Summary: In a kingdom where those born without hearts are said to carry a dangerous curse, 17-year-old Ace has lived most of his life believing himself to be a monster. Now, seeking closure about the defining moment of his childhood, Ace embarks on a coming-of-age journey to learn the truth about himself, the world, and what it really means to be human.
“Over the seven years I’d spent under Bertrand’s leaky roof, I had slowly become disillusioned with the idea of ever finding a potion strong enough to light a fire in my ribcage. Bertrand had tested a lot of his spells on me throughout my life, but the love potion had always proven to be the least effective. But I suppose that is to be expected when you do not have a heart.”
(Alternatively, read on Inkitt)
Began 18 July 2020 | Concluded 5 December 2020
Chapter I: in which the story begins
Chapter II: in which plans are made
Chapter III: in which the biggest victories are often anticlimactic
Chapter IV: in which ignorance is bliss
Chapter V: in which the proverbial dam breaks
Chapter VI: in which a goodbye is too final
Chapter VII: in which home is a fickle thing
Chapter VIII: in which sometimes we surprise ourselves
Chapter IX: in which people can change
Chapter X: in which the other shoe drops
Chapter XI: INTERLUDE
Chapter XII: in which second chances come to those who least expect it
Chapter XIII: in which time does not heal all wounds
Chapter XIV: in which the truth comes out
Chapter XV: in which late night escapades are often in poor taste
Chapter XVI: in which the winter melts into spring
Chapter XVII: INTERLUDE TWO
Chapter XVIII: in which some reunions are bittersweet
Chapter XIX: in which hope is the thing with feathers
(A/N: Well, this is the end. Thank you to everyone who has been reading, sharing, and/or shouting in my inbox about this story for the last 21 weeks. Finishing this and being able to share it with you all has been a bright spot in 2020, and I’m eternally grateful for the love so many of you have shown my little passion project. Thanks for following along.)
Epilogue
“Hey, tell me again why we decided to travel in the summer?” Petra groaned for the thousandth time. “I swear, the summers have gotten hotter. Or am I just getting too old to handle it?”
“Petra, you’re only fourteen, quit being dramatic,” I retorted, rolling my eyes. “Besides, we could have stayed in Verdigris longer, but someone was getting impatient.”
“Oh, are you referring to yourself?” Petra shot back.
“Shut up.”
I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the blazing sun and squinted down the road. In the distance, I could just make out the figures of two royal guards, leaning against the façade of a local inn. Frankly, the odds of either of them being able to recognize me out of context were marginal at best, but it wasn’t a risk worth taking. (I also wasn’t quite sure how effective Bertrand’s love potions had been or how long they lasted, and I really wasn’t eager to find out.) I turned heel and retreated the way we had come, and Petra no longer needed to ask to understand why.
“You’re right, though, the sun is very bright these days,” I mused, wiping the sweat from my brow with my shirtsleeve. “Should I start wearing hats? Maybe it’d be a good disguise.”
“I think you might as well wear a big sign that says ‘Look, I’m suspicious!’” Petra snarked.
“Not any sort of fancy hat, obviously,” I huffed. “I meant, like, a straw sunhat. Like a farmer.”
Petra sputtered and laughed mercilessly, doubling over alongside me.
"What, do you think I would look funny in a farmer’s hat? I could look the part!”
“Yeah, with the bow and arrow and everything,” Petra wheezed. “Typical farmer. If I saw you walking down the street, I’d immediately think you had something to hide.”
We took a break from the sun in the shade of a tall oak tree, in a quiet corner of the town where only a few passersby came down the road. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees away from the sun’s rays, and we both sighed in relief, taking large swigs of water from our canteens.
“Have you ever thought about what comes next?” Petra asked, picking absentmindedly at a fresh bug bite on her arm.
“I mean, we should probably find something to eat, and a place to camp out for the night.”
“No, I mean in the future.”
“Not really,” I sighed. “We could go back to Verdigris eventually, hole up for the winter there. We could keep trying to blend in here, or who knows, there’s a whole world out there far beyond Amistadia.”
Petra chuckled, and I shot her a suspicious look. She raised her hands in defense.
“It’s nothing, I just never thought I’d see you without an over-thought plan,” she explained.
I shrugged. “What good did that do me before?”
So far, that summer had wrought us nothing in terms of success since we returned to Amistadia. With the royal guard now calling the shots, very little had changed, materially speaking, though their increased presence had certainly sparked a heightened sense of suspicion in the air, as though people were beginning to wonder whether they were being pinned down. Our efforts to spread the truth and connect with the rest of the Heartless had so far been significantly hampered by my ever-present need to play dead, but I was not feeling particularly deterred. There was still hope fluttering within me, alive and well, and while it was possible those wings would melt under the relentless summer sun, it didn’t matter. I would simply grow them anew again, a thousand times over if that was what it took.
