by Lana Popovic
She was right about one thing: I didn’t need to know who she was to understand what she’d come to tell me. Had my thinking been unmuddied by the meddlesome magic of this place, and the beginnings of a more genuine love, I should have been able to piece it together from what he’d told me himself.
This kingdom was made in my image, he kept saying, from the likeness of my mind. Every story he had told me linked it to things I loved. Everything in it carried relevance, a glimmering line of connection winding back to me.
That being the case, I should long since have guessed its shape.
But before I brought this to him, I had to be sure I was right. I needed to find higher ground, she’d said. I needed the perspective of height.
Now that I was clear of the Lady’s bower and outside of the sphere of Fjolar’s stilling influence, the kingdom resumed its tumult around me—or my senses resumed their suspended revolt. The pounding of the waterfall grew horribly loud, a violent, compounded crash like the falling water might thunder apart the basin. The temperate air turned too warm, and the ruddy gold of the sky became searingly bright. Summoning the bloom would be easier in the Quiet, so I shaded my eyes against the glare and searched for a seam, a boundary that marked a passage point to another piece of the kingdom.
But I couldn’t find one, and I didn’t feel strong enough to go looking. I had the feeling that I’d be needing all my strength soon; best to start conserving it. And with nowhere to hide from so much light and sound, right where I stood would be as good as anywhere.
I half sat, half collapsed onto the ground, wincing at the stab of prickly grass. Closing my eyes and reaching inside, I found the gathered coil of the wisteria, waiting like a rope ladder for me to fling it out.
Up, I demanded. Take me higher, lift me up.
At my urging, the blossoms emerged easily, almost eagerly. I’d been getting a lot of practice out of spinning them into a cradle in the Quiet. Like every time, I knit them with my mind, blooming branch over branch into a pink-and-purple lattice, plaiting their twigs and flowers into sturdy rungs. It shot upward under my guidance, like Jack’s beanstalk twisting toward the giants.
With a crackling snap, the ladder solidified. It hung above me, suspended from nothing, swaying with the weight of its own branches and the spiraling corkscrews of its blossoms. I didn’t need to climb it with my body; even here, the shell of me could stay behind. All I needed to traverse the framework that I’d built was the nimble scurry of my mind.
Launching, I scaled up and up, high enough that I left the waterfall far below me and behind. Glancing down without fear—even if I let go, the receptacle of my body waited to catch me and break my fall—I could see the speck of Fjolar still curled beside the steaming water of the Devil’s Punchbowl. How fitting that he would choose a place with a name like that; he’d even admitted it himself.
He spent so much time telling me what he was, and I spent just as much choosing not to hear it.
This high up, the fabric of this cobbled-together world began to fray. I wasn’t climbing closer to an outer level of the atmosphere, because this wasn’t my earth and there wasn’t one here. No clouds wisped around me, nothing but a trailing gray haze. The kingdom fanned out below me like a twisted chessboard, every square a different color, size, and shape. And the board itself wasn’t a board, but a spiral swirling to a central point—from up here it looked both surpassingly strange and achingly familiar. The separate pieces were poured into this mold like pearls, each encased in a filmy, white layer that must have been the seam of Quiet threaded all around and between, stitching them together and keeping them separate.
All together, it took the shape of a coiled-up snake, a nautilus shell, or a furled flower bud.
A natural fractal.
And exactly like my birthday cake—the Sacher torte roulade Mama had once baked me, to echo the flavors of the bougainvillea I had blown for her.
I could almost recognize the pieces that we had visited, based on the shades and contours I saw from here. The ones on the very outside of the kingdom could only lead to the neighboring three pieces: whichever lay behind, in front, and toward the inside. With every tier closer to the center, the more pieces each one abutted. From any single one, we could have reached at least four others.
Fjolar could have waltzed me back and forth between them for months or years, maybe for decades, hopscotching through the kingdom at his whim. I would never have known if he was leading me toward the center.
A center that I could see, even from up here, pulsing with a distinctive, silvery light. That was where the soul would be.
Where he could have taken me from the beginning.
Twenty-Two
Iris
HE WAS JUST STIRRING AWAKE AS I CRESTED THE WATERFALL’S peak, jittery and out of breath from both the mercury swell of rising fury and the speed of the climb. I’d half jogged up here in my eagerness to confront him, but now that I could see him—bare-chested and beautiful, pale hair still rumpled from where I’d tangled my fingers in it—the maelstrom collapsed into a single point of pain.
You told me you wouldn’t lie to me. And then you did it again.
I’d thought I was beginning to know him, but he’d never stopped betraying me.
He smiled lazily at me as I stood over him, blinking sleep away, still too languid to notice the studied blankness of my face. “I napped with you, flower! I’ve never done that before. I think I even dreamed—”
“You’ve been lying to me again,” I broke in. “I know you have. And finally, I think I even understand.”
Slowly, he propped himself up onto his elbows. His expression shifted by degrees, to that implacability I recognized from when I had tried to refuse him on the Cattaro beach. A sulk between sullenness and stone. “And what, exactly, do you think you understand?”
