by Lana Popovic
I’d never thought of using the infinite bloom to kill. I didn’t know if it even could be used for that. But I needed this perversion to die, by my hand—and the wisteria responded to my need.
It roped out of me thicker and wilder than it ever had before, pulsing with magenta and violet light. It struck at him like a spear, and then coiled around him like a carnivorous vine.
Fierce triumph shook me, and I spooled out more and still more, flinging it at him. It hurt like it never had before. I’d already used so much; I’d destroyed an entire world before I landed here. But I had to be strong, like I always did. And I would be strong enough to murder him.
Then he opened his mouth, and more bilious black came surging out. It wrapped around my wisteria like a weedy parasite, its tendrils both sticky and sharp. It clamped down on the braided flowers and branches, so hard I could feel the monumental weight as it bore down—and began sucking my bloom into Herron’s mouth.
He was eating me.
As he inhaled my wisteria, he paused every now and then to sink his teeth into its slim branches, cracking them beneath his molars and grinding the soft petals between them. The black seeped from his mouth like a hungry mist, eating away at the blooms wherever it touched them. And it hurt, oh God, it hurt like infinite agony, agony folded over and around itself into a fractal of endless pain.
With every gnash of his jaw, I could feel parts of me slipping away. The memory of a fingertip swiped lingeringly beneath my chin—Fjolar? Luka? I couldn’t remember—a low, husky laugh that I recognized as Mama’s when she was young and still in love with her twin girls. The intricate network of wrinkles at the corners of Čiča Jovan’s eyes when he smiled at me in approval over a new technique I’d cast in glass.
Going, going, going. Everything was going or gone, leaving me like a receding tide. He was still at my edges, nibbling at my periphery, but the pain grew even more intense as he sank into the meat of me—and started eating memories of my sister.
I remembered more of Malina than I’d even known, I realized. Far, far back, I remembered opening my sticky eyes in a warm, dim place filled with opaque light, only to find my sister already looking back at me. We’d held hands in the womb; we’d held them in the cradle. And when we were old enough for our fingers to be deft, we’d braided her curls and my straight hair together, tangling it into such a snarl that Mama had to cut our shared plait out.
Then the memory winked out like a candle flame between licked fingers, and the terror fully overwhelmed me.
I couldn’t do this alone. I couldn’t save myself.
And if I kept trying, I’d lose everything.
“LINA!” I shrieked hoarsely, with everything I had left. “LINA, HELP ME!”
Twenty-Nine
Malina
WHY WERE ALL THESE BASTARDS FOREVER TRYING TO steal my sister?
She was mine, goddamn it. She belonged with me.
Riss shrieked out sobs as Herron sucked up her flowers into his maw. And then she called my name, called for my help.
At that, I flooded with raw will, was suddenly made of it. My sister needed me. And I’d take care of her, like she’d always taken care of me.
“You can’t have her,” I whispered to Herron, but it must have been somehow loud. Far above, Herron froze, eyes narrowing. Riss’s bucking body stilled. The sickening rush of her wisteria into his mouth stopped too, suspended. “You can’t have my sister.”
If you lead steadily and well, little bird, reality will leap to follow, Jasna had said. And I thought I’d already learned how to do it. Except I wasn’t a little bird, no one’s songbird, nor a fledgling. I was an eagle, and if I spread my wings they could blot out the sky. Reality would follow me wherever I led. The cavern inside me was even vaster and deeper than I’d felt yet—and it shimmered with the waiting stalactites of glowing will.
If Mara was made of angels, then so was I. And when I sang this time, I willed it louder than the music of the stars.
My ankle wobbled at my step, sent a shock of pain—it must have twisted during the battle. I ignored it, ignored everything but singing. The ground lurched and rocked under my feet. My hands balled into tight fists by my sides. This was my song, mine and only mine. I didn’t borrow anyone else’s strength for it.
“MY SISTER IS NOT YOURS BUT MINE AND MINE AND MINE,” I sang at him, wrath and ownership molded into melody. “FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO EAT, YOU BLIGHT, YOU NIGHTMARE SLUG!”