“Should we keep walking? I think there’s a farmer’s market down the road,” Petra suggested.
I nodded and pushed to my feet. We continued down the street, Petra already grumbling about the sun again.
(A/N: Next week’s the epilogue. Thanks for reading, folks. It means the world.)
Chapter XX: in which we are born whole
Over time, Petra grew antsy. A peaceful, quiet life of complacency—no matter how appealing from the start—was foreign to her, having been far out of reach her entire life. I felt no differently; the thought of all the people we had left behind weighed heavily on my mind, and I knew it was on hers too. We’d been part of a community that had been scattered to the wind; most of our friends and neighbors were still out there, somewhere, waiting for some kind of answer. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to stay still, to settle permanently in Verdigris and pretend as though the past had never happened. But there was another part of me that didn’t even know how.
It was thoughts like these that found me in the meadow next to Frida’s house at dawn one crystal-clear morning as the spring began to melt into summer, stringing together a crown of wildflowers to occupy my hands. I recognized Basil’s approach behind me by the sound of his slightly uneven footsteps rustling through the grass before he came to a stop beside me.
“You’re up early,” he commented.
“I was having trouble sleeping,” I replied, joining the two ends of the chain together. “Here, bend down.”
Basil obliged, bending at the hip, and I placed my finished crown on top of his head. “Crowning the king,” I thought to myself wistfully. He reached up and turned it over in his hands, examining my work.
“You have steadier hands than I remember,” he noted. Then he smirked. “But you still aren’t very good.”
I feigned offense. “That’s how you treat my gift?”
Basil replaced the crown on his head and dropped down to the grass beside me.
After a few moments, I inquired, “Basil, can I ask you something a little bit intense?”
“Of course.” Basil began plucking wildflowers from the space around him.
“Why did I ever want to feel human?”
“What do you mean?”
I hesitated, unsure how to fathom the whirlwind in my chest into something intelligible. Eventually, I settled on, “Well, if being human is so ideal then why are we so terrible? Why do humans spread hate and lies and kill or displace so many innocent people? People have died by my hands, both directly and indirectly, and if that’s what makes me not so different from every other human then maybe I don’t want to be human at all. Maybe I just want to float aimlessly through some void somewhere and never see or be seen by anyone ever again. I spent so many years wishing I could be human instead of a monster, only to realize they were the same thing.”
Ever wise beyond his years and mine, Basil set aside his half-finished creation and reasoned, “The question is not whether humans are good or bad, but rather how to reconcile so much kindness and goodwill with so much evil. The truth is each of us has the capacity for good and bad, and having done things you regret does not make you deplorable or beyond redemption. It just makes you human. And maybe it’s like you said and being human is the most monstrous thing you can be, but I like to think it’s also the most beautiful.”
“You say that so easily,” I mused. For someone who has experienced such violence, I did not add, but Basil seemed to understand, nonetheless.
He chuckled and returned to his steady and practiced weaving.
“Over time, life puts things into perspective.”
“What do you say of love, then?”
“Love has very little to do with it, at least not in the sense you’re talking about. Heart or no heart, there’s blood rushing through your veins, isn’t there? You’re a whole person, Ace. You’re alive. That’s really all there is to it.”
“It doesn’t feel that simple,” I muttered.
Basil shrugged. “I never said it was simple.”
A few minutes passed in companionable silence as the sun started to climb over the tree line and the commune began to buzz with activity, signaling the start of a brand new spring morning.
“I think Petra and I are going to go back soon,” I said eventually. “We finished the fence.”
Basil hummed. “I thought you might say that.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” I asked hopefully.
Basil smiled sadly, fixing his gaze somewhere—or some time—beyond the horizon.
“Ace, I’m tired. I fought with all I could at the age of ten. Please understand that I can never go back to that place again. I’m just… tired.”
“I understand,” I whispered, trying to hide my disappointment, though I’d anticipated his answer.
“Besides,” Basil sat up a little straighter, “the people here need me, that’s my role in this fight. But I’ll still be here whenever you come back, and that’s a promise.”
I smiled. “You’d better keep that promise,” I warned.
The flower crown that Basil had been weaving landed on the top of my head. I turned in surprise to see a sunny grin plastered across his face, an older, wiser reflection of himself from all those many years ago.
“I always keep my promises, don’t I?” he beamed. “I am a man of my word.”
By the time I broke through to the other side of the forest, I had worried my bottom lip into a bruised and bleeding mess, and the overgrown brambles had left angry scratches on my arms and legs. It had been a while since I’d had anything to eat or drink, and even longer still since I’d seen another person. For days as I traveled, thoughts of Swallow’s Point occupied my every waking moment. I was certain that Basil was dead, and that his final memories would be of me running away and leaving him behind.
