It didn’t take long for Insistent Tide to realize Nothing’s hair was too many layers to braid without wisps or choppy pieces falling free, and too fine to take pins or combs well. With a disgusted scoff, Insistent Tide pinned only a little back from her temples and clipped in a vine of sweet-smelling white flowers with light-orange centers. They were real, Nothing discovered when she touched their petals.
Insistent Tide picked up a pot of moon-white powder, but Nothing said, “No.”
“No?”
“I can do my own.”
The old woman frowned her obvious disbelief but backed away with her hands up. She hobbled over to the chair in which she’d slept when Nothing entered and collapsed back into it. Her dark eyes held on to Nothing, already judgmental.
If this was what it meant to have a grandmother, Nothing thought with a scowl, perhaps she was better off.
Nothing looked at herself in the small oval mirror. She was pretty, but not as pretty as the dress itself. Lightening her skin with the powder would be a better contrast with her hair, and vivid blue on her lips would pull at the dress. That is what a lady of the empress’s court would do.
Taking quick inventory of the available pots of color, the brushes and palettes, Nothing had an idea that made her smile.
She used her fingers and a single dark-blue pencil, slapping green and red in thick streaks against her cheeks and forehead, around her lips, giving herself the appearance of a monster. A goblin with green cheeks and swirling red eyes, a red mouth, and horns pulling away from her brow into her hair. The pencil she used to color her lips a blue darker than the dress. When she finished, it was as if a demon, not a girl, had dressed up in a diaphanous blue dress and put on twilight-blue lips, to have dinner with a sorceress.
Nothing grinned, showing herself her little white teeth, top and bottom rows, and her brown eyes glittered against the makeup, almost red.
Insistent Tide snored in the corner.
“I’m finished,” she declared, standing. The long gown swept around her legs, and Nothing remembered she wore no shoes. She’d keep it that way!
“By the Queens of Heaven!” The old woman groaned. “You’re a disaster.”
“I’m a demon, and you’ll take me to my dinner.”
Insistent Tide cocked her head and peered closely at Nothing, then laughed in a way that was almost a snarl.
It seemed to Nothing that she approved.
Warmth spread in Nothing’s chest, and she let her grimace fade into a smile.
FIFTEEN
THE DINING ROOM WITHIN the Fifth Mountain was a massive amethyst geode, glittering from every angle with facets of livid purple. The bottom had been covered with a crystal floor, translucent and laid against the spearing amethysts to give the illusion of walking across their sharp heads. The table was low, surrounded by gold-thread kneeling cushions.
Nothing entered alone, having been nudged inside by Insistent Tide before the old woman shut the door and it vanished into the crystal.
Immediately, Nothing lost track of the seams and was trapped.
She sighed and looked around.
Each slice of the geode sphere was as lovely and dangerous and purple as the next, like being imprisoned inside some kind of violet star.
Nothing loved it. Just as she’d loved the meadow of flowers and hard black ripples of ancient lava married together in the valley below the mountain.
At the wooden table, Nothing knelt, sniffing at the smell of pine resin and the rich, fatty aroma of whatever broth steamed from the bowls already set. A flask of wine waited too, beside two cut-glass cups in the shape of fish.
“Hello,” the sorceress said.
Nothing spun to face her, mouth open in surprise.
For a moment the sorceress’s mouth dropped open in similar surprise.
Before Nothing could think of why she’d surprised a sorceress, she was captivated by her: a young woman with the appearance of a twenty-year-old: smooth, light-copper skin; black-brown-red-streaked hair pulling straight back from her face to pour down her back like a velvet veil; a gown of sunset pink and crimson, edged in delicate sea green. And her eyes. Oh, her eyes were inhuman. One the brilliant green of summer leaves, the other bone white, and both with vertical red-slit pupils. A monster’s eyes in a perfect face.
Her mouth was unpainted, soft-looking lips ever so slightly darker copper than her round cheeks and elegant jaw. The sorceress smiled to reveal jagged, triangle teeth crowding her mouth.
