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Howl eats hearts.
It was a joke, at first. A quip thrown this way and that when they call him a rake, a rogue, a ravisher. You just go around stealing hearts, they say, sometimes accusing, sometimes sad, and he can't stomach any sort of seriousness so he replies with a winking and I eat them, too.
But this is the land of Ingary, where things such as giants and fire demons and seven-league boots exist.
And so, it becomes true.
He barely remembers how it begins. All he knows is that there's a gaping, burning hole where his own heart used to be, and his throat feels like fire, and his blood has been replaced by sparks and starlight, and he's so very hungry. He eats, and he eats, and he eats, and yet he never fills up, never feels satisfied; it's as if his stomach has become a gaping, burning hole, too. He tries crumbly pastries and soft mousses and sweet puddings, rare foreign fruits and common berries pies and sugar confectioneries that melt in his tongue. He tries hot steaming pies from High Norland, wild rabbits and thick stews from stout Strangia, hard cheeses and bitter preserves and salted fish offered to him on the wind-torn cliffsides of Montalbino.
And then he goes further, when it's not enough. Travels wider. He cannot do it as easily in his own world, but here, he is a wizard, a man to whom distances can be measured in breaths: he goes by castle, by seven-leagued boots, by broom, by carpet, by mirror and lake and thought. He eats and he eats and he eats, and the fire burning inside eats at him too, even as he devours the world.
And none of it matters. Because he remains hungry.
This is an illness not of his world. Even in this one it's hard to find a reason for it: curses and hexes, inheritances of ill-behaved ancestors, births under unfortunate stars, many causes and no cures for any of them, and so he reduces himself to eating fistfuls of grass on the same day he dines with kings, eyes with hungry abandon even crickets and worms he'd have run from not too long ago: it does not matter what he must eat, as long as it will fill him.
Then, there's a heart. A lonesome, stray thing, offered to him so carelessly, when he hasn't had the appetite for flirting for months now: neither of them realize the offer is a little more literal than they had intended. The sheets grow red and sticky and wet, smelling of blood-rust and metal, and Howl looks horrified at the remainders of the organ in his hands, still pumping weakly.
But she is not dead.
He can taste her name, her heart, bursting a sweet dark flavour down his throat like summer cherries and red wine. The ever-summer stored in her memories, of sunlight and laughing chases over yellowed grass; bitter beer brewed with a faceless mother and tiny sisters tugging at her skirts; stolen kisses behind a shed from a first love.
His partner looks at him with sorrowful, glassy eyes now, gore spilling from the hole in her chest. But she is not dead.
Death, perhaps, would have been a blessing.
Because he is not hungry anymore, and now he knows what he must do.
***
He runs away. That's what he has always been the best at doing, at his core: Howell Jenkins, coward extraordinaire. Howell Jenkins, who can't keep a job, who can't tame his delusions of grandeur to fit his small, ordinary, native world. Howell Jenkins, who instead of staying and heeding the words of his sister when she tells him to grow up, it's time to be responsible, do you think I'll take care of you forever, instead found a pathway to a different world so he would not have to obey.
Ironic, how for this escape, the worlds have reversed.
Wales is cold at this time of the year. Wet and damp and grey, as if to reflect the dark parts of his mind; he cannot even appreciate the beauty of electric lights reflected on the rained-on asphalt, the steady purr of his car, the growth to his sister's belly he hadn't known would be there. Howl's chest is still empty in this world. It feels even emptier now without Calcifer to keep him company in the lonely nights, without the strange moving castle he's cobbled together from bits and pieces of both worlds. But it's for the best. Or so he likes to believe.
Howl goes back to being the painfully average Howell and listens to his sister's scoldings. He does his best to get along with her husband, useless oaf that he is, biting back all sorts of jokes at his expense and stuffing his mouth instead. He gobbles down buttered oatcakes from the store and the slow-cooked lamb cawl recipe Megan had learned from their mother an era ago, and stuffs down leek pies and fruit cakes with enough fervour for his sister to look at him strangely. He'd always disliked those, he remembers; used to sneak bits and pieces into Megan's plate when their mother's back was turned, pulling faces to make his sister laugh before she'd gone all grown-up and sour.
