Da.
24
Of course.
The king was inmyvillage. 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 usandhalt 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.
