Night Shine

by Tessa Gratton

  What else explained her brand? The matching many-petaled flower here in the mountain? That she’d appeared from nowhere, without a mother or name?

  No, Nothing thought. There could be countless other explanations.

  She closed her eyes, but as she traced her memories, she found herself awash in random moments with Kirin. Kirin tying the bracelet of her hair reverently around her wrist, and allowing her to do the same to him; his gentle thumb brushing a tear from her cheek the first time she escaped from the witches; that same day, eleven-year-old Kirin’s fury as he demanded the witches be banned from Nothing’s presence; racing across the patterned sand of the Garden of Moons; shooting her an approving dark smile when he noticed her crawling above the First Consort’s library, perfectly balanced on the ceiling beam; kneeling together at a shrine to the great demon of the palace and tapping coded messages against each other’s knuckles while the priests recited prayers. And his arms tight around her when they said their farewells at the beginning of this summer. “I’ll see you soon, and then after the investiture, we’ll never be separated again,” he’d murmured, and Nothing had whispered into his ear, “I want to go with you.” “I don’t think you truly do, and this is my only time with Sky.”And Nothing had realized suddenly that he was correct: she hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of her palace house. It was too frightening. Kirin knew her better than she knew herself, sometimes.

  Every part of her life was anchored somehow to Kirin, since that day in the garden when he’d stared her down.

  No matter what else, she had to find him. Somehow he would know who or what she was.

  Nothing got up. She still wore the fine undergarments from the night before and stripped them off. With a bit of fresh water from the ceramic bowl on the stand, she rubbed as much of the demon paint away as she could, on the hem of the very lovely blue dress. It smeared on the silk like an old wound.

  Nothing didn’t feel like a demon. She felt like… nothing. Like herself. What was she supposed to feel?

  Standing, Nothing glowered at herself in one of the little mirrors, then went to the trunks to pull out something to wear.

  Once dressed in a short black tunic over a wrap skirt, her hair finger-combed, Nothing marched to the door.

  It opened before she could touch it.

  Spring stood with a tray of food balanced against her hip. “Oh,” the girl said.

  “Spring.” Nothing blocked the way.

  “I brought you breakfast.”

  Nothing bit her lip, thinking of what the sorceress had said: Kirin would eat what Nothing ate. With a firm nod, she backed out of Spring’s way so the other girl could set the food down upon the makeup table.

  “You have green under your ear,” Spring said. Her pink orchids bobbed gently against her braids as she lowered her chin shyly.

  “Huh,” Nothing said around a bite of warm bread, rubbing absently at her ear.

  “No, ah…” Spring reached for Nothing’s other ear, but paused just before touching her.

  Nothing stopped chewing and stared at Spring, wide-eyed. She dropped the bread back onto the tray and used the sleeve of her robe to rub where the girl indicated. It was satisfying to ruin another piece of the sorceress’s gifts.

  “I want to see Kirin,” Nothing said.

  “The sorceress will bring him to dinner.”

  “Really?” Nothing leaned forward to stare into Spring’s honey-colored eyes.

  “That is what she said,” Spring murmured.

  With renewed energy, Nothing tore back into the bread, adding a strip of bacon to her quick meal. She ate it all while Spring watched. Bread, bacon, sliced pear, and a little bit of peppery cheese. It was too much, and Nothing felt a resulting huge rock in her stomach.

  She thought of Kirin, full. She supposed this promise was the only thing that would have gotten her to agree to have dinner with the sorceress again, and the sorceress had guessed as much.

  Annoyed to be so easily manipulated, Nothing said, “Are you alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you live without your heart?”

  “Magic.”

  Nothing scoffed. “Will you get it back?”

  “Only if it’s given back, only if…” Spring looked away, toward the door.

  “If what?” Nothing tried to sound gentle, though she felt anything but. Where had this aggression come from? In the palace she’d never made demands, nor spoken up for herself. But if this was what she had to do to help Kirin, she would.

  Spring met her gaze and finished. “Only if the demon comes back before the mountain kills my heart.”

