by Lana Popovic
“What’s happening, my cherry girl?” she whispered to me. “There’s no more cold.”
“It’s gone, I think,” I whispered back, my throat tight. “The winter. We’ve lost it.”
Everyone else must have been as horrified as I was by the sudden snap, but I’d blown my bubble around me twice as thick as it’d ever been, infused with more will than ever before. I couldn’t hear anything through it. My kin’s shock and fear was more than I could take, when I had so much of my own.
Except for Mara. Her tolling was so momentous that I couldn’t block it out. I turned to look for her, in time to see her slip out the cottage door. Without thinking, I followed her out into the long rows of the vineyard and into the gathering dusk. The sky burned with the last of the sunset, as if some fiery hand had raked it. Maybe it wouldn’t have looked that way to me some other day. But all I could think of was the chalet burning, burning, burning behind us with Amaya’s unnatural flame.
With the bodies of the fallen smoldering inside. Catching fire like tallow candles, roasting for hours, melting down into runny fat.
So many of my grandmothers, dead. All their gleams reduced to ash.
And Nev. That, I couldn’t even stand to think about just yet.
Mara stopped so abruptly that I nearly ran into her back. I skidded to a stop myself, then glanced over her shoulder. There wasn’t anything special there, nothing to warrant pause. But when I walked around to face her, I saw that she’d stopped because she just couldn’t make herself take another step.
The glacial planes of her face were stricken, splotchy with tears. There was no golden goddess here, not anymore. Just a woman wallowing in grief and yet more guilt.
“I know. I know, and I am so sorry, fledgling,” she whispered. Her voice wasn’t even tripled, and her fine lips trembled like a little girl’s. She’d wrapped herself tight inside her arms, hunching over them. “Stars and gods, I am sorry for everything. I have never been so wholly wrong. Winter has broken much earlier than it should have, and now he comes, with a yet more fearsome horde. This time, I can feel him. Come full, ripe dark, he will be upon us. Sometime past midnight.”
That should have been the most important thing, but of course it wasn’t. “Why isn’t Riss back?” I asked her quietly. The plan had been to rage at her, but then there was her face. She hurt as much as I did, maybe even more. Those had been her daughters that we lost, children she’d loved for centuries. “You said when winter fled, the kingdom would collapse and that you’d catch Riss when it did. Why hasn’t it happened? Why isn’t she here?”
“I do not know why,” she replied, low and hoarse. “That is what should have happened. But the kingdom belongs solely to Death and his bride. For all that I can feel it too, it has never been under my control. And now it continues to revolve just as it did before. Perhaps it is his doing, some sustaining magic he spins there with your sister. The preservation of the lockbox was ever his domain.”
“Of course,” I said bitterly. “If there’s a way to keep Riss trapped with him, I bet that tricky bastard found it. So what now? How do we get her back?”
“I do not know, daughter.” Her voice shook with the admission. She was so unused to helplessness that it almost made me sorry for her. “And it is worse than that. If the kingdom continues to exist, Herron’s soul remains trapped within it. Now that winter no longer holds him, without his soul he will be even less human, and more demon. If we cannot destroy it, we cannot destroy him, either, and we are lost before he even arrives—unless Jasna draws her bedamned goddess down in the very flesh to fight him.”
The Lady. The way she put it reminded me what Luka had read.
Some gods can open doorways.
I wondered if the Dawn Star might be one of them.
“Forgive me, Malina,” she whispered again. “I tried, for all of you. Truly, I tried, as a mother should.”
I could have been selfish like I so badly wanted—it would have been easy. She’d tried but failed. The grief and guilt rolled off her, like the mournful bugling of some huge horn. She was ready for a flaying, steeled for it.
Instead, I reached for Mara’s hand. She was so astonished she tensed at the gesture, like I might hit her.
Then her face lapsed into lines of abject gratitude. Her cool hand relaxed and curled in mine.
