by Lana Popovic
Despite myself, I pressed my back against the wall as she picked her way toward us, hips rolling, precise as a tightrope walker. This close, I could see all the finer details of her face. Her eyebrows were as white as her hair, and her face was shaped sweetly, exactly like my sister’s, with the same cherry-cleft lower lip.
“Iris,” she said to me in that low, rich voice. “Malina. Quite absurdly trussed up, the both of you, but still so very lovely. Which is to be expected, but still—no harm in admiring my nieces.” Her eyes slid behind us, over to Naisha. “And I see you have a partially willing accomplice. Which is better than none, I suppose. Even if she might collapse at any moment, by the looks of it.”
“Please tell them everything,” Naisha whispered. “I . . . I have to leave. I can’t hold on much longer, but I swear I won’t—I swear I’ll keep this secret until you get them out. That much I can do for them.”
“Do it, then,” Dunja snapped. “And keep as far away from her as you can. Blend with the others. She can’t see you quivering like this, or she’ll know something’s afoot.”
Naisha nodded once and, throwing a last plaintive look at me and Lina, fled back into the corridors.
Lina’s hand sought out mine; our aunt wasn’t frightening, exactly, but she had such an aura of power to her, of a different breed entirely than Sorai’s. It crackled like ozone in the air before a rainfall, sharp and anticipatory, prickly on my skin. Still reeling from the effort of will that had freed her, I struggled to think what I wanted to ask her, where to even start.
She was examining me now, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “You set me free, with the infinite bloom. I thought only she could use that, and I’ve never seen any but the first nine tiers actually manifesting will. I wonder what makes you different. . . .”
“Why aren’t you dead?” Malina broke in. “Or with Death?”
“I was with him,” Dunja said, her tone laced with such longing my stomach knotted with sympathy. “And I should have been the final one. That was what your mother and I decided, between the two of us. That it would end with us, that we would be the last. That there would be no more sacrifice.”
“But how?” I strained to understand. “One of us would have had to take your place, to keep Mara’s bargain with Death. To counterweigh the curse, so that no one we loved would die without dying.”
“Is that what they told you?” Her face went stark and bitter. “That there was a curse of some kind, that we do this for some noble purpose?”
Malina and I glanced at each other, then she nodded. “Sorai told us that—”
Without warning Dunja’s head whipped up, arching her throat, like an animal catching a high-pitched, distant sound. “It’s starting very soon,” she said grimly. “Not yet, but soon. They’ll come looking for you within the hour, perhaps less. There’s no time now for explanations at your leisure. I can explain it all once I have you away from here. Away from her.”
“But if one of us doesn’t go tonight, Mama will wake up to agony, and the curse—”
She flashed forward and caught me by the jaw, her grip like steel, but so precise it didn’t hurt. “There’s no curse, sweetness,” she said through her teeth. “Just Mara’s simple bargain with Death: one daughter every generation, in exchange for her own immortality and that of all her other daughters. Your mother is only undead because Mara herself attacked her, and then suspended her in a deathless loop—to give both of you reason enough to offer willing sacrifice, without the requisite years of being brainwashed by all her poisonous love. Unlike you, daughters raised in coven don’t need to be incentivized. You’ve seen them all; you’ve seen what it took from Naisha to rebel. They’re trained from birth to be pliant, lovely, flawlessly obedient.”
Still held captive in her hand, I stared into her crystalline eyes. They seemed to go endlessly deep, made me think of the infinite lattice of carbon in diamonds. I could feel the wisp of her breath on my face, and it somehow seemed uncanny that she even needed to breathe. “How is that possible, when Mara was the first sacrifice? Her daughter, Sorai, said—”
“It’s entirely possible, on account of that being another whole-spun lie for your benefit. Your ‘Sorai’ is Mara—that’s the honorific we all used for her. The highest, the first mother, the one who begat us all and then ensnared Death into letting her sell us to him.”
“She’s not lying,” Malina said, her voice abstracted with concentration. “She sounds like glass rung with a spoon. Nothing muddy here at all.”
