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The brightest thing in Hunter’s room is his scroll, even when set to night mode and the lowest brightness. Flapjack sleeps on a specially-made pillow beside Hunter’s head, puffed and round.
Hunter whispers into Penstagram voice chat. “I can't tell the Emperor about him, but I love him to pieces. I love him so much it could break me in two.”
A few seconds later, a voice message from Willow talks back. “Aren’t they wonderful? I wonder how the first witches to carve palismen even came up with the idea. Were they like, I love animals and I love trees, so what if we had animals made of trees?”
“Oh, I know about this!”
“You’re so cool. It feels like you know something about everything.”
Hunter swallows, as if that would drain the blush from his face. “So according to this book from the Deadwardian Era— ”
The door bursts open, guards on either side. A knife of light pierces all the way across the red of his covers. In the hallway, the lights flicker, huddled in their sconces like touch deprived children. Hunter might be projecting a little bit, or a lotta bit. By their brightness and the shade of the sky outside, it can’t be later than four in the morning.
An antlered cutout grows in the middle of the blade and dismisses the guards.
Hunter pulls the covers towards himself, shrinking to as small as possible. “Uncle?”
Belos shakes his head just an inch, but it conveys an ell of disappointment. “So the rumors are true.”
“What rumors, Emperor Belos?”
“Remove your blankets.”
“But— why?” Hunter squirms, a fluid motion that lets Flapjack solidify and be tucked into his shirt.
“Nephew, enough of your dithering.”
“Who told you? Was it Darius?”
“So Darius knows too?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Wait!”
The covers fly off smooth like a tablecloth trick.
Flapjack is an obvious lump under Hunter’s sleeping shirt. Hunter throws him towards the window as wood turns to feather and bone.
“Flapjack, run! Fly!”
Belos’s arm gargles and lurches. Too many tendrilous fingers coil tightly around Flapjack’s wings. Flapjack chirps in protest, breathing hard against the thick strands of muck.
“No!” Hunter rushes to kneel at Belos’s feet and beg. There is no hole too deep, no demand too great. “I’ll do anything. Don’t hurt him.”
“Now, Hunter, what would lead you to think I would hurt your palisman?” Belos can’t get through palisman without spitting in disgust.
Hunter’s eyes dart through memory, all answers inappropriate for Belos’s question. How many palismen has he watched Belos drink the palistrom sap from? How many husks burned, dissolved into dust, melted into nothing?
Belos lowers his mask, smiling benevolently. Hunter’s guts chill with fright. Flapjack has gone silent, but still takes labored breaths.
“If you insist on having one of those vile things, you will make yourself useful. Good night, Hunter.”
Belos’s staff shines bright red, then doesn’t shine at all. Hunter’s world fades to black.
*
Hunter dreams of flying. He glides from branch to branch. He remembers the taste of worms, and not the neon-colored gummy kind. He pulls them from the ground with a beak he doesn’t have.
He knows things he has no way of knowing. Air fills his lungs for the first time. He looks up into the wide brown eyes of someone named Caleb and hears the delighted laugh of someone named Evelyn. “You can call it our first child!” she snorts.
Hunter awakens to Belos conversing with a coven researcher. He would recognize Lilith’s voice anywhere. She had been the head of the Emperor’s Coven before he siphoned her to work on unspecified ‘special projects.’ Hunter supposes he can count himself among the projects. He keeps his eyes closed and his breathing sedately steady.
“How is he doing? Has his body accepted the palisman?”
“Yes. Consistent with the other grimwalkers, the palistrom wood has proven capable of handling grafts.”
“What a relief. It will bring me particular delight to know that this one will serve me well.”
“Why is that, may I ask?”
“A cardinal palisman reminds me of someone I once knew. I think he would be happy seeing a palisman like his working in service of my goals.”
“Then Titan willing, may we have success, Emperor.”
“Titan willing,” Belos echoes.
Hunter rises, but he doesn’t. His body is stiff. His chest feels cracked open. His brain sends the signals to stand, but nothing happens. He looks to his limbs. Manacles ring both ankles, both wrists. He wears the same thin shirt as the night before— as several days ago? It’s impossible to measure.