  Guilt choked Nothing, for no good reason. Her throat closed with it, though Nothing pretended it was nausea from eating too much. She managed to ask, “Is your heart somewhere I could find it and restore it to you?”

  “It’s in the mountain,” Spring murmured. “But if you take it, everything else will die.”

  “The mountain is already dead; that’s why it had a demon, not a spirit.”

  “Not the mountain.”

  “The sorceress! If I take it, she’ll die.” Nothing wanted to throw something.

  Spring nodded. Nothing touched the lowest of the pink orchids, bobbing beside Spring’s jaw: just the tip of her finger to the tip of one of its long petals. She thought of the sorceress’s mouth when she did, and Spring’s matching pink lips.

  “I don’t care if the sorceress dies,” Nothing said quietly. She knew it was a lie.

  “I appreciate you asking about my heart,” Spring replied just as quietly.

  Nothing swallowed and stepped away. “What am I supposed to do today, while I wait for dinner with Kirin? May I see Sky again?”

  “You may go wherever you like.”

  “I would like to see Kirin.”

  “If you can find him, you can see him.”

  “Ugh!”

  Spring smiled slightly. “It is not my rule.”

  “The sorceress,” Nothing said again.

  “The sorceress.”

  It was so simply said that Nothing found herself touching Spring’s hand in sympathy.

  Spring brushed her knuckles to Nothing’s palm, collected the empty tray, and left.

  Nothing sighed heavily, thinking surely it would be more difficult to find Kirin than anything else. She put her fists on her hips. She supposed she should look for an exit. Once she had Kirin and managed to wake Sky, she’d need to lead them out of this mountain.

  She left the chamber, skimming her hand along the corridor as she walked to the right. If the sorceress planned to bring Kirin to dinner, he would survive a few more hours.

  “I need sunlight,” Nothing said aloud. “A stairway up, perhaps, a little mountain lake would be nice.”

  If she had been the demon of this mountain, surely she could find what she needed.

  Then again, if she was the demon, she had been yesterday, too, and that hadn’t helped her find Kirin.

  With no other direction, Nothing walked and searched, opening doors just as she had previously. She found the library again and wished to examine it, but could think of no good it would do either herself or her friends. She found dusty guest rooms and finally a staircase. It twisted both up and down, and she paused, smelling the cool air, wondering if there were a trick to it.

  She went up.

  The stairs were cut perfectly into the stone of the mountain, and the granite glittered with flecks of quartz that glowed enough for her to see. She wished she’d picked shorter skirts, but found a rhythm kicking the hem out as she climbed. It was almost fun, though it left her winded.

  She emerged into a cavern cut with tiny alcoves, each home to a shrine or a statue. Every god whose name she knew was represented, from the Queens of Heaven to the gods of rain, and there were rain-forest spirit shrines too, and demon houses made of tiny bones. The center of the floor was carved with the many-petaled flower. Nothing skimmed her bare toe against the clean line of one petal. If she lay down and
spread her arms, she might just touch either edge of the carving. Unlike most of the similar carvings she’d seen, here there was no inlaid gold or mother-of-pearl, no colored glass, no paint. It was simply a carving, as if it needed nothing else.

  “It’s a beautiful flower,” she said.

  Across from the stairwell entrance was a wide arch, and she went to it. The darkness beyond was a tunnel; at the end was a gentle light.

  The air turned cold and smelled of grass and dirt.

  Nothing walked faster, watching the growing light. It was another arch, leading toward brilliant green and blue.

  She stepped out of the mountain and into a small tucked valley surrounded by grim black peaks. But scraggly grasses and tough spruce grew down toward exactly what she’d sought: a small lake the color of the sky.

  And there were tiny pink and white flowers blossoming around the mirror lake in a pretty explosion. The breeze was as cold as snow, but in the light she could feel the thin warmth of the sun.

  Nothing dashed toward the lake. Her bare feet numbed against the cold flowers and earth, pricked by sharp pebbles, but she liked the tickle of flowers and leaves and the wind pulling at her hair.