Maybe he could have come with me, I thought. Maybe I could have saved the both of us. But it was too late for that now, and I spent every fleeting spare thought trying to convince myself that I had done what was right.
Past the brink of exhaustion, I dragged myself up the hill in front of me, past an impressively big oak tree and an old, rusty gate. At the crest of the hill, I reached a small, run-down cottage. A dirt road stretched out beyond the house, leading to a cluster of other stout buildings with stone facades and tiny gardens.
Putting an end to the consecutive worst days of my life, I knocked on the door.
And then I knocked again.
And then I knocked some more.
“Hello?” I called desperately. “Can you help me?”
I waited, but no one came to the door. It seemed like no one was home, so I turned and was about to keep walking down the road when the door opened—just a crack at first, and then wider, to reveal a bearded old man with a stony frown. He looked me up and down once, and the frown deepened considerably.
“Excuse me,” I said meekly, taking a tiny step backward. “M-My parents said I’d be safe here. My name’s Ace, and I think the whole world hates me.”
“Your parents sent you?” the old man asked. He had a gruff but non-aggressive voice to match his demeanor.
I shook my head.
“I had to run away,” I clarified vaguely. “Everyone was going to find out that I’m Heartless.” I startled at my own words. “I’m Heartless,” I repeated. I’d never said it out loud before, not even to Basil or my parents. It had always just been an unspoken truth.
The old man paused for a moment, and then he opened the door all the way and stepped aside. “My name is Bertrand,” he said. “Come inside. You look like you could use a good meal.”
With that, I stepped across the threshold and into the next seven years of my life.
The inside of Bertrand’s house was humble, somewhat in poor shape in comparison to my family home in Swallow’s Point. There was a wood burning stove and a wash basin, and an old rickety wooden table in the center of the room that looked as though it barely saw any use. There was a cot on the far side of the room, where Bertrand instructed me to sit and rest while he fixed me something to eat. Once I had some soup and bread in my stomach and a tall drink of water, Bertrand disappeared into a room at the back of the house and returned moments later with an array of bottles, a small cloth, and a basin of water. Then he pulled up one of the dining chairs in front of me and wet the cloth before tending gingerly to my cuts and scrapes. Other than occasionally instructing me to move one way or the other, he worked wordlessly, and I sat quietly as he did so.
“What did you do to your lip?” he eventually asked, dabbing at a particularly nasty cut on my arm with liquid from one of the little bottles.
“I was biting it too much,” I explained.
Bertrand hummed and advised, “You should avoid making a habit of that.”
I didn’t respond.
“What’s in the bottles?” I asked instead.
“I’m a potion master,” Bertrand answered. “It’s useful for healing.”
“Do you help heal the other people in the village?” I wondered. After all, the best doctor in Swallow’s Point was a potion master by trade.
“Sometimes,” was Bertrand’s reply. “But they have mostly stopped asking, as I have become very busy. I am looking for a way to reverse the curse.”
“Really?” I exclaimed, lighting up. “That’s amazing!”
Bertrand chuckled somberly and didn’t say anything more on the matter. He rinsed the cloth in the basin of water, which was now growing murky. Then, he applied one of the other liquids to it and held it out to me.
“Hold this to your lip,” he instructed. When I hesitated, he explained, “It’s yarrow and chamomile. It should help with the bruising, and the chamomile may help you sleep.” He sat there for a moment and waited for me to do as he indicated before he stood and gathered up the bottles to return to their proper place.
“You should rest,” he suggested. “It seems you’ve had a difficult journey.”
I nodded and lay down on the cot. Bertrand seemed satisfied and disappeared into the back room. The cot was admittedly not very comfortable, but after all that I’d been through, it may as well have been the softest mattress in the world.
“Thank you,” I called softly after him, but he was already gone.
Chapter XIX: in which hope is the thing with feathers
A dull sense of sorrow hung over Petra and I as we reversed course back to Verdigris, swirling like a black hole in my chest. The tree branches seemed to hang heavier than before, standing stark and gray despite their new growth. The air between us felt thicker than it ever had, and we spent many of our waking hours in tense silence. Petra’s aura had changed since we had last seen each other; she was more cautious, not so bold and brazen as she had been less than a year ago. Whereas in the past I always saw a glimmer of Basil’s childlike wonder and innocence when I looked in her eyes, now I could only see myself, and it made my stomach churn with guilt.
“Supposedly there’s some sort of provisional government in place right now,” Petra informed me glumly while we made camp one night.
