Chapter 174: What the Heart Remembers

The girl screamed.

It wasn’t a human scream. It came from somewhere deep under her ribs, a layered, grinding sound like a bell being cracked in half, and the crimson seam down her chest split another inch and spat sparks. Her back arched. Her hair stood up around her head like a halo of white fire.

"Hold her!" Kaelen shouted. "*Valerian, hold her!*"

"I’m *holding!*"

"Not her, the *bead!*"

She’d already grabbed it. Kaelen snatched the black bead off the rock in one fist and slammed the splintered end of her axe handle down on it so hard the stone beneath it cracked. The bead burst like a rotten plum. The Ninth’s laughing voice cut off in the middle of a word.

It didn’t help.

The light kept spreading. A long, bright crack ran down between the girl’s collarbones, and a second branched off it, and the skin along both edges began to curl back, wet and glowing, like paper in a fire.

"It’s *not* him anymore!" Tamsin was crawling toward us on her elbows, blood in her eyes. "That’s not a curse. That’s *growth.* It’s her own heart doing it!"

*She’s right,* Aurelix said. She’d shrunk to the size of a finger and was clinging to my collar, trembling. *He only lit the fuse. The heart was always going to try. It’s a demon king’s seed, Valerian. If it finishes, she dies, and something else wakes up in her skin.*

"How do I stop it?"

*I can’t burn a heart. I can’t burn* anything *in there without burning her.* A pause, thin and awful. *But your blood is in her. Your blood answers you. The heart doesn’t. Not unless you go in and ask it.*

"Go *in?*"

*Through the crack. With your hand.*

I stared down at the girl.

She’d stopped screaming. Her eyes were open, silver again, wide and wet and utterly terrified, fixed on my face. Her small hand had found my sleeve and was holding it so hard her knuckles shone.

"It’s okay," I said. "I’m going to try something. It might hurt."

"Are you going to leave?"

"No."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

I cut my palm open again, deeper this time, until the blood ran down my wrist in a hot red rope. I laid my hand flat against the glowing seam.

And I pushed.

---

It was warm. That’s the part I can’t forget.

Her skin parted like wet cloth, and my hand slid into her chest up to the wrist, and the inside of her was *hot,* as hot as a forge, and something huge and slow was beating against my fingers. *Thud.* The blood from my palm ran into it and burned. The girl made a noise like a kettle starting to boil, and Kaelen’s hand clamped down hard on my shoulder, and the world went white.

---

I was standing in a burning hall.

Black pillars. Red banners. A throne of bones at the far end, smashed to pieces. The air smelled of smoke and iron and something sweet beneath it, like the inside of a kitchen on the first cold night of autumn.

A woman knelt on the floor in front of me.

She was very tall, even kneeling. Long ram’s horns curled back from her temples, ringed in gold. Her skin was the dark red of old wine. Her robes had been fine once, and now they hung in burned ribbons, and a long, black hand had pierced her chest from behind and stood out through the front of her ribs, wrapped around something that glowed.

Behind her, half-hidden in the smoke, a tall figure in a mask of white lacquer was *smiling.*

*The Ninth,* I thought. *This is the memory.*

"You’re late," said the woman in the burned robes.

She didn’t look up. Her voice was low and warm and tired, with a kind of rough music in it, like a pot left on the fire.

"I’m sorry," I said. It was all I could think of.

"Don’t be." She smiled at the floor. "I’ve had a long time to rehearse. You’re the first to come in, you know. The others only knock."

"Are you..."

"Her heart. Her *mother,* if you like. I never got to be either." She laughed, a small, bruised sound. "I was the Eighth. I was the soft one, they said. They called me weak because I fed my people instead of eating them. Because I kept orphans in my halls." Her eyes lifted, black and gentle and full of ancient grief. "He didn’t kill me for the throne. He killed me for the *warmth.* A demon’s heart can’t be made to love. Mine could. That’s why he took it."