Belos strokes Hunter’s cheek. “Don’t struggle, nephew. It’s pointless.”
“What did you do to Flapjack? Where is he?” Hunter pauses. “What did you do to me?”
Belos slices Hunter’s shirt open with a tip of his finger, neck to navel. The sting of magic follows in its wake, along with a red seam of blood.
“Palistrom sap shares many chemical properties with witches’ bile. I have merely put your Flapjack where he can be of some use to you.”
Hunter rattles his chains, nearly hyperventilating. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him.”
“Look for yourself.” Belos traces an arc around the left side of Hunter’s sternum.
Hunter shrieks. A darkened slash, just unnoticeable before, is all he sees. It has a crimson tinge. “How could you do this? Take him out! Take—”
Belos closes a palm. Red light fills Hunter’s mouth with silence.
“Let’s skip all this, shall we?” Belos ushers air with his hand. “Your duties as Golden Guard are suspended immediately. You may retain the title if you like, but it will be irrelevant. You will not be leaving the castle. You will not be leaving this floor.”
A silent gasp wheezes in Hunter’s throat. “This is punishment for having a palisman, isn’t it,” he hisses.
“Do you enjoy trying my patience? This is not a punishment.” Belos’s smile doesn’t reach his stale blue eyes. “This is a reward.”
The manacles come undone. Hunter lies in the open cees of metal a little longer. They’re still warm with his body heat and smooth on the inside.
“And one final thing. Discretion continues to be a vital part of your new position. No need to spill our family’s secrets.”
The door closes behind the Emperor. Hunter hears the click of a lock.
He touches his chest. “Flap? I feel you in there. It’s— weird.”
It’s not the same as seeing his perpetual wink or hearing his wings in motion, but Hunter senses something beyond the physical sensation of a lump of wood. His palm rubs a circle over his heart.
“I know you’re scared. Hah, usually that’s your line to me. We’ll get us both out of here and then we’ll get you out of me. I promise you.”
*
Hunter crouches beneath the square cutout in the door and rises slowly to peer out through the bars. The hallway is empty.
“I’ve never done this through an object I couldn’t see around.”
He’s still not sure if Flapjack can read his thoughts or if he needs to verbalize them. He’s grown accustomed to sound after so long in silence. Even though they’re closer than ever, it’s lonely without the little bird around.
Four paces separate the far wall of the claustrophobic cell from the door. Hunter measures them towards the wall, then rushes at the door.
Teleporting feels like static, smells like gunpowder. He’s been able to flash between places since he first touched artificial magic, but never understood how it worked. Does his body stop, disassemble and reassemble itself, or does he put a pin in the fabric of space and walk along the metal?
Neither happens here. He smells sulfur. His shoulder cracks. Ouch. It will bloom with a bruise soon, but doesn’t scream dislocated or broken.
“It won’t work,” a raspy voice calls from across the hall. “The walls deflect magic.”
“Then I’ll teleport through the bars.”
“It’s been tried. Doesn’t end well, if it works at all.”
Hunter frowns. This voice knows a lot. “What happens if it works?”
“How far is it between each of those bars?”
Hunter measures with his fingers. “Dunno, two, maybe two and a half inches?”
“Those bars will make two, maybe two and a half inch slices of you. They’ve magic-proofed this place. Believe me, we’ve tried.”
“How do you know that?” Hunter finally looks over the bars to see his partner in conversation.
A basilisk strains against her chains in the cell across from his. She must have been hidden in the shadows before.
“You’re blond with red eyes, right? I’ve watched dozens of you wake, walk, and die.”
She transforms into someone who looks like Hunter but isn’t him, then does it again, and again. It looks like drawings by someone who forgot what he looked like and remembered only the edges.
“What are you talking about? There’s only one of me. I was an only child, my parents died in an accident, and the Emperor took me in.”
It stings to talk about Belos, who also put him in this cell.
“The others all had the same story. You’re his nephew, right? You remember growing up outside the castle walls but don’t have any evidence. No childhood photos, no baby fangs, nothing to prove you were ever younger than you are now.”
“How did you know that.”
“We call you pastless. You’re the first one that didn’t scream. They take palismen, sometimes one, sometimes as many as will fit, and press them into you. Sometimes they take out organs, or gave them to us as meals.”
Hunter gags. Acid coats his throat and makes his teeth feel sticky, but there’s not enough in his stomach to give the satisfaction of emptying it.
“Do you know what a grimwalker is?” he pleads.
“Never heard that word before. Do you know what a basilisk is?” She meets Hunter’s eyes for the first time. “That’s me. Subject Five. The basilisks call me Vee.”
“I read about basilisks.” Hunter looks down. “In my briefings. Shapeshifters, resurrected as alternatives to the Day of Unity. Whatever that means.”
“All of us were bred in captivity.” Vee scrunches her face. “By people who looked a lot like you.”
“Those must be the grimwalkers. The pastless. They’re the same.”
“I would say it serves you right, but I can’t wish a moment in this place on anyone.”
“Thanks, Vee, I think? My name is Hunter.”
“I wish I could say it’s nice to meet you, Hunter. I l never learned any of the other grimwalkers’ names.”
“Why’s that?”
“Most were too busy screaming, or doubled over from pain, or didn’t have working voices.”
“Oh Titan. Um, you know, I was supposed to start monitoring the experiments next month. I had no idea it would involve this. You have to believe me. But then Belos discovered I had a palisman.”
“A palisman chose you?” Vee laughs. “All you grimwalkers were in the Emperor’s Coven. I’ve never seen a coven scout with a palisman.”
“When a member of the Emperor’s Coven gets a palisman, Belos takes them for his stash. At least he did until my palisman found me.”
Hunter remembers the Emperor’s warning about spilling family secrets. They’re not secrets if the basilisks know them, and the Emperor might not even be his family.
“That’s backwards, right? Witches make palismen.”
“Not since Belos, or I should say, we, overharvested the palistrom forests. But my palisman literally flew into my window.” His voice softens. “And into my heart.”
“Aw, cute, someone who was going to be an accomplice in torturing me misses his friend.”
“There’s nothing I can say to that. I’m sorry.”
“What was your palisman’s name?”
“His name is Flapjack.” Hunter pushes the knuckle of his thumb into where Flap is closest to the surface.
“Too bad what happened to him.”
“Thanks, Vee.”
*
It becomes a pattern. Hunter passes out and wakes up chained down, limbs heavy with forced sleep.
“Have you enjoyed your time down here?” Lilith asks clinically.
“No, and if you’re asking for feedback, the food is always undercooked and the snorse milk never comes with lactase pills.”
Hunter knows he’s not supposed to answer, but it’s been so long since he’s talked to another witch that the words glide from his mouth.
“Is there any soreness or swelling near the insertion site?” Lilith presses hard enough to make Hunter wince.
“The pain is purely emotional,” he says through grit teeth. He and Vee don’t lie to each other, or at least he doesn’t lie to her. Lying to Lilith feels like riding a staff for the first time after a long break.
“Uh huh.” Lilith jots down notes in ruthless shorthand. “Based on past experiments, that will likely change. All clear, Emperor.”
Belos fits his fist into a glove that resembles ones used for branding coven sigils. The palm is stained bright with a sticky liquid that Hunter recognizes. It glows green.
There is no good end to this. “What will that do?” Hunter tries to stall.
It doesn’t work. Belos answers as he presses the glove to Hunter’s sigil, anticipation playing in his eyes. “If you aren’t another disappointment, it will let me live.”
Searing pain radiates from Hunter’s wrist, snaking through his body. He sees silver, tastes iron, presses his back against the table’s rust.
Something is leaving him that doesn’t want to, like breath without breathing, trailing claw marks on his psyche and between his bones.
“Emperor, I advise you to stop.” Lilith sounds cautiously overjoyed.
Hunter bites his tongue. He won’t give them the satisfaction of a scream.
“It’s working. I feel,” Belos licks his lips, patient in his search for the right word. “Rejuvenated.”
“The striation patterns in the wood indicate impending depletion.”
Belos lifts his hand. The glove leaves a scorch mark like a permanent shadow, the burns leaking into long, wavy patterns like a fingerprint.