“Yeah?” I glanced over at her from where I was preparing the fire. “You know anything about it?”
Petra shook her head.
“It’s only temporary anyway,” she lamented. “I’m sure that before we know it, things will be back to the way they were before. It’s not like anybody but us knows what actually happened.”
The pessimism was new, I noted. I chose not to press her for more information, and the conversation died out for the rest of the night.
Another day, Petra stalked through the woods alongside me with her shoulders hunched and fists clenched at her sides. She was noticeably on edge, jumping onto the defensive at every rustle of the bushes or passing shadow of an animal. The agonized way with which she carried herself was horrifyingly familiar. And again—there was that nagging pit of guilt swirling uncontrollably in my stomach that screamed you caused this.
“Petra,” I blurted at one point, startling her out of her own head. She glared up at me, but there was no fire in it at all.
“You know none of what happened is your fault, right?” I asked gently. “This is all on me. You did everything you could, and you saved a lot of lives that day.”
While it didn’t completely dissipate, the tension in Petra’s shoulders seemed to soften, if only just a bit. She kicked at a stray pebble in the dirt and shrugged.
“I don’t really think it’s your fault, either,” she admitted, “in retrospect. I was mad that you didn’t come back for months; I thought you just did your damage and disappeared, like you didn’t care.”
“I wanted to come back,” I insisted. “I had a gaping wound in my chest!”
“I know that now,” Petra shot back. “So, I’m not mad. I know who the real enemy is and has always been, trust me. It’s just a lot, for me to process.”
“Believe me when I tell you I understand that completely,” I huffed.
“You know…” Petra shoved her hands into her pockets. “After all this time you still never told me what happened. With Basil, when you were little.”
I shrugged.
“Well, it’s his story,” I pointed out. “If you want to know so bad, ask him yourself.”
“Do you think he would tell me?”
“Probably not.”
Petra sputtered indignantly and shoved me to the side, grumbling to herself with her arms crossed over her chest. But she didn’t press any further, and the silence that dropped into the gap was warmer than the one that had come before.
A beat passed, and then Petra teasingly asked, “So, can I see the scar?”
"Huh?” I did a double-take and glanced down at her. The playful smirk on her face and the faint flicker of tenacity in her eyes, however infuriating, soothed the swirling unease in my gut just a little.
“What? No.” I shook my head vigorously and turned front.
Petra bust out laughing, bright and clear. I smiled to myself.
Yeah, we’d be alright.
* * *
Unsurprisingly, Basil was stunned beyond belief to open the front door and find that I had returned so soon. He joked something like, “When I said you’d be back, I didn’t mean right away,” but something in the way he glanced between Petra and I told me he knew something had gone terribly wrong.
Frida welcomed us both with open arms, and once we had introductions out of the way, Petra and I relayed the story over bowls of soup that we barely touched. The entire time, I felt like I was going to be sick with guilt—this must have been evident on my face, as I could feel Basil eyeing me from across the table even as Petra prattled on and her words turned to cotton in my ears.
“Ace?” Petra beckoned, jostling me out of my stupor with her elbow. “Are you okay?”
My stomach lurched. I sucked in a deep breath and looked over; her expression was tight, brow furrowed. My hands were shaking, so I quickly hid them under the table. Basil’s eyes bore holes in my skull. Frida was at the kitchen counter, cleaning up.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” I replied unconvincingly. “Don’t worry about me, Petra.”
“No thank you, I think I will continue to worry about you.”
“Hey,” Basil called softly from the other side of the table. I looked up to meet his eyes, soft with concern.
“I feel awful and we’re talking about people I don’t know. I can only imagine how much you’ve been bottling up,” he said. “It’s okay to grieve, Ace. I promise.”
Petra reached under the table and slid one of her hands into mine, and that was all it took. Something in my chest ripped open and everything came gushing out all at once until I was sobbing myself raw and ragged in the middle of Frida’s kitchen, with Petra squeezing my hand and Basil rubbing gently at the space between my shoulder blades. Frida wiped my face as I wept, and the three of them remained there beside me without judgment as the grief spilled out of me, until I finally stopped crying and asked Frida if she could make me some tea.
* * *
Petra and I returned to our old tricks, helping neighbors with chores in exchange for other favors, or sometimes for nothing at all. Our preferred pastime was working in the community garden, and that spring, we planted several new beds and committed ourselves to single-handedly repairing the weather-worn fence to keep the animals out.
“Do you think the others are okay?” Petra wondered aloud one afternoon, holding a fence stake in place while I hammered it into the ground with another piece of wood.
I paused my hammering and replied, “I would hope so.”
“I worry about them,” Petra mused. “I wonder what Amistadia is like now.”
