The older woman dropped her cane. “Sacrilege!”
The beams creaked, and the wood moaned as the house lurched forward on its spiderlike roots. A window slammed downstairs, and Aignan’s triumphant voice rang out, “It’s thanks to me, you know! I’m a powerful sorcerer.”
Martine clutched at her heart. “That lamb is cursed!”
“The greatest of the Cursed,” Aignan proclaimed, puffed up with pride. “Bow before my power!”
I burst out laughing at the sight of Martine, overwhelmed, collapsing to her knees in desperate prayer. The wind rose, whipping harder.
“Faster, please,” I whispered to the house, as if it could hear me, before addressing the mist butterfly. “Guide the confectionery to Arawn.”
The butterfly darted straight into the chimney. I flew down the stairs, heart pounding, and rushed to my kitchen. Planting both palms flat on either side of the closed grimoire, I stared it down without blinking.
“I need to ask you something,” I murmured, though I already knew the wretched grimoire had the nasty habit of answering with a sharpno. “Rewrite the recipe Arawn sought to end his life and erase the sucremort. Transform it into a recipe that can restore his human heart. Bind his hearts together. Even mine, if it helps.”
The grimoire opened, and ink blossomed across a fresh page.
“For such a recipe, only a confectioner with an unshakable heart may hope to succeed. You would not survive. You are far too inexperienced.”
A breathless, bitter laugh slipped out of me. “You know, I’m really starting to get sick of being told what I can or cannot do.”
A crack split the leather cover, but I pressed my palms flat against the page anyway.
“I am a confectioner! And you are MY grimoire. So stop underestimating me and obey. Let me enter Arawn’s heart!”
“His heart is too powerful for you. The sucremort will consume you.”
“It won’t harm me. Once inside, I know I can reach him. I believe in him. Now, it’s your turn to believe in me.”
The ink bled like blood, drowning the light, carving crimson letters onto a backdrop of shadow. I swallowed hard.
The Syrup of Bound Hearts: the origin of sucre d'or and sucremort.
A fatal candy.
The warnings engraved on the page resonated like a curse. A fragment of my own heart would be required. One mistake, and the syrup would turn to poison, burning flesh, crushing bones, and tearing the drinker apart from within.
“Only a heart chosen by the sucre d'or, in its purest, most powerful form, can vanquish the evil of sucremort.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Let’s just pray I don’t blow him up.”
But the grimoire wasn’t finished. Ink bled again, forming a final warning.
“The bond between confectioner and sorcerer must be unique and unbreakable.
Otherwise, the recipe will fail, and the confectioner will perish.”
The words weighed on my chest like a stone. Arawn’s true confectioner… His soulmate was Nyla. Not me. Sugar had neverchosen me. But I loved him. The strength of our feelings had to count for something. This bond we had woven, this trust he had given me, the way he savored my pastries as if they were the only things capable of softening his world. That would be enough.
“It has to be enough,” I whispered, my gaze burning with determination.
The grimoire finally revealed the recipe, divided into two parts:
A crystalline shell, tender under the tongue, shattering into a thousand melting fragments… to reveal a flowing heart, black as ink, where sleeps a poison capable of binding a soul—or breaking it forever.
Ingredients:
For the Coulis of the Bound Heart:
