“How do we get her out without hurting her?” I asked.
Sylvester placed his hands against the glass, or crystal, or whatever the tank was made of.
“I’m not sure exactly how it works,” he admitted. “I do know that the heart is taken out of us and replaced with something else, and that our original hearts wither and die. But I don’t know if she can survive without it attached to her yet.”
The thread connecting her to her heart was something like an umbilical cord then, passing something from the organ to her. Something she must still need.
“I think I can get her out,” Sylvester finally said, still touching the glass with questing fingers, like a blind man reading a face. I knew he was examining the spell as best he could, trying to see it like one of the fiery cats’ cradles with which he liked to play. “But I can’t do anything about her heart. The new one inside her may have grown enough to sustain her ...”
“Or it might not have,” I finished. I chewed on my lip.
“It’s up to you.” He turned to look at me, his eyes bright silver in the eerie light emanating from the tank.
“Do it,” I decided.
Sylvester nodded. He reached out a hand for me again. I hesitated.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “This seems like a delicate process.”
“All the more reason.”
I gently placed Cornelius on the ground and touched Sylvester’s hand, lightly at first, then laced his fingers with mine. He waited for me to nod and then pressed his other hand against the glass of the tank. I really hoped it wouldn’t explode. Cornelius crouched beneath the shelter of my skirt, just in case.
The tank shattered. The liquid inside flooded out, so much more of it than I had expected, and it was sticky and warm around my ankles. Cornelius leaped up onto my shoulder and shook himself.
The threads holding Millie up snapped, one by one, and she slithered out of the tank and onto the floor. The rush of the liquid had been enough to carry her over the worst of the shattered glass, so she only had a few scratches that I could see. The black heart, dragged behind her, looked deflated and soggy. I fought down the urge to vomit.
Sylvester let go of my hand and knelt next to Millie’s body. He took the cord attaching her to her heart and pulled it apart between his hands. It stretched out for a second, long and sinewy, and then snapped with a sound that nearly turned my stomach again. We both stared down at her.
For a moment, I could see nothing—and then I saw the faint pulse at her throat, and the surge of her chest. I let out a long breath of relief.
“We’ll have to bring her with us,” said Sylvester. With a flicker of his fingers, he bundled her up in warm, black clothing, making her skin look even more bloodless against it.
“I can carry her. You worry about the hearts.”
I hefted Millie up so that her lolling head rested on my shoulder and my arms were curved around her back and under her knees.
The liquid from the tank had left her skin slick and a little tacky to the touch, and my hands struggled to find purchase, but eventually I had her more or less secure. She was a substantial weight despite her diminutive size. Only the almost imperceptible shiver of her eyelashes and the occasional puff of breath against my shoulder reassured me that she was still alive.
Quick as winking, Sylvester magicked us outside again, near where the House had been. The fact that we had so many more hearts to use now, despite the corruption slowly dissolving them, made me feel a lot better about facing the king. We would not be entirely helpless—and perhaps I wouldn’t have to use the Weftwitch’s seal after all.
“We’ll need the carriage,” I said.
“Foss ...” Sylvester began, but then out of nowhere came the sour, old-penny smell of copper, twanging and blue-tinged in the air—don’t ask me how a smellsmelledblue andsmelledlike a twanging sound, but it did—and the air around us seemed to knot up tight and tense like a horse’s haunches before a leap.
I gasped and collapsed against the brick of the old woman’s house, barely holding onto Millie. The sorcerer was just as unprepared as I was, and he crumpled with a faint, “oh,” as if he were mildly surprised, falling to the cobblestones.
“Sylvester!” I let Millie down, then knelt beside the sorcerer and cupped his face in my hands. “What happened? What’s wrong?” Cornelius mewed from my shoulder.
“My father ...”
The sorcerer’s breathing was shallow, his lips already bluish. I tore open his shirt, feeling the shock of the spell when my skin touched his, but pushing it aside so that I could feel across his torso and find his heart. His pulse was faint and thready. The veins on his chest stood out dark and angry, and all his muscles were tensed.
“It’s a spell,” he managed. “Weaker because cast from far away, but still potent. I had my protections in place, but they must have slipped for a moment ...”
“Your father did this?”
“He must have been waiting ... for us to get back.”
