by Lana Popovic
Because of him.
He reached for me cautiously, then when I didn’t shy away, drew me up against him until my face tucked into the space between his neck and shoulder. I burrowed into him, far past caring who I took comfort from. I locked my arms around his waist and keened against his chest, gulping in the smell of him. Terrified of lapsing back into nothingness, that awful abyss of total deprivation.
“I didn’t think it would be so terrible for you,” he said quietly, stubbled cheek pressed to my forehead. “But of course it would. You’re not made of what I’m made.”
“What . . . was . . . that?” I whimpered. “Where . . . ?”
“Some call it the veil, or space between worlds. Though of course it isn’t really a veil, or true space,” he said. “I call it the Quiet. It’s what I use as thread every time I remake this patchwork kingdom. Without it, the component pieces would slide apart, dissipate. Evanesce back into the ether from which I conjured them.”
“So why didn’t I feel it when I first came here?” I murmured into his chest. “There was all that light, and that hungry dark somewhere below it, but nothing like that—like that nothingness.”
“It’s because on the way here, I led you through existing fissures in the Quiet.” He wasn’t going so far as to stroke my back, but his hands were very warm where they rested. And his voice sounded like an apology. “Like wormholes between your world and this one. Here, the Quiet is fine as spider silk, threaded through the fabrics of this world—between its distinct pieces, stitching them together. There are no openings in the seams here. No other way to cross it except by plunging through.”
“And being in it doesn’t make you want to die of being alone?” I whispered, before I thought of how silly that would sound.
He huffed a laugh through his nose. “It just feels like quiet to me. Hence the name. It feels like the closest I ever come to home.”
If that felt like home to him, I wondered with an icy shudder, what must it be like inside his head? The roaring silence of a black hole that had eaten every last speck of light? No one ever grieved for black holes, but what would it feel like to crave light so badly, when it was the deepest of your nature to inhale it into nothing whenever it ventured too close? No wonder he had made that deal with Mara. No wonder he had wanted us.
And no wonder Dunja had loved him so hard, even as she scrabbled tooth and nail to keep her nieces from ever taking her place.
He finally ran a hand down my back, and I flinched at his touch in surprise. Mistaking the shock for recoil, he let me go, stepping away so abruptly I nearly stumbled. The delicate bubble of rapport between us burst. “Take my hand if you need to,” he offered coolly. “I don’t want you falling over. Especially not here.”
Nodding jerkily, I laced my fingers through his. A damp breeze like seaside summer lifted my hair, and I liked it so much I tipped my head back and let my eyes slide closed.
Then I opened them, and lost my breath to the sky.
Eight
Malina
INSIDE THE ENTRYWAY, MAMA CLUNG TO ME LIKE SOME chilly, overgrown child, refusing to leave my side until Dunja gently peeled her away. “Amrisa wants to see you, Jas, after she examines Mara,” she’d said softly, running her fingers through Mama’s hair as if the writhing roses didn’t faze her. “To see what can be done for you.” Mama had glanced at me in that distant, glassy way, both vulnerable and cool, as if asking for permission.
I’d shifted uncomfortably, awkward in this new role. “You should go, Mama. I’ll be here if you need me.”
They’d drifted off together in a weird sort of symmetry, like opposing chess pieces. Dark and light heads bent together, the black queen and the white.
After that, Izkara herded Niko, Luka, and me back to the room I’d slept in the one night Riss and I had spent apart before the contest. Niko and I crawled onto the massive four-poster bed and she fell into a fretful doze beside me, curled up under a fur throw. Luka sprawled over the window seat across from us, silently brooding at the dawning sky. The nonstop grind of his worry and longing wore away at me, like a pestle churning a mortar’s insides. The sound of it set my teeth on edge enough that I couldn’t even graze the edge of sleep.
Not that I would have anyway. I’d gotten so used to always hearing Riss, the shifting rains of her moods. She sounded gentlest at night, right before she fell asleep herself. A soft, lulling patter like a light summer rain. I kept catching myself straining, listening for her. Without her, the song of the whole world sounded off, an orchestra ruined by the twang of a badly stringed violin.
