple in her left cheek.
“Did you know I was there when the passenger pigeon’s died?”
I blinked. “No.”
She nodded, her hand still pressed to Jagger’s door. “1883. Jagger was there too. There were billions of them, you know? They flew in flocks of hundreds. Thousands. Everyone says, ‘Oh, they were hunted to extinction.’ But that’s not what happened. Not really.”