“There might still be something we can do.” I squeezed tight, shifting my grip until our hands clasped like warriors’. “It’s not over yet, sorai. You fought alone for all these years. Tonight, we’ll stand with you.”
I WANDERED JASNA’S garden barefoot, looking for the right place. My wrists, throat, and ankles tingled in the evening cool. Before I went out back, Jasna had led me to the lily sink again. She’d sprinkled me with consecrated water and anointed me with the same cinnamon and mint.
Marking me as the Lady’s child.
“Does your Lady answer her children even if they aren’t sworn to her?” I’d asked her. “Will calling on her even do any good?”
She’d drawn back, her hands still glistening with fragrant oil, and given me a solemn, clear-eyed look. “The Lady does what needs doing, bird. As you’ve learned to do. And her hand is already over your heart.”
The night sky was so clear above me, a cloudless expanse around the shining sickle of the moon. Despite everything, I felt so safe within the circle of the valley’s mountains. As if the valley itself were a pair of clasped hands that held me gently in open palms. Jasna’s vineyard sprawled over so many acres, the rest of the village far enough away that all I saw were the distant firefly flickers of house lights and the pearly strings of the cars trailing each other over the mountain roads high above.
Out here, we were very much alone.
In half a haze, I began kneeling here and there. Taking careful clippings without damaging the plants. Jasna had told me what would be best. Rosemary, hyssop, holly, and rue. Mugwort, mistletoe, and thistle. Elderflower and betony. And a cluster of rowan-berries from the little tree that grew in the corner of the speared wrought-iron fence.
Then I knelt in front of a birdbath, its water like silk. There was barely any breeze, the night like a held breath. I’d left candles lit and a chalice there, full of Jasna’s victorious wine. To offer to the Lady, and then to drink. Once I’d poured some out onto the soil and taken a long sip, I clasped the trimmings in my hands until I felt them heat with will. My spine tingled like it had the first time Jasna taught me, and it felt like a root, reaching down into the earth.
The Lady’s earth.
Then I spread my hands and prayed.
I wasn’t very good at it at first. I’d never really prayed to anything before. But maybe the Lady’s hand really was on my heart. Once I began, the words poured out like a remembered psalm. Like something I’d said before.
“Attend me, Lady of the Rowan,” I whispered. “Dawn Star, Sun Mother, keeper of the fertile soil. Harken to your seeking daughter even before she gives her oath.”
Grape leaves rustled around me, expectant. Even though I still didn’t feel any stirring of a breeze.
After the greeting I spoke to her silently, informally. Like she was my mother. I begged her to find Riss, to pry her out of Death’s prison for me. To show my sister Herron’s soul and tell her how to bring it to us.
If she did it for me—all of it, or any of it—I promised to give her myself.
Even if she did nothing, she had me anyway.
I was so intent I almost didn’t hear it at first. But the night was bated with quiet, and I’d heard that warbling thrum before.
When I opened my eyes, for one wild, ecstatic moment I thought I might see the Lady. Instead, there was Riss—her face consumed with terror, tortured as a ghost’s.
There was a filmy not-quite-thereness to her, but it was really her.
Shock poured over me like hail, and then without warning, she shattered into everywhere. Like she had turned herself into a fractal. The night air thickened into a pond broken by a
stone, and in every facet I saw a slice of her face.
I couldn’t reach her or touch her. And though I could see her speaking, I had no idea what she said. The wind wouldn’t carry even a wisp of her voice.
But if she could hear me at all, I had to tell her what we needed her to do.
Twenty-Four
Iris
I COULDN’T DO IT. NO MATTER WHAT I DID, THE JAR remained in one obstinate, uncracked piece.
So I was sitting with my back against the altar, splay-legged like an exhausted child, when Fjolar appeared silently in front of me, his presence displacing a rush of air.
I glared up at him through the hair plastered across my face, sticky with sweat. I’d bashed the jar into the wooden pews, kicked it, stomped on it. I was so tired I could barely move. The jar was now in my lap, wedged between my knees, where I’d been turning it around to examine it. I thought I knew the catch to it now, what that series of deceptively decorative holes was really for.
