I saw the finished plates for the banquet lined up and waiting on a long table, resplendent with elaborate garnishes and fiddly bits of decoration. I grabbed the nearest one and did my best to blend into the hustle and bustle, as if I was just another servant taking a dish to the banquet.
When I entered the Room of Hearts this time, I took a deep breath and pulled the mobcap a little lower on my head. Because of that, I couldn’t get a good look around at first. I followed the line of servants to the great, shining tables that lined the walls, groaning with food waiting to be served.
Most were dropping off their trays and immediately scurrying back to the door behind the tapestry to fetch another, but some were doing complicated-looking finishing touches on the plates, so I hovered by the table and tried to look busy and purposeful.
Under the cap, I was sweating profusely. When I had calmed a little, I dared to look up. And saw absolutely no hearts. All I saw was a large banquet hall, dark and ornate. An ordinary room—for a palace.
I looked about at ankle-level for Cornelius but couldn’t see him. He might not have followed me in. His nose couldn’t have been wrong, surely—this had to be where the hearts were kept. Why else would this room have been inaccessible from the Other Palace if it contained nothing more eldritch than a ridiculously long table? I would have to wait, and watch, and hope that I could find some way to find them.
The king and his daughters were already seated, most looking bored or impatient, somerat-tat-tattingtheir long nails on the polished wood. I quickly turned my face down again, lest the sorceresses’ beauty enchant me ... or lest they recognize me.
Was this the meeting Clarissa had talked about, to which all the magic-workers were to bring their harvest? It was certainly a bit grander than I had imagined from her description.
And was this where they planned to bring me, their little prisoner that they still imagined safely shackled to the wall? Was I to be some kind of grand finale to the sharing of the harvest, like a primitive sacrifice? Was Clarissa going to finally rip out my heart in front of all her sisters? It seemed a tad excessive to throw a party for it when she could have done the job just as efficiently behind closed doors. And why wasn’t Sylvester here?
When the king and his daughters had been served with goblets of clear, honey yellow wine and plates of cut fruit, more servants began to pour in, all with the absent looks of those under the sorceresses’ spell—a good thing for me, because I could lose myself among them.
They came bearing great wooden chests with brass handles, which they stacked against one of the walls until it was almost completely covered. I could not count them all, but I would guess there were at least a couple dozen of them.
The last servant to enter bearing a chest was Colin. I was glad to see him alive, I suppose, but he might have been better off if he had died with the rest of the Snagged.
More thralls followed him and lined up against the walls in their dozens.
I looked about. The kitchen servants had slipped away, their job apparently done for now, and only the thralls were left to serve the banquet and perform whatever doubtless sinister duties the magic-workers commanded. I mimicked their distant stares as best I could.
When all the chests were in place, Clarissa stood and walked with a sense of ceremony to the one Colin had brought in. She lifted the lid. I craned to see as best I could while still keeping my face in shadow, although I already suspected what would be inside.
I saw jars, stacked neatly, as many as if someone had been busy turning their strawberry harvest into jam. Instead of preserves or pickles, though, each one that I could see contained that same yellowish oil, and a heart.
Some were whole, and looked like the hearts I saw in the butcher’s shop back home. Some looked like the little, wizened one I had found in the square. Some were partial, cut in half or smaller. Some were little more than nuggets of flesh. All were floating in that golden, viscous liquid, something like dirty honey.
More chests, and more, and more, each filled with a clinking, sloshing mass of jars. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.
“It’s more than we have ever harvested before,” announced Clarissa, taking out one of the jars and turning it in her hand. The heart inside revolved slowly, looking like a hairless baby bird. “As you can see, Father, we have all worked hard.”
The king stood and walked along the line of chests, opening one here and there to glance inside, then continuing to stroll with his hands clasped behind his back. The sorceresses watched him. When he came to the end of the line, he turned.
“It is not enough,” he said.
Clarissa seemed startled. “It is all we could take,” she said. “If we had harvested any more, the people would revolt. We cannot take too much from each person, from each village. They would notice. They would rebel. This is already more than we would bring to you in a year or more.”
“And yet it is not enough,” said the king. He tapped a long, yellow fingernail against the glass of one of the jars. It gave off a hollowclonk clonk, its resonance dulled by the oil inside.
He then did something I couldn’t quite see, something that made his heavy coat lift and settle as if caught by a gust, and then the whole back wall of the room seemed to rush away into the distance, as if a hand had whisked it away like a cloth, revealing an immense chamber beyond. I braced myself for a room of nightmares—blood, needles, even a butcher’s block where humans would be chopped up like so much meat.
It was nothing like that. It was a wide, utilitarian room—more like a barn than the sort of room you would find in a palace, if a barn were the size of a cathedral.
Several bright lamps placed on a long, plain table near the front of the room gave some light, but the room stretched out so far to either side that the light of the lamps faded into darkness long before it hit the far walls, wherever they were.
There were scores of rows of shelves, and dozens of long tables between each, and all of them were crowded with jars of varying sizes, thousands upon thousands of them. They were filled with hearts. Of course they were. Each column of shelves went all the way up to the high ceilings and stretched the length of the room, groaning under the mass of the jars.
I couldn’t even begin to guess how many were there—thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as I said—and each of them had once been a person, or part of a person, with wants and wishes, and a warm body, and the right to grow old and die naturally rather than being gutted like pigs for a holiday feast. I forgot to hide my face as I stared, but none of the thralls around me reacted at all.
The sorceresses gasped and murmured among themselves. There was something wrong with nearly all the hearts that we could see. Some looked like the fresh jars brought in by the servants, but most of them did not. The thick, golden liquid that kept them floating was only halfway up the jar, or less, rather than filling it to the lid, and the space above was furred with a powdery green mold, the texture of a moth’s wing.
All about me, overwhelming even the sorceresses’ sweet perfume, was the stink of decay, a scent like vinegar, like fruit fallen to the ground, and like spoiled meat, all at once. No wonder Cornelius had been able to sniff this place out through who-knew-how-many thick stone walls.
“I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was as bad as this,” said Clarissa.
