by Lana Popovic
Faintly, I remembered Mama telling us of home. That’s what it’s like, when women in our family eat the moon, she had said. We’re bound to each other, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.
“It merely wants you to let it loose,” Shimora continued. “And you will, but for now, just breathe. I’ll help a little, too.”
“Help how?” I gasped.
“I ply scents, the way your mother plies flavor. You’ve smelled it already, the perfume of my welcome to you both. Scent can mean so many things—it can make one feel, or even see, such a great deal.”
As if she could sense my nausea and mental churn, her distinctive perfume shifted by a single note, fresh and cool as a zephyr, and I relaxed before I even fully registered the change.
So that part of Mama’s story had been another pyrite fleck of truth, then, I thought as I leaned on my thighs, sipping air through parted lips. Our grandmother did make perfumes that swayed the mind, though I wondered if she even needed the physical trappings of essentials and absolutes.
Or if she herself was somehow enough.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” she cooed. “It’ll be better still the more you breathe. It’s not just me you’ll smell in here. It’s all of us, the scent of how content we are together. And of how much love there is between us.”
I took a few questing breaths. The air did smell powerfully of that unnameable sweetness that suffused Shimora’s scent, so rich it must have leached into the building’s planks. It still smelled somehow familiar, and I found myself breathing as deeply as I could, until I felt not only recovered but giddy and light-headed from the sweetness of the sting.
Beside me, Malina grinned as soon as I straightened, her lips pink and bright against her teeth, her silvery eyes glazed like glass.
“It does smell so good in here, doesn’t it?” she said breathlessly. “It’s . . . wow. It smells like when I first realized . . .”
“When you first realized what?”
She gave herself a little shake. “Nothing. I—nothing.”
I gave her a slantwise frown, but before I had a chance to pry into what she had meant, Shimora trailed her hand over the hobnailed back of a velveteen black-cherry love seat close to the marbled podium.
“Will you come sit, Iris, Malina?” She wrinkled her fine nose a bit. “We’ll have proper names for you soon, but we thought the naming and the scenting could wait until after. You have your ribbons already, after all, and that’s most important. Faisali saw to that, at least.”
“Naming?” I echoed dumbly as Lina and I settled back into the plush contours; there were even two ottomans for us each to rest our feet. “We already have names, too.”
“Yes, ones Faisali chose for you, as she chose Jasmina for her common name. But they aren’t coven names; they don’t capture you as they should.”
Coven. The word felt strange in a way “witch” never had when Mama said it. Eating the moon hadn’t felt like a coven to me, nothing so formal. It had felt like family, my mother and sister holding my hands while we wove wonder through beauty, on a shared loom beneath summer nights.
Coven was something else altogether. And even with the smell of joyous homecoming filling me to bursting with every breath, the bone-deep sense of hearth and home that I somehow recognized even if I’d never seen this place before, I wasn’t sure I liked what it might mean.
“What does that mean, coven?” I asked cautiously. “How is it different from—”
Shimora had moved fluidly to stand behind us, winding her fingers through our hair in a way that sent tingles rushing down my spine. “Let us perform for you, first. All these years without full gleam . . . I can’t imagine how you made do without it, or without us. How that loss must have ached at your core, even if you couldn’t fathom its origin. I understand why Faisali chose that way, but I swear I don’t know how she could have borne it in the end, being so alone.”
She bent forward between us, propped on her forearms, her curls creeping over my shoulder like ivy. Her breath smelled like mint and strawberries when she whispered, “Watch your kin now, if you will. See what you were born to be.”
I only had a moment to exchange a seeking glance with Malina before a raw swell of music washed over us, crystalline violins over a thrilling heart-stir of a beat. It was gorgeous and freezing and uncanny, the aural equivalent of a rave inside a palace of ice.
Then the atrium above us shattered into a moving swarm of light.
