by Bree Barton
“I don’t deserve to be forgiven.”
“Then I forgive you all the same.”
Angie’s smile was sad around the edges.
“I want to give you something, Mi.”
She laid her hand on her lap, revealing her ravaged palm once more.
“Under the snow palace,” Angelyne began, “I said that the Elemental Hex was a feeble human attempt to understand a complicated world. I stand by that. You cannot reduce humanity to six tidy elements on three perfect poles. There is a seventh axis. But I was wrong about what that axis was. It isn’t death.”
Angelyne’s other hand was balled into a fist. She offered it to Mia, who hesitated.
“She’s yours,” Angie said. “But don’t let her fly away.”
Intrigued, Mia held out her hand, Angie uncurled her fingers—and the ruby wren strutted onto Mia’s palm.
The bird tilted its head, calmly assessing her, as she assessed the bird. Mia felt as if she’d been reunited with a long-lost friend. She remembered the night her father gave her Wynna’s journal, back when the bird was just a fojuen key. Both she and the ruby wren had survived quite a lot since then.
“The seventh element is life,” Angie said gently. “Remember that. Take it back with you to the river kingdom. That’s what Mother tried so hard to teach us. Love is always the stronger choice. Hatred only leads you astray. It’s led me so far astray I can’t find a way back.”
Fin cooed in her cradle. Ange smiled.
“And life is always more powerful than death.”
Mia sank onto the window seat beside her sister. She was tired, too. She wanted Angelyne to choose life. Real life, not the kind in an imaginary cradle.
She rested her forehead against the windowpane. Stared into the orangery, reshaping the orange trees into bloodblooms in her mind. Mia imagined the charm in her palm, the sound of creaking wood as she breathed in, the hush of rustling leaves as she breathed out.
Maybe she could teach Angelyne what Muri had taught her: how to calm her own breath. If Mia coaxed her sister back into her body, would she be able to convince her to come home?
“Angie,” she began. “I’d like to . . .”
Angelyne was peering intently out the window. Mia followed her gaze. The mist hovered thickly above the orangery. It stretched as far as the eye could see, seeping over waterfalls, pouring through valleys, masking the entire island in a soft white cloak.
From this height, Mia saw what she’d missed. The mist wasn’t stagnant, as she’d assumed. It churned in a rapid spiral. She peered more intently. There was something odd about the way it caught the light. Almost like it wasn’t droplets of water. Which would mean it wasn’t mist at all.
She heard the voices whispering. Calling to her. Some were new. Some she recognized.
And then, unmistakably, she heard Nell’s words.
The wind whips up the sand and the sun melts it into a glittery glass cyclone, and when you look into it you see your life . . . only it isn’t really your life. All the grief and sadness are gone, along with the mistakes you made, the people you lost, so you’re looking at the life that might have been, the better one, and you don’t just see it, you’re inside it.
Startled, Mia pushed back from the window.
“It’s not mist,” she said. “It’s glass.”
“Beautifully done.” Angelyne looked pleased. “A million tiny shards, to be specific. They call it a glass terror on the mainland, though. I don’t much care for that name.”
She lifted herself off the window seat to perch on the sill. Mia fought the urge to grab hold of her. To make sure Angie didn’t plummet to the ground below.
“Do you see now? It’s not like we stop existing. We’ve been sawn into a thousand pieces, yes. You might call that an act of violence. But our hopes, our most precious longings, our very souls—the mist holds them all. And when we are ready to let go of what came before . . . to let the mist rewrite the pain and suffering of our past . . . once we choose to move into the final stage of our life on Prisma . . . it invites us into a warm, eternal embrace.”
Instinctively Mia traced the six petals inked on her wrist, conjuring the Elemental Hex in her mind. Glass was a kind of Stone, and Stone was bound to aether. A shard of glass could twist what the eyes saw and what the body understood.
A thousand shards of glass could make it so there was no longer any body at all.
Mia stared out the window, heart pounding in her ears.
“That’s what a glass terror is,” Mia said, realizing. Her words thick with horror. “And that’s why there aren’t any people on the island. The bodies of everyone who came to Prisma have been sliced apart.”
Angelyne’s eyes shone like glass.
“Not apart, Mi. We’ve finally come together. This is the last choice I must make. The last choice for anyone who comes to Prisma: the moment we decide to truly let go. The mist is a million souls freed from a million bodies, liberated from all pain and suffering. Now that they’ve surrendered the lives they had, they are finally able to give themselves—to give all of us—the lives we’ve always wanted. A life without illness or death. We vow to give our bodies and our spirits to this island. In return, we are given only love.”
The words skulked through Mia’s mind with an eerie familiarity. She had once said something similar herself. Standing in a chapel that felt more like a tomb. Quin’s hands in hers.
I give you my body, my spirit, my home.
Come illness, suffering, e’en death,
Until my final breath I will be yours.
No. The Glasddiran wedding vows had it all wrong. Had she really expected otherwise, from a kingdom as backward as Glas Ddir? Love was not meant to be an abdication of your personhood, a capitulation of body, spirit, and home.
She summoned Nell’s words.