  At the lakeside, dawn sprites hovered just above the water, dipping their feet in and buzzing over the surface in games of tag. Nothing had never seen anything more idyllic.

  The sprites looked like tiny naked human children with orange and bright-yellow bodies and translucent wings sparkling in every shade from deep violet to red to vivid orange. Like the dawn sky.

  “Hello,” Nothing said. “May I swim in this lake, or drink of it?”

  Three of the ten sprites zipped to her, wings abuzz, and studied her with the black eyes of bumblebees. “Ask Esrithalan,” they said in unison.

  “Who is Esrithalan?” she asked, wondering what powerful spirit had such a name. It occurred to her in a flash that it might be the sorceress’s name, and what a boon that information could be, but the thought was dashed when the sprites sang, “The unicorn!”

  A stunned Nothing looked around. There, within a copse of thin, trembling alders with golden leaves and gray whorls in their bark, a small creature knelt watching her.

  Nothing walked carefully around the edge of the lake toward the unicorn.

  It was delicate and gray-white, like clouds and ocean waves, or rain streaming down glass. The horn was impossible to miss, curving gently off its brow and full of so many colors it seemed almost a dull steel. Cute as a goat, proud as a pony, it had purplish eyes, solid as pearls, and its nose was a soft-looking pink. Its fur seemed downy, and Nothing wanted to touch it, pet her hand down its back to the small, sleek tail.

  “Hello, Esrithalan,” she said, breathless. “May I join you?”

  “Yes,” it said prettily.

  Nothing knelt near enough to touch the unicorn but without crowding it. “I’m Nothing,” she said. It smelled of salt and brine.

  The unicorn snorted. “Hardly,” it replied.

  “It’s my name.”

  “Is it?”

  Frowning, Nothing said, “Yes. It is.”

  “Is that what you are?”

  She supposed she ought to have expected as much from the unicorn. They were avatars of the gods, according to priests: neither spirit nor living creature, not quite a god. Made of god-stuff, not aether nor matter. Nothing remembered Kirin liking the definition when they’d been taught it, and the phrase god-stuff. Because it was both generic and specific.

  Nothing said, “The sorceress thinks I’m her demon.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m just a girl.”

  “What is just a girl?”

  Nothing opened her mouth, then glanced down at her body, unsure what to say. She touched her lips, then her chest, and slid her hand down over a breast and let it fall into her lap. Everyone had assumed Kirin was a boy because of his body. Was she making the same mistake? Assuming she was a girl because of her body?

  The unicorn closed its long-lashed eyes. It spoke as though it had overheard her thought: “If a body was all it took to be something, there would be no demons.”

  Nothing paused to understand. Demons were dead spirits and needed a new house, a new body, to exist. “Demons possess new bodies all the time,” she murmured. “I don’t feel like I’m possessed.”

  “I wonder what that feels like,” the unicorn said.

  “You aren’t a very helpful unicorn,” Nothing said.

  The unicorn made a huffing sound she suspected was laughter.

  Sunlight glinted off the lake, and Nothing sighed. Flowers bent and danced in the breeze and that breeze chased their ripples straight across the lake, marring the reflected sky with tiny wavelets. Nothing loved it here, too. There was so much she loved about the Fifth Mountain and its foothills and lava fields. Was that because it was beautiful, or because in another life it had been her home?

  She drew a deep breath, focused on her chest and lungs, the weight of air against her stomach, and she listened to the brush of hair on her shoulders as she nodded, felt the press of her heels against her bottom, her bent knees, the line of her shins against the earth itself. Sunlight at the nape of her neck, the cinch of the sash holding her tunic tightly closed.

  “I can’t be a demon,” Nothing said.

  The unicorn said, “All right.”

  Relief melted her backward, until she lay in the grass beside Esrithalan, legs stretched toward the lake, hands under her head. Mountain breeze—the breath of the Fifth Mountain, Nothing thought whimsically—fluttered the alder leaves. They twitched and shivered like little drops of molten gold.

  “What does it feel like to be a girl?” the unicorn asked.

