“Her side,” Nothing repeated. Something was uncoiling inside her. Night and day, her side, their side.
Sky nodded.
“What do you want, when we are home? Will you be with us? We would like that.”
Nothing caught her breath. She held it, tucking her lips into her mouth to make them disappear. She stared at the line of his collarbone and her vision blurred. Not with tears, but with shadows. She remembered wanting. She remembered wanting to know the sorceress, wanting to be hot magic—but she didn’t seem to want that anymore. Why?
Sky stepped closer to her. He said, so quietly it was more vibration than words, “You should decide, or Kirin will do what he wants instead.”
“What should I do?” Nothing asked before she could stop herself, jerking her chin up to stare back at him. She struggled with her breathing, because her heart threatened to tighten her veins, to make her chest ache in panic. Why did it scare her to think about wanting something? Why was she afraid of what she might choose?
Sky was good. He would tell her the good choice.
“You have to choose what to be.” Sky stopped, clenched his jaw, looking incredibly displeased with himself.
Nothing released a shaky sigh.
He said, “Do you want to be Nothing, as if there has been no change between you and Kirin, between you and the world? Or do you to be a hero who rescued the prince from a sorceress and earned a new name? It will be honored. Or…” Sky stopped.
Nothing continued. “Or do I want to tell everyone where I come from? Do I want to be a reborn demon, first of my kind?” Shaking off his hand, she stepped the final pace between them. She was so close she could feel the chill of his demon-kissed blood. She had to tilt her chin awkwardly to meet his dark eyes. In the sunlight, they did not gleam demon-blue. “Do you think it’s still inside me, Sky? The great demon of the Fifth Mountain? Is it possible? Can I be something so large?”
Sky cupped her face. Holding her gaze without hesitation, he said, “After this summer I can believe anything of you.”
“If I was a demon, can I be a girl at all?” None of the options felt right to her. Something was missing. Another choice. Nothing, a new hero’s name, or her past. Something neither night nor day, neither her side nor theirs. Her own and between it all. A new name, a shadow name, for the person she could become. A name to make her future.
Kirin appeared beside them. He curled his long fingers around Sky’s wrist and pulled that hand away from Nothing’s cheek. “I wouldn’t complain so much as you if I learned my heart had belonged to a demon once.”
The absurdity made Nothing laugh.
Sky put the hand Kirin grasped onto Kirin’s face so that the bodyguard held them both. He said, “You’re both demons, and I don’t know if I can keep you both safe.”
“Good thing then that your job is only to keep me safe,” Kirin said with a vicious smile.
Nothing jabbed her fingers into his ribs.
“Oof,” he said, and bared his teeth at her. “Do you believe you’re a demon?” Kirin asked. “You seemed to believe it, when we were at the mountain.”
“I did, when we were at the mountain. All the evidence…” She shook her head. “I’ve always heard the aether, and you compelled me as a child with my name. I could do magic in the mountain, and the flower carved into the mountain is just like my brand. The sorceress would know, wouldn’t she? How can I not believe it?”
“But do you feel it?” Kirin asked lightly. “A heart has many petals. Maybe there is more than one choice. Maybe you are more than one thing.”
Nothing frowned.
Sky’s hand on her cheek was cool, and she lowered her chin, letting his fingers slide into her hair a little bit. She said, “When I was there, I think I did feel it, but since we left… I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel like my heart is a volcano. But maybe that’s what hearts are supposed to feel like.”
Kirin pushed away from both of them. He went to the iron stove and knelt to stir sugar into the boiling grains. He said, “Neither of you has ever asked me how I know I’m not… a man.”
Nothing glanced quickly at Sky, who shook his head at her and went to join Kirin, steps slow with trepidation. “How do you know?” Sky asked.
“I just know,” Kirin said, hot and immediate. He nailed Nothing with a glare. “What do you know? You decide what you are. You.”
“Why don’t you tell everyone you’re a girl, then?” Nothing cried. “If you’re going to act like it’s easy, then really act like it.”