The jar needed a tiny, sharp-pointed key, and would only open if unlocked.
“So that’s your final trick,” I said bitterly, picking damp hair from between my lips. “I can’t even open it without you.”
He dropped into an easy crouch in front of me, rocking onto the balls of his feet. His hair was up, the way I liked it best, and his eyes were unusually bright, that blazing azure slick as stained glass.
It took me a moment to recognize the gloss as tears.
“You can’t,” he agreed, lifting a hand. His bracelet swung from his strong, veined wrist, the arrowhead like a pendulum. “The key to it is mine.”
I lifted both hands to hide my face, unable to quell the rising tide of tears. Everything was lost. Everything. “And you won’t give it to me, will you? You wouldn’t even come here with me. Why would you help me now?”
So gently, he pried my hands away from my face, then held them curled tightly between his own, resisting easily when I tried to pull them back. “I didn’t say that, flower. The key is yours if you want it. Just say the word.”
Astonished, my eyes flew up to his. “Please, Fjolar. I have to take the soul back. When I tried to open the jar by breaking the glass, I—I don’t know. I did something, made things worse for Lina. I know I did.”
“You did,” he confirmed. “You set Herron free, and realigned this kingdom’s clock with yours. The battle will begin soon, in your world. But it hasn’t yet. We still have a bit more time—if you’ll let me have it, as a final gift. A parting present.”
“Why would I let you have anything?” I snarled at him. “Why would I give you gifts? You let me come here alone. You let me try to break the jar. You—”
“Because giving you the key means the end of me,” he interrupted. “Keeping that soul trapped is the only reason I exist in this form. Once you have the soul—and once you leave—I die, flower girl.” He huffed out a little laugh. “The only death that Death itself will know. And if you want to go now, I understand. But if you’ll stay a little longer—just a little while—I’d like to tell you about this last place. So you understand. I won’t take long, I swear.”
I wavered, torn between my pounding urgency and the open plea in his face. Even after everything, the notion that after this he’d stop existing made me quake in a way I wouldn’t have expected. It struck the part of my own heart that could—and almost did—love him.
“I know it’s a courtesy I wouldn’t have shown you if our roles were reversed, flower,” he said quietly. “But you aren’t me. You love to give, live for it. It’s one of the thousand reasons I love you.”
I watched him for another moment, gauging him for tricks. I’d been fooled so many times before—how could I know this wasn’t just another sleight of his hand? More of his endless smoke and mirrors?
But I believed him, yet again. And I couldn’t help letting him have this one last chance to prove he deserved all the trust I’d wasted on him.
So I reached for his hand, let him pull me up with the jar cradled under my arm.
“Show me, then.” I said. “But be quick about it.”
“A GERMAN KING had a gallery once,” he murmured, moving to stand behind me as I rested the jar back on the plinth. “An entire pavilion dedicated to thirty-six beautiful women, in the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. Some were singers and actresses, not just ornaments. And others were close to him—his daughters, wives, mistresses.”
“Well, that makes sense, then,” I said acerbically. “All performers, one way or another. But why make this a church?”
He tilted his head up to the ceiling. “Well, for one, I thought you might like this.”
I followed his gaze. Two chandeliers hung above us, flickering with candles and dripping with crystals; I hadn’t even seen them when I came in alone. But their framework was exceptional, elegant with violence: clusters of bullets fused together into bristling flowers, bayonets and blades thinned out to form curlicues and arcs.
“It’s from the Ružica Church in Belgrade,” he told me. “It doesn’t look quite like this—you’ll know that by now—but there really are two chandeliers there, made by soldiers from shell casings and weapons abandoned on the battlefield. I thought it might remind you of the one you liked so much, at Our Lady of the Rocks. The one made from glass flowers, between lintels hung with gifts from sailors’ brides.”
I did remember it, that hushed, sweet church afloat on its artificial island like a miniature Avalon near Perast.
