by Bree Barton
“I’m glad to see you kept the melonfish,” Muri said. “I’ve always been so taken with the idea that a creature can illuminate itself from within. Sometimes we need a reminder that we can create our own light.”
“That,” Mia teased, “is what we call a metaphor.”
And when, a week into the journey, one of the pink kamas hurt his foot, shrieking as his cloven toes touched the sand, Mia stepped forward.
“Mind if I take a look?”
She extracted her notebook from her pack and scrutinized a sketch she’d drawn in the Curatorium of a horse’s injured hoof. Then she purloined tea leaves from the food stores, a swatch of bloodmoss one of the women was keeping on hand, and a drop of her own elixir. She heated the ingredients over the fire—and applied the paste using the magic in her hands.
By morning the kama had made a complete recovery. He stood evenly on all four feet, spitting globs of saliva. He brayed, bleated, and—to Mia’s ears, anyway—growled his thanks.
From that point forward, whenever any member of the caravan, two-legged or four-, had a hurt or ailment, they came to Mia first.
The days blended into a soothing rhythm. Kamas, campfire, desert, sky. Every talk with the Shadowess buoyed Mia’s spirits, and each time she healed a scrape or cut, she felt stronger in her own body, her own mind.
When the caravan crossed the Glasddiran border, the pink kamas struggling to find purchase in the western marshlands, Mia was already dreading the moment they would part ways. But there was something she had to do before she could go to Kaer Killian, and by the time they reached the outskirts of Ilwysion, she could no longer forestall it.
“I’ll be in Killian Village,” said Muri, hugging her close. “Take good care.”
Mia nodded numbly.
She walked all day. She didn’t need a map: she knew the way by heart. Her feet found familiar pathways, moss and lichen stitching a soft green carpet on ancient rain-worn stones.
Night had fallen when she made it to the cottage. It was just as she remembered. The sweeping balcony. The gently sloping eaves.
When Mia saw it rising from the bluff, bathed in moonlight, she had an overpowering urge to turn back. She should have stayed with the caravan. Traveled with them to Kaer Killian, even though that, too, filled her with dread, imagining what they might find.
Yet here she was. Standing before her home. Desperately wishing to be anywhere else—and knowing she’d made the right choice. Not in spite of the painful memories. Because of them.
She climbed the old path, touching the birch tree with the knots that looked like eyes, stepping around a colossal white rock. Mia paused for a moment, remembering. As a girl she had argued the rock was a die cast by the four gods in a celestial parlor game. Angelyne said it looked like an elephant. They had never agreed.
Mia scaled the five steps to the porch, skipping the second and fourth, her childhood ritual intact. She swept her hand across glaucous cobwebs draped over two rocking chairs before facing the iron door. She clutched her satchel, drew her shoulder blades down her back—and reached for the rose-shaped knocker.
The staleness struck her first, the damp smell of a house untouched by human feet or hands for many months. The moonlight fell in uneven chunks and wedges, revealing curled brown leaves blown in from some forgotten window.
Mia stood, motionless. Unable to pull her eyes away from the empty kitchen. Always toasty warm and filled with tantalizing aromas, this little room had been the soul of her home.
Now a thick mantle of dust coated the square table. No potato cakes dunked in sweet brown mustard, no twisty pretzels, no garlic goose-meat pies. Mia remembered how, on her fourteenth birthday, her mother had spent all day fretting over a butter cake—only to accidentally send it flying off the cooling rack. The four of them had sat cross-legged, scooping crumbly hunks off the floor, dipping them into a bowl of fresh-whipped cream.
Now, standing in the desolate kitchen, Mia had to remind herself to breathe. She placed one hand on her heart and one hand on her belly, just as the Shadowess had taught her, and felt her diaphragm expand and contract. She sorely missed the bloodbloom charm; she had looked for it everywhere in the House of Shadows. But it was gone.
For a moment she thought she detected the rich, velvety scent of butter. Then it vanished. How could a fragrance—no, the memory of a fragrance—bring so much pain?