“I’m honored to offer my fetching cadences to you, little pretty,” Dunja said dryly, dipping into a mock curtsy. “And I’m glad to know you can even hear me, with that love-struck garbage in your hair. I assume it’s because you’ve only had a few days with it, it hasn’t taken root properly. You may want to please her terribly, but you don’t yet have to do it; entertaining the notion of revolt doesn’t make you feel as if defiance or betrayal would tear you apart from within. The ribbons are dipped in your soul perfume, and each of our scents has a drop of her wretched come-hither blood in it. It’s the first way we become tied to her, an open conduit through which she compels love. That’s how she can sense you through them, beckon you toward her.”
“Why would Mama have put them in for us, then?” I asked.
“Oh, try to keep up, baby witch,” she snapped at me. Her porcelain-doll face was so unsettling from this close up, the youthful delicacy of our own age paired with those deep, distant eyes. “Of course she didn’t give you ribbons—that would have been one of the coven, to set everything spinning in motion before they tried to catch me. Your mother was attempting to hide you as best she could, all these years. After the monumental failure of having had you in the first place, that is.”
Malina let out a distressed little sound next to me. Dunja sighed, her face warming over a fraction. “I’m sorry, sweetness,” she murmured. “No need to say such barbed things to you, you who asked for none of this. Might we agree I’m perhaps a tiny bit on edge? Of course, having you wasn’t truly Fai’s—Jasmina’s fault. We never even considered that it might play out as inevitable, just like everything else. Like the proverbial spindle, as it were.”
“Lina,” I said miserably, “how do we know to believe her? I still feel it, all this . . . devotion. It makes me feel like we’ll be hurting Sorai. Mara. Whoever she is.”
Lina turned to me. “We’ll believe Dunja because I can hear her, and I know she’s not lying, Riss. She sounds entirely pure, unlike any of the others. The sound of her truth is stronger than what the ribbons make me feel. I believe Naisha, and I believe her.”
She searched my eyes with that beloved, familiar clear gaze. My sister’s eyes were so much like my own, but not the same. “I know I’ve let you down before, but remember Fjolar. Remember that I knew not to trust him. This is my ‘I told you so’ moment, sister. Crappy timing, but here we are. Can you trust me enough to be strong for the both of us, to let that be our foundation?”
I wavered, my hands over my face, desperate to hide. I didn’t know how to do this, when I wasn’t the one being strong.
“I could sing you into it,” she said gently, tugging down my hands until I could see her again. “But I’m not going to. Again, this is your choice.”
Looking at her, I remembered that I’d once read how twins, after four or five months of sharing a womb, reached for each other every day, held hands and touched each other more than they touched themselves. My sister and I had been together as little tapioca clusters of cells, bumping against each other as we swam in salty amniotic seas. No matter who else I loved—real love, not the false kind Mara had foisted upon us—I would never love anyone as much as my sister.
And if I loved her like that, it stood to reason that I could trust her when I couldn’t even trust my own instinct or judgment.
“I know,” I said finally. “I choose you. I trust you.”
Malina folded me to her, then pressed a fierce kiss to my forehead. “Thank you
, Riss. We’ll get through this, I promise, okay? So what do we do now?” she asked, turning back to Dunja. “How do we get out?”
“I won’t be able to fight through them if we come at them head-on,” she said. “I’ll need the ambush advantage. And I’ll need the two of you.”
My mouth sucked itself dry. “The two of us to do what?”
“To compete, of course, as she means you to. To keep her occupied. To play your parts to perfection until I can make my way toward the center of her web, and then get us out of here in as few pretty pieces as I can.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
DUNJA LED US BACK THROUGH THE PASSAGEWAYS, TO MY bedroom, before taking a branching route away from us. We spilled out of the wall to find the door still shut and the room empty, and after a crushing hug, Lina melted back into the corridors to make her way to her own room. I sat on the edge of the bed to wait, my hands shaking so hard I couldn’t even drink any of the elderflower water to calm myself. Why couldn’t they at least have left some wine, those miserable bitches? Presumably taking the edge off might have diminished the beauty.