“To be honest, I’d be scared to find out,” I admitted, straightening up and stretching my shoulders. “I guess I’m still a coward.”
Petra frowned, looking at me curiously.
Then, she said, “You were never a coward,” and did not elaborate as she walked away to grab another wooden stake from the pile.
I often wondered idly about Esther, and whether she’d found peace, and Knife Boy, and whether he’d found what he was looking for. Sometimes, I even thought about Swallow’s Point, and Carita and Marcus and the rest, and wondered if they, too, could change. The nightmares never fully went away, but they became more manageable, and the pangs of grief and guilt I’d been amassing for years slowly faded to a dull ache.
We planted a small herb garden at the back of the garden plot, and I privately dedicated it to Bertrand. It was an apology and a thank you all at once.
As the spring wore on, something akin to hope sprouted wings in my chest and refused to die. Petra and I could be happy here, in Verdigris. And in the summer, we could make raspberry pie, and we could learn to build a new home for ourselves from scratch, and some day, after we had long returned to dust, nobody would ever have to feel like we had felt ever again. It was a faint hope, but it was something, and it slotted itself strong and steady between my ribs.
Chapter XVIII: in which some reunions are bittersweet
I could not remember blacking out, but when I opened my eyes next, I was on my back with bright, leafy green branches filling the sky high above my head. After a few moments, recognition set in; this was the oak tree, the same one I would perch in nearly every night and look out for trouble, trying to spot Petra on her way back from town.
If I had a heart, it would have clenched. Petra—I wondered with a heavy sense of grief whether she was even still alive.
“Welcome back,” a somber voice piped up beside me.
I leapt out of my skin, scrambling to balance myself upright. There was Petra, as if on cue, hair now chopped shoddily above her chin. Her eyes, in the months since I’d last seen her, had taken on a haunted look too mature for a fourteen-year-old child. She had a bow and arrow slung over her shoulder—mine, the old bow I had given her before I left.
“Petra!” I exclaimed. “What… What happened?”
“I found you passed out in the middle of the village and dragged you here.”
“No, no, that’s not— You know what I mean!”
Petra exhaled brusquely and averted her eyes to the treetops. “A while after you left, the royal guard came to the village. Burnt it to the ground. I saw them approaching while I was in town, and managed to warn most of the village to flee, with Marley’s help.” She paused, biting her lip. “Everyone who left has long since moved on by now, probably in hiding in other villages. There was no use coming home to a pile of rubble, only to see if they’d come back a second time. I know Marley took a lot of folks with her. Maybe they aren’t even in the kingdom anymore, I don’t really know.”
“And... Bertrand?”
“He refused to leave his study, no matter how much I begged.”
“Oh.”
“I couldn’t save everyone.”
“Petra, I’m—”
“I know it’s because of you, Ace. I’ve spent enough time out there to know that the king was assassinated by one of the Heartless, and something tells me you had something to do with that.”
Finally, she returned my eye contact once more. Her mouth was set in a permanent frown. It was then that I realized this was not exactly a welcome reunion.
“I… Yes,” I admitted. “I killed him. It was a lapse in judgement. I didn’t think they’d—they thought I was dead. Why would they come here?”
“Do you really think they needed a reason?” Petra snapped. “Ace, why would you do that? Why would you put us all in danger like that? Sure, we didn’t have much, but why would you throw every good thing we did have away just for your moment of glory?”
I pulled absentmindedly at the grass beneath me, twisting the blades around between my fingers. “The royal guard… killed my parents. I was going to confront him, and then… then he was dead. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret getting his blood on my hands like that. And, evidently… the entire village’s.”
Petra averted her gaze again.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she murmured, fist clenching in her lap until her knuckles went white. “But you know what, Ace? That’s not even the worst of it. It’s been months since then, and all this time I’ve been coming back here over and over waiting for you even though I’m so mad that you abandoned us and left me here. Where have you been?”
It was then that I remembered everything I had wanted to tell her before I found what was left of the village. I told her everything, from invading the royal palace with Knife Boy to being dumped in the woods to waking up in Frida’s house to reuniting with Basil and everything in between. When I told her the truth about the curse, she leapt to her feet and began screaming at me, letting loose the kind of pain and anguish that can only be felt by a child who has been lied to her whole life.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she yelled. “I’ve been here on my own for months because the royal guard finally decided to take us all out, and now you’re telling me we never deserved ANY of this? That all this time we were struggling in poverty and isolation is just because everyone hates us, not because there’s something wrong with us? How is that supposed to make this less terrible?” Petra started crying then, hot and angry tears rolling down her face.
“It isn’t,” I replied gently. “I just thought you deserved to know the truth.”