The clusters of hollow spheres and onion bulbs that dangled from the eaves filled in a moment, some with little sprigs of suspended flowers, others with glimmering insects: dragonflies with whirring wings, fireflies, butterflies with elaborate tigereye designs. Some of the spheres simply held light, amber nuggets that shed a glow without any visible filament. I dug my nails into my palms to keep the shifting patterns from fractaling into a transcendence that would have eclipsed anything I’d ever called up before.
As if she could sense my struggle, Shimora pressed her cool fingers into my nape, and another fresh-breeze waft of calm swept over me. My blood stopped feeling like it wanted to surge free from my veins.
While we’d been looking up, gaping, a woman had stepped onto the slick marble podium, a petite olive-skinned beauty with glossy black hair braided around her head like an elaborate crown, a few spiral curls bouncing free by her temples. Her strawberry face was much softer than ours, with a tiny chin and wide, full cheeks, a lush scarlet pout, and a button nose. She wore something like a catsuit in bands of sparkling red and gold, sheer over the carved muscles of her abdomen and the powerful density of her hips and thighs.
She gave a deep but sprightly bow, sassy as a wink, one small bare foot pointed in front of her and arms spread and lifted behind. Then she spun once and sprang into the air, launching herself into one of the bolts of silk behind her. In the two blinks it took to wind her limbs through it, all the bolts deepened into a velvet blue like the darkest edge of night, shining with constellations so bright the silk might have turned to damask, pricked full of holes and held up to some massive light.
The illusion was so convincing that when the woman spiraled down, unwinding from the silks in a tumbling plummet, she looked exactly like a falling star spun free of the Milky Way.
As she climbed and fell, leaping effortlessly from silk to silk, the bolts changed along the way like a theatrical backdrop to her celestial play. They melted into plum and peach palettes of dusk and dawn, clotted with clouds, trailing her rise and fall as if she were the sun—then a comet—then a meteor hurtling hot through the atmosphere. Then they formed the brilliant sky above a green canopy of trees, and she fluttered easily between them like a tropical bird—before rising upward like a phoenix, against the roaring fire that raged beneath and around her.
“Oh my God,” Malina whispered next to me.
“Holy shit,” I agreed, just as quietly, my heart racing. This wasn’t a gleam but a Gleam, a magic of an entirely different order of magnitude from anything Lina and I had ever done. “How is she doing this?”
“Manipulation,” Shimora said. “Of sight, in Ylessia’s case. We’re all manipulators of the senses, to evoke sensation, emotion, or both. That’s the nature of the gleam, to sway perception toward beauty. Ylessia could do it without her silks, if she wanted; she doesn’t need to move at all to project a vivid illusion on any backdrop. The elders are always stronger because they’re higher, closer to the source.” Something like envy tinged her tone.
“But it’s so much lovelier with the silks, don’t you think?” she continued more lightly. “And that’s what we’re made for, after all. The striving for beauty in all things.”
I frowned at that, but just then an entire universe in miniature painted itself across the bolts, exquisite solar systems and whirlpools of galaxies like an orrery brought to life against pitch black. A supernova pulsed at the center of it all, and when it finally burst—a yellow heart scorching outward into blinding
red, blue, and green—Ylessia catapulted free of the silks and landed lightly on the podium, as if the dying star had given birth to a new one in her shape.
I wondered if this was a good time to clap. This was a performance for us, for sure, but it felt somehow both bigger and more sacred than that.
Malina must have had the same idea. She brought her fingers to her lips and kissed them, then held them out to Ylessia, who gave a smile like gilded sunshine with deep dimples on each cheek, dipping into another pert bow.
The pageant continued after that, relentless. I barely remembered to breathe, with the joy clamoring inside me so loud. This was what I’d missed, through all those years of my fading gleam. The ability to steal the breath of the world, to stun, to stab with beauty. To revel in the birthright, wallow luxuriously like these women did.