It's a relief that the hunger has seemed to go away.
At least, until it returns.
Howl wakes up, one day. The day is as grey and dour at it has been every day since his arrival, and he closes his eyes, longing for the mess of his home and its glittering trinkets and the smell of magic in its very foundations, and then he feels it.
The hunger.
It's a slow thing. Dull, almost. He eats more and more at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, all day and every day until Megan says that he'll eat their way out of having a house, and he realizes that the hunger hasn't lessened at all.
But he cannot simply go.
Howl eats, and guilt eats at him. He's been ignoring the issue. He's been ignoring the reason he's ran away: the problem is not the hunger, but its consequences. His teeth remember sinking into the hard flesh of the heart; his mouth waters at the memory of flavour and the flavour of memories, sweet and tart and so vivid he can still see them when he closes his eyes. But the girl.
There'll be others, when he returns. If he returns, though the thought is desperate and aching and painful and he knows he cannot stay away, no matter how much he might need to for their sakes. But to deny himself is to perhaps lose control, to go after the heart of someone less willing, someone who hadn't offered it to him, and that's an even worse thought. On this Earth, death is permanent. People cannot live without their hearts.
So what can he do? He returns. He returns, so hungry that his very bones ache, and greets Calcifer with dark eyes and clenched teeth; the gaze he receives in return is not without pity, but they both knew that their contract would come with a heavy price.
Howl had just thought it had already been paid.
He puts a permanent, glassy-eyed smile on his face, and tells them up-front. Tells all those who chase him, who look through their lashes and lean down with pouting lips and charming smiles of their own, one after the other, that he will devour their hearts, eat them whole: those who decide to stay do it at their own risk. He says I will eat your heart if you give it away and they take it as flirtation. He says I need your heart to keep living and they give them away expecting it to be a declaration, a metaphor, a lie; the worst are those that give them to him expecting him to give his in return, when the whole of Ingary knows he is heartless.
"You can't blame yourself for that," Calcifer says with a sharp flicker, though not as callously as he could have. There's a cold turn to his flames; Howl thinks it's his own way of mourning after another meal, after months of trying to keep the hunger at bay. "They knew, and they chose to do it anyway."
Just like us, Howl doesn't say, because they both know it. And just like us, they come to regret it.
But Howl is a coward. The kind of coward who will keep to this cursed living, because death is so much worse, so much scarier, and so he keeps coming back with glassy eyes and red lips and stained sleeves, and the number of devoured hearts continues to grow.
***
He takes in an apprentice, at some point.
Michael shows up. He comes in. He sits at the table, and Howl is still feverish with hunger, still trying to hold on for as long as he can without feeding again, and so he barely notices. His last heart tasted wintery on his tongue, of harsh spurned love and snow flurries with their light flakes, of ice-white stars in the distance and too much iron on cold blood. That one had left him shivering for weeks afterwards; he hates that he has eaten enough hearts to develop a preference, hates that he likes them sweet and summer-bright and bursting with the want to be loved, and so he does his best to keep away from those.
It takes him coming back full, mouth and limbs still red-hot with the passionate heart of a dragon-tamer and sleeves trailing bloody tracks across the entrance floor, for him to fully realize that there's another person living in this castle now. Mostly because that person has just dropped a whole dollop of jam on the floor after turning to look at him, toast half-hanging from his hand and eyes very wide and very frightened.
The guilt comes back full force, which only means that everything about him becomes nonchalant, casual. "Having breakfast too, I see."
And that's that. Michael is not stupid enough to ask more questions, when Howl has already taken it upon himself to spread as many rumours as he can about his heart-eating habits. If anything, the amount of rumours only seems to go up once Michael realizes that not only Howl was the one who started them, but that he also actively encourages them.
Howl supposes he's clever enough. The next day, he leaves him with half a dozen spells to study and a towering pile of magical theory books he's never personally touched, and goes off to visit Mrs Pentstemmon with an offering of crystallized figs from his homeworld.