“And the outside is a replica of the Basilica of Saint Denis in France. The one that holds the mummified heart of a dauphin. So I gave it to you as Herron’s ‘heart.’ I thought it might seem . . . familiar to you this way.”
With a pang, I realized it did. It brought back years of fighting tooth and nail with my mother. Sometimes in Lina’s defense, sometimes in my own, and sometimes just because that was what we did. And all the many times I’d imagined the shape of my own poor, battered heart, the boxes of glass I’d built in my mind to keep it cool and safe.
For a moment it nearly overwhelmed me, how much of me he knew. No one else I’d ever be with would understand me so thoroughly, from the inside out.
No matter what else he had done, there was something to be said for being so known.
He must have sensed the slight softening, his eyes flicking up to mine. “And look where it is,” he murmured, with a ghost of his rakish smile. “Technically it’s been right under your nose this entire time.”
I looked up to see what he meant. Below the stained-glass iris in the window, there was another one, like a little wink to fractals, and I couldn’t help but smile a little at the gesture.
The final portrait in the gallery’s collection.
The last of Death’s beloveds.
My portrait wasn’t surrounded by the same gold-leaf frame the others shared. Instead, mine had a border of blown glass, a fractaled profusion of petals and stems that radiated out and away. I was half smiling in the painting, my long face, domed cheekbones, and angular features unusually soft. My hair spilled over one shoulder in a slick of black so glossy it looked almost wet. And my eyes were a light, warm hazel I didn’t recognize, their edges darkened with smudged liner beneath neat black dashes of brows.
In cupped palms, I held a handful of wisteria rising into a fractal like a whirlwind and drifting over my shoulders. Above me it streaked up into the night sky, to burst into pink and purple falling stars.
“Do you remember all of them?” I asked him quietly. “The ones who came before me? Really remember them for who they were?”
“Every one of them,” he replied, just as hushed. “I know you think it’s been nothing but caprice with me, but it was always more than that. I didn’t know them like I know you, because they weren’t really here, not fully. But what I knew while I loved them, I’ve never forgotten.”
“It’s not enough for me to forgive you, you know,” I told him, unable to peel my gaze from my own portrait. “Not even close. But I will say that
I love my painting just a little.”
He pressed a kiss into my hair from behind, light as a breath. “Then that’s enough for me, flower girl. More than enough.”
I turned to face him one last time. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, fisting a knuckle against his forehead. “I’m actually afraid, flower,” he said, with a brittle, breathless half laugh. “What an awful feeling. Who would have thought?”
I tugged his hand away from his face and held it in mine. So broad and coarse and strong, with all its many rings. Marked with whorls like a real human hand, one that had been shaped with me in mind. One I’d never touch again, or feel sliding over my skin.
The loss wouldn’t be only his. I didn’t forgive him—I hated him, even—but it still cut deep to be not just leaving, but also destroying him.
“It has to be now,” I said softly. “Even if there was another way, you don’t deserve it. Not after everything you’ve done.”
“I know my penance is part of it.” He met my eyes with that dazzling cornflower blue and pressed my hand up to his cheek. “I’ll just miss you so much, flower. Whatever happens to me, I’ll miss you.”
“I know,” I said. “And I hope—I hope you find something that can pass for peace.”
Before he had a chance to say anything else, I rose up on my toes and gave him a warm, full kiss.
“Good-bye,” I whispered against his warm lips, so soft against his stubble.
Then the cool, sharp point of the arrowhead landed in my palm.
I closed my fingers around it as empty air settled into the space where his lips had been, with the echoing whisper of a sigh.
Twenty-Five
Malina
I HAD NO IDEA IF RISS HAD HEARD ME. IF THE LADY HAD gotten through to her.
Even if she hadn’t, we couldn’t do nothing. Herron was still coming, and now both Mara’s coven and Jasna’s were preparing for battle.
I’d fight with them—without my sister. Like Mara, I had to set aside all that grief for now.