“I don’t care anymore! Whether we’re broken or not, we’re still not allowed to be happy! What’s the point?” Petra snatched the bow and arrow off her shoulder and flung it across the dirt, sending stiff feathers flying into the air. A deep, ragged breath escaped her lungs before she continued, quieter, “Just when you think things are working out, they find another way to ruin you. By taking out the king, Ace, you brought us one step forward but many, many steps back.”
“I know.”
Petra sighed and dropped back down into the grass, sitting cross-legged with her chin in her hands. She sniffled once or twice and wiped the lingering tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. We sat there in silence for a few moments, as the reality of what our lives had swiftly turned into began to sink in.
“You’re going to leave me here again, aren’t you?” she whispered after a couple of minutes.
My stomach lurched, and I knew that after all that both of us had been through, I could not lie to her.
“You could come with me,” I suggested instead.
“What, and leave home?” Petra shook her head, smiling despite herself. “I couldn’t, not after everything.”
“There’s nothing left here, Petra. It’d just be you.”
Petra frowned at the dirt, yanking blades of grass and twirling them between her fingers.
“It’s different for you, Ace. Home for you was always something far-off, like some fantasy you got to live as a child where you had parents who loved you and tried to keep you safe. Me? This place, and the curse that I always thought came along with it, is all I’ve ever known.”
“I lost my home, so I made a new one, over and over again. You can do the same.”
She looked back up at me and furrowed her brow. “Easy for you to say. You knew life before this. For you, the Village of the Heartless gets to be an unfortunate dark patch in between two perfect realities where you get to be safe and live happily ever after. I don’t have that luxury. This village was your temporary hell, but it’s my hometown.”
It was a child’s oversimplification; when I thought of Swallow’s Point and its inhabitants, the ever-present fear of being discovered as Heartless, any image I could conjure up in my mind was far from idyllic. The Village of the Heartless had become home to me for many years, but I had also indirectly been the cause of its demise. I couldn’t deny that Petra’s words had some truth to them, however exaggerated.
I paused, considering my next words carefully. “Listen, Petra, like it or not, I can’t stay here. I’m a fugitive,” I pointed out. “The entire kingdom thinks I’m dead, and if I’m ever caught, I can assure you they will not hesitate to try to kill me again, and this time, they will make sure they succeed. You can go back and stay with Esther, tell her the truth if you want, or tell her I’m dead, I don’t care. But I can’t stay here, not now.”
Petra averted her eyes again, pulling her knees up to her chest.
“No, I’m coming with you,” she muttered.
I had been expecting more of a fight. “You are?”
“I don’t think I have a choice.” Petra at last raised her eyes to meet mine again, and I saw the glint of determination behind the last few tears she hadn’t been able to suppress. “I’m not going to let you get yourself killed just to make me happy by staying here. And I’m not going to let you leave me again, either.”
I watched in awe as she clambered to her feet and walked over behind the tree, retrieving the bow and arrow she had thrown in her anger.
“But if we’re heading out together again”—she held them out to me—“you’re going to be needing this.”
I took it and ran my thumb and forefinger along the thin maple of the bow, instantly being called back to the day I received it from Marley, and the first time I succeeded at hitting the targets I had set up behind Bertrand’s house out of old tin cans and spoiled gourds, and the nights I spent perched in that same oak tree looking for trouble after dark. This was not the bow with which I had condemned my village, but the one with which I had defended it; Petra now entrusted me with that duty again, although there was nothing left to defend.
The incongruity of this responsibility weighed heavily on me as we dusted the dirt from our pants and set off up the hill through what was once the Village of the Heartless, headed toward the back woods in the direction of the commune. I came to a halt at the top of the hill, frozen stiff before the remains of Bertrand’s house, the tiny run-down cottage I had called home for so many years. Like the rest of the village, it was only burnt rubble now, sprouting soft and verdant with the new growth of spring. I was struck with the realization that Bertrand had died still believing he was a failure for never breaking a curse that had never existed; I wondered briefly whether in his final moments he thought of me fondly or cursed himself for ever giving me shelter.
The weight of the suffering I had caused rose up from the blood-soaked soil and flooded the vacant spaces where my heart should be, and it settled there, heavy and still.
For the first few weeks, whenever I would try to bring up the nearly eight years that stretched between us, Basil would go tense in his shoulders and quickly change the subject to something more mundane, like if I was feeling okay or what we were going to have for supper. He’d talk me in circles about life in the commune and the array of people who lived there, or reminisce on our early years when we’d play made-up games all day and sit speaking in hushed tones about our single shared secret by night—but the moment the conversation drifted too close to that fateful day or the many years that followed, Basil was quick to shut it all down.
I grew tired of the run-around late one afternoon, as I sat at Frida’s dining table watching Basil flit aimlessly around the kitchen, looking for something to occupy his hands in an effort to avoid confronting me.
