by Lana Popovic
“We were connected by the spell, before you tried to break it open,” he said. A runnel of sadness ran below the accusatory words, like an underground spring. He missed it, I could tell, the intoxicated, spellbound connection between us when I was still under the thrall that Mara’s magic cast over us both.
And with a guilty start, I realized I missed it a little too. Without that sense of magnetic attraction, he was a stranger to me, volatile and hostile. Which left me even lonelier, a more desperate castaway than before. Afraid on top of angry. He’d never done anything violent in front of me, but that meant nothing now. He’d even stopped calling me flower.
And tall as I was, I was so little compared to him. Especially in this alien, toxic place. His place.
“I could feel the crenellations of your mind, your interests and your cravings,” he continued. “I knew what would please you to see, the shapes that could tantalize you. And that’s what this world is—an offering to you, made in your image.” He shot me a dark, slantwise look. “Though I see I might as well not have bothered.”
“You mean a stage made in my image, don’t you?” I tossed back. “That was the idea you two had, wasn’t it? To give me the perfect backdrop for my performance for you.”
“You give her so little credit,” he said, with such a sudden knife-edge to his voice that it startled me into looking properly at him. His azure gaze was so direct and reproachful that for a second, I actually felt the burn of shame. “It’s cruel to talk about her that way. Worse than cruel, it’s petty. And neither becomes you.”
I barked out a half laugh. “You think I care what becomes me? You’re calling me cruel and petty, when the both of you piled lies on top of lies? She used her own daughters to keep herself alive, and you simply used us for play. And now I’m meant to spill over with sympathy for her?”
This time I couldn’t interpret the murk that crossed his eyes. “The spell she cast was colossal,” he said, clipped. “And even with all the effort it took—with everything it cost her—she didn’t want you to suffer. This world I built for you is meant to make the most of your gleam, but it’s also meant to bring you joy.”
“How do you build anything, anyway?” I snapped. “You’re Death. You’re a negator, not a creator.”
He lifted a pale eyebrow. “And who do you think crafts what comes next, for every sentient thing that dies?”
I felt a sharp nick of surprise at that, like a paper cut before the blood welled up. It was so easy to forget, having touched all the parts of him that were warm and so convincingly human, who I was really talking to. Regardless of what he looked, sounded, and tasted like, he wasn’t just a demanding, self-indulgent boy. The piece of him by my side was only a fraction of a force that I couldn’t begin to understand.
The culler of every living thing.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could die of being with him, at any moment. The others before me had, yes, but it had been by performing until they burned themselves out. But now, I was a person like any other. He could snuff me out like a midge smeared carelessly between two fingers, because that was who he was. That was what he was for.
Maybe I needed to be so much more careful with him than I was being.
“Ah . . .” I opened my mouth and closed it. “So that’s what happens after we die? What about reincarnation? Shouldn’t—wouldn’t God have created whatever comes next? Or gods, whatever there is.”
He gave a rugged half shrug, like a wolf twitching its hide. “The right isn’t mine to share those kinds of truths with you. And I didn’t bring you here to debate theology. We’re here to be happy together, so that our bliss . . .” He trailed off, his face shuttering.
“So that our bliss what?” There was something else going on here, then. I could practically feel him holding back from me. But why? “Are you telling me there’s some purpose to you crafting this world for me, and me making things beautiful for you? Something beyond letting Mara live forever, I mean?”
He stood abruptly, dusting silvery sand off his black-trousered thighs. “Of course there’s a purpose. She’s never been one to do things on a whim. I won’t deny how much advantage I’ve taken of the pleasures on my end, but everything in her life has always had a price.”
His admiration of Mara hung palpable between us, and I abruptly remembered the fondness with which she had gazed up at Death during the ritual banquet before Malina’s and my contest.Callous as he was with me, clearly real respect lived between them, somehow.
