by Lana Popovic
I slid even farther back and to the side, making room for her against the boulder. Moving gingerly, but without shedding that stuttering grace, she slipped in next to me.
“I wanted to make something with cherries for you, but I couldn’t find any,” she said, lips pursing with disappointment like a little girl’s. “So I took some strawberries instead. They’re just chilled, topped with sugar and some simple cream I whipped. Will you try them?”
I took the bowl from her, cupping its cold bottom. The strawberries were perfectly sliced, fanned around a smooth dollop of cream swirled to a flawless peak. I spooned a bite into my mouth while she watched me avidly.
“What does it taste like?” she said, a faint tremor of hope in her voice.
Cool and creamy sweetness melted onto my tongue, citric with fruit. The sugar granules crunched heartily between my teeth. It tasted exactly right, for what it was. But nothing more than that.
“It’s good,” I answered, swallowing. “But it doesn’t . . . there’s nothing to see.”
She sighed once, deep. “I didn’t think so. What happened to me stole the gleam, along with almost everything else. But I thought, maybe—remember when you were small, you and your sister? And I brought you to the beach in swimsuits with little strawberries to match mine? Since we were all there, I thought, even without the gleam . . .” She trailed off, dropping her gaze to her hands.
She’d lost so much, I thought, aching for her. Not just the gleam, but the force of the woman that she’d been. Her way with customers at the café, gorgeous wide smiles and neck arched back, laughter ringing at even the lamer jokes. She’d sometimes let herself be stunning even when I could see.
Once, our mother had been bright as the northern star.
And now, she was this. A sculpture of ice subsisting on roses instead of blood.
“I do remember that, Mama,” I said softly, my insides tender with pain. “I don’t have to see it to remember.”
And I didn’t. It was the exact memory Riss and I had shared when we thought Mama was lost to us forever.
I nearly flinched when her arm brushed against mine. “Do you think maybe you need to put something else on? On top of all the briars?”
“It doesn’t help. And I’m finding I mind it less and less. It’s like a punishment, crafted for me.”
I stole a glance at her bold, falcon’s profile. “What do you mean? A punishment for what?”
“For what Dunja and I did,” she said with an air of obviousness. “To Mara. We may have acted out of ignorance and not malice, but the outcome is the same. She sacrificed all she had to keep everything safe from him. And we tore it down. I see what I should regret so much more clearly now that I barely feel it.” She huffed a pale laugh. “At least I still know irony.”
“But you didn’t know,” I argued. “You and Dunja thought you were doing it for each other. For your freedom. Why wouldn’t Mara have just told you all this? She didn’t have to manipulate and lie, practically enslave her whole line with all that forced love to make us willing to sacrifice.”
“She answered as much, after you had already gone,” Mama replied. “True names have power in a witch’s mouth, as does truth itself—I used to tell you so, when you were little, remember? That pillar of winter she built barely kept Herron contained. Mara couldn’t risk lending him any strength by letting her daughters know of his existence or his name.” Her voice softened just a touch. “And I think she was ashamed, too, to have us know how deeply she’d failed us, or thought she had. As if the guilt was solely hers to bear.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“What could have been more selfish than what I did?” She gave a measured shake of her head, as if she were trying to remember how to be rueful. “Especially when I couldn’t keep myself from having you. And then the way I had to twist you and your sister, to keep you quelled and tied to me. I was so cold to you, so frozen through, long before I felt this way.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. “Why didn’t you just tell us? Why didn’t you even try something other than lies?”
“It’s hard to remember now,” she answered carefully. I was getting used to the monotonous cadence of her voice, the slight upticks of emotion to it if I listened hard. “My reasons all seem so flimsy, flat. I think I was afraid of what you would do. My hibiscus girl especially, always so eager for Japan. For the whole world. I could see her hatching plans for escape every time she looked at me. What if she knew what kind of life the coven could have given her? How could I have known one or even both of you wouldn’t have been willing to sacrifice, if only so the other could have such luxury?”