Nothing gasped. Just like this geode, just like the lava-and-flowers valley, the sorceress was more beautiful because of the threat.
“I thought you were Nothing, but you know otherwise,” the sorceress said, studying Nothing’s face.
“I am Nothing,” Nothing replied in a whisper. She swallowed and said in a stronger voice, “Where is Kirin Dark-Smile?”
The sorceress glided toward one end of the oval table and knelt. Her skirts billowed around her like a pool of blood. “Join me?” When she gestured, the flask of wine rose from the table and poured thin red wine into both fish glasses. As if an invisible hand served them.
“Is that the great demon of the Fifth Mountain?” Nothing asked, unmoving.
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“At home,” the sorceress said with a secretive smile. Her unmatched eyes flicked to Nothing and her shark-tooth smile widened.
Nothing’s stomach fluttered nervously, and she knelt on the firm golden pillow at her end of the table. Out of reach of the sorceress. She took the cup of wine. The glass was cool, its scales pressing sharply into Nothing’s fingers. She drank, a little too much.
The sorceress laughed prettily. Those eyes stared at Nothing, and her lips parted with hunger.
Fear thrilled in Nothing and she cast the cup away with a little cry. The wine arced against the crystal floor; the glass cracked in two perfect pieces. One drop of red splashed the sea-green hem of the sorceress’s gown. Nothing stared at it, panting. “Was it so easy?” she cried. “To take my heart?”
“I don’t take hearts.”
Nothing bared her teeth, suddenly remembering the demon’s face she’d painted upon herself.
The sorceress leaned forward. “I accept hearts.”
“What does that mean?” Nothing put both her hands flat over her chest, but she could not feel her racing pulse through dress and skin and bone.
“I have not poisoned you, nor drugged you in any way.” To prove it, the sorceress took her own fish glass and drank half of the wine, just more than Nothing had swallowed.
The sorceress let go of her glass and it floated toward Nothing. She said, “Drink.”
Nothing plucked it from the air and put it to her lips, breathing the heady fumes. Her sip was barely there, barely a taste.
“The soup is my favorite,” the sorceress said. She lifted her bowl in a slight salute before setting it down and taking a lovely crystal spoon.
Nothing stared at the reddish-brown broth. It smelled like beef and peppers. Not what she expected from the table of a sorceress who could have anything, presumably. There ought to have been songbird eggs and fluffy pastries, thinly sliced fish laid out in a rainbow, jellies and towers of fruit Nothing had never seen before.
“Eat,” the sorceress commanded gently.
Nothing did not lift her spoon.
“Kirin will eat what you eat.”
“What?” She lifted her gaze to the sorceress.
“I have told the prince that he will be served what you eat. So feed him.”
Nothing ate. It was good, spicy, and surely better for a starving prince than any of the magical, strange food she’d imagined. Halfway through the deep bowl, she slowed down. The sorceress had been eating too, and when Nothing paused, the sorceress patted her lips with a napkin.
“Why do you have him?” Nothing asked.
“I thought I needed his heart.”
“But you don’t.”
“I need what
his heart will bring me.”
“What?”
The sorceress blinked, and her eyes were more human seeming, without the long red pupil, though still one was bright green and the other dull white. They could be, under certain circumstances, those of a very strange woman. It shifted the sorceress’s face to less magnificently beautiful and more approachable. “An answer. That is what I look for in the hearts of all maidens.”
“An answer to what?”
“A curse, of course.”
Nothing froze. “You’re cursed?”
“Yes.”
“What is your curse?”
The sorceress smiled wryly.
“You can’t say,” Nothing grumbled.
“I can tell you a story. Eat.”
Somehow the sorceress had acquired a new glass of wine, though Nothing’s broken glass remained where it had fallen.
Nothing put another spoonful into her mouth.