“Well, what is it?” I asked, tilting my face up to meet his gaze. Anger would only drive him further from me, and with the pit of desolation gaping inside me at every thought of Lina left behind, I needed to try something different. I needed to make him want to talk to me. “What are we meant to be doing together? How am I even here to begin with, if the spell is broken?”
I could see him teetering on the precipice of telling me, wanting us to share something again. “It’s damaged, not broken,” he finally conceded. “I can still feel the shreds of it, clinging to the magic’s original shape. If I hadn’t claimed you when I did, sealing my end of the bargain, it would have broken fully. But there was still enough of her will left for me to salvage some of her spell.”
I remembered the network of black roses that had imposed Mara’s will in infinite scope—I had overwhelmed it in the last mad rush of battle, throttled her blossoms with the surging wisteria of my own will. Had I somehow missed a part of that tremendous web? “So if you had left me there, would Dunja and Lina and I have broken the spell entirely?”
“It would have shattered if I hadn’t stepped in, and I couldn’t let that happen. Not when . . .” Then he shook his head in a single bitter, brittle snap. “No. You hate it here. You hate being with me. What this place should be doesn’t matter anymore.”
Steeling myself for nausea, I rocked forward onto my heels, one hand on the tooth-grindingly gritty sand to help me ease to my feet. Once the world stopped swimming around me, I looked up at Fjolar, trying to blink the dizziness away.
“But it does matter,” I said softly, forcing my tone gentle. This wasn’t something I could wrest from him with rage. Anything I stole from him would have to be much subtler than his theft of me had been. “It matters to me. If something about this kingdom isn’t what Dunja told us—if it’s more than just a pleasure dome for you—then maybe . . .”
Maybe knowing how it works will help me figure out how to get loose from here, I wanted to say. Maybe if I can understand its shape, I can teach myself how to crack it open and crawl out.
He wanted me to want to be here with him, and for once, maybe I could be more like my sister and take the subtle path. Be a kiss instead of a fist. And if he wouldn’t tell me whatever he was hiding now, I could hold on until he would. For Lina and Luka—for Dunja and Mama, if she was even still alive—I would fake whatever it took.
“Maybe you can start by showing me how it’s supposed to be, then,” I finished. “The way it was before, for you and Dunja. You and the others. Like you said, none of them were here with you the way that I am, were they? So it might just take more time for me to get used to it.”
His face stayed walled off. “But look at you. You can barely stand. And worse, you don’t even really want to find your footing here.”
“Remember what you told me, though,” I persisted. “About my name. A flower that grows in rocks and deserts, refuses to die, clings to just about anything? You say you made this world for me; there must be something here for me to cling to, then. And besides . . .”
I dropped my eyes slowly, let my lashes fan out lush over the hollows beneath them. I might not have been trained like my sister was by Naisha all those years, like all the mothers and grandmothers before me, but I could imagine how I looked to him. Glossy hair, the dark and dainty swipes of brow and lash, the diamond hollow between my nose and cut-glass lips. All painted in the watercolor wash of that uncanny violet light.
I might not have
been raised into seduction, but right now, it was the only tool I had.
I reached up carefully, as if I was uncertain, until my fingers just barely skimmed his shoulder. “Besides, I have you to cling to, don’t I?”
He crossed his muscle-corded arms over his chest, but he didn’t move away from my glancing touch. “And why would you be willing to cling to a thieving bastard like me? You’ve made your feelings for me—and for this gift of a world—more than clear.”
I opened my mouth to spool out more lies like silky thread, but another wave of dizziness crashed abruptly over me. The ground seemed to almost tilt under my feet, as if we stood on a ship’s deck. With a little choke of a gasp, I stumbled forward, pressing both hands against Fjolar’s chest to catch myself—almost exactly like I’d done on the Cattaro beach our first real night together, when being around him still felt like the best kind of drunk—and he reflexively reached out to steady me.
As soon as his hands wrapped around my arms, the world went still.
With Fjolar touching me, all of it settled. I could still smell the desert, its cold and salt; the bones around us still glowed beneath the purpled sky. But now the beauty, and the swarming potential behind it, felt gentled. Like an invitation instead of an assault.