“Because sometimes I’m not a girl,” he said. “Sometimes I am a man. Sometimes I’m both, or neither. I’m something different, in between. There are plenty of mes. Only my body doesn’t change. Sometimes I wish it could. Like the sorceress. I wish I could melt between, because I hate that what I am doesn’t always fit with what people see. Sometimes that makes me feel… distorted. And then some other times I’m perfectly happy with… me. And I love what I am.”
Sky looked away. His cheeks had darkened. He ran his hands back through his hair.
Nothing understood what Kirin had said. On some fundamental level, she understood. She thought about it, about knowing, and realized that she couldn’t trust anything inside herself, any feelings she had or didn’t, any understanding of who she was. Not when she didn’t even know her name and how she felt about it.
She opened her mouth to ask again, to make him tell her. But she stopped. Sky had reached to tentatively put his fingers against Kirin’s jaw and held the prince’s gaze as if trying to communicate when he couldn’t speak in front of witnesses. Kirin’s lips trembled. He was afraid. Her glorious, ambitious prince was afraid of how Sky might react to his confession. He was eager; he was determined. He was so many things, all at once.
A Heart Has Many Petals.
The name uncoiled.
Her name. Kirin’s name for her. How many times had he said it since they’d left the mountain and she’d not noticed? He’d been telling her for days.
Nothing pushed the heel of her thumb into her chest as the world tilted.
But it wasn’t enough. The name was a key, but she had to blast open the door. Nothing had to free herself.
She needed a new name that was all her own. Not what she had been, or was now, or given to her by an accidental sorcerer who was also a prince.
The sorceress had said to her, This is how magic works: you find it yourself.
And, Names can change. That is a magic we all share.
Whirling, Nothing went to the prow of the barge and gripped the rail. She closed her eyes, ignoring Kirin and Sky as they called after her, ignoring the spray of water, ignoring the brilliant crystal sunlight.
The shadows inside her were growing, warming tendrils of darkness reaching, licking, and eager. So very eager.
She thought of what she longed for.
And Nothing gave herself a new name.
THIRTY-FOUR
IN THE DEEPEST CAVERN of the Fifth Mountain, a heart pulsed hard in the prison of smoky quartz, and then the crystal cracked.
The sound echoed sharply throughout the obsidian corridors, skittering along granite floors and pooling around stalactites. The Sorceress Who Eats Girls felt it before she heard it, rather like a flicker of lightning before thunder.
Her own heart had fluttered before, with weakness and skipping, and she thought at first it was only the same such. She paused her reading and slipped the quill between the pages to mark her place before pressing her palm over her chest.
Then the echo reached her library, reverberating through the very stone of the mountain so low, so final, that the sorceress gasped.
She lost control, and sharp feathers sprouted up her cheekbones and down her spine, and her shoulder blades ached with the powerful press of wings. Her finger bones curled and started to crack, but the sorceress breathed again and forced her body to her will.
Standing, she walked at a measured pace, full of dread, through the library hearth and into t
he heart chamber.
The eerie glow of the mountain had faded quite a lot, but she did not have the energy to spare for a crown of bat-bone light or aether-torch. The sorceress took one of the far spiraling staircases and made her way over an arch and then beneath a perpendicular stair, to the plinth in the center of the cavern.
The smoky quartz had blackened and cracked nearly in half.
That old last heart she’d bargained for sat in a gruesome puddle, congealed and stringy. Dead.
The Sorceress Who Eats Girls did not touch it. She stared, allowing herself a moment to grieve. Not for the girl, or the heart, but for herself. This ending had come faster than she’d expected, and now her choices were two: go find another girl, another heart, and betray her half promise to Nothing, or hold the power of the Fifth Mountain a day, a week, a month if she could, hoping Nothing returned quickly, and in time, before the sorceress was as much a puddle of congealed magic as that dead heart.