Hunter’s chest feels emptier. The rest of him does too.
“This is all thanks to you, Hunter.” Belos flicks Hunter’s hair from his forehead.
Hunter lets it happen. He lies more still than a corpse.
“Your fixation on wild magic, on carving more palismen, made me realize that I had a renewable source of palistrom wood after all. If you hadn’t been so persistent in your efforts, none of this would be happening. The Titan is most pleased, and has let you live.”
Lilith translates. “You’ve lasted a month down here. You’re doing very well. Longer than most.”
Hunter had no idea it had been a month already. He had no idea it had only been a month. Time is a syrup, a knot, a wrinkle like a brain, a maze like a gut.
“Am I supposed to be encouraged? Is that a pat on the back for a job well done?”
Lilith examines the burn area. “The alternative for you is dying, so all things considered, yes.”
Hunter closes his eyes. “Maybe I’ll try to do worse then.”
*
The tests grow more brutal, more taxing. His skin is mottled with burns in different degrees of charring, scarring, festering, and healing.
When it’s not him suffering at the Emperor’s hand, it’s Vee and the basilisks. He learns what their screams sound like, which is handy when he’s not sure whether his own lungs are the source of the sound.
In time he learns that the Basilisks all have numeric names, Vee and Vi and Ee and Eye. He’s not very good at Stoman numerals, but he knows that shakes out to four names when Vee is number five. She won’t tell him what happened to the missing member of the group, but he has a guess.
He wonders if the rubbery chicken-fish he ate, a strange blip of texture amongst the gruel, was something else. The crispy skin was delicious. He would eat it again.
In the dark, His dreams grow more vivid, or maybe his reality grows more dull. A rectangular prism prison of cold metal and stone is not fertile ground for anything but damp and mold.
In the dreamscape, a woman screams. He recognizes Evelyn even without her snorting laughter, even with her face crumpled and teary. Different versions of her distraught voice calling out pierce through fabric with red and orange threads, embroidering flames.
He flies in front of an enraged man with a beard and a lighting-bent dagger. He falls from the air as half his vision snaps to black. He flies into trees and through boney thickets that only look like trees. His beak scrapes futilely against keratin. It smells like burning steel and sizzling flesh. His heart is heavy with despair.
Hunter thrashes. His shoulders explode outward. His mind reaches out to the familiar sensory texture of gunpowder and static, but he knows he hasn’t gone anywhere. Now he’s on his side. Now something very soft is all around him. Now he wakes up.
Lilith drops her clipboard in the doorway. “Titan twice boiled, thrice fried!” She hurries to close the door and secure the cell from the inside.
“What’s happening to me?” Hunter’s voice carries a strange melodic froth, a song he doesn’t know but learned from his parents. It’s impossible. He never knew his parents, if he even had parents.
“You’ve become some kind of cardinal harpy. I’ve only seen something like this once before. How did this happen?”
Hunter’s attention snagged two sentences back. “Cardinal?” The weight jutting from his back is a pair of wings. He scrapes air with his taloned hands and feet.
“As red as your palisman. And the implant wound, I think it’s gone! Is this a curse? Is this a miracle?”
Lilith’s hand is cold as she touches his black-feathered chest.
“You’re burning up, but birds do run a little hot.”
“Don’t tell Belos, please don’t tell Belos. I’ll figure how to stop this. I’ll turn back. I don’t really want to die.”
He plays a film about the slow slide of his short life on the back of his sorrow-squeezed eyelids.
“I hate that I recognize the weakness in your eyes.” Lilith shakes her head. “This is between me and someone else, but I swear to you, for all the Clawthorne family swear is worth, I won’t tell the Emperor.”
“What’s it worth?”
Lilith frowns. “Look. It’s on you to get out of this form by the next time Belos makes the rounds. You were lucky it was just me this time. How would Belos react to having a giant palisman?”
She finger-puppets her hands into a wriggling flytrap and has it bite at air in Hunter’s direction.
“Understood.” Hunter swallows. “The weakness. Is it what you see when you look at Edalyn?” Everyone knows Lilith walks around muttering about saving her sister from the worsening curse.
“No. It’s what I see when I look at myself. We’re both trapped here.”