Fury lit in an instant, a gas flame flicked to life. It wasn’t like me, to leap to anger like this. But just having her back, this cold yet needy shadow of her, wasn’t enough to erase the sense of betrayal that hadn’t fully left me. “You could have trusted us, for one. And maybe Riss wouldn’t have always been trying to escape if you’d been willing to tell us anything real about our father, like you weren’t hiding him from us. I mean, his name, birth city, favorite food? That was really the best you had?”
“What I told you was even more than I had, sweet,” she said, something close to bitterness stirring under the surface of her voice. “I knew him for a single night. I never even asked his name. It wasn’t something that the spell demanded.”
“But you said it was Naoki,” I protested. “You said he came from a port city in Japan, that he liked—”
“Naoki comes from nao, the kanji for ‘sincere,’” she interrupted. “And ki means tree. I was trying to give you two a gift, if a lie can ever be any kind of gift. The least I could do was name you an honest father, unlike your liar of a mother—you grew up never even knowing my own true name. And I meant the tree for Iris, for the one I knew she loved. That wisteria she painted everywhere.”
I swallowed back the bitter swell of tears. For once I understood Riss’s constant, simmering discontent. We’d had so much less than we even thought we had. “So, Shimoda then too? And the sea-urchin sushi you said he liked to eat?”
She twitched her shoulders in a shrug. “Shimoda is a port city, with the look of Cattaro. I thought it might quench the curiosity a bit, to find so much similarity when you researched it like I knew you would. Make you feel like you weren’t missing out on the whole world. The sushi, well . . .” Another shrug. “I stepped on an urchin while I was pregnant with you. The memory lingered. And I’d always heard their meat was delicious.”
“So you thought, what?” I bit back. “The scraps you fed us, you might as well make a joke of them?”
She ran her knuckles down my arm, leaving goose bumps in their wake, and this time I didn’t even try to fight the flinch. “Try to understand, my cherry girl,” she murmured. “I was so young, lost in a foreign world. Alone save for Jovan’s kindness, and he wanted the kind of love I couldn’t give him, so I could never lean on him too much. Sometimes levity was all I had. That”—she traced my jawline with a tender fingertip—“and the two of you. You’re the only thing I feel now, you know. How much I love you. Maybe it’s because you’re made of me—the only part of me left unfrozen, still warm and alive. All I want is to be near you, and to have your sister back with us.”
I couldn’t keep the anger stoked, not with her like this. So vulnerable, in a way I’d never seen. And the mournful melody of her love, beseeching trills snatched away like scraps by hungry seagulls. She reminded me of Dunja, sisters in opposites. Where Death had blackened my aunt down to nothing but fiery wrath and single-minded love, winter and resurrection had left Mama even more bereft.
I leaned my head against her shoulder, shuddering as my cheek met her skin. I was so lost too, and desperately afraid. Whatever we were—half goddesses or angels, monsters made of light—I couldn’t make myself believe it would be enough. Not after what Mara had shown us.
“How are we going to get Riss back?” I whispered. “I’m so scared we won’t. And I’
m so scared of him.”
“I know, my sweet,” she whispered back. “I know. But if anyone can draw her back down, it’s you. And until then, I’ll put myself between you and anything that comes.”
“How?” I dropped my forehead onto my knees. “What could you do when he comes? What could any of us do? Only Mara can use the gleam to fight—her, and the first nine, I guess. But the rest of them, useless. None of them are even as strong as me, and what good am I, even?”
“We were never meant to be strong like you are, or like Mara is,” she said softly. “We were meant to be lovely. Our gleams molded into beauty by the training.”
“Training,” I murmured. Something occurred to me, just the outline of an idea. The shadow of a notion. “How exactly were you all trained?”
“Learning and repetition, for years and years. Perfecting our gleams by practicing, using the instruments or accessories that showcased our beauty best. And Mara was always urging us into beauty, singing us toward the loveliest incarnation of our gleams.”