“Basil, we have to talk about what happened.”
For the briefest of moments, Basil froze, before he resumed rummaging through the kitchen cabinets in search of nothing in particular. He said nothing in response.
“I told you everything,” I pointed out. “This isn’t fair.”
Basil turned and glared at me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I quickly swallowed my frustration. “How do you expect to bridge the gap between us, then? Did you just expect us to pick up where we left off? If you’re hiding something from me to protect me, don’t bother. I’m not a child and it’s not your job, as my friend, to try to shield me from horrors I know plenty about myself.”
“Fine.” Basil pulled out the chair across from mine and dropped into it roughly. I didn’t miss the wince when he sat down. “If you really want to know what happened, then I’ll tell you.”
“And I’m happy to listen,” I replied with what I hoped was a reassuring tone.
Basil breathed deeply and looked out somewhere into the middle distance. Then, he began, “Well, you remember the last time we saw each other. Eventually, I managed to scramble away. I don’t remember if someone intervened or if I just found an opening, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I took off running into the woods, as best as I could with a broken leg, and I guess I ended up running in the opposite direction you did.” Basil snorted, though it wasn’t really funny.
“I didn’t stop running until the adrenaline wore off and I could barely move,” he continued. “I pressed onward, though, for a couple weeks. I had no sense of where I was headed or if anyone would ever find me, but I was afraid of what would happen if I went back. I barely ate, drank, or slept that entire time. Those were the most terrifying nights of my life, wondering if I would die out there. Eventually, though, I was found by some folks from Verdigris out hunting, and they carried me unconscious to Frida’s house. I guess that’s why I started taking walks into the woods from time to time as I got older; never thought I’d actually find anyone, though, until I found you. Carried you pretty far until I managed to find help.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? At first, I wouldn’t let anyone near me. If they tried to touch me, I’d start screaming. Frida was the first person I warmed up to, and after I was back on my feet she took me on as an apprentice. But in a way, the entire commune raised me. They all took me in as one of their own, this terrified kid they found in the woods, and I think they’d have done the same even if I wasn’t Heartless. In spite of everything that happened, I was lucky. I guess even us cursed folks get lucky sometimes, don’t we?”
Basil slid his gaze over to meet my eyes and smiled earnestly in spite of his words. I immediately felt a pang of guilt, and Basil must have noticed it in my face, because he quirked an eyebrow at me and let the smile drop into a frown.
“Basil, there’s something I didn’t tell you,” I whispered, biting my bottom lip. “It’s about the curse.”
As expected, my words sucked the air out of the room. An unnerving silence stretched across the kitchen table, threatening to widen the gap between us that we had only just begun to mend. But peculiarly, the look that passed across Basil’s face was not one of surprise or trepidation, but of something akin to shame, a sort of conflicted expression that took the confession from my lips and painted it across his own.
Before I could open my mouth, Basil stood up abruptly from the table and moved to stand by the kitchen counter so that I could not see his face. He leaned forward with his arms outstretched and palms pressed against the counter’s edge.
“You’re going to tell me it’s not real, aren’t you?” he asked, so quietly I could barely hear him.
“Something tells me I don’t have to,” I responded.
Basil said nothing. Instead, he merely bowed his head.
“How long have you known?” I demanded, keeping my voice low.
“I’ve known for years,” he admitted. “Everyone here does. I was afraid to tell you.”
My mouth went dry. Several seconds passed in tense silence; Basil still wouldn’t turn to meet my eyes.
“So you’re telling me,” I finally spoke, pausing as I tried to gather my suddenly spiraling thoughts into something coherent, “that you all know about this, and yet you let your own people suffer under those lies?”
Basil whirled around to face me, expression darkening. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why doesn’t anyone come back for us? Why didn’t you come back for me?”
The usual warmth in Basil’s eyes flared into raging fire.
“Why didn’t I come back for you?” he snapped. “I just spelled out every horror of my life for you—at your behest, might I add—and you have the nerve to think I should have come back for you? You wouldn’t have been there anyway!”
“But all these years, I thought we were monsters—”
“What does it change?” Basil shouted, throwing his arms wide in exasperation.
I swallowed my rebuttal, and his statement rang through the empty house for what felt like ages in the resulting silence. After a few moments, Basil shook his head and reached for his cane, and I realized belatedly that his hands were trembling.
“Gods above, Ace, this is why I didn’t want to talk about this. Try again when you’re mature enough to listen.”
With that, Basil disappeared outside, the back kitchen door slamming shut behind him. I stood up to go after him, but a firm hand came down on my shoulder, lowering me back into my seat. I swiveled to see Frida standing behind me, a somber expression on her face.