He strained against my song, spewed out more dark. His hair had merged with the darkness that flooded from him, and both blotted out the stars in the night sky above. Like the corona of a full eclipse. It didn’t matter, meant nothing to me. I couldn’t destroy him—that wasn’t my battle—but I also wouldn’t let him budge until he gave me what I wanted.
I was a daughter of both light and earth.
And he would give me back my sister.
“Have her, then, you shrill harpy of a brat,” he bellowed through the battering of my song. “She’s not what I came for, anyway!”
He flung Riss down like a child tossing away a toy. She would have broken herself on the ground, if Mara hadn’t thrown out a woven hammock of roses to catch her fall. It was threadbare and faint, woven of seedlings. But it was hers, and it was enough.
She had caught Riss in her net of roses after all, just like she’d promised me. Even if it hadn’t been the way she’d planned.
Wound in them, Riss drifted down, and I reached out to catch her as she descended.
“You’re with me,” I murmured to her, pulling her half onto my lap. Her eyes fluttered—a new hazel I’d never seen before, like sunshine slanting over maple wood, bracketed with burst blood vessels. And she was so pale I could see the faint threads of veins under her eyes. But she was alive, and I was going to keep her that way. “You’re going to be fine.”
Above us, Mara had taken advantage and regrouped. The roses of her wings filled and darkened back into life, fueled by the last of her will. With a wordless echo of my song that was more a sense than sound, she flung herself back at Herron.
“You will have no more of my daughters,” she bellowed in her savage knell, smoldering and near-deafening as a bell fresh from the forge. “NO MORE!”
Something flared, blinding at the periphery of my sight. I turned—and saw Jasna leading Dunja to the golden breach that Riss had made when she arrived. Behind her, the rest of her coven still circled their altar stone. None of the creatures had even brushed them. I could almost see the dome of power they had raised from the ground. A whirling flicker in the air around them, like a school of minnows circling.
“Draw down your gods,” Jasna was saying to Dunja, and the peal of her voice carried much louder and clearer than it should have. I could see her shadow cast on the ground by the light spilling from the split in the air. It stretched many feet farther behind than her own height, and it wore trailing robes and an antler rack that weren’t really there.
“You’re strong enough to hold them, and already a vessel,” she went on. “Their world is pure love, just as his is pure nothing, with ours standing between them as the battleground. And love will always, always win. They’re here waiting—I see you see them—but they can’t cross without your invitation. So invite them, girl. Invite them in, as that befouled man invited his filthy hordes. Be a person, rather than a ghost.”
Dunja gave her an uncertain look, then glanced back at me cradling Riss. Whatever she saw in us decided her. She shot me one of her brief, savage smiles, like a descendant of the Amazons.
Then she turned back to the breach and fell to her knees in front of it, arms uplifted.
The gold poured into her as if it had been waiting like a dew-drop on a leaf, quivering with eagerness to fall.
Dunja arched her back, mouth opening wide, swallowing the light. It sluiced and pulsed, shimmering waterfalls of it running down her throat.
Watching, Riss stirred against me. “I almost did that,” she whispered, awestruck. �
��I was there, before I made it to his kingdom. I crossed through it too, on the way back. It’s beautiful there. I think—Lina, I think that’s home.”
“This is home,” I told her, blindly fumbling for her hand. “But I know what you mean, and I think you’re right.”
The cascade finally subsided, and Dunja swept up. Both Iris and I shaded our eyes. For the first time that night, a hush fell over the vineyard. Above the sear of fire and the sweet-wine smell of burned, crushed grapes, a heady perfume tide rolled out in waves. I recognized it as Mara’s scent, the Garden-of-Eden lushness of ripest, sweetest fruits. The nectar of ambrosia born from a tree of everlasting love.
A kind of love that didn’t grow on earth.
Dunja didn’t look like she had grown from earth anymore, either.
