They all rose from the table. When the king and his personal servants had filed out, followed by the sorceresses and their thralls, the room felt even more vast than before. Only Colin remained, and he stood expressionless as Clarissa walked over to me.
After a moment, she reached out with those long fingers and I flinched, but she was merely releasing me from the spell. I couldn’t help flopping over when I was freed. My bones felt like they were made of ice that had suddenly melted.
She let me sprawl there and nodded to Colin, who came over to me and heaved me up from under the armpits, in an odd reversal of our position from the day before. I muttered, “That’s gratitude for you,” but I wasn’t sure he even heard me.
Clarissa sashayed over to the storeroom. Colin walked me over to a large, slanted board fixed to the floor with metal struts. There was some kind of mechanism beneath it, perhaps to adjust its angle, and metal cuffs placed where hands and feet would be. It didn’t take much imagination or intellect to figure out where I was about to end up. Colin lifted me onto the board and clicked shut the cuffs. Nearby, an assortment of unpleasantly sharp and pointy instruments were laid out on one of the long tables, and Clarissa busied herself with them.
“What are those for?” I bit out. “I thought you’d just pluck my heart out with your fingers.”
“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” said Clarissa without looking at me. “Your heart requites more precision, however, now that we know its worth.”
“So, what’s going to happen to me?” I asked. “I’m going to have the heart carved out of me and stuck in one of those smelly jars?”
“Not quite that crudely,” Clarissa answered. “But, essentially, yes. Eventually.”
My stomach lurched.
“It isn’t that bad,” she said. “You won’t miss it.”
Part of me wondered if this was true. After all, my heart hadn’t been much use to me since Sylvester came along. Perhaps having the whole thing removed would take away whatever pain was left and stop me yearning after him. It might be worth ending up like Dav, who had about as much life now as one of his own dead fish, in exchange for being rid of that tugging, shameful pain. Clarissa saw me considering it.
“It is not so dreadful, what we do,” she said. “It keeps all of you safe, for a price. You have no idea of the horrors beyond our borders. The invaders we beat back. The armies we keep from your doorstep.”
“So, our hearts are taxes, then?” I argued, trying to keep the quiver from my voice. “Why not cut off our fingers and toes while you’re at it? Why not dice up our livers, or pop the noses right off our faces?”
“So dramatic,” she murmured. She reached out to stroke one of the jars. “With these many hearts, you can summon armies of which no other kingdom could dream. Or at least you could when they were whole and well.” She licked her lips, as if unconsciously savoring the flavor of such a heart. I recoiled.
“They are so powerful, in fact, that we have to store them as you see—in these jars, and then in this room with thick stone walls, and powerful wards placed upon it. Even then, despite our best efforts, some of the power still radiates out.” She looked around her.
“An unfortunate side effect of our work is that the presence of so many human hearts stored for magical purposes here in the city stunts the growth of our plants and animals. So, we grow our food elsewhere, and bring it in. That has been becoming more difficult, lately, as the blight has been spreading to outlying villages as the hearts decay, contaminating the food. We have had to use more magically-created to compensate, but the human body needs more than we are able to create, long-term. Obviously, this is not a state of affairs that can be allowed to continue.” She sighed, and rolled her shoulders a little, as if to relax them. “You’ll understand, then, why the king finds you so interesting.”
“Not really,” I said.
“No? Finding out what exactly causes your resistance to our magic would be invaluable to us in protecting other hearts in our store. Perhaps in healing some of those already affected, as well. That should please you.”
“Where is Sylvester?” I asked Clarissa, as I had asked her father. Maybe someone would finally give me a straight answer.
She snorted. “Not here,” she said. “And he probably never will be again.”
My stomach roiled. “What do you mean?”
She rolled back her sleeves in a businesslike manner, and picked up a strangely-shaped knife from the table. I strained against the bonds, but they held fast. I could not even try to escape to the Other Palace—this room existed in an entirely magical place that I hadn’t been able to reach from there, and there was no comfortingly mundane human dwelling concealed beneath it.
“What do you mean?” I asked her, louder.
“Sylvester has disappointed Father,” she answered. “Grievously.” She shrugged. “It was clear he was a lost cause. Luckily, we have already found a replacement.”
Millie.I thought of all the king’s experiments—each one a human child, to be dissected and stitched back together into an abomination. I didn’t know how exactly he went about creating a sorceress out of a street child, but all the ideas with which my imagination supplied me were horrifying.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I said sharply.
“He will be disposed of, like all the other experiments that fail,” she said lightly. “Poor boy. I tried my best.”
I allowed a little venom to spill into my voice. “It didn’t sound like you and Sylvester parted on the best of terms.”
“My brother is stubborn,” she said, “and tender-hearted. He gets ... attached to things. It is my job to remind him that we cannot afford attachments not in our position.”
“The position where you rip my heart out? No, I suppose not.”