“Once a girl climbed into the core of the Fifth Mountain asking to speak with the demon. She wanted to be a sorcerer and bargained with the demon to teach her magic in return for a wife.”
“You’re the wife of the Fifth Mountain!” Nothing interrupted.
The sorceress’s eyelashes fluttered: Nothing hadn’t noticed how long and curving they were before. Like the line of a soaring raven’s wing. “The demon agreed, and they married, and she learned so much it could not be told in words. The sorceress and her consort were happy, and powerful, for many years, and so the sorceress decided what many sorcerers do: she would find a way to give her demon life again—a form of its own. But demons are not meant for such things. Spirits live; demons exist. They make new homes in the houses of others. They devour. They take. To live is to give, to create, and so it is a trap to think it possible to give life again to a demon. But the sorceress asked herself, is love not giving too? Is it not creation? If a demon can love, can it not live?”
The sorceress paused. Nothing stared at her. Despite having eaten so much, she felt empty. “Was she certain demons can love?” Nothing whispered.
“She believed it, which is better than knowing,” the sorceress said. She drank more wine before continuing. “The sorceress began her attempt, gathering power she could barely contain, to make a living form for her demon. Storms racked the Fifth Mountain, and its core burst and burned, and when the sorceress finished, instead of embracing her from a cradle of new life, the great demon of the Fifth Mountain was simply gone.”
“You said the demon was home!”
“It is. Now.”
Nothing scowled.
“When the demon vanished, the sorceress searched high and low, across the empire, but could not find it. She asked dragons; she begged the wind to take her pleas to the Queens of Heaven and demanded answers of the rain-forest gods. She even sent messengers to the Four Living Mountains, though their sorcerers hated her. None knew. Finally, the sorceress succeeded in summoning a unicorn, and it offered her a single piece of wisdom: You will find your answer in the heart of the most beautiful maiden.”
The sorceress paused to sip her wine again, and Nothing was breathless.
“It was a very unicorn answer, for they are drawn too well to beauty themselves. Nevertheless, the sorceress hunted for years. She hunted beautiful maidens and asked for their hearts.”
“Asked?” Nothing nearly spat the word.
“Asked,” the sorceress continued. “Bargained. Seduced.”
“How can anyone give their heart? Their actual heart? Don’t they die?” Nothing stopped, thinking of Spring.
“That is a different story,” the sorceress said gently. “Shall I tell it instead?”
Nothing was torn, wanting to hear about hearts, too, about seduction. But she shook her head, no. Kirin mattered more.
The sorceress said, “The hearts she was given fueled the Fifth Mountain and kept the sorceress’s magic bright. But none held her answer. None pointed to what had happened to her demon consort. Until the height of this summer, when she found the most beautiful maiden she’d ever seen.”
“You. You found.”
The sorceress leveled her uneven gaze on to Nothing. “I found,” she said silkily. “And this maiden, this beautiful maiden, said she was a prince, not a maiden. I said, ‘Both, then, maiden and prince.’ But the prince replied, ‘Not quite one or the other, but I am the Heir to the Moon. I want to be—must be—he to the world no matter what else, and so call me such. Remind me what the world expects of me.’ ”
Nothing glanced down at her soup, hurt that he’d never said such things to her. Had he thought she wouldn’t understand?
With a soft sigh, the sorceress continued. “The prince’s sadness reminded me of my own, and so I brought him here to my mountain, thinking at last I had found the right heart. The heart of a maiden that was not the heart of a maiden, in a prince between both. We spoke of men and women, night and day, life, death, good and bad, and I reminded him that power lies in change, in shifting, in more than two possibilities. The empress and her court—humans—force contrast, force two-sided thinking, as if the world could possibly conform to such a thing! What is twilight? I asked him. What is a shadow? What is a tree with both flower and seed? I asked him if perhaps he was not a prince, but a sorcerer like me, and perhaps his heart was where my demon hides? He was the right age, after all. To have been born when my demon vanished.”