Though they weren’t exactly like us, I realized, as the next took to the podium. She wore a leather corset over a frothy emerald tutu skirt, her feet in matching green ballet slippers laced up her sturdy calves. Her knotted hair was dyed glossy teal, shaved on one side and on the other full of magpie things, feathers and coins, insects made of wire and little chips of colored glass. Her lips were wine-dark and her nose pierced through the septum, and she was round-limbed and curved everywhere, heavy breasts and strong, full hips. Sleeve tattoos raced down both her arms, tsunamis and lightning storms and flowers on tangled vines. I loved it all, but somehow none of it had the razor edge it might hold in real life, on a punked-out woman brushing shoulders with me in the street.
In its way, it was no less studied than Shimora’s spare elegance.
I forgot the thought when massive wings spread behind her, raven-black like a fallen angel’s and at least twelve feet in span. She spread her arms along with them, wrists cocked and palms held up, the fingers splayed petal-soft. Standing en pointe, she preened in a circle like a music-box dancer, showing them off from every angle. They rippled, feather by feather, from glossy black to dove white, then whirred into iridescent dragonfly wings, two on each side. And then she grew silky, near-transparent bat wings, threaded with fine veins, that she curled around herself, peering up coyly above their bony tips with black sequins glittering above her eyes.
Both Malina and I gasped as she flung them out into dragon wings, so massive that they nearly reached the atrium’s third floor, a faint smoke rising from them. But even when she beat them toward us, like fanning a flame, I couldn’t see even a slight budging of her frame. They weren’t going to lift her no matter what she did, and no hot air stirred toward us, either.
“It’s not real,” I whispered. “Is it? And why just wings?”
“Seems, like, very specific,” Malina said, then added hastily, as if she might hurt someone’s feelings, “but gorgeous, definitely.”
Shimora sighed behind us, another faint strawberry waft. “It is very specific, and yes, that’s all Oriell can do—project illusions directly behind her, extensions of her own frame. Not only wings, of course, she has a surprisingly broad repertoire within her limitations. But this is her prettiest for you. The gleam has . . . honed itself over the years. A dilution of necessity. And Oriell’s one of our youngest, only three blood-tiers above you.”
“Three blood-tiers?” I asked.
“She’s my mother,” Shimora said simply. “Your great-grandmother.”
Shock yawned inside me again, like a vast pit, but there wasn’t time for it.
The next performer already knelt on the podium, strawberry-blond hair drawn back into an austere bun, her face sharp-angled as a Valkyrie’s. Her skin was thoroughly freckled, nearly nutmeg against her fine-cut lips. She was naked above the waist, save for silver earrings like chandeliers, trailing demurely over her chest and breasts down to her bare knees. In measured movements, she laid a series of ornate bells in front of her. Cocking her head to the side, she lifted a slim, arched brow, lips pursed into a sultry smirk. Then she spoke a careful litany of words, like picking a path across slick river rocks, ringing a new bell to mark each syllable.
She was polyphonic just like Malina, I realized, before my head fell back, a wave of pure sensation rolling across my skin. I bit back a moan as a thousand invisible, silken streamers trailed with almost painful languor over me at once. She spoke again, a burbling rush this time and with different bells, and I plunged into warm water fizzing with bubbles. It was so real I could feel my hair lifting as if to drift like seaweed around me, even though I could look down and see myself dry.
She didn’t really need those bells, either, I thought. Like the winged one hadn’t needed ballet shoes, or the falling star her silks. But I was beginning to understand. All these women were like clockwork—like our mother must once have been—painstakingly matching tools and their own movements to their gleam. Every head tilt and loose curl meant something, each bent joint an evocation.
Trained to entertain.
There were others, after. A brunette in the middle of a flighted swarm, butterflies, moths, and bees flitting around her like buzzing clothes as she twined herself through hoops and a trapeze. A bobbed redhead wound her body through slow, snaking contortions as she flung up ground ice that magnified into a flurry twirling lazily around her, fat, lacy snowflakes as large around as basketballs—followed by a handful of sand that blinked into a massive array, a confetti of broken bits of seashells, rock-candy crystals, and polished pink fragments. Another cast shadows like simulacra all around her, black silhouettes that fell in step beside her and followed every rolling tumble that she made.