She towered over the battlefield, swathed in folds of gold. Like light incarnate. Something like wings rippled behind her, if bat wings could be made transparent and cast from a precious-metal mold. She also had more arms than was the norm, I noticed. Definitely more than she’d had before, but they seemed natural as all the rest of it. Her hair ran with honeyed runnels, her features shone, gilded and glittering. Marks scrolled across her forehead and down one cheek, looping letters of some alphabet I’d never seen.
And her eyes had grown so huge, pupils twisted into cloverleafs like crossed infinity signs.
So tremendous.
So beyond beautiful.
Our aunt turned to a goddess of light.
Two steps took her to where Herron tussled with Mara. Next to her, their mortal combat had all the scale of toddlers playing tug-of-war over a toy.
With immense, delicate fingers, she lifted Mara from Herron’s grip and gently deposited her next to us. I shifted Riss next to me and lifted Mara’s head onto my lap.
“You can rest now, sorai,” I murmured to her, combing my fingers through Mara’s sweat-drenched curls. “She’s got it from here.”
Mara let out the deepest, most careworn sigh, then closed her eyes. I would have been afraid we’d lose her, too, but though her chest rose and fell only slightly, breath was breath. And I could still hear the ringing of her bell. Mist-shrouded, dampened, and so far away.
But there.
Our far-mother was made of courage, too much to just die before she saw us safe.
Above us, Dunja reached for Herron. He shied frantically away from her, the dark around him scrabbling away from her gold. But there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. She cupped him in her hands and brought him to her chest, then engulfed him in a fiery embrace. Everywhere he touched her, he burst into instant flame. Her face placid above his struggle and shrieks, she pressed and pressed him against herself until he simply burned away.
What was left of the devils followed in his stead. They went up in yowling showers of sparks, burning to cinders wherever they stood.
Watching her and watching them, I could understand.
How humans who’d caught glimpses of these warring worlds had seen both salvation and damnation in them. It probably wasn’t that simple—nothing ever was. Maybe there was something to Herron’s dark that none of us would ever know, something that had drawn him to it.
But now, looking at Dunja, who could resist that clarion light?
Sweeping her liquid gaze across us all, Dunja bent and gently held out a giant, glowing palm that could easily have cupped both me and Riss. Her light fell over us, a loving solar flare, cauterizing any lingering shadows.
“Baby witch,” she crooned to Riss in a behemoth voice, like whale song played by an infinite number of violins. “Where is the rest?”
Her hand trembling, Riss pointed to the lumpy, glinting thing she’d brought with her and dropped beside us when she ran. I still couldn’t tell what it actually was, something silvery and black that glistened like meat. But I knew it had to be Herron’s soul.
Dunja smiled in thanks, showing teeth that beamed painfully bright—then lifted the lump and promptly dropped it in her mouth. A little grimace rippled across her serene face as she swallowed, like a baby tasting a lemon.
Then she lifted easily, turning to where Jasna stood haloed by the breach. The older woman hadn’t moved, but she dipped her head when Dunja touched two fingers to her heart in a salute.
“Thank you, lady,” Dunja said. “They—we—I owe you a debt for your help.”
“You owe me nothing,” Jasna replied. “He trespassed on my soil. Do you know what to do next?”
Dunja tipped back her head and laughed. A rich, rolling sound like a sunrise turned to song. “Oh, I’m going home, of course. And after that, who knows, who knows? Perhaps . . .” A platinum tinge of wistfulness crept into her face. “Perhaps after that, I’ll find him again, somehow.”
She turned back to me and Riss, blew us each a kiss. “Tell sorai good-bye, when she wakes. And my baby witches—don’t forget your aunt.”
I shook my head furiously, choking on tears. I knew it was right, knew she had to go. But why did they all have to leave?
As she turned her back to us and stepped daintily through the breach, it sealed shut behind her with a blowtorch hiss.
Thirty
Iris
THE GRIEF DESCENDED WITH THE ASHES.