Hunter thinks of what Vee might have to say to that and says nothing.
“Visit notes: no change in status to report,” Lilith narrates as her pen glides across the page. “Goodbye, Hunter.”
*
Is this a curse? Hunter thinks of ways to undo curses. Elixirs, tinctures, potions, all require ingredients he doesn’t have at his disposal. Kissing, something about true love, more things he doesn’t have. Time. He definitely doesn’t have that. And there are those pesky curses that become stuck.
He thinks of Willow. Would she recognize him like this? He can barely recognize himself. If she came across him, would she think him a threat? He could be some weepy beast wrapped in her thorns. All that would be now is exchanging metal and stone for leaves and vines.
He misses her. He misses Gus. The whole flyer derby team must be wondering where he went. Belos surely had someone come up with some convincing lie, but they could see through it. Maybe they were told Hunter went to live with his parents on the Left Leg or work on road construction in the Carpal Tunnel. Maybe he dropped out and went to farm glandberries and get crawled on by wolf spiders in the bogs of the Hips.
Willow and Gus could be looking for him right now. He almost wishes they wouldn’t, but both are stubborn as set-off Slitherbeasts. If they get it into their heads that Hunter can be found and rescued, they’ll try it. His mind wanders, plotting the ways they could be intercepted if they found themselves in the wrong part of the castle. There had been intruders before. He read Lilith’s report of how Hexside students had been found attempting to steal artifacts, a human, a round-faced Plant track girl with glasses and a short Illusion track boy. There was only enough luck in the world for them to escape with their lives once.
Hunter has his own life to worry about. His fingers still end in hooked claws, sharp as needles. He tries to pick the locks on his chains, knowing as he does it how foolish it is to even try. He read it in a book once.
Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t realized that coven researchers were standing in the hallway. He heard voices and the struggling squeaks of eyeball rats. From the hallway, the smell of rain.
“Seven in one minute. Complete.”
He doesn’t recognize the speaker, or the chorus of others that echo the observation.
“And the experiments?”
A slick sound, like innards being rearranged.
“The abomination goo performed miserably. I’m telling you, there’s no way for it to store a magic charge.”
Laughter. “You’re saying that Blight Industries finally overpromised? The Emperor will love hearing that.”
“I think Odalia Blight could take him.”
“Okay, okay, let’s not get too blasphemous in the very castle where he sits. Let’s see if she can do eight. Who knows, there might be a minimum level of magic current it needs to activate.”
It doesn’t work on eight in a minute, or nine or ten or eleven. The petrichor multiplies. Hunter imagines he’s in a storm, drops of water tickling his face.
“Okay team, what’s our line when we report the results to the Emperor?”
A chorus of “we are only the messengers” rings out, meekly proclaimed by people pretending they can conceal their fear.
Inside his chest, Hunter feels Flapjack shivering. He remembers shivering as his hutch was lifted into the air. Winding through the streets of Latissa, he watches himself scowl and refuse help, kindness, and connection. He sees himself like a giant but chirps a greeting. As the bruise-colored light of early morning turned to dawn, he flew into his room and hardened into a staff. In his heart it felt like a long-rested stretch.
Hunter looks at his hands, rotates his wrists. No feathers. He’s a witch again. As a final test, he traces the raised crescent, off-center on his chest. Flapjack is there.
*
Belos watches intently. His invasion of Hunter’s personal space is both comforting after many weeks without it and nauseating, because Hunter knows what comes next.
“Good morning.” Lilith says with no more than perfunctory pleasantness. “Today we’re going to perform a series of stress tests. I hope you’re adjusting well to your new state.”
Which new state, not seeing sunlight for months? Drinking hard water by the drop from the centuries old tap? Not having more than two yards in any direction to move? Even Flapjack feels like a bird in a cage— in a cage, accounting for Hunter’s ribs. At once he understands the meaning. Keep the cardinal harpy down.
“I hope I am too.” He closes his eyes, missing Lilith’s worried glance.
Belos looks down at him. “Don’t worry, I have every confidence in you.”