"Foolish boy," she scolds him, even as she takes the tin from him without a second look. "Went and caught a falling star, didn't you? I thought I taught you better than that."
It was lonely and afraid and so was I. Howl puts on his best, toothiest grin and says, "You know I've always been soft-hearted."
"Heartless, now," she says, mournfully enough that his smile dies down on its own, too. "I will miss that Howl's heart."
"Yes," he agrees, for once allowing himself to be sincere. That heart still beats, tender and burning between coals and logs and ash, but when he places his hand on his chest there's nothing there at all. "I miss it, too."
***
There's not much time to miss anything at all when hurricane Sophie comes knocking.
Or not knocking. He doubts she's ever knocked once in her life; all he's ever witnessed is her bullying others into opening doors, or magically showing up inside somehow, taking over chairs and kitchens and talking fires until everything is under her scowling command. He watches disbelievingly as Calcifer cowers under her breakfast demands, bacon sizzling instead of burning, and wonders when his castle stopped being just his own.
With her, comes the constant scent of a heart. A strangely stout heart, hidden beneath layers of age and and cursed magic, so very familiar to him. His very self reeks of that very same magic, embedded beneath his skin like a splinter he can never get out, and it only intensifies as time goes by.
He cannot escape this curse either.
"Don't you want your heart eaten?" is the first thing Calcifer says to Sophie. It's remarkably straightforward of him, and Howl tells him as much later, sunken in his seat by the hearth. The house is asleep, and the night lends its shadows to hide their secrets.
Calcifer scowls, and Howl feels it like a flare in his veins. "I'm tired, Howl. So are you. There is no point in dragging this on for longer than we have to."
"You think she might break the curse," Howl says. He can't quite blame Calcifer for it: Howl, too, hopes she can, but such is their contract that it's almost impossible to break. "She has her own to handle."
"Quite a strong one, too," Calcifer agrees. "I wonder what she did to cross the witch."
A rueful smile. "You know it doesn't take much."
His fire demon's flames flicker, halfway between angry and amused. "You sure liked to test those limits, skirt-chaser that you are."
Howl puts a hand over where his heart should have been. "As if I was the only one to find her charming."
Calcifer changes colours. Howl wonders if he's embarrassed, in that peculiar, self-assured way that only a fire demon can be. "I didn't find her charming."
"You didn't meet her," Howl corrects, though it goes entirely against his argument. He leans back, silence hovering between them both for a moment. "But you felt it. We both felt that she was like us."
But the Witch of the Waste did not care if she ate hearts. The Witch of the Waste took joy in her beauty and her cruelty, and yet had been no less naïve than the owners of all the other hearts he'd taken: she, better than anyone, knew what it was like to be heartless, and she'd still asked for his heart.
Calcifer is quiet, crackling lowly on his log. "You won't eat Sophie's heart, will you?"
"She said she didn't want me to," Howl says. It's as good an answer to that question as any other; he shifts in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable.
"Would you?"
Would he? Sophie has grown on him like the spiderwebs on his ceiling, and she is cranky and nosy and loud and kind. He wonders what her heart would taste like: it'd be a tough thing, to be sure, cursed and aged as she is. But also sweet and tart, like berries, like his favourite pies his mother used to make. Like cold nights by a warm fire, like summer blossoms under the sun, like fresh laundry and hot soup waiting on the table.
He wants to eat Sophie's heart. The urge beats beneath his skin, like a drum, like the heartbeat he no longer has, heady and heavy and dark.
Would he eat Sophie's heart?
He's cowardly enough not to find an answer.
***
At some point, he must eat.
He knows Sophie keeps an eye on him at mealtimes. He knows she comes from Market Chipping; he knows she has heard the rumours about the hearts he eats. Howl devours the bacon and the eggs and the bread and the buttery cheeses she places in front of him, taken from his own pantry, and is rewarded by a softening of her look, by the unfurrowing of her brow.
But he is still hungry, of course. It has almost become familiar, by now.
And he can't hold off his actual feeding forever.