“You know where the center of the kingdom is, and you’ve known this whole time,” I accused. “You could have led me there straightaway—because it’s a spiral, isn’t it? Instead of following it around and around, we could have bisected it. Taken a direct route to the kingdom’s core.”
He shook his head, eyes steely, still clinging to denial. “Being here with you bolstered the last of the spell. I wouldn’t have wanted to take any shortcuts, not while we were doing our part.”
“That’s not how it really works, though, is it?” I demanded, my voice breaking. “All you needed to do to keep the spell from breaking fully was bring me here right before it broke—and you did that just by stealing me. Once I got here, it didn’t matter how long I stayed, did it? You said so yourself; this is a place outside of time. And the kingdom would only need sustaining if Mara was still trying to keep Herron’s soul imprisoned—and I know she’s not, otherwise why would Lina have told me to find it and bring it back? You’ve been keeping me here just because you could. Even though you knew how much I wanted to go back.”
His face was still impassive. “Why would I ever do that to you, flower?”
The pain peaked, overwhelmed me, the immensity of the betrayal. Especially given that I should have expected no less from him. I knew better, and still I hadn’t learned.
“Because you wanted the kingdom’s magic to keep chiseling at me. So you could pry me open, steal my time and love. I know how to get out, once I find the soul—you’ve practically told me how to unravel this world. I could already have been back where I belong!”
He came to his feet in one explosive motion, a storm raging across his face. His eyes burned with an intensity I didn’t recognize, and he clasped both hands behind his neck, gaze boring into the ground.
“You’re right, flower,” he lashed out hoarsely. “Is that what you want to hear? Well, there you have it—you’re absolutely right. I forged this world for you; of course I know where I lodged Herron’s soul for safekeeping. But can you blame me? Why shouldn’t I have allowed myself the luxury of a little time with you, since it makes no difference to them when you leave here?”
I shook him off, hating how much I still wanted to lean into that familiar touch, and turned my back to him. “You don’t have the first fucking idea of what loving means,” I tossed over my shoulder. “Maybe I’m not the best at it myself, but at least I’ve got the basics down. If you wanted time with me, you could have asked me for it. Not taken it from me like something that belongs to you.”
The bitterest pill was that I’d thought that I’d found a little freedom, for once, here with him. And instead I’d been doing what I always did. Fulfilling someone else’s desires, bending myself to their demands.
“I was just afraid . . .” Tears turned his voice hoarse. “I was so afraid that you’d say no.”
“Then you’d have lived with it, like the rest of us do. You’ve already had more love than most, stolen as it was.” I refused to turn back and look at him, give sympathy a route back in. “I’m going to the center; I know which way to go now. It’ll be fresh hell getting there without you, but I’ll do it if I have to. So I suppose this is when you decide. If you really believe you love me, then help me get there, and keep me strong until I find it.”
He watched me for a long moment, with so much raw tenderness in his eyes that my stupid heart stirred a little. Maybe he’d do it, this one thing I needed so much. The one sacrifice I wanted from him.
Then he shook his head once, and turned away.
HEAVY WITH ANGUISH, I set off on the straight line that would slice like a knife through the patchwork pieces and lead me to the spiral kingdom’s center. I had no sense of how long I walked, and without Fjolar’s presence to moor me, it was a nauseating, dizzy slog. One miserable, leaden foot after another. Eventually, I even found myself looking forward to passing through the seams of Quiet, where at least I could use my wisteria to protect myself and steal some comfort.
Because as much as the kingdom itself tormented me, the pain of his refusal was infinitely worse. It shouldn’t have hurt so much, but it did, because I hadn’t been lying when I told him I could have loved him. I’d come to understand parts of him so well, and despite everything, I simply ached to be without him. It had been so long since I was truly alone, and in this world—his world—I was more alone than I’d ever been.
And then I found it.
I knew it for what it was as soon as I stumbled shakily through the final seam. The central piece, the core pearl of the kingdom, felt nothing like the rest.
I could sense the cloy of it as soon as I stepped out of the Quiet. The welt of sky above hovered on the brink of storm, all grays, blacks, and purples streaked across the swollen bellies of the clouds. Every once in a while, a cool spatter of rain blew across my face.
Below the incipient storm stretched an endless field of flowers. Not wildflowers, but cultivated, decorative blossoms. Plump orchids, gladiolus spears, cups of tulips. Pale, slim lilies, bright bursts of carnations and chrysanthemums. Red, yellow, and blush roses, the lush profusion of hydrangea.
Maybe they should have been beautiful, but they all seemed like funeral flowers to me.
A simple medieval abbey sat in their midst. A Gothic basilica with one rose window, three portals, and a single, splendid tall tower.
The wooden portal door swung open for me, creaking heavily on its bronze clasps, before I even reached out. “Oh, nice touch,” I muttered to myself.
The inside of the cathedral wasn’t truly a church. I stood under what should have been the nave, with pews on either side. But though there was an altar at the farthest end, floodlit by the bruised light spilling through a stained-glass window cast with a single iris, the rest of the room was a gallery. A simple one, all its walls lined with portraits in the same style and size.