She heard Muri’s gentle voice. Because the body holds pain, just like the mind.
Mia took a deep, brave breath and climbed the stairs.
For the first thirteen years of her life, Mia had shared a room with Angelyne. But after her first bleeding, as she teetered on the cusp of womanhood, her parents had decided she deserved her own space. They’d set to work transforming Griffin’s study, clearing out his collection of treasures from the four kingdoms—curios, maps, compasses, astrolabes, and countless books on magic.
“Please don’t take them,” Mia had begged, drunk on the thought of so many precious artifacts from a world beyond her own.
“You can keep the maps,” her mother said. “But you have enough books already.”
Mia had raved and ranted, refusing to eat for a whole day. What a spoiled brat she’d been. Now, of course, she understood why her mother had forbidden her to read her father’s books on magic. They’d been inked with fear and hatred, not to mention lies.
Mia stepped out of the hallway—and into her room.
Everything was exactly as she’d left it the day her father had announced she would marry the prince. Books neatly arranged on their shelves and four walls thatched with maps, anatomical sketches, and, best of all: her life-sized Wound Man, a faceless man with sundry weapons plunged into his body. Beside each wound she had scribbled various modalities of healing.
She looked away sharply. How could an ink outline of an anonymous man first drawn hundreds of years ago remind her so much of Quin?
Mia padded out of the room, closing the door softly behind her. She placed her foot on the top step. She would go downstairs. Even if it was important to remember her past, there was no need to torture herself. She had only come to say goodbye.
But she did not go downstairs. She pivoted, drawn to the room at the end of the hallway. Angelyne’s room.
She made it no further than the doorframe. Her gaze snagged on a rack of satin hair ribbons, embellished with feathers in a dozen shades of green. In this room she saw the inchoate dreams of the castle Angie would build on the Isle of Forgetting. The fantasy life she had chosen—by surrendering her own.
The dam broke. Mia staggered backward, consumed by grief. She fled down the stairs, her feet striking the floor in the exact spot Wynna Rose had stopped her own heart. Impetuous Mia Rose, skipping home through the forest, never suspecting she had just lost her mother. She’d lost her sister, too, though she wouldn’t know it for some time.
Mia stumbled over the threshold and into the pale moonlight, leaving the door ajar. She dropped her satchel and sank onto the stoop, eyes blurred with salt water. Hugged her knees to her chest, inhaling, exhaling, even as silent tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I thought I might find you here,” said a voice to her right, and Mia glanced up, startled, to find Pilar in a rocking chair.
“I’m glad I found you here,” her big sister said, and smiled.
Chapter 44
Bloom
IT WAS GOOD TO see Mia. Pilar hadn’t expected it to feel so good, but it did and she wasn’t complaining.
“How did you . . .” Mia touched her wet face. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess.”
“Don’t dry them on my account. I’ve been doing more of that myself lately. Got to say: after choking down tears my whole life, crying feels pretty damn nice.”
Rose burbled a reply. Something between a laugh and a sob.
Pilar grinned. “So you agree.”
She still couldn’t believe she’d found the Roses’ cottage. All she’d had to go off was the crude map a river guide drew he
r on an old canvas sack. He was an odd man, dressed in a peculiar costume with long, sagging green sleeves, babbling some nonsense about Kaer Killian falling off the side of a mountain. After he sailed away, she’d spent half an hour squinting at the map, trying to decipher the mysterious meaning of OUR before realizing it was part of FLOUR.
It was a flour sack. Typical.
The river guide hadn’t known much more than the general area where Griffin Rose might live. “The leader of the Circle?” he’d croaked. “I don’t reckon you’ll find him. I hear he’s so far gone he slurps soup from a boot in the castle dungeons.” Clearly that rumor had been making the rounds.