It took days to fully douse Jasna’s burned wreckage of a vineyard, trampled by Herron’s demons and seared by Amaya’s flames. The villagers turned up to help, and though they whispered to each other behind their work-worn hands and looked at us with fleeting, fearful eyes, they didn’t ask any probing questions.
They’d felt the ground rocking with the battle from miles away, seen the lapping of the fire against the sky—but an earthquake and a careless bonfire that had blazed out of control were answer enough for them. They didn’t need to consider monsters darker than the night, glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
I wished I could do the same myself. Sometimes ignorance was the wiser choice, and easier on the heart and mind.
Malina and I helped where we could, but neither of us had much to give. Not to the effort, nor to each other. We’d lost so much that the world felt both new and somehow tainted, raw and rotten like a fresh-peeled fruit plucked too late. It should have been some comfort to bear it together, but for once, it wasn’t. We had an overlap of anguish—Mama, Nev, Jovan—but Lina had also lost family that she’d come to know, coven daughters who were strangers to me. Women she’d trained and learned to respect, who meant something more to her than they ever would to me except a list of lovely names.
Niko understood the loss better than I could; she’d been there for it. I rarely saw her drift far from Lina’s side. She was always there, petting, gentling, watching over her “pie”—and Lina took care of her in kind. They spent most of their time in Jasna’s herb garden, tending to it and cutting plants for healing tinctures and tonics that I refused to drink.
That garden wasn’t my place, not the way it was theirs. And even if it had been, I no longer belonged with them.
They hadn’t lost Fjolar like I had. They hadn’t almost-loved and then killed Death.
I couldn’t blame them for their distance like I would have once. I was too tired for blame, and I was different, too. Alien, disjointed, out of step with the whole world around me. The passing of time bothered me, the heartache of losing day to night over and over, instead of seeing a steadfast sky above. The kingdom had marked me like a brand, in some indelible way.
The only one who could have understood my newness, and my shameful longing for Fjolar—the only one who would have helped me through both without judgment—was Dunja.
Our aunt turned goddess, and then lost to light.
I didn’t even have her to turn to, now that my own mother was truly gone.
And then there was Luka.
He haunted me, a ghost hovering around my edges. Gazing at me with those watchful hazel eyes, muscles always tensed under his fine-cut face. Uncertain around me in a way he’d never been before. He’d held me through that first rending, weeping night
of loss after Dunja destroyed Herron, but that had been comfort lent in catastrophe. Now, in the absence of tragedy, we couldn’t seem to find each other.
I couldn’t find my own best friend.
Maybe it was me who was the ghost again. Like I’d been to Lina every time she saw me fractaled.
Maybe I’d never be anything but a stranger again, the prodigal daughter who should never have come home.
THE THIRD NIGHT, I couldn’t sleep. I was still so tired, bogged down as if my veins ran with silt instead of blood, and all I wanted was the comfort of oblivion. Which, of course, wouldn’t come.
Even sleep wouldn’t indulge me here reliably, not anymore.
As far as I could tell, none of the surviving coven daughters were similarly troubled. The cottage was filled with a soft symphony of sleeping breath, the thirty gathered women drowsing away the gathered exhaustion of difficult days. Niko and Lina actually had one of the spare bedrooms to themselves, as if they were Jasna’s designated royalty.
At least I wouldn’t have to see them curled together in the kind of peace I couldn’t seem to find.
I stepped between pallets and bedrolls, picking my way carefully through them until I made it to the kitchen, where I found a storm lantern to light my way. Then I wrapped myself in one of Jasna’s hand-knit sweaters to ward off the mountain chill, my nose wrinkling at the fabric’s scent; everything she owned was fragrant with wild onion, beeswax, and herbs. I should have loved the earthiness of it, the homespun warmth. But I didn’t. Some part of me had delighted in the allure of Mara’s exotic haven—the same part that had thrilled to Fjolar’s kingdom in all its overwrought glory.
I just didn’t like it here. It felt like the essence of Cattaro, or Montenegro itself distilled down to an absolute.
And it was still the opposite of what I wanted.