Eventually I got up and wandered to the ornate vanity mirror, a heavy oval held up by two haughty lamias, their serpentine coils supporting the glass. I’d meant to look at the fine detail of the carvings, but I glanced at my own reflection first out of habit. My hair was a storm of curls, and I’d scraped my cheek, maybe during the climb down from Bobotov Kuk. And my eyes—
My eyes.
I leaned so close to the mirror that my breath spilled over the glass, heart kicking hard in my chest. One was still almost like it had always been, wintry gray circled by a nearly charcoal line. But the other . . . beneath the familiar, lacy fringe of my dark lashes, it was a deep brown, distinguishable from black only by its contrast with my hair. A color so totally, jarringly alien, it felt as if someone else’s eye had been grafted onto my face.
And even the gray eye now held a narrow slice of that same dark brown.
Leaden with dread, I wondered what this new strangeness could possibly mean.
I was still staring queasily into the mirror when a resounding knock came at the door. Niko sprang awake at the sound the way she always did—semi-insane, with all the poise of a baby bird falling out of its nest. “What?” she demanded, unfocused eyes darting between me and Luka, her fine hair mussed across her face. “Who?”
I went to shush her back down, picking caught strands out from between her lips. “Easy, princess. Someone’s at the door. You wake up all the way, and I’ll go see.”
A petite, dark-skinned brunette stood outside, dark ringlets falling over her eyes. I recognized her as Ylessia, Riss’s tutor from before the contest. The sprightly aerialist who painted her silk backdrops with exploding skies.
“Azareen. I wanted . . . ,” she began, then bit down hard on the words, running her tongue along the inside of her cheek.
“You wanted what?” Luka snapped from his perch. Waiting for Mara to summon us was preying on all our nerves, but he was fraying especially fast. “Either spit it out or get out, will you? If you’re going to stick us in here for hours without bothering to tell us anything, at least have the decency to let us be.”
Her bowed mouth tightened, eyes narrowing, and my heart juddered as I realized that her irises were mismatched like mine. One was still wolf-gray, but the other had become a warm, amber-shot brown, like sherry. And like my own, the gray eye seemed to be slowly turning amber too.
Whatever this was, maybe it was happening to all of us. I abruptly remembered that Dunja’s eyes, too, had seemed somehow different, even back in the star-pricked dark of the mountaintop. With everything else swirling so chaotic around me, maybe I just hadn’t noticed the transformation.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, you boorish boy-child, was I?” Ylessia retorted. “And if we haven’t told you much, it’s because most of us know as little as you. Perhaps you might take this gift of time to learn manners in addressing your elders.”
“I don’t care who you were speaking to, and you’re not my anything.” He turned back to the window. “We wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you. And Iris wouldn’t be—”
“Luka, would you stop?” Niko broke in, now fully awake. Her voice was even raspier than usual with fatigue. “We all know you’re ready to rip everything up by the roots to find Riss. So are we, okay? But it’s not that one’s fault that Riss isn’t here. Or not hers specifically, anyway. You’re just extra pissed because she dragged you back he
re from the summit with, like, one of her arms, as if you were half her size instead of the other way around.”
I winced at the high, sharp-edged new note of Luka’s hurt. Niko could be like that under pressure, sometimes, shooting off words like poison-tipped arrows without caring where they struck. Stone-cold bitch mode, Riss had called it, totally oblivious to the irony. It was part of the reason their friendship had always been half a step away from throwing punches.
The regret had reached her face by the time I squeezed her knee in belated warning. But Luka had already launched himself up, heading for the door.
“God, Nikoleta, how can you stand being such a fucking scalpel all the time?” he fumed. “You’re old enough to grow a little range.”
“Luka, wait—” I reached out to him as he swept by. “She didn’t mean—”
He squeezed my hand in passing and spared me a tight half smile, then shoved past Ylessia. “Must be so easy to spit up whatever venom you want,” he tossed over his shoulder to Niko as he swung the heavy door open. “Since Lina’s still here to smooth everything out for you, once you’re done.”