Love is what happens when two people come together as equals, each with their own painful history and gifts and failings, neither of them needing to be saved.
That was the kind of love Mia wanted. That and only that.
That was the kind of life Mia wanted. A life of painful histories, and gifts, and failings. Perhaps failings most of all.
She had spent the last seventeen years doing a kind of accounting. On one side of the ledger was every theory or hypothesis she was able to successfully prove, every time she’d been unequivocally, unmistakably right. She had forced her need to be right on other people—bludgeoned them with it, really—treating them as equations that needed to be solved. As long as they needed her, she must be worth something.
Mia had run from her mistakes. Run from suffering, both other people’s and her own. In truth she had treated all pain as an ailment in search of an antidote, not a natural course of body and soul. She had fled from all her failures, sure that they would stack up on the wrong side of the ledger, chipping away at her perfect armor—and proving just how broken she was.
She was beginning to see it differently. Her failures were what made her whole.
When Mia spoke again, her voice was quiet.
“I tried to take care of you, Angie. But I failed. I never saw what you needed. I saw you as our pretty little swan. A delicate rose, tragically sick, unable to survive without her big sister.”
“Sweet baby sister was the role you gave me. And it was the role I played.”
“You shouldn’t have had to play any role. You weren’t a pet. You were wild and beautiful. You deserved to have magic, and have babies, and be anything you wanted to be.”
Angelyne stared at her scarred palm. Then closed her fingers around the wound.
“Girls don’t get to be both wild and beautiful.”
“They should,” Mia said resolutely. “They will.”
She cleared her throat. She could already feel the tears building behind her eyes.
“I am so sorry, Angelyne. Sorry for everything you have suffered, and for the ways I have deepened those wounds. I love you. You will always be my sister. And I w
ish you’d come back with me. I wish that more than anything. But I won’t pretend to know what is best for you, or try to mold you into the shape I want. You get to choose.”
Angelyne turned away from the window. She gazed toward Fin’s cradle, her blue eyes soft.
“I already have.”
The grief Mia felt then could not be named. She had known this would be her sister’s answer. But for maybe the first time in her life, she had wanted so desperately to be wrong.
She reached out and touched Angie’s cheek. Mia’s hands were steady, even as her voice shook.
“Goodbye, Angelyne Rose,” she said. “Explorer of Worlds. Sister of Mine.”
Chapter 41
Remember Me
EVERY PART OF PILAR hurt. Outside, inside. Scabs on her knuckles. Holes in her heart.
She dragged herself back to her sfeera, unaware of anything but the pain. Celeste had abused her position and her power. She had stripped Pilar’s history for parts and made them into weapons. Lord Dove had done this, too. So had her mother. Morígna. Orry.
The same questions looped through her mind.
Why does this always happen? And why does it always happen to me?
But she knew why. These people, these predators, hunted her like a wolf hunts a dying deer. They smelled it on her. Her hunger to be loved.
Pilar had amassed a whole brood of recruits because she needed to be loved. She’d found joy in teaching them. Pride. But she’d taught them the wrong lessons. Or maybe the right lessons, in the wrong ways. In trying to keep Stone from being hurt, she’d only hurt him—and then he had hurt Shay in return.
Pilar wanted to cry, scream, break something. She’d wanted to give Stone a set of tools to protect himself against people trying to hurt him. Not people trying to love him.
She kept smacking up against her own hypocrisy. She drew a circle in her mind around everyone she had ever loved. Or almost loved.
Her mother. Orry. Morígna. Quin. Mia Rose.
It was a small circle.
She drew a second circle around everyone who had ever hurt her.
Her mother. Orry. Morígna. Quin. Mia Rose.
Not two circles. There was only one.
Then she thought of Stone. Shay. All their funny, eager friends, young women and men searching for something they couldn’t quite describe. Pilar loved her students in a different way, of course, but that love was no less valid. No less true.
But when it came to opening herself up to love? No. She’d blocked it at every turn. She’d refused to share anything personal. Rebuffed Mia. Stone. Her brood. They didn’t need to know anything about her. She deflected every question they asked about her life, her fears, her dreams. She was teaching them to be strong. How to defend themselves.
Or so she thought. Because what had she taught them, really?
How to be lonely. How to hold themselves apart from everyone and everything. And she’d modeled it so well! Don’t go to jougi. Don’t join the circle. Don’t share meals. Answer vulnerability with sarcasm. When someone wants to connect, laugh. Shrug. Always shrug. Build a wall around your heart so tight, no one can ever break it.
Build the wall so tight, your heart can’t even beat.
Celeste’s words haunted her. But they were true.
Pilar didn’t belong in the House.
The reek of roses knocked her back. She was passing the Rose Garden. She thought of Celeste, the gardener with the touch of death.
Then Pilar thought of Mia. Where was she right now? She pictured Rose sitting on white sand. Sipping pulped papaya. Blissfully unaware of everyone’s suffering. Including her own.
Honestly, pulped papaya didn’t sound so bad. Even a glass terror would be child’s play compared to how Pilar felt.
Maybe Rose had it right. Maybe the only way to survive loving people was to leave them.
