by Lana Popovic
“I . . . I’m not sure?” Flimsy as eggshells, barely even a whisper. “I can’t hear her, but that could be because she’s too far away. If she were dead, I hope . . . I think I’d know.”
“Lisarah is not dead,” Mara proclaimed from behind me. I wheeled to face her, my heart leaping so high I actually balled a hand up against my chest. “She reached the kingdom safely. I can feel it spinning, still, as the last of the spell stutters along—we have some time yet before it fully fades. Perhaps time enough, if we stand beneath auspicious stars, to prepare for his advent.”
I stole a glimpse at Luka, who held a clenched fist against his mouth, his eyelids trembling with emotion. The relief pounding from him harmonized with my own.
“If she’s alive, how do we get her back?” I pressed frantically. “And who exactly is this ‘he’ you keep dangling in front of us?”
“He is a monster,” she said simply. “And my beloved, once.”
While I stood reeling, she tipped her head to the chalet. “Let us all take some rest before we delve into so much past. You sway where you stand, fledgling, and I will need some mending first, before I find the strength to talk of him. And even my Amrisa does not wield her miracles in moments.”
“There’s something else, Lina,” Niko broke in, stepping to my side and lacing our fingers together with a tight squeeze. “You should be ready for it, before you go in. If it’s even possible to prepare for . . . something like that.”
My insides dropped like an anvil, and I felt suddenly so exhausted and put-upon. Everything was too much. It wasn’t fair. “Ready for what? What’s inside?”
She pressed her lips together and gave me a solemn, sloe-eyed look. “It’s your mom, pie. Jasmina’s awake.”
“FAISALI, AWAKE,” MARA murmured to herself in the stunned silence that followed. “That might well be the heart of it.”
Faisali, awake, my mind echoed dumbly, over and over. Like the cry of seagulls above the bay.
Faisali awake, awake, awake.
Last I’d seen Mama, she’d been bloodless as marble on Mara’s chamber floor, drowning in black roses. It’d been part of Mara’s symphony of lies, the idea that she was keeping our mother from waking to a deathless agony—the last victim of our line’s invented “curse.” Every once in a while, I remembered, Mama had made a gasping sound like the living sick. But I could hear the grim tolling behind it. I hadn’t told Riss it was over, but I’d known then. No one came back from sounding like that.
But now Mama was awake, and awake meant alive.
Our mother was alive.
While I stood quivering and dumbstruck with hope, Dunja rounded on Mara. Before any of the rest of us could so much as twitch, she charged over and gripped Mara by the throat, driving her to the ground until they were nearly nose to nose. With her snowy blaze of hair and dainty doll’s profile, she looked like the afterimage of Mara’s black sun. Like her negative.
“I saw her,” Dunja hissed through her teeth. “I saw what you did to my sister, to entice my nieces to you. To wring even more out of us. You crushed her heart, and then you wouldn’t let her die. How could she rise from that? How could you allow it?”
“Unhand her, Anais,” Izkara half growled from behind her. She’d mostly shifted back to human, but the hand on Dunja’s shoulder had stayed wicked with claws. I could see them digging into my aunt’s skin like tiny scythes, leaving taut divots in their wake. If Izkara put even a fraction of force into it, she’d shred Dunja to the bone. “Can you not see how weakened our sorai is? Show compassion for her, at least, if you can’t muster respect.”
“Sorai,” I repeated under my breath. It was the false name Mara had given us for herself, but it also meant something to the coven. It was her honorific, the designation of “highest.”
“Daughter, please,” Mara added, sounding so bone-weary and unlike her imperious self that Dunja’s grip faltered just a fraction with surprise. “Faisali’s rising is not my doing, I swear it. And I am a touch ill-used to be dragged about in the dirt. Once Amrisa sees to me—and after you hear the full truth of my shame, not the bits and scraps you have mistaken for the whole—you can judge me as you will.”
Hairline cracks of uncertainty threaded through Dunja’s porcelain face. “What do you mean, bits and scraps, old witch?” she demanded scathingly. “Truth is truth.”