By the time Shimora came to collect me, I had flung the windows open and was leaning halfway out, taking great gasps of the brisk mountain air—cool pine and the sweet green exhales of closing plants—trying to fortify myself for the onslaughts of perfume that I knew were coming.
“Lisarah, it’s time,” she said. “Come. Azareen is already here with me.”
“Just a moment,” I told her, swallowing hard. Please, I thought into the night, unsure of who I meant the plea for. Sorai had said there were gods made of magic; if that was even true, maybe one of them would hear me. Please, no matter what happens, don’t let me lose her.
Shimora had become even more stunning since we’d last seen her, in a midnight-blue sheath overlaid with black lace, her hair pulled back tightly into a tail that fell high from her crown, each shining section held fast with a silver band. Her scent was both mellower and spicier than before, allspice, mint, and something Christmasy like chocolate-dipped oranges—a heartening, celebratory smell that made me want to relax my shoulders, let excitement seep into my belly as if we were headed to some sparkling, joyous occasion instead of being all but led to a menhir for sacrifice. I let the scent soak in, but bent it to my own purpose, a bolster for the performance I was about to put on. My heart quickened as I fell into step with her, sharing a warm, furtive glance with Malina—I trust you—before we both shrugged back into the guise of sisters at the worst kind of odds.
Keeping marked distance between us, we followed Shimora out onto the balcony overlooking the atrium. The ceiling fixtures were aflame; the globes and onion domes cupped fire without any kind of fuel, varying in shade from electric blue to ruby red. They snapped with sparks that glimmered oddly, and with a closer look I saw that each flame flung off a perpetual shower of tiny crystals as it burned.
Shimora caught me looking at them. “Do you know, dear heart, that the tiniest of diamonds are born even in a candle’s flame?”
“No,” I said quietly, taking note of it for later. “I didn’t know that.”
Below the chandelier, candle sconces flickered over a hall filled with our family. Some wore clinging cocktail dresses, while others billowed in tiered ball gowns, full relics of satin and lace from another era. Many danced together, arms looped around each other’s waists as if they’d been apart for long enough to fiercely miss each other, while some stood in chillier clusters, by the long glass table that held cut-glass wine decanters and goblets that would take two hands to cup.
And at the center of everything, I saw Sorai. Or Mara, rather, our witch-queen in the flesh. Dazzling and regal and very much alive, the room around her billowing with waves of her undiluted scent.
She sat on a throne of glass and metal, her black hair still shining like a firelit river. Her dress was just as sleek and dark, flaring out into an oil-spill train that pooled all around the base of her chair. For once her arms were fully bare, and now I saw they were cluttered with diamond piercings, connected by lines of ink into complex constellations. Somehow I immediately understood, now that Dunja had told us the truth—the shape of the spell itself was pierced and inked into her skin, so it could run freely through her. As if she were a lightning rod.
I would have bet anything that she had exactly as many diamonds as there were daughters sacrificed.
Her hands rested on the scruffs of two lionesses sprawled beside her, and as I watched they glimmered in and out, human to animal, as if beneath a strobe light. Her honor guard, maybe. From the first nine tiers Dunja had mentioned, whatever that meant. And all around her dais, tiny bonfires burned in bronze bowls, hissing and sparking, circling her with fire. I wondered what they were for, if they were purely ceremonial. Or if they reminded her of her younger days, those dim, prehistoric times when fire meant the difference between being safe and being devoured.
The entire room went silent as Shimora led us down the staircase that spiraled to the banquet room. I felt as if I could sense the weight of every pair of gray eyes on me, and now that I knew what I was looking for, the spectrum of emotion behind them was visible, the triumph and jealousy and pity. Many of these women still served Mara; maybe most. But some, I thought, did not.
We followed our grandmother toward the throne, the sea of beauties parting before us. “Kneel,” she murmured to us. We did, the floor cold beneath my gauzy skirts, the room so silent I could hear the metallic feathers of Malina’s dress scraping against the marble tiles. The seams between them bit into my knees, and it made me want to shift a little, rearrange my weight. But I could feel the stillness of Malina’s form beside me, and I wouldn’t run the risk of seeming any less composed than she was.