She flinched as the heart shuddered, then berated herself for the weakness. To prove she was unaffected, the sorceress grasped the remains of the heart in her hand. It was cold and sticky, only so much spoiled meat.
Lifting it out of its shattered crystal cradle, the sorceress squeezed until globs smeared between her fingers and slithered over her knuckles before plopping to the platform at her feet. One tiny chunk hit the toe of her silk slipper.
The sorceress cast it away with a cry. She flung up her hands and leapt from the platform. Wings unfurled, and she bowed them in wide arcs to slow her descent. She landed on the floor of the cavern in a gentle crouch, black talons gouging the stone.
She strode out, angry enough to go the long way, especially as she should not expend more unnecessary magic traveling through the shadow-ways of the mountain.
She missed the cruel laugh of her demon when she was upset. How it would be amused at her now, judging her for letting it come to this. How can you despise me for loving you? she’d demanded once, and it had answered, Judge me for my weaknesses too, and give me a life of my own to ruin at your side. That is what I want, more than I want to devour the whole world. If that is not love, what is?
The sorceress closed her eyes and sneered at herself, a high hiss through her razor teeth, because she’d been alone for so long, and then her mountain had been alive again.
Alive with only the energy of that strange, pretty, surprising girl.
How she wanted to shred that pretty skin, reach down that hot throat and awaken the spark of her demon. She would have kissed it to awareness, chewed it into fullness.
“Sorceress!”
It was her.
The sorceress stopped, nearly colliding with Nothing.
No.
She was different. The girl was different, fuller already.
The sorceress’s heart began to beat again, and she’d hardly noticed it pause.
But the girl stared up at her, expression wide with… It was hard to say.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked. Her voice was thicker, her dark-brown eyes vivid with sparks of fire. Was she slightly taller? More elegant and graceful despite the thin tunic that barely skimmed her knees and her scraggly, tangled black hair. Was the sorceress hallucinating because she was so very exhausted by the weight of the mountain?
No, this was illusion. The girl was on the barge, sailing far from here. This was the magical projection of herself: that was all. The girl had changed her self-knowledge and thus her projection changed.
A shimmer of scales the color of starlight appeared like a sheen of sweat under the young woman’s eyes and along her brow.
The sorceress said, “You’re you.”
A pit opened inside her, filled with fear and love.
The girl smiled broadly, and somehow it was both a dark night smile and brilliant dappled starlight. “I am!” she cried, and then turned in a circle to show off.
A flicker of moon-bright wings spread from her shoulders, moth wings, or butterfly, gone again, and the young woman stepped nearer to the sorceress. “I wanted to show you. I named myself, Sorceress. I am free of Kirin’s binding. I feel so massive!” She laughed.
It was another surprise. This young woman, this creature, was constantly catching the sorceress off guard, changing expectations, pushing and pulling. She was exhilarating, and the sorceress tried to smile, but her mouth was a monster’s mouth, chitin-hard and full of shark’s teeth. With effort, she dragged herself into her woman form, leaving only teeth and eyes like monsters. Sweat broke down her back and under her breasts. It should have been easy. But the mountain’s heart was dead.
As the new young woman stared at her, joyous and strange, the sorceress realized what had happened: She’d named herself, and it did break her free. Not only of Kirin, but of everything she had been. The rebirth was complete, finally. That’s why the mountain heart had cracked.
“Do you remember?” the sorceress asked in a rough whisper.
The reborn mountain, the girl of the demon heart, grabbed the sorceress’s hands, and her eyes sparked again. She squeezed and said, “I remember fire and a joy so sharp it must be ecstasy. That’s inside me. Power. I am so large with it.”
“Mountain size,” the sorceress said.
The young woman laughed. “Sometimes as tiny as a flower—a balsam, I think, with weird petals, but it likes the taste of lava rock.”
It sounded like nonsense, and the sorceress wanted to ask for the demon girl’s new name. Instead she said, “Be gentle with your body as you learn to be massive, too.”