Yet here she was. Camped out on the Roses’ porch. In no small part because Mia had yammered on and on about the rock that Angelyne insisted looked like an elephant and Mia insisted did not. Angelyne was a murderous delusional liar—but she was right about the rock. Once Pilar saw the elephant, she knew she’d found her way.
What a stroke of luck. Or maybe fate. Pilar wasn’t sure she believed in fate, but for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t sure she didn’t.
“When did you get here?” Mia said, freeing a curl glued to her wet cheek.
“This morning.” Pilar patted the rocking chair beside her. “Care for a rock?”
“I thought for sure you’d beat us here.” Mia stood shakily, then sank into the chair. “Did you take a pink kama through the desert?”
“No. Came by boat. A boat half the size of Maysha, with twice as many people.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Awful doesn’t even come close.”
The journey had been a monthlong lesson in humility. It had started well enough, when she’d filched a bucket of expensive Black Roses from the Rose Garden. Was she proud of stealing from the House? No. Did she enjoy plucking the heads off Celeste’s precious flower children? Oh, fuck yes. She used the roses to barter passage to Dead Man’s Strait, where she planned to hop off the ship and head north to Kaer Killian.
Key word being ship. Not the bobbing banana peel she’d been prodded onto after surrendering all her roses. The promised three meals a day turned out to be gruel, peanuts, and hardtack so stale one passenger chipped a tooth. Pilar endured a series of dramas, from the annoying—farts upon farts upon farts—to the terrifying, like the night a man got drunk on banana wine, pitched overboard, and never resurfaced.
“You must’ve missed me terribly,” Mia said.
Was Rose joking? Her puffy, tearstained face made it hard to tell. Pilar thought of a few biting gibes she could toss out. She lined them up on the tip of her tongue.
But what she said was, “I did miss you, actually.”
Mia sat a little straighter. Listening.
“I couldn’t do this part without you, Rose. The epic final battle. That’s how every story ends, right? Though to be honest”—she waved a hand around them—“this isn’t quite the epic battlefield I was expecting.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“This is your house. Seemed like a good place to start.”
“I meant more, how did you know I wasn’t on Prisma?”
Pilar leaned back in her chair. How had she known? She wasn’t sure she could explain it. But she would try.
“When I left the House,” she began, “I was wrecked. Not just because you left. That didn’t help, but there were other reasons. I can give you all the gory details if you want. I said goodbye to Stone, swung by the Rose Garden to pick up a few things”—Mia arched a brow, but didn’t press—“then wandered Shabeeka until well after dark, plotting what to do next. I was looking for the fastest, cheapest way to get to Glas Ddir. I didn’t find the boat as much as it found me.”
She scowled, remembering the neat little swindle. The man who sold her the ticket had pointed to an impressive ship docked at the harbor, then goaded her onto a small canoe to ferry her to the larger vessel. Once she and the other passengers were all loaded and the canoe pushed out into the bay . . . the impressive ship sailed off. It had never been theirs to begin with.
“From the dock I was only a stone’s throw from the Bridge. The sky was so clear. You know that thick white fog that’s always hanging over Prisma?”
Mia gave a hard, sharp nod. There was a story there. Pilar would ask about it later.
“Well, that night, the fog was gone. I could see all the way to the island. Honestly, I was so angry at you for leaving. I’d just left the one place that had started to feel like home—and it nearly destroyed me. And there you were, off lying on a sandy beach, drinking pulped papaya.”
“As long as we’re being honest,” Mia said, “I didn’t care for the pulped papaya.”
Pilar rolled her eyes. “Hilarious.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of what you’re saying. Go on.”
“So I saw the fish trees swaying in the wind. And I had this funny feeling I could hear someone singing. Lots of people, all these voices crammed together. I figured it was probably just the Pearl Moon Festival behind me. But underneath the noise, I felt this sense of . . . quiet.”
She cracked her knuckles. Frowned.
“That’s not the right word. But it’s hard to put into words. It’s the way I used to feel when I believed in the Four Great Goddesses. I guess you could call it peace, or a kind of knowledge that comes from something bigger than your own brain. Somehow, I just knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That you were going to leave the island.”