“Singing to you,” I murmured. My heart began to pound, straining with the sudden surge of hope. I’d used my own songs for encouragement too. Except I’d used them for more than just prettiness or peace.
I nearly slipped over myself, scrambling to my feet on the slick grass. “Mama, let’s go. I need to talk to Mara. There might be something I can do to help.”
“YOU TRULY THINK you can sing them into being able to fight, fledgling?” Mara said. She stood next to me in the Great Hall, in one of her full-body sheaths, burnt-cherry suede that clung to her like butter. Her hair was pulled back into a complicated loop of shining braids, the first time I’d ever seen it up. “Turn my daughters into soldiers?”
I had underestimated the depths of Mara’s desperation. She’d latched so eagerly onto my suggestion that I finally realized what I was hearing from her—not just guilt, but resignation laced with hopelessness.
She thought that after the millennia she’d spent trying to protect them, all her daughters were going to die anyway. To save them, she’d try anything.
Including vesting her hopes in me, the youngest of her line.
“I have no idea if I can do it for them,” I answered. “But I do know I’ve done it before for Riss. When we needed to free Dunja from the ice you trapped her in—I sang Riss into shattering it with her bloom. And that was just the first time I helped her. I sang to break your spell, too.”
“Why risk the others when we have me, sorai?” Izkara muttered in her husky half growl, from where she prowled the room’s perimeter behind us. She never quite seemed to leave being an animal behind, even when she took on full human form. I’d seen her sniff the air and flick her ears like a fox listening for prey. And sometimes she leaned far out of open windows like a dog in a speeding car. I’d been half hoping to see her loll out her tongue when she did it, but no luck yet. “And Amaya, and Terasai—”
“I know, my warrior-heart,” Mara crooned. “I am well aware of who could hold their own in combat. But where we are few, and untrained, he can simply make as many soldiers as he needs. Even his mindless could mow any number of us down, and they are far from the worst of what he commands. The remnant of winter is a quarter gone already; you can see it in your own eye. He will have begun to muster his forces as he regains strength, and we need more of our own to stand against him. Do you know a better way to make more full-gleamed soldiers, my warrior-heart?”
Izkara’s lips tightened, and she spun on her heel to stalk back to the window in sullen silence.
I swept my hand out at the women clustered in front of us, hands clasped behind their backs. Not all two hundred were here. I’d asked Mara for only the eight or nine with the most dramatic gleams. The ones that could be readily bent to battle. “You sang them into beauty in the first place,” I said to Mara. “Can you help me with this? To strengthen their gleam?”
“I will help, of course, for now. But if this works, you cannot rely on me.” Her face went feral. “When the time comes to fight, everything I bring to bear must be notched like an arrow at him, if we are to have any chance at all. I will have nothing left over to help you with.”
“You keep talking about him. But what about her? What about Riss?” Urgency crackled my voice. “I know we need to fight him—I’ll do whatever it takes to help, you see that—but how are we going to get her back?”
Her face softened at that, and she ran her knuckles under my chin. “You worry for your sister,” she said in her low, velvety triptych of a murmur. “Of course you do. But when the last of the winter fades, the spell will break all the way through. The kingdom will collapse and release Lisarah; she will come tumbling out, back to us. And if we live to see it—if he does not best us—I will be there to catch her with my own net of roses. I swear it to you, Azareen. Malina.”
It sounded true, a pure crystalline chime. Her oath was the best assurance I had—and even it wouldn’t matter if we couldn’t stand against him. If I couldn’t do my part.
Twisting my hands together, I turned back to the coven daughters on display. Some of them I knew both by gleam and name, so I thought I might as well start with one of those.
My gaze landed on Oriell, with the wine-dark lips and the teal bramble of hair pinned up with glittering treasures. She had clockwork beetles strung in it today, brass and pewter and colored glass. I remembered her gleam from the showcase on the day Riss and I first arrived—she could project illusions, as long as they were directly behind her own body. An extension of herself.