“How can a mountain fit inside this?” She flung out her arms again and spun. “I’m so alive.”
“Are you coming home?”
“Not yet. I will, but not yet. I have to see Kirin home, and I have to show the great demon of the palace. I have to see my old friends and make everyone safe. I want to stay for the investiture, to make certain everything is in order. Then I will.”
The sorceress held herself still. “Be quick, tender heart,” she said with as little inflection as possible.
“Because you miss me?” the brilliant young woman said with an edge. A dare.
“Because I cannot hold the mountain forever. I will hunt again, soon.” She would not tell her the heart was already dead, that this rebirth had killed it. The sorceress refused to have her come home to save other girls or out of desperation or a belief that she must.
It would be a choice. This young woman had said it herself when she was Nothing. She would choose to come home, or never do so.
Something like disappointment bled into the young woman’s large brown eyes, drawing the sorceress. How the sorceress wanted to kiss her again, to taste the new flavors there. How she wanted to ask her new name.
Instead the sorceress bared her jagged shark’s teeth and leaned in. “You’d better be ready when you come back to me. To hold your own against me and with me. I might eat you alive.”
The young woman bared her teeth back, but they were only small white human teeth, pretty as pearls. In her eyes, though, the volcano rumbled, and the sorceress felt an answering heat inside her. “I hope you try,” the young woman said.
With that, she vanished, pulled back to the barge and her body, pulled away as she always was pulled away.
The sorceress let go a tiny gasp of pain as she listed sideways, sinking against the smooth granite corridor. Her skin ruffled; her bones ached. She was a woman, a monster, both and neither. She gritted her teeth and held on to herself.
But barely.
THIRTY-FIVE
NIGHT SHINE OVER THE Mountain had been her name for only half a day when the sorcerers of the Second and Third Living Mountains came for her.
Something flashed in the east, high in the clouds, like a mirror catching sunlight, and Shine sat up, wandering to the rail of the barge, eyes fixed upon it. The brightness didn’t hurt, and that’s how she knew it was aether, not real sunlight, which still made her human-enough eyes water if she stared.
The barge su
ddenly stuttered in its smooth flow, and Shine spun. “Selegan?”
Then she heard a crackling sound and a low groan: ahead of the barge, ice chased toward them.
It clawed and rushed, freezing the river so fast the water moaned.
Sky appeared at her side, and Kirin too, with his hand on her shoulder. “What’s happening?” the prince asked.
A ripple of silver scales and choppy waves streaked across their path, and the Selegan burst up, a huge, ferocious dragon lashing its triple tails. It roared at the ice, blasting it back with a wave of itself.
Its wings spread, glinting just like the ice, and Shine saw frost edging the feathers.
She didn’t know what to do.
Arrows of ice flung up, burying themselves in the dragon: it bent and screamed, and water splattered down on the trio.
Shine gripped the rail, put her foot up to leap over, but Sky grabbed her around the waist. “Stop,” he said.
Kirin leaned over the prow, hands spread, and called, “Release the Selegan River! I am Kirin Dark-Smile and I command you, whoever you are. Release the river, and us.”
“Put me down,” Shine said, struggling against Sky’s iron strength.
He dropped her and unsheathed his sword as light flared around them, warm and sunny.
Shine looked up just in time to see an even more brilliant glow. She flung up an arm to block the radiance: the shape of it echoed behind her eyes. An eagle?
Claws dug into her shoulders, and Shine screamed.
She pressed her fists over her chest, reaching for the volcano inside her, but—
Shine hit a hard surface.
The shock threw her breath away, and she struggled to turn over, choking for air.
It was dark, complete blackness around her, and under her hands and knees was stone. Cold, reverberating stone.
“Kirin,” Shine said, tasting damp air—mountain air!
This was not her mountain, though. It felt off, filled with someone else’s magic.
Swallowing fear, Shine opened her eyes, searching for aether. Even in darkness there should be strands of it.
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