So he waits until nightfall, on a day when she retires early, claiming an ache to her bones. Until his hunger is so deep and so consuming he does not think he can hold on for much longer, and that to stay would be to risk both her and Michael. He leaves, and does his rounds: inns and pubs, flirting without being recognized and then flirting when he eventually is. You're a rake, one says, giggling, and he bends to kiss her hand and offers an roguish smile and says, and I eat hearts, too.
Once upon a time, it would have been different. Before this, before he became this heartless, hungry thing, he would have been softer, kinder. Looking for hearts to make his instead of for hearts to devour; grinning and charming out of a urge to be loved, rather than to eat. He'd court and he'd take his time, and he'd come visit bringing flowers and tiny gifts, and he'd charm his way into houses and beds all in due time.
Now, he can't quite bring himself to do it.
Nothing long. Nothing that will give them more expectations than he can meet, not when they already expect so much. He comes and he grins and he flirts, and at the end of the night he leaves sheets damp with blood and dead-eyed partners who will get up and continue their routines the very next day, if only with a little less heart.
He's warm when he returns. The new blood in his veins makes him flushed, almost healthy: he hasn't felt himself in years, but these are the times when he comes the closest. His mouth tastes of grape juice and peach cobbler and autumn mornings spent reading inside, and he can almost feel the echo of a heartbeat in his chest. The hunger is abated, for now. The lack of it turns the world is fuzzy and light and he stumbles in the doorway, an almost-giddy laugh bubbling out of his mouth despite the weight of his guilt.
Of course, this can only mean that Sophie is waiting for him to arrive.
He stops, stock-still. He can see her eyes moving about his form, taking him in: his green eyes, glassier and more inhuman than ever, the red across his mouth that could have been lipstick as easily as blood. None of this is particularly damning.
But he's looked at his reflection before, when returning from feeding. He never looks quite so much as a demon as after consuming a heart.
Howl doesn't have one, but he feels it drop all the same. "Sophie," he says.
Then stops.
What can he say to this? What can he say to her? Sophie, fair Sophie, demanding Sophie; Sophie with the kind heart, with the gentle hands, with the menacing stick. Sophie with her own curse to bear, and making the best of it. Sophie who makes no pretence to hide what she really thinks of him at any point, at any time.
He's a coward. A slitherer-outer. But his glib excuses slip away from him under her hard stare, leaving him bare and defenceless before her, and he cannot run from this.
"Sophie," he says again, stupidly, and falls silent.
Calcifer flickers. She's been sitting in front of him, working on mending a pair of Michael's trousers; he doesn't know whether she'd actually been sleepless or if she'd been waiting for his return all along.
Her face is carefully blank, the lines of her age hiding any thoughts. "Had a nice night?"
"A bit cloudy," he says weakly. "We're going to have rain in Porthaven, tomorrow."
Sophie rises, dusting off her dress. "Is that so?"
He feels like a child again, about to get scolded after playing in the mud. Howl tries to shuffle past her, back to the wall: his plan is foiled when she turns the full force of her glare on him and puts her hands on her hips.
"So you were eating hearts."
"In my defence," Howl says, "I never said I wasn't. In fact, I turned it into a pretty well-known fact."
"But you haven't eaten them!" Sophie shouts, throwing her hands up. "I see you eat every day, and I've cleaned this castle top to bottom, and there weren't any hearts!"
"I don't exactly keep them stored, Sophie dear," he says dryly, unwilling to simply let her have at him now that there are no escape routes left. "Keeping them in jars to grow mouldy and dry is just cruel."
"And eating them isn't?"
Howl wraps nonchalance around him like armour, and shrugs. "It's hardly my fault if they give them away so carelessly."
"Howl," Sophie says, almost a growl in tone.
"Sophie," he mimics. Then softens. "I don't take them unwillingly."
It's very important that she knows this, for some reason. She may think him a cad, a coward, arrogant and vain and terrible, but not cruel. Never cruel.
