With each pendulum swing of the jar on its little chain, the rest of my heart in my chest gave a violent lurch to one side or the other, whether from suggestion or from a real connection to my half heart, I did not know.
I kept my eyes fixed to the winking glass, terrified that she would drop it. If the jar smashed, would the piece of my heart flop about on the floor like a dying fish? Was it still alive?
“The curious thing,” she said, watching it pass back and forth in front of her face, “is that there is no corruption on this at all. Not a speck. Not one spore. By now, living with Sylvester for this long, you should have been ...”
“... In a green puddle on the floor?” I supplied.
“You put it more colorfully than I would, but essentially, yes. Longer exposure to the magic-worker seems to hasten the process.” She stopped swinging the jar and clasped it in her long fingers. “Interesting. You display a remarkable resistance, even now.”
She shook it a little. I twitched involuntarily.
“You want it back?” she said. “It won’t do you much good. Once it’s out, it’s out.”
“There’s no way of mending it?” I asked. I didn’t really expect an honest answer, but I felt I should ask anyway, just in case.
“I’m afraid not,” she replied. “And we need it more than you do, frankly.”
I doubted that. But she seemed transfixed by the sway of the jar on its silver chain, peering at the bisected heart within. I didn’t realize Colin was beside me until I felt the cuffs at my wrists click open, followed by the ones around my ankles. Startled, I slid off the slanted board and to the ground, landing with an undignified “oof”—but I was free.
Clarissa’s head snapped up, but Colin had moved toward her with astonishing speed, and grabbed her by the forearms in what I suppose was a last burst of his personhood before he succumbed to the magic forever, wresting her away from the table.
He would have been no match for her usually, but she was taken by surprise, and they struggled, moving farther away from me. I had time to back up against the instrument table and let my hand starfish out behind my back, hoping for something, anything, to fall into my fingers.
Something cold and sharp insinuated itself into my palm. I moved my fingers a little, and felt the familiar, comforting heft of a meat cleaver. I closed my hand about the handle and moved around the table to stand between it and one of the tall shelves, bracing myself for a fight.
Clarissa finally managed to wrest her arms free from her servant and then thrust them both into his chest up to her elbows, as easily as if she were plunging them into water. He bent backward in an unnaturally perfect arch, like the shape a salmon makes while leaping, and then dropped to the ground.
I could tell immediately that he was dead. His chest looked like ground meat, a mess of blood and offal. Clarissa’s arms were bloody to the elbow, as if she were wearing red evening gloves.
She turned from her fallen servant and advanced on me. I leaned back involuntarily against the shelf, setting the jars rocking.
“Don’t be foolish,” Clarissa hissed. But the jostled jars had given me an idea. I might not be able to run or stop her from doing what she was about to do, but I could make it more unpleasant for her at the very least. Thanking the powers-that-be for my butcher’s muscles, I swiped my free hand along the length of the shelf, toppling all the jars that stood on it.
I can’t begin to describe the noise. There was the shattering of glass, yes, but also a stomach-turning, wet, plopping, sloshing sound as the hearts slid free from their jars and flapped onto the floor like netted fish hauled into a boat.
Clarissa cried out, as much for the gooey mess on her fine dress as for the lost hearts, I imagined, and in that small moment, while she was distracted, I turned and ran for the door, skidding on the slimy golden liquid and trying not to look down as I heard the squish and splat of hearts underfoot.
The poor hearts had done no harm themselves, but their soft and flabby forms, partly dissolved and bleached pale by the liquid, furred with the green gray mold, made vomit rise in my throat again.
“Stupid girl!” yelled the sorceress. “How far do you think you’ll get?”
Power started to swirl around her. Hearts in nearby jars disintegrated into dust. I could taste the metal tang of magic in the air, like a coming storm, and I turned to look behind me.
She had stretched out one arm, gorgeously sleeved and bejeweled, the bones of her wrist delicate and perfect in construction, an intricate little piece of machinery, her hand and many-ringed fingers the culmination of some genius creator’s art. That gorgeous hand: the nails red and hard-lacquered, fingers spread and ready to reach.
She released the full force of her enchantment on me again, and helpless, hapless, I felt it take me, and I froze. She moved toward me with long, graceful strides. Everything became golden and sweet as honey. She would take the rest of my heart as a fine lady reaches into her canary’s cage and lets it perch on her finger, listens to its song. It would be painless, almost beautiful. It was what I wanted.
No.
I shook off her glamor again and remembered that I held a cleaver, and that she was close enough now for me to use it. I closed my fingers tight around the handle, and just as her hand touched my breast, I struck.
I struck at her, and at the same time, I struck at every pretty girl who had ever laughed at, sneered at, or pitied me, and I struck even at the pretty girls who had done nothing to me at all except exist in their prettiness.
It was a mean, petty hatred that added its strength to the thrust of the cleaver, added its strength to the plain old terror and rage, and gave it just that little extra heft and distance, enough to pierce the sorceress’s own heart, or whatever it was that they kept inside those dainty chests.
My long-nursed resentment, that I had been born the way I was and not like the other village girls, had directed my hand to the perfect spot. Well, almost the perfect spot. A cleaver is not for precision work, no matter how skilled the hand wielding it, and I hadn’t done a precise job on the sorceress’s heart, but it did the trick.
It was very different, cutting into a human (or a humanlike creature, because I still wasn’t sure about the magic-workers being human), from cutting into a slab of meat on the butcher’s counter. I knew it would be, of course, because a steak can’t move or answer back, but I wasn’t really prepared for howverydifferent it would be.