Rose’s rocking chair slowed. “Even though no one’s ever come back from Prisma?”
“Even then.”
Mia gazed up at the porch ceiling, where the white paint was peeling off in strips.
“Incredible,” she murmured. “You knew even before I did.”
She lowered her chin, meeting Pilar’s eyes.
“Are you still angry I left?”
“Angry. Hurt. All kinds of things.”
“You have every right to feel those things.” Mia took a breath. “I want you to know I wasn’t leaving you. I left because I felt like a failure. I had failed you, Nell, Angie, Quin. I couldn’t give any of you what you needed. I hadn’t even seen what you needed. I went to Prisma because I couldn’t bear to live with that failure.”
She sighed. Tucked a stray curl behind her ear.
“But I came back from Prisma because I finally understood that failing is the only way to live.”
Pilar watched her. Rose did seem different. Calmer. Sadder. And at the same time, lighter. Whatever had happened on the Isle of Forgetting had certainly left its mark.
“Those are pretty words,” Pilar said. “But I’m going to need all the gory details.”
And Mia began to speak.
Angelyne had an imaginary baby. The white fog was cut-up souls. The Isle of Forgetting swept your memories quietly out to sea, then brought new ones on the tide.
“I don’t understand,” Pilar said, after Mia had told her everything. They were sprawled out now: Rose with her back pressed against the big iron door, Pilar’s feet dangling over the edge of the porch. “I don’t see why Angelyne would choose it. Why you were going to choose it.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to go back and change what happened to you?”
Pilar saw the cottage by the lake. The rafters. Her Dujia sisters. And most recently: Celeste.
“A thousand times. But if erasing my pain meant erasing my self?” She shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve spent plenty of time hating myself. I’m flawed as all four hells. But at least, at the end of the day, I know who I am.”
She thumped her chest. “At least I know I’m here.”
Mia peered at her intently.
“When you think of yourself, is that the part of your body you think of? Your heart?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Fascinating.”
Rose rooted around in her satchel, then pulled out the melon-fish notebook she was always lugging around
the House. Pilar watched as she scribbled down a note.
“I didn’t realize that was noteworthy.”
Mia tucked the pen in the crease of her notebook. Her gray eyes had a thirsty spark, the way they always did when she’d made some new discovery.
“When I think of me . . . where my true self sits in my body . . .” She touched her forehead. “It’s here.”
“Huh.”
“Huh, indeed. I always assumed a person’s essential who-ness—their self distilled to the most vital essence—resided in their intellect. It hadn’t occurred to me other people might feel differently.”
Pilar chewed it over. Maybe her self didn’t always sit in her heart. Maybe it was also in her fists. Her blood. “What would Angie say, do you think? Which body part?”
Mia closed the notebook.
“It doesn’t matter now. She no longer has a body. At least not the way I understand it.”
Pilar thought Mia might start crying again, but she didn’t. She slid the notebook back into her satchel. Then she fumbled around inside, almost by instinct. But her hand came up empty.
“Are you looking for your charm?”
“Oh, the bloodbloom?” Mia looked embarrassed. “It wasn’t in my sfeera when I got back.”
Pilar couldn’t suppress a grin. She knew there was a reason she’d held on to the bloodbloom. She tugged the wooden disc out of her pocket.
Mia brightened, just like Pilar knew she would. She started to reach for it, then hesitated.
“Have you been using it? I don’t want to take it from you.”
“I don’t even know how it works. Besides, you know how I feel about belly breathing.”
“You must’ve held on to it for some reason.”
“I kept it because it was yours,” Pilar said simply. “I went to your sfeera after you left. I was ready to do whatever it took to convince you to come with me to Glas Ddir. Then I saw your books and that journal and your clothes, and I knew immediately where you’d gone. So I took the charm. It felt like the only piece of you I could hold on to.”
