“No. Not yet,” said Basil. “Not all of us.”
He unbuttoned his shirt. I watched as if mesmerized. Was this what had happened to Dav? If so, I owed him a drink when I got back home, if nothing else.
When Basil opened his shirt, there was no gaping hole, like the boy’s, but a gray patch like a bruise. The same greenish black lines spiderwebbed out from it, and the skin between them was tender.
“This started a month ago. Maybe two—I remember the first faint greening of it,” he said. “Before that, you could see nothing from the outside. But now ... well, you see.”
“It has happened to all of us,” said Em. “We don’t know what it means.”
“We are afraid,” said Basil in his precise, dry voice, “that it might shorten our already decreased time.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked. I tried surreptitiously to peer down the front of my dress. I hadn’t noticed any mold sprouting there, but perhaps it had been obscured by the eerie light of the House.
“Some new spell, perhaps?” ventured Basil. “Or something going awry with the old one. We can feel it creeping in our veins, alongside the love we still bear our sorceresses. It is sapping what little strength we have.”
Everyone in the room nodded.
“We are so glad you are here,” he added earnestly, rebuttoning his shirt.
“Why?” I said cautiously.
“You are uniquely positioned,” he said. “You areinsidea Magic-Worker’s house. You can find his store of hearts. You are closer than anyone else has been,after.”
I looked around at all the expectant faces. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I have been in every room in that place—or every room that it’s possible for me to enter, at least—and I have seen nothing. What do you want?”
“A way to get the hearts back,” said someone.
“And once you have them, then what?” I asked. I had wondered this myself. I had a vague hope that, if I found my heart, it would flutter back into my chest like a homing pigeon. But what if it didn’t?
“We have found someone who may be able to help us,” said Basil. “After much searching and studying. We have a network of Snagged all across the kingdom, and we correspond as best we can, sharing any information about ways in which we might free ourselves. One such Snagged on the border received a message from beyond our kingdom—from someone as powerful as the sorceresses themselves. Someone who can help.”
A wave of nods and murmurs around the room.
“This person feels strongly that they will be able to help us to repair ourselves, if we provide hearts that can be used as replacements. Of course, we understand that we were alltakenby different sorceresses, and so might not be able to retrieve our own exact heart, but apparently that should not matter.”
“This ... person can use any old heart?” I asked. “Then why not just go to a butcher’s shop and buy a bagful? We usually give them to the dogs.”
Basil closed his eyes briefly against my crassness. “Not just any old heart, obviously,” he said. “But any human heart, taken by a Magic-Worker, and stored and preserved in whatever way they store and preserve them. Yes, she can use any of those. If you can find them, or tell us where to find them ... Well, it has the potential to save us all.”
There was someone who could help? Someone who could fix my heart and break the spell? I couldn’t help thinking that Basil had been taken in by a clever charlatan, but I couldn’t deny him—nor myself—the faint stirring of hope. Even if it did mean someone else’s heart would be banging about in my chest in place of my own. It was better than nothing.
“I can try,” I said. “I have to try, at least. But I can’t promise anything.”
“That’s all we ask,” said Basil. “That you try. Whatever you can find out will be more than we already know.”
There was hope in the many pairs of eyes that stared at me, but there was also greed, and that same shimmer of dark envy that I had noticed before. I shivered. On top of that was the unsettling feeling that they weren’t quite telling me the whole of it.
“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “To be careful of?”
“We have told you all we know,” said Basil.
“Hells, I don’t even know what theydowith the hearts, exactly,” I said. “Do you?”
“Everything,” said the old lady, unhelpfully.
“Like what?” I prodded. “And not just guesswork and horror stories. What do theyactuallydo with them?”
“We are not sure,” admitted Basil reluctantly. “But whatever it is, the city seems to run on it. The whole kingdom, maybe. The Magic-Workers are very deep in the king’s counsel.”