Coming from the Emperor, this strikes like a dagger in the ribs. Hunter’s last months as Golden Guard were a daisy chain of failure after failure. This is the thing the Emperor thinks he can do well?
It starts with the glove from before, the one that glows and takes from him. He flinches before it touches his skin, sticky and not yet warm.
This is the baseline, Lilith explains. She takes a measurement at both wrists and both ankles, then adds a glove and repeats in combinations until every limb is covered. Basic counting problems were part of certification in the Emperor’s Coven, much less exciting than the mazes with the traps, but weighted equally.
Even with every pain receptor in his body screaming, he can solve this problem. If order doesn’t matter, then from a group of four, there are four ways to pick one, six ways to pick two, four ways to pick three, and one way to pick four.
Four and six and four and one is fifteen. He counts one by agonizing one. By five, petrification sounds like mercy. By ten, his pride is gone. He yells words and doesn’t understand them by the time they leave his lips.
The basilisks would suffer in silence. Maybe eating magic is like gluttony after all. Hunter can’t help but wail. There is no sin that shames the Titan to compare this to. This is already the punishment, being burned alive.
His skin glows white with heat where the gloves draw it from him. His nerves never stop pumping relays to his brain of how unbearable this is, reminders that, despite his wishes, he is alive.
Hunter presses his teeth to his lip to say fifteen, then loses control. Hunter writhes, boneless and vermicular until the deep red wings emerge.
“Emperor, get back!” Lilith shouts. Belos stumbles but recovers. It would be sacrilege, punishable by immediate smiting in any other circumstance, were Hunter’s claws not piercing and shredding the air he emptied.
Belos is silent. “Your reaction suggests you knew this would happen.”
“Emperor, I—” Lilith is skilled at lying to herself, but those skills of deception fail to work on others. She needs a truth. “I recognized the symptoms of my sister’s curse.”
“Mm, very well.” Belos dismisses the conversation. “What have we here?”
Lilith switches to scientist mode. “Subject has assumed the form of the implanted palisman. Evidence of burning and other extractive wear and tear is significantly reduced. How exciting! Ahem, perhaps as a next foray, we repeat the baseline to establish differential between—”
“No, we won’t do that.” Belos says drowsily. “Your devotion and brilliant mind are tiresome.”
Lilith’s brilliant mind can’t comprehend the sugar-coated slap in the face from the Emperor. She bows and steps aside.
“Well Hunter? Is it worth it? You have done wild magic and you have become wild magic.” Belos looks up and down Hunter’s feathered body and frowns. “Is it what you wanted? I told you it was destructive.”
Hunter has no answer.
“And how is your palisman? Do you miss him?” Belos laughs.
Hunter fights tears and wins, for now. He has plenty of experience feeling one thing and saying another.
“How are the other experiments going, Emperor? I heard the Blight Battery was a dismal failure.”
“It was, but a new alternative has emerged. Perhaps I’ll show it to you one day, although you may be elsewhere at the time.”
“Speaking of time, Emperor, we are late,” Lilith says, almost squeaking like an eyeball rat fed to the basilisks.
“Let’s not keep our next appointment waiting. Goodbye, Hunter.” Belos’s gentle smirk is a threat in a sheath.
*
“Oh Titan, Lilith meant it. Once Belos found out, it really was over for me. You may be elsewhere? That’s just being dead without saying it. I don’t want to be dead!”
“It could be worse.” Vee’s face is hidden, but the shrug of her chains is loud. “Now you know how you’re going to die.”
“What are you saying?”
“Think, Hunter! I’m valuable because I can suck magic out of stuff, but I’m replaceable. I didn’t even get a name.”
“Only got a number.” Hunter completes her thought. “But he’s waited a long time for me. I could misbehave so bad and he wouldn’t end me, because who knows how long it would take for there to be another palisman-bonded grimwalker!”
He clenches his fist excitedly. After the last round of experiments, he woke up missing fingers and toes. Or rather, they were exactly where he left them, disintegrated. He had seen it happen with countless palismen and now it’s his turn. In slow motion, his whole being frays around the edges.
“I don’t know if I would be proud of that,” Vee says. “You can’t even control it. Or can you?”