I wandered to the first one on my left, trailing my fingers over the gold leaf of the frame. A black-haired, black-eyed woman met my eyes with a ferocious, regal gaze. She looked so much like a younger Mara that at first I thought that might be who she was, but the plaque beneath the painting read “Amrana.” In the portrait she held both hands upraised, palms up, a fountain of water twisted into lacy shapes arcing from one hand to the other.
A taper candle inlaid with petals and herbs burned beneath the portrait, and when I bent over the flame, I smelled the curling, complex scent of a soul-perfume. She’d been a brave woman with a savagely tender heart, quick to anger and just as quick to laugh.
Amrana, Mara’s daughter. The first of Death’s brides.
I made my way from one to the next, inhaling the candles’ scents, tracing the lovely lines of their faces. All beautiful, to the last, and each posed with the most incandescent depiction of her gleam, the smell of her soul wreathing her likeness from below.
“It’s us,” I whispered, wondering if it was appropriate to feel so much reverence. My predecessors had been sacrificed and so badly used, but they had performed for Death somewhere beautiful and drenched with love—and they’d been offered up for a greater good. Maybe they deserved my respect, along with the well of sympathy and grief.
But why a simple church for this gallery, I wondered, when a gallery could have been tucked somewhere more extravagant?
Maybe because churches had altars.
My heart began to pound as the pieces fell in place, and I picked up my pace toward the altar. A crystal bell jar etched with complex designs—concentric circles and jagged bolts like lightning—rested on a white marble plinth.
The air grew so cold near the plinth that I could see my own breath. The thing inside the jar was fleshy and silvery, and it still beat, though not the way a human heart would have—something more like the ripple of serpentine muscles. It had too many chambers, a honeycomb of them, and was too muscular and veined to even mimic a real heart.
It felt familiar, that pulsing, ravenous dark, from all the times I’d seen him through the infinite bloom.
Herron’s soul, shaped like a captive heart.
I went to pick the jar up and hissed at the touch—it was icy cold, clustered with snowy crystals at its base. I turned it around in my hands, looking for an opening, some kind of keyhole, but all I could see were the bas-relief etchings that decorated it, the stipples and holes. The jar was of a single piece, as if it had been blown with the heart already inside it, like a ship inside a bottle.
It was as magical and unlikely as anything else here; it belonged to this world. Unless I pried the heart out of it, I wouldn’t be able to take it with me when I left.
So I lifted it over my head—it was heavy, desperately heavy, almost impossible for me to lift that high—and threw it down on the marble floor with as much force as I could muster.
The glass didn’t even crack, though the slab beneath it did, spidering all the way through.
Instead, the snow crystals that had rimed the base scattered loose, and the air around the plinth went moist and very warm. As if the cold had somehow contained it, a dark miasma thickened and clotted around the jar—and the thing inside it began to shriek.
Wordless as it was, the hissing scream carried a note of victorious gratitude. It almost sounded like it was thanking me.
Then I realized, with an awful, creeping chill, that the light inside the chapel had shifted. I walked to the window, craning my head up to the sky. The storm outside was gaining strength, the cloud banks drawing closed. Rain shattered in sheets against the glass.
Which meant the clouds were moving. For the first time, a piece of the kingdom had proper weather, a changing sky.
Breaking the jar’s icy seal must have somehow spurred the kingdom’s time back into motion, like winding a stilled cuckoo clock—linking it back to time in my own world.
Words floated unbidden to the surface of my mind, wher
e they were still scored from the first time I’d seen Herron—in the mountain forest, surrounded by his monstrous menagerie. The little spy-witch has broken our last shackles, he’d said.
All this time I’d spent agonizing about who his helper might be, which of Mara’s daughters might be the treacherous one, torturing myself over how little I could see of any of them besides Lina.
But it had been me all along. The little spy-witch—he’d meant me. It dawned on me that I’d done a terrible thing.
A thing that was happening to Lina, and to everyone else in my world, right now.
Twenty-Three
Malina
JASNA HAD WELCOMED US BACK WITH UNRUFFLED GRACE, given that we really were bringing a war to her doorstep this time around. How all of us even fit in her cottage, I couldn’t understand—fifty people shouldn’t have been able to pack into it, but there was room. It made me feel almost hopeful, like she might really be able to help protect us.
We were just settling down to try to eat when I felt it.
The last of winter snapping, like the cracking of the frozen surface of a pond.
The melting had been gradual until then, and we were meant to have more time. It was too soon for this. But there it was, a violent, final crack, a splintering shard of pain in my hourglass eye. Surrounded by gasps of fear and surprise, the other daughters clutching at their faces, I stood and stumbled to the nearest mirror.
The pale, terrified girl who peered back at me had two warm, fully brown eyes.
Somehow, Herron had managed to shed winter’s shackles early, before we had even a night to recover.
All I had to do to make sure was elbow my way to the others, find Mama, and touch her. When I gripped her shoulders, for the first time, her rose-animated flesh was warm as the air around it.