When Pilar reached her sfeera, her key didn’t work. The locks had already been changed.
She felt a mounting panic—for a reason that surprised her. Mia’s wooden charm was locked inside.
Then her hand flew to her trouser pocket. The charm was there. Relief surged through her. She had something of Mia’s after all.
Pilar dropped the sfeera key. When the metal struck the glass floor, it let out one shrill, sad note.
It wasn’t her sfeera anymore.
But then, it never was.
Food. Bed. Coins.
Sandbags. Sparring.
Sisters. Brothers. Broods.
Laughter.
Music.
Love.
How could a single person need so much—and then pretend she didn’t?
The violins were exactly where Stone said. In the Orkhestra, stacked inside the cabinets.
“Who are you?” asked a girl with curly blond hair, hard at work murdering a violin. “You’re not one of the players.”
“You’re not holding your bow right,” Pilar tossed over her shoulder. She was eyeing a pretty silver case. When she opened it, the violin inside was even prettier.
“You can’t take instruments out of the Orkhestra,” protested the girl as Pilar cut a path through the music stands, case tucked under her arm.
“You can’t murder them, either,” she replied. “Though you seem to be doing just fine.”
Light leaked out from under Stone’s sfeera door.
Pilar’s heart ticked up a notch. She saw his shape, hazy through the frosted gray glass. He was inside.
“Stone?”
She didn’t expect him to answer. That was all right. She’d come equipped.
“I brought you something,” she said.
She slid to the floor. Pressed her back to the door. Opened the violin case.
The memories came in one heady rush. The sweet ones from the early days, when she didn’t know how to hold a bow herself. Morígna had been a patient teacher. Gentle. Forgiving.
Pilar remembered the first time she’d played a song well. It had felt like magic flowing through her fingers—the good kind.
There were bad memories, too. Of course there were. The violin would always be bound up in what happened. Pilar had lost so many precious things that night.
But there was comfort to be found in music. That much she knew. A song could be a gift. And if this was the final gift she could give Stone, then she’d better make it good.
She nested the violin in the crook of her chin. Brought the bow to the strings.
Froze.
What was she doing? Music couldn’t save someone. It had certainly never saved her.
A sound came from the sfeera.
“Pilar?”
The voice was muffled. Soft. Had she imagined it?
She lowered the violin.
“Stone?”
Shuffling inside the door. Was he about to open it?
No. She heard a heavy slide, then a thud. She could see it so clearly. Stone slumped on the other side of the door.
“Can you stay with me for a little while?” he said. “I don’t think I can open the door.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll be right here.”
“Are you crying?”
She was. Funny how she hadn’t known until he asked.
“Yes.”
For once she didn’t fight the tears. They welled in her eyes. Spilled down her cheeks.
“I’ve done everything wrong, Stone. I taught you to shut people out. I told you not to trust anyone because they’d only hurt you. It scared me how easily you opened yourself up to people, how much power you gave them. But the reason it scared me is because I used to be just like you.”
She took a breath.
“You wanted to know my story, what happened to me. What happened is that the person I trusted most—the person I loved most—betrayed that trust. He hurt me so badly it almost destroyed me.”
Stone was quiet. She could feel him hanging on every word.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt like that. So I tried to teach you how to protect yours
elf. I thought the only way to do that was to close yourself off completely. And then . . .”
Her voice wavered.
“Then I saw you with Shay. Someone who so clearly adores you. Someone who understands you and likes you just the way you are. And you rejected her, all because I taught you to. Of course I taught you to. I’ve been rejecting everyone who’s tried to understand me, too.”
She heard a soft sound against the door. Imagined Stone pressing his palm to the gray glass.
She pressed her palm to the other side.
“You taught me how to fight,” came his muffled voice.
“I’m not saying fighting is bad. Celeste is wrong about that. Knowing how to protect yourself is powerful. It lets you take ownership of your own body. But there’s a difference between hardening your fists and hardening your heart.”
She tasted salt on her lips. Tears dripped off her chin. She let them fall.
“I’m sorry, Stone. I should have known better than to try and teach you things I hadn’t learned myself. I’m lonely, too. I’ve always been lonely. My whole life I told myself it was better that way. That I was better off alone. But I was lying. I don’t want that for you.”
“I don’t want it for you, either.” His voice was soft. “Stay in the House, Pilar. Let us in. Don’t shut us out.”
“I can’t stay.”
You break everything you touch, she’d said to Mia.
But she’d been talking about herself all along.
The violin was getting wet. She wiped her face on her sleeve.
“Besides,” she said, trying to joke, “Celeste is a demon from four hells. I’m not going to stay in a place where the Keeper gets to kiss your cheek and read your mind.”
Stone was quiet. Neither of them said anything for a while. Just sat together, with only a door between them.
“I wanted to give you something before I go,” Pilar said finally. “One last gift. Probably the best one I’ve given you—though considering the others, that’s not saying much.”
Her arm shook as she clutched the bow. She willed her hands steady.
“When you remember me, Stone? Please remember me like this.”
She kissed the bow to the strings.
And played.