  Nothing answered without thinking: “Sometimes I feel like a mountain, but other times I feel small and like I’m being watched. Judged. Like I’ll never be good enough.”

  “For what?”

  “For anything,” she whispered.

  “That certainly doesn’t sound like something a demon would say.”

  Anger surged up her spine. “What does it feel like to be a unicorn?” she demanded.

  “Like being a unicorn.”

  Nothing groaned, but the answer deflated her anger. She took another deep breath, her chest lifting, and blew it out in a stream. Like the mountain breeze. Maybe it felt like this to be a mountain: the earth your body, bones of ancient crystals, blood like rivers of magma heating you up. Flowers and stones for skin and your mouth a lake. If she was a mountain, she wasn’t a girl. Unless one could be both a girl and a mountain. Like Kirin was both a prince and a maiden. Her sleep-melting mind liked the thought.

  The unicorn plopped its head onto her stomach, sighing like a weary dog. Nothing buried a hand in the silky fur at its neck and relaxed further. The air was cool and hazy, and the alder leaves flashed like tiny oval mirrors, catching light in a slow dazzle. The sun made the unicorn’s horn into a curve of pure luminescence, a sickle moon.

  For a moment Nothing thought she understood what it felt like to be a unicorn.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN NOTHING WOKE, SHE was alone. Annoyed at herself for not asking the unicorn more practical questions—about magic, about finding her way around the mountain—she got up and went to visit Sky.

  But in the silent altar room where the warrior slept, with its ceiling of crystal rain, Sky was not alone. A person sat against the base of the altar, youthful and lean. Nothing couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl, and in a moment of clarity left over from her time with the unicorn she decided it didn’t matter. They seemed younger than her, maybe fifteen years old, though in a place like this was it even possible to judge age or gender or more elusive things like humanity? The sorceress looked like a strange young woman, but if the rumors of when she’d arrived at the Fifth Mountain were true, she had to be closer to one hundred years old!

  “What are you doing here?” she asked darkly.

  The youth opened vivid gray eyes that seemed to fill half
their pale, narrow face. Sleek blond-white hair fell to their chin in fine, straight lines, and they wore a gray robe and gray trousers belted with white. They blinked up at her, then drew one knee up against their chest and hugged it to them with oddly long hands. “Guarding him,” they said. They were barefoot too and had oddly long feet to match their hands.

  “Is he in danger?” Nothing neared the altar, hunting Sky’s sleeping face for signs of damage or trouble.

  “Not from me,” the youth said. “I admire him.” As Nothing walked toward Sky’s head, they tilted their face to follow her with their gaze. She glanced down at their watery gray eyes. The gray flecks in their irises shifted like tiny ripples. Definitely not human.

  “Hmm,” Nothing said, and touched Sky’s cheek. He was cool, but not cold, and his chest rose and fell as smoothly and slowly as it had yesterday.

  “Is he crying? His tears…”  The youth trailed off wistfully.

  Nothing put both hands on Sky protectively. “Selegan River spirit!”

  The dragon stood too fast to be seen and stared imploringly at her. “I want him to live.”

  Nothing and the dragon were of a height, both slender and small, and for the briefest moment Nothing wondered if they were more the same than different. She bit her bottom lip and leaned her hip against the altar. One hand remained resting against Sky’s chest. She stared at the dragon. “When you said ‘I know you,’ were you talking to me or to Sky?”

  “You.” The dragon frowned prettily. “Don’t I know you? You seem familiar.”

  “Familiar how? Do I look like someone you know?”

  “I am unsure,” the dragon said. “The potential of the moment has passed—I might have been able to answer had you asked me then.”

  Nothing sighed in annoyance. Neither spoke for a moment, sizing the other up. Eventually she said, “Do you know where Kirin is?”

  “Kirin,” the dragon said slowly, then repeated it, the name deliberate and soft on their lips. “The beautiful maiden who is also a prince.”

  Nothing whispered, “The Beautiful Maiden Who Is Also a Prince,” and the rightness of it felt like a name. Both identities true, neither negating the other. Maybe the two together made each other better—made each other more.