He doesn't know why he cares so much. Heartless Howl, who cannot love. Heartless Howl, wicked heart-eater. Many are the aunts and the mothers and the siblings of those whose hearts he has taken, and they've all come to his door, weeping or shouting or begging, calling him all manner of things. They offered, he says, and it's not an excuse. I warned them, he says, but they do not listen. He runs from them, runs from the nightmares of the glassy-eyed faces of those whose hearts he's eaten and manages to forget them more often than not, but he cannot run from Sophie.
Sophie stares at him unflinchingly. "Why do you do it?"
"It's not his fault," Calcifer pipes up, quiet, subdued. But the terms of their contract don't allow him to speak any further, and so nothing more comes from him beyond the low crackling of his flames.
Howl turns his eyes away. "It's no one's fault," he says, though that's not strictly true. He remembers an open field, a sky full of falling stars: I'm scared, Calcifer had said, ice-white and dimming in his hands, clinging on with the last of his strength. And Howl, inside, had thought I'm scared too. "That's just how it is. You need food to restore what you lack, Ms Nose. So do I."
Sophie, incredibly enough, nods in understanding. "So you need it to live."
It's not a question. It's so accepting, so casual, so unexpected, that Howl falters and loses all his words again like a scattered deck of cards. He opens his mouth, closes it. Does it again.
Calcifer takes pity on him, dragging a log to feed on. Beneath him, Howl's heart beats an unsteady rhythm, pulsing and withered amongst the flames. "He does."
She crosses her arms, back in full lecturing form. Something shifts, turning things back into what they should be. "That still doesn't make it a nice thing to do, though."
"Sophie," Howl says, half-laughing, half-desperate. "If you find me an alternative, I'll be more than glad to take it. I swear it."
She studies him. Her eyes, wizened with age, drag across the trembling of his hands, across the lost expression on his gaze that says he's tried it all already, the unsteady way he stands beneath her judgement. At last, she sighs.
"I will go to sleep," she says, a dismissal if he's ever heard one. But it's not biting, not cold, not final: more than he could ever have hoped for. "We will talk in the morning."
She leaves. The room is left with only the crackle of Calcifer's fire, and the strange heaving breaths of his chest Howl can't quite contain.
***
They don't talk in the morning, of course.
But Sophie takes a new, dedicated approach to his food. His meat comes out a little raw; his eggs half-liquid; she takes to walking to the butcher's and coming back with entire organs for him to examine.
Howl eats them all, because Howl is always hungry.
He's not sure how much of it helps. It is true that sometimes the hunger does take longer to rear its biting head, but he doesn't quite manage to keep track of what makes a difference and what doesn't - at least, not until he walks in on Sophie bent over a piece of raw liver, muttering harshly fill him up, fill him up, and understands why the results are so unreliable at times. He wonders if she knows she's the one keeping her curse wrapped around herself, dull and faded like her old dress; he wonders if she knows of her power at all.
One of his suits is now enchanted to pull in girls, after she got her hands on it, and he can't quite believe it was her intention to make it so. If it wasn't, then he's not sure if he should be flattered or offended or hurt: does she think he can't do it himself? Does it have a different layer to it, that his eyes cannot quite see? He'd sooner believe there's a loophole embedded in the seams, something like pull them to him but don't let them love him. Pull them to him, but let them get away in time. Pull them to him, but only those who won't fall for his talk. It seems too easy, after so long hiding it - too easy, even after Michael has long since accepted it and proceeded to ignore it to the best of his ability, but Michael is not Sophie.
Michael is not Sophie. Michael is not Sophie, and so it's not Michael whom Howl follows with his eyes, and it's not Michael to whom he asks where they ought to move, and it's not Michael he takes extra care to make comfortable and safe and settled and warm.
He wonders what it means. If he had his heart - if he were not heartless and wicked and incapable of any warmer feelings than a base fondness - he might even think himself in love with the girl beneath the curse. It's a first. He has no idea what she might look like, or how old she is - hopes, hopes that she's that mousy girl he'd seen on that May Day from so long ago, brimming with tightly-held power in clenched hands and downcast eyes, and he'd been so, so fascinated with her - but he doesn't have a heart and there's something like a hot coal burning in his chest, simmering and bright, and he's not sure what to make of it at all. Heartless Howl. Wicked Howl, who can never love.
It's ridiculous that he's even considering it.
His visits to her sister are short. He returns after seeing her long nose poking around the bushes, half-laughing at her lack of subtlety, and yet the laughter dies in his throat at the fierce look she sends him.
"Not Lettie Hatter," she says, voice as hard as steel. For a moment, he thinks he can see a glimpse of her younger self, a little thing firing off sparks from the very tips of her hair, but the illusion is quickly gone.
"No," he agrees, swallowing. "Not Lettie Hatter."
He'd gotten all he needed from her, anyway.
Things get blurry. Time passes too quickly. A visit home; more clues about Sulliman; a dark-haired woman that is a little too familiar. His thousand days and nights are drawing closer, and the curse is closing in on him: mermaids and falling stars, mandrake buds and white hairs. He pretends he doesn't see them in the mirror, and bleaches and dyes all of them out as if they never existed. His one hope is the clause about the winds and the honest mind, because Howl hasn't been honest a day in his life.
But Howl is not the only piece on this game, and so he takes precautions.
Precautions that amount to nothing.
He's flying. Flying with Sophie, weightless on the wind, his hands grasping hers - and the words just keep spilling out, honest for once, because his heartless chest is still tight and terrified at the thought of losing her to the Witch, and he cannot pretend not to care anymore. The curse catches up with him, and he's so hungry, so hungry and weak and desperate, made hungrier still by the weeks of running and hiding from the Witch, but the only heart around he could eat is Sophie's.
And this is when he knows.
Howl could never take her heart.
***
"I can't stay," he mutters, dizzy, bewildered. His mouth tastes of blood of the heart, and his ears buzz, and he can still feel the echoes of a something pumping on his chest. He must just have fed, and stayed the night in pure terrible guilt. "I have to save that fool Sophie."
"I'm here!" she says, and he looks at it's her, it's her, it's her, uncursed and young and red-haired and determined and Sophie. "But so is Miss Angorian! Get up and do something about her, quickly!"
Howl doesn't dare lay still for a moment longer. There's a stick in flames hacking its way across the room; a scarecrow in the doorway; a fire demon with pinched eyebrows making her way out. He calls on his magic, thunderous and terrible, and then he has the Witch's old heart in his palms and her fire demon's life as well.
And Howl is not cruel. He has never been cruel, tender-hearted as he once was, and it pains him to see that this is what he and Calcifer could become, too. So he pushes his hands together and crumbles the heart - such a tiny withered thing, so much like his own - and in moments, the Witch's fire demon is gone.
And with a start, Howl realizes that the something beating hard on his chest is not just the ghost of a heartbeat. He turns to Sophie, wonder filling him up like hot blood, like memories, like a kiss. "Gray doesn't really suit you," he blurts out, because he's not sure what else to say. Her hair flies around her like a flame, like a fire, like the heat around his heart. How ironic, he thinks, that I traded one sort of burning for another. "I thought that when I first saw you."
"Calcifer is gone," she says. He cannot seem to stop looking at her, drinking her in like water to a drowning man. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, his heart sings, after being silent for so long. "I had to break your contract."
"We were both hoping you would," he says. His heart twinges, painful with disuse: Calcifer had been his one constant company, his one constant friend. "We didn't want to end up like--"
Like the Witch and her fire demon. Like those who discarded humanity and hearts like waste; like those who grew cruel and cold and terrible with only a single withered heart to share.
Howl places a hand on his chest, feeling it beat for the first time in years. "You gave me back my heart."
Sophie smiles, red-gold strands falling around her face. He wants to kiss her. He loves her, and he loves her, and he loves her, and he isn't sure what to do with all the feelings bubbling in his chest, foreign and sweet and familiar and bitter all at once. "I did," she says. "Don't go giving it away, now."
"Even if it is to you?" he says, laughing. She hits him on the shoulder, and he grabs her hand affectionately, dragging his thumb over the smooth skin of its back. "I think we ought to live happily ever after."
"It should be hair-raising," Sophie agrees.
And so they do.