Mara closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them again, they glittered with very human tears. “What a relief it will be just to speak of it, after all these many years. To lay the burden of so much deceit and silence down. If even then you wish to dredge me in a bog and drown me in salt water, your efforts will be welcome.”
“If she’s still inclined to drown you whenever ‘then’ is,” a cool, toneless voice interjected, sending chills skittering down my spine, “I hope she’ll let me do the honors. Or at least consider sharing.”
I knew that voice. It sounded like sleet, and was even more wrong in inflection—but I’d been hearing some version of it for seventeen years, and I couldn’t help the chime of joy that rang in me at the sound.
I pried my eyes from Dunja and Mara and turned slowly to the chalet—to where Mama stood in front of the threshold, haloed in the light flooding from the doorway.
Enmeshed in a living web of black roses that had grown into her skin.
She was maybe naked underneath them, I thought. But they grew so clustered thick she didn’t need any clothes. Pitch-black from stem to leaf, petal to thorn, they wound around her legs and torso all the way up her neck. As if she were a human trellis. Two of them crept up so high they’d sunk into her left cheekbone and right temple, the trailing leaves half embedded in her flesh on either side. Framing her face in twin crescent shapes.
And her hair hung so thick and heavy with them it looked like a chestnut briar. Against the nest of her curls, the captive petals shone glossy-bright with the honey light spilling from inside the chalet.
Everyone had gone breathless, staring at her. If Niko and Luka had seen her before I got here, many of the other coven daughters must have too. It didn’t matter. No amount of looking could chip away at so much horror entwined with beauty, skew it even close to normal.
Her gaze skipped from left to right, cold and light as snowflakes carried on a gale. I could almost feel when it finally landed on me, an icicle lodging in my chest. It reminded me of a story Riss had read to me many years ago, of a little boy who’d crossed a snow queen’s path and wound up with shards of ice in his eyes and heart. Seeing her had tainted his vision, turned him into something else.
This new version of Mama felt like she might have the same potential to transform. And not for the better.
“Lina,” Mama finally said, and there it was. The tiniest thawing in her voice, a high note of pure human relief in her familiar alto. Enough to remind me that this uncanny stranger was still really my mother, even if she did look carved from a fairy tale’s heart. “You’re here, my cherry daughter. She didn’t steal you from me after all.”
She made her way to me, graceful even in her eagerness. Cutting an easy swath through Mara’s nine, and the other coven daughters who had come surging out of the chalet to watch her. She stopped right in front of me, so near I could see the petals fanned over her chest fluttering with her breath. So she still had to breathe. That was good to know. And from this close, I could see where the flower roots branched into her flesh, fading to ink blue as they tunneled under the layers of skin. It made her look like she had sprouted a fresh, new network of veins.
And maybe that was it. Maybe she had. Whatever was fueling her now, it wasn’t blood—at least not the kind that ran through me. I knew, because I’d seen exactly where all of hers had been spilled.
That last red memory of her sprawled on the café floor pricked the bubble I’d blown around myself. I could feel the tears start, rolling fat and hot down my face, and then everything came pouring in. All of everyone’s sound.
The maelstrom of sho
ck that whooshed around me, coalescing from the crowd.
The relentless tolling of Mara’s ancient bell, a basal hum of lovestruck allure.
Luka’s grief and loneliness, the baying of an abandoned dog lost and far from home.
Niko’s concern, delicate yet vehement as a moth’s wings brushing against a windowpane.
And in front of me, my mother’s love. A distant, eerie fluting that rose and fell without a steady cadence. As if snatches of it were constantly being stolen by the jaws of some starving wind. Mama had sounded like an army once, broad and aggressive and sometimes jubilant. But now, only these frail trills were left.
There was something else, too, beneath that. Something I could barely hear. A dark, dry, hungry sound like the rustle of something reptilian and ancient stalking through the ferns of a primordial forest.
As I balked, overwhelmed and tingling with fear, Mama spread her arms and simply waited.
That was what convinced me. Whatever she’d become, she knew how she looked to me, and she was letting me decide.