“I’ve read enough used comic books to know that the trigger and release must be emotional, but beyond that? Who’s to say.”
“If you needed to fly away right now, could you?”
“I— no. I don’t remember turning back. I just wake up torn between hating myself and this kind of fuzzy sensation. That might just be how Flapjack and I normally feel about me, all squished together. It’s really hard to tell.”
“That’s too bad, because you might want to learn how to fly on command.”
“Huh?”
“Help!” Vee yells with a voice that isn’t hers. She transforms into a beak-masked member of the Emperor’s Coven. “Lilith! Steve! Emperor! Anyone! The basilisk escaped!”
She thrashes, panicky, putting on a show for the guards who rush to assist her. Hunter knows the well of emotion she draws on for this performance is deep. “Get me out of here!”
The guards fumble with her cell’s padlock then work on her chains. When the last one clangs off, Vee slouches with relief.
“Sorry about this.” Vee inhales and drains their magic. They fall to the unforgiving floor.
She unlocks three more cells. The other basilisks, who Hunter recognizes by their voices, slither free.
“I didn’t forget about you.”
A winded Lilith shouts “Don’t you dare!” as Vee lifts the lock to Hunter’s cell.
Vee’s eyes rise to meet his. He leans against the door and almost falls backwards when it opens.
They regard each other with glances that contain grand speeches, creature to creature.
“Fly away, bird boy.” Vee turns and runs.
He stands in the doorway. “I can’t.”
Misty red light foreshadows Belos appearing. His body gurgles up in a fluid motion, as if poured into a glass.
“You stayed. What a loyal boy. Today is the day you meet the Titan.”
Hunter changes his mind. He teleports down the hall. Feathers sprout through his skin. Wings burst from his back. He thinks fly and it happens. His clawed feet leave the ground.
He once patrolled an area like this a few floors up. He counts on the castle’s modular layout as he flees.
Belos’s arms race towards him, dissolving into a mass of braided tentacles. He’s never felt them against his skin. They stick to his feathers like tar. He flies faster.
*
A great thud rattles Willow’s window. She looks up from her Magic 101 homework. The smudge on the panes is huge. The air smells of charcoal and burnt hair. She looks to the sill, the first place where hurt birds end up, then to the cobbles at street level.
As she runs down the stairs, she calls Gus on Penstagram. “My place, now.”
Gilbert drops his freshly brewed hexpresso. The stain in the carpet will wait. “Miss Park, what the hyoid bone is that?”
Willow ignores him, calling on the snake plants in the hallway. They hiss, bodies undulating, but deposit Hunter on the coffee table. The skeleton of a thousand-piece puzzle falls to the floor.
“Who, dad.” She pushes feathers away from his face.”
“Well I’ll be petrified. I’ll call the Healing Coven. And the Beast Keeping Coven?”
“No. We don’t know who’s after him. It’s bound to be someone we don’t want coming to visit us.”
Willow touches Hunter’s cheek. “Are you in there?” She tells Gilbert, “He hit my window, and hit it pretty hard.”
“You can see the bruises starting to form.”
Gus lets himself in, huffing. “What did I miss—aligned vertebrae, Hunter?” He kneels at the coffee table. “Buddy. Hey! What happened?”
Willow grabs a first aid kit. Only in a plant coven house is it filled with leaves. “We’re figuring that out.”
“He hit her window,” Gilbert explains.
“You closed the window on him?” Gus shouts in disbelief.
“I didn’t, now put this pillow under his head.” It’s embroidered with a flock of snorses in slither-gallop.
Gus obliges. Willow sets a leaf on Hunter’s lip and draws a spell circle. A puff of tinted pollen poofs into his nostrils.
Hunter jerks awake, head against the pillow. “That is foul.”
“Hunter!” Willow and Gus hug him, rubbing their faces against the closest cheek. Going with the grain of the feathers, it’s literally downy.
“What happened to you, man?” Gus fluffs Hunter’s wing.
“The Emperor put Flapjack inside me and now I think she’s the only one who can get him out.” He points to Willow.
“Inside?” Gus frowns.
“Me?” Willow gawks.
“Yeah, fun fact about me I learned while imprisoned for— how long was I gone?”