“He won’t go far, just give him some space,” she reassured me, already bustling about the kitchen as if she’d been waiting for our impromptu meeting to adjourn so she could go about her business.
“Were you eavesdropping?” I questioned. She nodded. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough,” was all Frida said. “Now, I’ll fix us all something to eat, you just stay there and calm yourself down.”
Startled, I looked down and realized my own hands had been shaking too, in plain view out on the tabletop. I quickly hid them from sight, pressing them between my knees to try and stop their anxious jittering. As Frida set to work lighting the stove, I allowed myself to consider what Basil had said, and a cold, heavy feeling settled into my chest.
By all accounts, I was a murderer, even if King Brutus had deserved it. I was also a thief, even if it was only for my own survival and even if it made me no different from someone like Knife Boy. I had left behind Petra, Bertrand and the others without so much as a thank you. And now, I had even hurt my best friend, the first person who had ever truly understood me, and potentially driven a permanent stake through our already complicated relationship. Would any of that have really been different, had I known the truth all along?
Eventually, Frida slid a bowl of hot soup in front of me and waited for me to take a few sips before starting in on her own portion.
“As you might imagine, all of this is a very sore subject for Basil. I don’t like to make him talk about it,” she told me, though it didn’t strike me as a reprimand. “He’s a very mature and optimistic young man. I think sometimes that causes me to forget he has seen as much hardship as many of the rest of us, and perhaps more so, given his young age.”
“He was the same way when we were young,” I responded, eyes downcast into my soup. “I looked up to him, I think, because he seemed so much more sure of himself than I was. I think a part of me always believed he was unshakeable, even up until the end. But I now realize how childish I have been for thinking that way.”
Frida hummed in response, and we remained silent for the duration of our meal. When I had finished, she peered out the kitchen window and tutted in disapproval before disappearing into the other room and coming back with Basil’s cloak draped over her arm.
“Here, why don’t you go bring this to him, and see if he’ll come back in to eat?” Frida suggested, passing the garment off to me. “I don’t want him catching a cold.”
I found Basil sitting cross-legged in the tall grass beside the house, cane sitting discarded at his side. He was flitting between staring at his hands in his lap and gazing out at the rest of the commune. I was cautious to approach, almost feeling like I was intruding on some kind of private moment. Basil jumped when I draped his cloak over his shoulders but quickly sobered up and turned away again when he realized who was suddenly dropping down next to him.
“Are you here to apologize?” he muttered when I was silent for a moment.
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry, Basil,” I said softly. “It was unfair of me to attack you like that. I was being insensitive.”
Basil shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not, I shouldn’t have pressured you to talk in the first place,” I insisted. “But if you don’t want me to push it, I’ll leave it be.”
He shook his head. “No, I appreciate the apology.” Basil pulled his cloak tighter around himself. “What you don’t understand is that nobody here wants to go out into the world and draw attention to ourselves. Even if I thought I could, I wouldn’t want to. That’s the very thing that got me—both of us—hurt before.”
I began yanking blades of grass from the dirt absentmindedly. “Why would someone fabricate such a cruel lie?”
Basil didn’t have to guess what I was talking about.
“People fear things they can’t understand, Ace.”
“But how could anyone believe it?”
“We did.”
My breath caught in my throat. “That… That’s different! We were only eight—we were victims!”
“Maybe so, but either way you and I both still believed it.”
“I’m still trying to make sense of this. This whole time, it’s just been a convenient lie for the higher ups?” I cried, finally turning to look at Basil. He was frowning at me, eyes sullen and brow furrowed deeply.
“You’re living proof of that yourself,” he pointed out. “If the Heartless were really dangerous monsters, then why haven’t the royal guard taken out your entire village?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s easier for them to blame some arcane curse and cast us aside to flounder on our own than it is to challenge everything they think it means to be human. Bigotry is for cowards.”
“That’s it? It’s really been that simple all along?”
“The cruelest explanation is usually the simplest one.” Basil sighed.
We both fell quiet, but this time the silence was a comfortable one, not so unnerving as it had been in the house. After a few minutes, I remembered the soup waiting for Basil on the stove and nudged his knee with my elbow.
“Do you want to come in and have supper?” I asked when he looked at me quizzically. “Frida has soup waiting for you.”
Basil shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“I know, but you should try to eat something,” I urged. “Just a little. What do you say?”
Finally, Basil nodded, and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards ever so slightly. It wasn’t much, but I could see the faintest glimmer return to his eyes. I let Basil use my shoulder as leverage to push himself back to his feet, and we headed back into the house side by side, as equals for the first time in years, if ever at all. And though we said nothing, I felt as if we came to understand each other for the first time all over again.