The masked figure behind her tightened its fingers. Blood ran down her ribs in a long black stream.

"I held on," she said. "That was my one small revenge. I held on to everything I was, in the glass, in the dark, for the whole of her making. Ten days of whispers and needles. He thinks the heart is a lock. A key. A furnace for a king." She looked up at me. "It isn’t. It’s *me.* It’s what I wanted. I wanted someone to hold."

I swallowed.

"What do you want me to do?"

"What you already did." Her smile cracked and spilled over. "You said *stop.* Nobody has ever said stop to her. She has been told *go* and *kill* and *bloom* since the day she opened her eyes. She doesn’t know it’s allowed. She doesn’t know she’s allowed to be a *child.*"

"How do I tell her?"

"Hold her. Tell her." Her face blurred, softening, flickering to something less like a demon and more like a woman at a window, at dusk, waiting for a light on the road. "And Governor? Don’t let him finish. When he comes for her, he will come *warm.* He will come kind. He will come with a *gift.*"

"I won’t."

"I know." A small nod. "That’s why I picked you."

The hall began to dissolve. The fire guttered. The woman with the ram’s horns closed her eyes and, very softly, began to hum. A slow, simple tune, no words, the kind you sing over a cradle.

I knew it. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat. It was the tune the girl had been murmuring under her breath in the orchard, over a dying demon’s face.

---

I opened my eyes.

I was on my back on the black ridge, soaked in sweat, staring at the first stars. Kaelen’s hand was still locked on my shoulder. Tamsin was holding my other wrist. Blood ran down the inside of my forearm, and my right hand, from the fingertips to the wrist, was black.

*Valerian,* Aurelix whispered. *Valerian. Valerian.*

"I’m all right."

*You are* not *all right. You stopped breathing for a full minute.*

"I’m all right," I said again, and tried to sit up.

The girl was curled against my side.

The crack in her chest was gone. It had sealed into a thin, silver scar, a long, curving line, like the stem of a flower, running from collarbone to breastbone. The red in her eyes had faded. She lay there with her cheek on my arm and her whole body slack, breathing in tiny, even puffs, as if she’d been asleep for a week.

"I told her," I said hoarsely. "I told her she could stop."

*And?*

I looked down. She’d put one pale hand over my black one, very gently, like a person holding a bird.

"Father," she mumbled, half asleep. "It stopped. It’s quiet."

"Yeah," I said. My throat closed. "Yeah, it is."

Kaelen sank down onto the rock beside me, and for a long moment nobody said a word. Tamsin lay back with her arm over her face and laughed, a short, shaky, astonished laugh that was nearly a sob.

"Twelve," she muttered. "*Twelve.* And I thought *I* was the monster."

---

It was Kaelen who noticed it first.

She’d gone very still. She was looking out over the dark valley, at the silent grass, and the black ocean beyond, and her face was the color of bone.

"Valerian," she said. "Look."

I looked.

All across the island, in the dark, small lights were opening.

One by one. Then ten at a time. Pale gold and green and a sick, sullen red. Pinpricks first, then dozens, then hundreds. In the hills, in the grass, in the grey fog of the sea, scattered across a landscape that had been black and silent a minute ago. They were *eyes.* Every one of them was turned our way.

"The bloom," Tamsin whispered. "It was a beacon."

"It was a *dinner bell,*" Kaelen said, and she had her cracked axe up before she’d finished the word.

*Valerian,* Aurelix said, in a very small voice. *The stone.*

"What about the stone?"

Beneath my back, deep inside the black rock, something groaned.

The ridge shuddered. Dust sifted down from the cliff face above us. A long, slow vibration ran through the whole spine of the hill, as if something enormous, lying buried under our feet for ten thousand years, were drawing its first real breath.

Kaelen’s grandmother had said it. *Every old god has a door.*

She hadn’t said that the safe place was one.

The black stone beneath us cracked from end to end, and a single huge, pale, lidless eye opened in the ridge, thirty feet below us, and looked up.