Maybe it was the tattoos of wild water and blooming vines that sleeved her arms, or the anticipatory sparkle in her densely lined eyes when she met mine and took a step forward. But I thought maybe I could coax out some spirit there.
“Okay,” I began, fighting down a wave of shyness. I could practically feel the expectant weight of all those eyes on me—and hear the bright, electric hum of newborn hope. This had been my idea. What if I couldn’t do it at all?
I glanced back over my shoulder at Niko, who sat with Luka on tasseled velvet cushions next to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. They’d finally smoothed things out between them. Niko scrunched her face into a pixie grimace of encouragement. Next to her, Luka jostled her shoulder and tipped me a big-brother wink.
Fighting back a smile, I turned to Oriell. “Could you show me some of your wings?”
She dipped her head, stirring the miniature carnival of her hair. “Of course, Az—Malina. How about these?”
Without any warning, she flung out a massive pair of cobalt wings, the brilliant plumage trimmed with white and black and rakishly flared at the tips. I took a startled step back as she fluttered them in my direction. But there was no feather-brush or gust of air as they flapped at me before folding back behind her. Just like the rest of what they all called up with their gleam, her illusions were empty.
What kind of song did I even need to flesh them out, make them real enough to lift her? I wondered. Something that felt like rising, like flight.
Like Niko felt to me.
The memory that fizzed up was from a couple years ago, when Niko and I had snuck off by ourselves and taken a ferry to Ostrvo Cvijeća, the Island of Flowers. It had been a riot of foliage in bloom, sandy beaches strung smooth like canvas. I would’ve been happy to spend the day wandering hand in hand, or finding nooks to curl up into together, in a tangle of limbs, coconut lotion, and salty, air-dried hair.
But Niko found an overlook jutting twelve feet above the water, the sea spread under it like a sheet of ruched blue silk. She’d have jumped it by herself, if I’d stuck with my initial no. She liked to push me beyond my own boundaries, but only ever with gentle prodding—never a bully, not with me. And any kind of leap was irresistible to her.
But she’d wanted me with her so badly, I could hear her ringing with it like a tuning fork. And there were so few things I let us do together out in the open, where anyone could see us. At least I could give her this much, even if
it scared me past reason.
I’d never forgotten the force of that run, the pounding of our feet over the sharp rocks and to the edge. Niko’s tiny hand clutching mine so hard, as if the grip could keep me from changing my mind before we leaped. I was so terrified I kept my eyes open so she’d be the last thing I saw, in case she was wrong and we wound up splatter-dead.
And when we jumped, there was this moment, right before the drop. Shimmering suspension, as if the air around us had turned just a little closer to honey. Just for long enough to let me watch her watching me, her pretty eyes squinched against the sun. Her mouth open wide and round into the fullest laugh, as if she could gulp down all the joy of being with me in the air.
Then we fell, obviously, but that wasn’t the point.
Aloft. That was the word I wanted. That feeling both of freedom and of not being alone.
Aloft was what we’d had that day, what Niko always meant to me.
I hadn’t even realized that I had started to sing, but in front of me Oriell stood with her plumage fluttering as if caught in a cross breeze. Dark mascara tears streamed down her face.
“I think . . .” She clenched her hands into fists by her sides, and I could see her venom-green nails sink deep into her palms. “I think I can feel them, and I want it, I want to be lifted . . .”
“TRY HARDER, DAUGHTER. LET LOOSE FROM CONTROL,” Mara belled out from behind me. Like an entire chorus of carillons, ringing together across a city of belfries. Her voice braided with mine, twining through my song. Strengthening and cementing it. “YOUR GLEAM IS YOURS, TO MOLD INTO SOMETHING GREATER.”
Oriell spread her wings wide and arched her back, rib cage and sternum straining against her skin like a corset from the inside. She began beating her wings slowly, and then fully flapping them. I nearly lost my song when a feather molted loose from one and floated by my face—I could feel it brush my skin in passing. I could smell the trace of her perfume it carried, frangipani and cloved orange over ambergris.