“Maybe three months?” Gus guesstimates.
“—for maybe three months, is that I’m sort of made of palistrom wood. Which means that—”
Willow gasps. “Grafts! Your body treats palistrom wood placed in prolonged contact as a graft!”
“Much more eloquent than I was going to put it.” Hunter admits.
“I can do it.” Willow says. “Flapjack, where is he?”
Hunter’s wings disappear in a cloud of feathers. His claws retract. He points to his chest.
“Can I do this?” Willow rephrases. “I don’t know what’s in there, what I’m going to break.”
“I don’t know, can’t you just talk to me like I’m a plant?”
“Okay, I can try on a part of you that should be less risky.”
She takes his hand, not disguising her surprise at the gap in his fingers. Her eyes glow green. Hunter’s missing finger grows back.
“You can still grow. Interesting for a plant with no leaves or roots.” Willow touches Hunter’s new growth. She holds his hand. “Now for the riskier part.”
She draws a spell circle over a different finger. It slowly zips itself apart from nail to knuckle.
“There’s no bone. It’s just tree stuff. Hunter, you’re literally a tree!”
“Flapjack,” Hunter insists.
“It’s one thing to poke around in your finger, but your heart? I’m not even coven-certified. Hunter, I could kill you!”
“If Flapjack doesn’t come out, I’d rather be killed than live with it.”
“Oof,” Gus mimes a struggle to lift a large package. “This is heavy stuff. On that note, any last words, Hunter? Just in case?”
Hunter raises his arm and Gus slides seamlessly into their secret handshake. “It’s been real. And Willow?” He looks at her for only a moment. “If you’re the last thing I look at before I go, well.”
A smile creeps across Willow’s face. She laughs, uneven. “Why can’t this be one of those spells that breaks with true love’s kiss or something?”
Hunter bites his lip. “Want to make sure it isn’t?”
Willow presses her lips to his, quick enough to miss. If spells wanted a passionate kiss, they would have specified. “I’ll see you in post-op.
Hunter stares dazed at the ceiling, which for some reason is spinning.
With the same leaf beneath his nose, Willow calls forth a cloud of spores to knock him out.
“Gloves.” She holds up her hands for Gus to poof on a pair.
“Magnifying glass.”
When it poofs into the air, Clover grabs it and hovers in place.
“Forceps.” Emmiline chirps and drags them over.
Willow traces the ridge on Hunter’s chest. Her eyes glow green. “Come on, come on.”
The wood is volatile. As soon as she opens a hole, it tries to close. She works it from different angles. Larger holes take longer to close. She would have to make a pit the width of Hunter’s ribcage to have a chance at exposing and recovering all of Flapjack. She doesn’t know if Hunter would survive that, and she does intend to see him in post-op.
Willow bites her lip to keep herself from crying. “Gus, it’s not working. I can’t clear enough away.”
“They’re both palistrom wood, right? And you can grow stuff from him, right? Have you tried getting his body to give Flapjack to you? Like— the lockers at school!”
“Gus, you’re a genius!”
“Yeah, I know.”
Willow presses both palms to Hunter’s chest, index fingers at one end of the red ridge and thumbs at the other.
“Hi Flapjack, it’s been a while. We’re looking forward to seeing you again. I just need you to, um— what I don’t want to happen is for both of your wood to grow together. I should be able to just—”
Willow breathes steadily. Flapjack seems to rise from Hunter’s sternum, out of a pool of skin.
Flapjack loosens and stretches his wings, then starts to pull on Hunter’s hair and peck at his nose.
Willow smiles. “I know this is because birds don’t understand anesthesia, but you’re really cute.”
Gus clears his throat. “I know you want to watch Flapjack be adorable, but we should wake up Hunter.”
“Good recommendation, Doctor Porter.”
Another puff of spores and Hunter stirs.
The reunion is wordless. Flapjack presses his head to Hunter’s nose. All the tension in Hunter’s body melts.
“You did it, Willow.” Hunter’s voice is all relief, then he shrinks into his shoulders. “Oh. That means. Is this the post-op?”
“Let’s say yes, it is.” Willow looks at Hunter’s lips and considers what she wants to do next.