But she was my mother. Like there was even a choice.
I stepped into her embrace, and let myself be small. Her grip was even stronger than I remembered, sturdy as oak branches. Like being wrapped in a dryad’s arms. And she was tall enough that I could rest my head against her chest just like when I’d been a little girl.
Just like that, anyway, if I could make myself ignore the velveteen stir of the flowers under my cheek. They were unnervingly warm and alive, moving in a way that had nothing to do with the breeze. It reminded me of how they had filled the room the first time Iris and I had come face-to-face with Mara-as-Sorai, nosing and nudging us like animals.
Because they weren’t flowers, not real ones. They didn’t smell like true roses—not like anything, really—but they had a buzzy, thrumming sound. Together they rang in canon, a miniature melody echoing Mara’s behemoth bell.
I couldn’t help shying away from them. Mama made a dismayed little sound, sliding a palm flat between my shoulder blades. Her hand was so cold I could feel it leaching through the fabric of my shirt. “Please don’t go yet,” she whispered in that unnerving toneless way, as if each word weighed exactly the same. All identical pebbles dropped into water one by one. “Let me hold you just a little longer, now that I have you back.”
“I . . . ,” I began haltingly, sneaking a desperate glance at Niko. She gave me a reassuring nod. She’s your mother, she mouthed, with an eloquent shrug that I guessed was meant to acknowledge the overarching weirdness of the situation, and her suggestion that I roll with it.
Reluctantly, I let myself relax against Mama until my breathing smoothed from its ragged rhythm, and I realized that the strand tickling my nose was just that. Not a tendril of unnatural roses, but simply her hair. My mother’s hair, somehow still smelling as familiar and complicated as I remembered, of lavender and cedar, rising yeast and confectioner’s sugar.
No matter what she had done to me and Riss—to Riss, especially—through all those years, it had always been from love. And even when I hadn’t known it, I’d loved her anyway. She was my mother, my anchor, my cornerstone. I had lost her for what should have been forever, and now I somehow had her back. And not just back, but holding me tight, clinging like someone starving for warmth.
The kernel part of me that I’d managed to harden against her over the years cracked helplessly open, tender to rawness.
I curled my fingers around her bare shoulders. “Thank you for coming back, Mama,” I whispered to her, my voice tremolo with tears. “Thank you for being here.”
“You’re welcome,” she murmured, stroking my hair. “My cherry girl, so sweet and warm. But where . . . ?” She drew back a little, alabaster brow creasing. One of the rose tendrils curled against her temple like a fiddlehead, as if it wanted to comfort her. “Where is your sister? Why isn’t my hibiscus daughter here?”
I couldn’t help it. My face crumpled, and I shook my head, wordless.
When she started to cry too, her tears dripped onto my nape and trickled down my back. Cold as winter rain.
Six
AIR.
Sun.
Sand.
He needed none of those things to live, of course. Air was simply an indulgence, a tasty trifle like food or drink. Or like the glorious beating of the sun on the skin of his back, stretched tight with dried, caked salt when he finally clawed his way to shore. He sank his fingers into the crumbly grit of wet sand, sighing with pleasure at the feel. The pure luxury of touch and texture, after all these years of numbness and ice. This, too, was something in which to wallow.
He might not even have needed his soul in order to live—he could feel the gaping lack of it, like a hole where a tooth had been; he could even feel how far it was, impossibly beyond his reach—but he could still enjoy these gifts easily enough.
Eventually he propped himself up on his forearms and lifted his head, to see where he had washed up. A blissfully warm breeze stirred the strands plastered to his face; he scraped a hand over salt-crusted hair to sweep it back, squinting at the wonder of the sky. So many years with his back pinned to the silty dregs of the seafloor, too far down for any proper light or color to reach, yet he’d never forgotten the exact azure of a high summer sky. Blazing with the ferocity of the sun’s fiery eye.
He matched it for long moments, gaze to gaze, grinning like a wolf. It would never burn his own eyes to cinders, no matter how it tried. Nothing in this world could best him, neither with brute strength nor cunning.