The door slammed shut behind him like a rifle shot. Niko and I flinched, and even Ylessia’s muscular shoulders bunched in response.
“I wanted to apologize to you,” she said eventually, once the ringing aftermath of the slam had settled into silence. “To you, Azareen—”
“Malina,” I corrected. “I don’t want to be called by her name for me.”
“Malina, then. I wasn’t very kind to your sister, before. It seemed”—she cleared her throat—“it seemed very unfair to me that the two of you should have had what none of us ever had. So much power. Such free rein. And even after being given all that strength and freedom you had to be cajoled, wheedled into the sacrifice by deceit when the rest of us had done it willingly for centuries. As if you were so different, special enough to require such coddling.”
I exchanged a wry look with Niko. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this apology,” I said to Ylessia, “but you’ve maybe gotten kind of derailed?”
She pursed her pert lips. “It does still smart,” she admitted, “to feel so very weak and little next to my own granddaughters so far removed. Everything feels different now, unruled by Mara’s love. What seemed to me like self-indulgence in you and your sister appears more like true devotion to each other. And whatever hunts us in this new world—whatever it is she’s been keeping from us all this time—I would like to think I can stand with my youngest kin against it.”
Looking at her, it was almost impossible to imagine that any comparison to me could ever make her feel little or weak. She might have been a head shorter, but every part of her looked so compactly powerful and poised. And beneath the riot of her hair, her heart-shaped face shone bright with resolve.
Yet I could hear it, the wrenchingly sweet, harp-string pluck of exactly how vulnerable she felt.
“I don’t hate you.” I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to. “Riss didn’t either, I’m sure. It’s just . . .”
She shook her head briskly, shining curls springing wildly around her face. “I don’t wish to tell you how to feel, either. I simply want you to know that this time around”—her level eyes met mine, amber and gray—“you’ll find me by your side.”
ONCE YLESSIA WAS gone, Niko made us a pillow nest. I sat between her slim brown knees, leaning back against the softness of her chest. The swooping, dusk-blue swaths of the gossamer canopy above dipped so low they nearly brushed the tops of our heads.
“How are you feeling, pie?” she murmured to me, lifting the heavy upper layer of my curls out of the way so she could start another tiny braid beneath. I loved it when she did that. The deft twist of her fingers and the pull against my scalp calmed me like nothing else. “I don’t want to upset you if you don’t want to talk. But I can’t hear you like you do me. So just tell me what you need.”
“I don’t even know where to start,” I whispered, sinking into her touch. “Nothing sounds right. We know Riss is alive, but I can’t stop thinking about where she is, so far away and stuck with him. It makes me want to die inside. Then my eyes suddenly turn wrong, and Mama’s alive, but . . .”
“Is also a rosebush,” Niko finished for me. “I agree that part is problematic.”
Despite everything, I burst into hiccupy giggles. “Ah, princess. I love you so much. Have I told you recently?”
“No, and it took you forever to say it the first time.” She dropped a delicate kiss on my ear. “So feel free to overcompensate.”
“Love you, love you, love you,” I singsonged, tilting my head back against her shoulder and nuzzling into her silky neck. She shivered a little at my exhale against her skin. She was so ticklish there, in the best way. Beneath the familiar melody of her, the feathery brush of many wings beating together—Niko always sounded like flight—I could hear the slow, drumming stir of her rousing to my touch. It was such a comfort to recognize the sound of her, unchanged, when everything else was coming unstrung so fast. “How’s that, for starters?”
“Atonement really suits you, pie. Keep going, if you want.”
“Speaking of atonement . . .” I sat up a little. “Should we go find Luka? You were hard on him, princess. He’s hurting so much, almost as bad as me. I know you can’t hear it, but he used to sound so solid. Like knocking on wood for good luck, if that makes sense. Now he’s gone so hollow I can practically hear his heart rattling around like a peach pit. You could be gentler with him, or at least try? He’ll crack if you don’t.”