In front of us, Shimora fell into a curtsy so deep it brought her to her knees at Mara’s feet, bare beneath the hem of her dress. Mara laid her hands on Shimora’s shoulders to lift her up. I could see the shudder that traveled through our grandmother’s body at her touch, the involuntary arching of her back.
Tipping Shimora’s chin up with a curled finger, Mara leaned forward and brushed her lips in a chaste kiss.
“Do you present these daughters for the choosing, Shimora?” our blood-mother crooned. Her words were wrong in the most enchanting way, burred and dark and flat, like a fossil record of the language we spoke. Tonight she seemed more feral than ever, as if the occasion wouldn’t allow her to hide any more of her true nature, her real age. “In the absence of their mother, you are the closest of their blood kin. Would you stand now in Faisali’s stead?”
“Yes, Mother,” our grandmother said. “I present them to you.” I could hear how the love caught the breath in her throat, the tremor of the weakness in it. Then I momentarily lost the scornful thought as Mara’s eyes fell on me, and I swam inside the cool, fathomless sea of their gray until she shifted her gaze to Malina.
“Such beauty,” Mara murmured, its echo resounding again and again, as if the banquet hall had become much larger than it was—as if we knelt in front of her in that original plateau beneath an ancient sky, surrounded by the soar of mountains singing back her sound. “Like flowers grown in dark jungle depths. Look at this one’s hair, black and blue and even threads of red, like surging seas beneath the breaking dawn. Look how well she holds her wrists. And the other one, the fearless bones that shape her face, the fretwork of that collarbone, like a birdcage for her heart. Are you ready, daughters? Are you ready to gleam for us?”
I wished desperately I could reach for Malina’s hand, but I forced myself to not look at her as I nodded once.
Mara tapped one of her flawless nails on the armrest; once, twice, three times. Each click thundered through the hall like an avalanche, and that distortion around her gathered in density, like a dome of molten glass. She fairly reeked of power, and though she wavered like a mirage behind the thickening, I could see her glance up and to the right, as if someone invisible now stood by her shoulder.
Unseen but u
nmistakably there, the true holder of the stakes, the one who would claim one of us.
Death. The way she looked up at it was almost fond, like they were friends who’d kept each other company through the endless years.
Then she turned back to us.
“Azareen,” she boomed. “You who were born first to Faisali, who is lost to us. Rise and begin.”
For the first time, I shifted enough that I could look at Malina. Her eyes were closed, her face nearly serene and almost alien with the swooping patterns drawn with kohl winging away from her lids, her lips glittering and cheeks vivid with blush. Even just the cameo perfection of her profile nearly broke my heart.
She took her time raising her chin, and when her eyes finally opened it was with languor, slow blinks like an invitation—as if she had all the time in the world, and was preparing to invite someone to share it with her. She lifted one knee and then the other, rising to her feet with weightless grace, and when she spread her arms as if through water I remembered that she’d had something I’d never had—Naisha’s tutelage, years of being invisibly nudged toward beauty.
Then she began to sing, a slow, sweet summoning, with the underpinning power of that tremendous, angelic chorus she’d found within herself. Come find me, it said. I’m worth it. I was born for you.
As her voices crested and rolled in multitude, she moved along with the song; not dancing, exactly, but simply following its currents, stepping gracefully along the path of its flow, the metal feathers shimmering around her, the tops of her breasts and her fine shoulders glowing like silvered snow above the black bodice.
I’d heard my sister sing of true love, of Niko, but it hadn’t been like this.
This song was pure passion, and a kind of aloof sensuousness I’d never known Malina even possessed. It made me think of enchantment, of being mesmerized by a sylph. Of following her through a forest as she leaped ahead like a doe, wearing something wispy and trailing with lace and ribbons, glancing coyly back over her shoulder above the froth of her hair. It made me think of her resting in a stream with her arms above her head and her back against smooth stones, water soaking through her wedding nightgown until it clung to her skin, near sheer.