“What?” Fjolar demanded, giving me a little shake where he held me. His many rings and the arrowhead bracelet he always wore were cool against my arms, but now their cold gave me a tingly chill, nothing like the bitter agony it would have been before we touched. “What is it?”
“I’m starting to see it, I think,” I replied, half laughing. “Maybe because you’re touching me. Like you’re the place we can meet in the middle, me and your world, the connective tissue between here and where I come from. The tendons or sinew, or—”
“A minute ago you were up in arms at being talked about like meat,” he said dryly. “I’m starting to think I should be entitled to the same courtesy.”
“You’re not entitled to anything,” I said archly, cocking my head to the side. “You brought me here without asking, and this time I didn’t even owe you a single kiss. But since I am here, could I at least get a tour?”
He watched me warily, but I could see the seed of interest sparking in the depths of his cool blue gaze. Neither of us had moved, and despite myself I took a deep breath of him. He still smelled deliciously like I remembered from my world, earth notes of peaty whiskey, chocolate, and fresh tobacco. “And what would you offer me in return?” he finally said.
I held his eyes, watched them flicker to my mouth when I licked my lips as if they were dry. A warm bloom of triumph unfurled in my belly. I could do this. I could sway him. “I’m sure I can manage something.”
Before I touched him, the world had been far too much to fractal. But now that it had stilled into some semblance of peace, I could work all that intricacy into a filigree of my own making.
With the familiar sense of letting some internal river loose from its dam, I unleashed the gleam and fractured the landscape around us into a revolving starburst of a world. I began with the neon sky, with its Van Gogh whorls and blinding spill of coruscating galaxies—graphing it out into squares of varying dimensions, like a three-dimensional Soma puzzle with its cubes being shuffled.
Leaving the sky to throb above us, shifting in and out like a geometric mosaic with a heartbeat somehow attached, I turned my attention to the swath of sand riven with skeletal remains. Whipping them up, and up, and up, I trapped us in a woven bone prison like a basket or a loom, alternating rib cage and spine to weave the warp, and looping the tails and limbs through to thread the weft. The skulls I left for last, multiplying and impaling them on each rod of the fractal structure, pinning them like finials.
“I think a very old skull might be staring at you,” I whispered coyly up at him. “In triplicate. Does that get me anywhere?”
Despite himself, he smiled, not-quite-straight teeth flashing tiger bright as he gazed up at the sky. “Oh, I think it might, flower girl. I think it just might.”
Five
Malina
MARA LED US HOME IN TATTERS, A GROUP OF SPECTERS SLIPPING through the dark spears of the pine trees. Like a ghostly wedding caravan that had somehow lost its bride.
Even Mara was faltering. Roots snagged at her feet and she stumbled, leaning hard against the two who gripped her forearms to support her. I could hear her from where Dunja and I brought up the back, the rusty groan of her fatigue like an old organ-grinder. Eventually, Izkara stepped forward. Silently, she flowed through a series of fluid, complicated steps that reminded me of the kata Niko’d practiced during her few earnest years of karate. Her limbs lengthened, joints locking outward and back. At her sides, her fingers splayed wide before curving into claws.
I cringed at each new angle, steeling myself for the sound of her pain, the howling mangle of werewolf movies. But there were no wet pops or crunches. Nothing more than the grace of a ribbon being swirled through the air, one thing unfurling easily into another. And she sounded so exultant as she changed, an ecstatic, swelling crescendo like an orchestral movement reaching its peak.
Finally her hair cascaded into a sleek wave of shining black fur. It swept down and around her body until she eventually fell forward silently onto all fours—an inky, amber-eyed panther, much bigger than any real wildcat. Her tail swished at Mara in almost playful invitation.
Dunja gently tipped my slack jaw closed with a finger under my chin.
“She can just—she can do that?” I managed.
“That,” she confirmed grimly, “and a great deal more.”