Nothing believed it.
For a moment she absolutely believed it: Kirin was a demon reborn.
He was power and beauty, and trouble. Mischief and wickedness, wildness and passion—and stuck, too, in between. And he took and took and took. She felt her own heart stutter and set down her spoon; she could not possibly eat.
The sorceress continued to stare at Nothing with her life-and-death eyes. “I told him I could split him open and look into his heart for my consort, my lost demon. If Kirin did not remember who he was, maybe I could free my demon from that uncertain house and begin again. But Kirin pointed to a carving in the wall and said, ‘I have seen that many-petaled flower before.’ And so I did not split open his chest. He said, ‘Do what you will. Nothing will come for me.’ ”
Warm gladness burst in Nothing. “He trusted me,” she whispered at the sorceress.
“He gave you up,” the sorceress replied. “You came, just as he promised you would. Nothing, indeed.”
“I’m here. Let him go.”
“That is not in my nature.”
Nothing crossed her arms over her chest. “That is an excuse.”
“Bargain with me,” the sorceress murmured. She skimmed a finger along the rim of her glass while her eyes held Nothing’s.
“Let Kirin go, and I will stay.”
“Stay and what? You’re not as beautiful as he is. I am looking for my answer in the heart of the most beautiful maiden. I have that. What better could you offer? Your heart?”
Angry suddenly, Nothing said, “That was a terrible story! I still don’t know your curse.”
“That isn’t the end of the story.”
“What is?”
“Have you seen the many-petaled flower before?”
Nothing stopped. She had. She knew.
A lifetime of spying, collecting hints and gossip, of living in the walls, served her now, and she knew. She touched her cheeks, dragging her hands down the paint, smearing the green and red demon makeup. She realized why the sorceress had been surprised to see her like this. “You think I’m your demon! Not Kirin. I’m the—you think I’m the great demon of the Fifth Mountain!”
That heavy heartbeat roared in her ears.
The sorceress stood and knelt just beside Nothing, putting her hands palm up against her silk-covered lap. Nothing stared in abject astonishment. The sorceress’s pupils turned red again, elongating. She said, “Marry me, my love. Before it is too late.”
Nothing leapt to her feet. “No!” she cried. She flung herself away, turning for the missing door. “Let me out!”
A small arched doorway appeared, and Nothing ran through it.
SIXTEEN
NOTHING QUICKLY FOUND HER room with its red-and-pink carved door. She touched the many-petaled knob and hissed, letting go as if burned. But it opened and she stormed inside, throwing herself down before one of the many mirrors leaning, nailed, hanging from the obsidian walls. Her makeup was a raw, rotting wound on her face, melting between girl and monster.
With paint-stained fingers, she pulled at her clothing to bare the scar. It was tiny, pink, wrinkled like a fresh burn. A dried-out cluster of petals pressed between the pages of a book. A peony lipstick mark from a kiss to the heart.
Just like the many-petaled flower carved all over this mountain.
“I’m Nothing,” she whispered.
Jerking to her feet, she tore through the room, digging through the trunks and among the sheets of the hanging nest until she found it: the green silk baby blanket with its delicately embroidered flower.
Nothing pressed it to her face, breathing in: it smelled like nothing at all. Or the slightest hint of shrine incense.
Curling up her knees, she clutched it to her chest and felt—nothing.
SEVENTEEN
MAYBE NOTHING SLEPT: SHE felt restless and scattered, her mind spinning in choppy circles, her pulse erratic, her legs sore as if she needed to move them. She tried to think through her entire existence, for evidence she was a normal girl, or at least a slightly strange one. Not a demon. It was impossible! Demons were dead; she was alive. The sorceress couldn’t have succeeded. The witches in the palace would have noticed, or the priests, or at least the great demon of the palace.
Unless that was why it liked her. Because she was a demon reborn. Maybe it was true: the great demon had known but not said anything. Demons kept their own counsel.
Night Shine Page 9