It was all too beautiful to bear.
“How?” I finally said, when my face was slick with tears. I turned back to face Shimora, drawing my legs up. “They’re so young. They can’t all be our family, how would that be possible? And what is it all for?”
“That isn’t for me to answer,” she said, running her finger down my damp cheek. “We just wanted you to truly see it, what a gift it is. How worth it it always is for both, the one chosen and the one who lives.”
Dread dropped into my belly like a swallowed ball bearing. Beside me, Malina caught a shuddering breath. “What does that mean?” she barely whispered. “The one chosen?”
“Let me take you to meet Sorai, dear heart. No one but her should tell you.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’D SEEN HER IN A STOLEN MEMORY. I’D EVEN SEEN HER IN the flesh, for a moment, on the bastion’s ramparts in the Old Town.
But not like this. She hadn’t been so close, then. She hadn’t been anything like this.
Shimora had led us up one of the two sweeping staircases that winged to the second-floor landing, and from there we’d made our way to the fifth floor. But as soon as we stepped into Sorai’s chamber—my mind wouldn’t let me think of it as a mere room—I felt purged clean of the casually strewn wonders that we’d seen. There had been so much, all of it pulsing in my vision, frantic to fractal: silver platters of cracked-open geodes with winking crystal teeth; vast sculpture-scenes made entirely of stained glass; huge models of constellations etched bas-relief into the chalet’s walls, precious stones wedged in like placeholders for stars.
None of them compared to Sorai.
She knelt with her back to us, inky hair tinged plum by the dusk creeping in through the series of slanted skylights above her, cut into the chalet’s roof. Even without facing us, pure power rolled off her in tremendous waves, like a desert wind, or the clanging of some silent, behemoth bell. The air nearly trembled around her with its force. It was hard to look at her directly; it was as if we saw her through a porthole, elongated from the curving of the glass.
And all around her, the room writhed with black roses. They were glistening and unruly, twining through the air as if they needed no espalier to hold them, no soil in which to sink. Petals, stems, and branching roots were all black and suspended, as if the maze of thorns trapping Sleeping Beauty’s castle had erupted into midnight bloom.
Maybe it had, if Sleeping Beauty had once been our mother.
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Mama lay on the floor in front of Sorai, her chestnut hair fanned out and shining against the mahogany floorboards. She looked both cold and flawless, as if someone who’d once adored her flesh-and-blood face had carved her exact likeness from snow and ice. A shroud of roses covered her, and it was almost lovely until I realized that their roots and thorns drove into her, piercing flesh and digging deep. The network of veins around each puncture branched out black beneath her skin as if whatever lived in the roses flowed through her too.
Then the roses crept over her entirely, closing ranks like a living, floral casket and hiding her from us.
“What did you do?” Malina moaned, half sobbing. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, child,” Sorai said, in a burred, resounding triptych of voices. Malina and I staggered back as one; I hadn’t seen any of the steps it took Sorai to stand and cross the room toward us, the roses parting neatly for her. She’d been kneeling one minute, and in the next she faced us, close enough that I could feel her exhales on my own lips—her breath smelled exactly like that dizzying sweetness that underpinned everything else: our ribbons, Shimora’s perfume, the entire chalet. She wore eggshell ivory, glowing pale against all the flowers that nudged and strained toward her like eager children, a long-sleeved, narrow gown that clung to the contours of her body and pooled at her bare feet.
Her eyes were just like ours, but they also weren’t, set against the deep, dark skin of her imperious face. They didn’t seem like human eyes so much as a window into the soul of winter.
“Nothing,” she said again, and warmth spread through me at her voice, a fire-flower of ecstasy unfurling in my chest. “Something was done to her, and now I fight against it. Do you see these roses? They are my will, made flesh. And so I still her with my will, keep her at rest. Until you do what must be done to save her.”