Mara set her teeth as the panther padded toward her, nudging her calves with its glossy, rounded head. “While I appreciate the gesture, my warrior-heart, I am perfectly capable of—”
The wildcat yowled at an earsplitting decibel, then delicately locked her jaw around Mara’s ankle.
“Stars and gods,” Mara muttered sourly, burying her hand into the charred twists of her hair and giving them a disgruntled tug. “Fine. But just this once.”
And that was how we made our way back to the coven’s clearing. With Mara riding a panther as if this was a thing that happened every day, swaying with the rolling rhythm of Izkara’s gait. One of the other daughters lit our way like a living flame, the same blue-and-amber fire she had set for Mara curled in licking loops around her body. Even her auburn hair burned harmlessly with its light.
My throat tightened as the forest in front of us parted to reveal the chalet, massive and blazing against the mountainside. Like the hull of one of the glittering ocean liners that knifed into the Cattaro Bay at night, the warped, distant burble of their musicians and milling guests filtering over miles of water like a haunting.
Now that I was so close to seeing Niko again, yearning for her began sprouting spines in my belly. I missed her that way so often, even if we’d seen each other only hours before. It used to make me curl up tightly in bed, my back to Riss, knees stuffed against my chest to stifle the rawness of the ache.
And then as if I’d dreamed her up, I saw her petite silhouette press against the ballroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Sweet, small fists clenched against the glass, fogged with the ghostly bloom of her exhale.
Even though I couldn’t see her face with all the light behind her, I still felt the exact moment that she saw me. All that tension fled her body, like a tightly wound coil finally sprung free. A moment later she burst into the clearing with Luka close at her heels. I only caught the briefest glance of her little, lovely face—her eyes so big, and shining in the dark with captive tears—before she was in my arms.
“Oh, Lina,” she whispered into my collarbone through a bit-back sob, and I half melted at the contralto rasp of her voice. The tumult of her love and relief sang out in my mind, sunlit and pure. She sounded like an entire choir of church bells ringing in a holy day. “You came back, you’re here. Thank God, pie, thank God, I thought—”
“I’m here, princess,” I soothed, slidin
g one hand into her silky nape and the other down her back. My fingertips followed the fragile, staccato ridge of her spine. Beneath the thin top, she was almost feverish-warm, like she always was. “I didn’t have that much choice about it, you know? It was either make it through, or think about all the horror movies my poor revenant would have to watch after you learned necromancy just to make me sorry for dying.”
She sputtered with laughter, then whiplashed to concern. Niko’s emotions were like that, quicksilver ripples. “Riss,” she said, searching my face. “Is she . . . ?”
Luka appeared from behind her. “Where is she, Lina? Where’s Iris?”
The sound of him was so dire and overwhelming I took a reflexive step back, expanding the bubble I sometimes used to shield myself when all the hearing got to be too much. I’d imagine a birdcage building itself around me, wrought-iron bars falling into place as a heavy cloth pulled over it and drowned out the world beyond. Locking me into my own little bubble of night and quiet. A silly thing, but it helped a little.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .” He took a ragged breath, dragging a hand down over his face. “I’m so glad to see you, Linka, of course I am. I just—I have to know. Please. Where’s Riss? I don’t see her here, so I thought maybe she was hurt, lagged a little bit behind . . .”
I bit my lip, my eyes stinging with the salty well of tears. “We lost her, Luka,” I whispered, and not even the thought of all my sister’s steel could keep my voice from trembling. “I’m so sorry. Death took her. It was Fjolar, it was always him. We half broke the spell, I think—at least, we did something—but he took her with him at the end.”
It hurt so much to see his face collapse as the last of the hope burned out. A twist of paper blackening at the point of a flame, before curling into ash. Even with my bubble in place, I could hear the mountainside avalanche of his loss. The great crack and grind of boulders so loud I thought they might bury him like a cairn.
“What does that mean, then?” he said, his voice breaking. His face twisted as he clenched his teeth, trying to wrestle himself under control. “Is she dead?”