Besides her, of course. She who would never have the chance to entrap him twice.
Blinking away the golden haze of sun, he levered himself onto his knees and surveyed his surroundings with hooded eyes. He’d chanced upon a sheltered little cove, slanting up into a grove of evergreens. He sniffed at the air, nostrils flaring, testing the astringent bite of pine and the clean sweetness of its sap. He might gather handfuls of those needles when he chose to stand, and rub their spice all over his skin to set it tingling. Just as he had done to her, once, by the pearly light of dawn. He might—
Then the storm of Lightless whispers crashed over him like a shipwreck, and the black oil in his veins began to churn and writhe.
LOOK WHAT IT IS, it chanted at him, both low and shrill, a cacophony of velvet pierced with rusted spikes. LOOK WHAT IT IS LOOK WHAT COMES TO US FOR SUPPING LOOK AT HOW IT HOW IT GLOWS SO INVITING—
The “it” was in fact a “she,” he noted, and the marrow in his bones began to pulse with hunger. A solitary mortal female emerging from the shade-dappled copse beyond the beach. She looked perhaps eighteen or nineteen turns; a woman grown, muscled elegantly through the shoulders like a well-bred mare. Her chestnut hair looped over one shoulder in a wrist-thick braid. Her clothing was so bright it both fascinated and repelled him, in its garishness and how little of her it covered. A marigold yellow scrap clung straining to her torso, dipping low over full breasts and barely skimming her navel, leaving bare strong arms and a sturdy neck. A pair of something like tiny white breeches cut high above her knees, revealing legs as trim and robust as the rest of her.
The cluster of bracelets around her wrist chimed as she lifted her arm to shift the satchel slung by its crook. He could smell her from where he stood, scented with the imitation of some sweet fruit he didn’t recognize, cloying in its artifice. And other things too: the yeasty warmth of bread, savory cured meats, and the tang of ripened cheese.
His stomach stirred in response. She had come here to eat, then. To be alone, to enjoy her repast in the sun.
That much they had in common.
A woman of his time would never have done anything half as foolish, to stray so far from the safety of huddled clan. But this was a different time. The Lightless snaking through his veins had whispered sagas of the passing eras while he endured beneath the fathoms, showed him each century’s sights even as he lay encased in ice. This new world fairly boiled with its masses. Its denizens soared thro
ugh the clouds in giant artificial birds, and other similar contraptions ferried them over the dirt at speeds unlike anything he could have conceived of on his own. They spoke to each other across unimaginable distances, words hurtling through air and somehow arriving safely on the other side. And their dwellings stabbed ruthlessly at the sky, sharp and brilliant as stalagmites.
There would be so much to claim here. So much over which to lay dominion. So much on which to sup.
It would be very good to start with this girl.
He was on his feet and halfway to her before she even saw him.
The moment the danger struck her was even sweeter than expected. It crossed her face like a shadow, a bank of clouds rolling in to mask the sun. He could imagine what she saw as her wide eyes flickered over him. His corded hair, matted and tangled to the small of his back. His body, birth-bare and powerful as the day that he’d been cast under—the Lightless that sustained him would tolerate no weakening of their vessel’s flesh—with thick black circles tattooed around his arms, from wrists to shoulders. Rings of ink, shot through with branching lines like lightning strikes, and stippled with a flurry of starbursts and dots.
The inked language that had opened him to the Lightless like a portal, and bound his spirit, soul, and form to them for eternity and beyond.
Whatever this girl made of him, he doubted it filled her with comfort.
She could have fled; she had time to at least stage an attempt. He would have run her to ground if she had, of course, but futility rarely prevented prey from at least attempting flight.
Instead, uncertainty and fear chased each other back and forth over her face, across features that were bright and pleasing if not precisely pretty. By then he’d drawn close enough to trace the faint freckles on her nose, a smattering like pollen between clear and clever brown eyes. Yet still she stood waiting for him, though he could see a slight shifting in her stance. Hips dipping as she shifted her weight to one leg, leaving the other light and limber, hands curling into loose fists at her sides.