She sighed so deeply that I lifted along with the rise of her chest. “I know. I’m sorry. I just can’t take how angry he is,” she mumbled. “He doesn’t get to be so pissed that you came back and Iris didn’t.”
“And how would you have felt?” I asked her softly, twisting around on my knees to face her. Running my knuckles down the nectarine curve of her cheek. “If it had been me who didn’t come back to you?”
With a wordless sound of protest, she clambered onto my lap to straddle my thighs. Her hands plunged into my hair, twisting tight, her forehead tilting against mine. She gave me a soft, lingering kiss, grazing my top lip with her bottom, then canted to the other side for the next one. And another, and another, changing the angle each time until my head swam with her scent and nearness. The plush give of her mouth.
I could hear the purring bass thrum of her rising lust, and the piercingly pure, higher notes of her love ringing above it. And I couldn’t help but hum it back to her, against her lips.
“You would never,” she whispered fiercely, dark eyes locked on mine. “You wouldn’t ever leave me that way. No matter what happened. No matter who tried to take you. Tell me you wouldn’t.”
“Of course I wouldn’t.” I wrapped my arms around her sparrow waist and flipped us, taking her with me. Her hair fell around us like a warm curtain drawing closed. “And I can show you exactly why.”
She smiled at me, close-lipped and so sweet. “Let’s see you try. And for the record, I think your eyes are gorgeous this way too.”
Then the knocker fell against the door again, in three sharp raps.
AMRISA’S CHAMBERS WEREN’T what I expected. While the rest of the chalet was shamelessly opulent, her rooms were nearly spartan. Airy and sparse, everything in white, or steel, or glass. All tastefulness and restraint, flooded with the light of the bright day outside.
Despite the exasperation zinging off her like an ungrounded current, Amrisa herself was stunning—full-gleamed first tier, Mara’s actual daughter. I’d noticed her before, but she’d kept to herself more than the others. She had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, a deep inky black with almost purple undertones. Like night still clinging to the violet tide of dusk. It glowed against her one-shouldered lavender dress, as if it gave off its own deeper spectrum of light. Her shifted eye was nearly as black, and her hair was piled into a heavy, complicated coil on the top of her head. It balanced the impossible delicacy
of her profile—plum cheekbones, pillowed lips, a pointed chin like—
“Could you stop staring at your great-grandma like that, pie?” Niko said tartly, under her breath. The song of her beating wings veered toward ruffled, in warning. “You look like you’re composing odes in her name. Someone might get the wrong idea.”
I looked away from Amrisa, chagrined. She really had almost been enough to distract me from Mama, who sat on a cushioned examination table with her glazed eyes fastened on me. Though the roses never stopped their crawling, her form beneath them seemed unnaturally still.
Dunja leaned against a corner of the room, slim arms crossed over her chest and one dainty ankle over the other. Her glossy, snowy hair draped over one shoulder like a pelt. Even that casual pose seemed on the brink of movement, vibrating with pent energy. And now that I knew to look for it, I saw her eyes had changed, just like mine. One had turned a bold sapphire blue, and a dazzling thread of the new color had already spread to her gray eye.
“I tried my best with her, baby witch,” she said to me, as if Mama wasn’t even in the room, her delicate jaw set tight. “But she wouldn’t let Amrisa touch her unless you were here too.”
So that explained Amrisa’s annoyance. She clearly wasn’t used to being thwarted.
I also caught an odd, faint jangle of something like hurt from Dunja. Hurt and . . . jealousy? Ah, that was it. Her twin needed something, badly. And she wasn’t it.
“Lina,” Mama said, and my eyes flew to her. It was beyond disconcerting—not only how little she sounded like her former self, but how such a toneless voice could be so forlorn. “Will you come sit with me? Amrisa would poke and prod me, and I—I feel so strange. Everything feels so strange.” She broke off into a shuddering gasp. “Except you, my cherry girl. My most beloved thing. If I can’t have you and your sister both, will you please come, at least, and hold my hand?”
