by Lana Popovic
Her cherry lips glistening and parted as if she’d drunk fresh from the sweet stream. As if her mouth would taste of it.
Come get me, the song called out. Come claim me, lover, and have me for your own.
It was so sensual it made me want to squirm out of my skin, that something like it should come from my sister, but it didn’t. Because right now, she was someone else. Not Malina, but truly Azareen. Someone distant as a star, as far from me as other galaxies, and infinitely more beautiful than the sky in the clearest night.
Where are you, Dunja? I thought desperately. We need you.
Because if she didn’t come for us in time, I was going to lose my sister. Because how could I ever compare to this.
Malina finally completed her slow circuit of the hall, and with a final parting trill of song—like the sweet, guileless thrill of fingertips pressed to lips, a kiss blown toward a lover to be borne along the wind—she settled back next to me on her knees with a heavy head, dropping her chin. Now that she was near me again, I could see the toll the song had taken. Her chest still heaved with labored breaths, and the hollow of her throat had pooled with sweat. Single tracks of tears silvered her cheeks, and I thought how much this must have cost her, betraying her real love like this. It had been far from effortless, and the sight of it made a sinkhole of fear gape in my belly. She’d given everything she had, because she thought this might be real. That Dunja wasn’t coming.
Mara made a pleased, humming sound, like a queen bee glutted and secure in the confines of her hive.
“Lisarah of Faisali,” she purred at me. “Born second, but no less bold for it. Rise, and begin.”
I came to my feet, not bothering with feigning grace. It wasn’t built into my limbs, and I didn’t think now was the time to try plying artifice. For a moment I just stood with my eyes closed, letting myself breathe; feeling the gossamer folds of leaves and ivy draped around me, the thorns that circled my skin, even the thick black around my lids. Thinking of the way my pale eyes would flash when I finally opened them.
I wasn’t some elusive maiden-sprite flitting, mesmerizing, through a copse of trees. Nor was I cool, trickling streams, or lips parted expectantly for a kiss. So what was I? What could I be to save her, to win us this?
“Lisarah,” Mara began, a stratum of something like uncertainty glinting through the ancient, limestone layers of her voices. “Will you—”
Without answer, I snapped my head up, and shattered the sky.
The constellation of chandeliers and baubles dangling from the ceiling may as well have been designed to fractal. I let loose all the gleam at once, splitting and multiplying them without mercy—glass and metal into endless, massive rows of domes and spires, the trapped butterflies and iridescent beetles bursting into a shimmering, winged army that looked like it might conquer us like a locust plague. The entirety of the ceiling grew like stalactites striving in fast-forward, into a celestial city built of crystals, like a heaven of my own making.
As I pulled at it with all I had, it came rushing down the atrium toward us, as if this crystalline new world might crash-land onto ours.
To meet it, I turned my gaze to the ring of flames around Mara’s dais, and began blooming them one by one. Tongues of fire swirled around one another like blazing prayer wheels, and as they overlapped they formed a scorching, spitting wall of orange, red, and gold, a hellfire that rose to meet the heaven I’d built from above. Within the flames, those diamond-sparks I’d seen before magnified into a blinding shimmer, until the entire inferno glittered like a hellscape contained inside a ruby. Together, ceiling and floor obscured Mara entirely, trapping her behind the fire and glass.
I didn’t move with it like Lina had, and I couldn’t have even if I wanted to—it took all I had simply to hold this marvel, and then some to keep it spinning. But it didn’t matter, because this showed everything I was.
That I was wicked.
That I was wild.
That I would not be curbed.
Dimly I could hear the gasps of wonder, the shrieks from the lionesses beside Mara, even delighted, raptured laughter from others in the crowd. And I began to think that maybe I could finish it this way, that maybe I could simply close the fractals around her. Trap her and Death both inside this cage.
Then those three clicks again—Mara’s fingernails on steel—before she snuffed my bloom out in the space of a breath, the ceiling retreating meekly back to where it hung static, the flames diving back into the confines of their bowls.
“ENOUGH,” she boomed. “ENOUGH, MY WILDLING. THE WINNER HAS BEEN CHOSEN, AND IT IS—”
Then Dunja landed neatly in the center of the hall like a fallen star, between us and Mara, and the world froze around us all.
She stood poised so perfectly she could have been a statue rather than breathing flesh, en pointe with one leg swept high behind her head. Both her arms were flung up too, curved above her in a soft oval, fingers nearly interlaced. Her head was tilted so the snowfall of white hair could spill freely down her back. Her spine arched like a bow, and the muscles in her bare midriff stood out from strain, above billowing harem pants and below the slip of beaded band that covered her breasts.
She launched into a series of movements, a flawless finesse that defied anything we’d seen in the pageant the day before. Barefoot steps took her through effortless flips, arms and hands and the tilt of her head sketching the shapes of another world, as if she were painting with her body. The trappings of the ballroom blurred and then fell away, until she danced on the surface of water, beside an abandoned ship that had grown a tangled forest from its rusted iron innards. The chandelier—the atrium itself—had been replaced by a blue sky with a slender row of clouds above its horizon.
The desolate beauty of it was so intense it ached. Nothing I’d seen so far could have compared to the immensity of her dance, the illusion she conjured with every movement.
The women all around us were caught, rapt, in poses of fascination. Dunja swept by them, whirling and swooping, and even when she dipped so close her passage stirred their hair, none of them moved—eyes wide and lips parted with wonder, some with hands clutched to their chests.
She dropped into a mocking bow as she finally reached Mara. The lion-women beside her were simply women now, on their knees with faces mesmerized. “I don’t do well on ice, Baba Mara, you should know that much,” she said. “At least not since you left me gathering frost in that godforsaken cave.”
Mara trembled with the effort to move, the tiny muscles in her face quivering, but only her eyes shifted to track Dunja as she whipped forward, looped a lock of Mara’s hair around her little hand, and ripped it out by the root, then tucked it into her pocket.
With an enormous, straining yank, all the tendons in her neck and chest cording like rope, Mara tipped her head back and shrieked like a banshee. The dance-illusion shattered at once. Ship and sky and water vanished like mist, and the candlelit room snapped back into place. The baubles of the chandelier knocked hard against one another, cracking and raining down over her and Dunja in a shower of glass. A tangle of black roses began snaking from Mara, transparent at first and then blushing full and dark, rounding into existence. The rest of the coven began shaking themselves free from their stupor, as wave after wave of love rolled off Mara, pungent and irresistible.
Destroy the usurper, the scent urged. If you love me true, strike her down where she stands. DESTROY HER.
The urge to leap to Mara’s defense was so overpowering I was ready to spring at Dunja before Malina actually snatched me by my hair and wrenched me back.
“No, Riss,” she managed, between panting breaths and snippets of defiant song. “No. You don’t really want to do that.”
Next to us, Dunja’s eyes flicked back and forth, assessing the ranks descending on us. “Well,” she said mildly, “this won’t do.”
She leaped away from Mara and the throne in a neat, airborne somersault. As she landed, she brought one foot down with
a cracking boom that reverberated through the hall. It echoed over and over, spreading away from Dunja in nearly visible ripples, and each wave brought down the advancing women as if it were a physical blow. They collapsed over one another, tumbling to the ground as if they’d been struck.
Only the two of us and Mara, near Dunja’s epicenter, were unaffected. Lina and I flinched back, hands knotted, as Mara swept to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf’s and chest heaving beneath the dress’s sparkling mesh, hands curved into claws at her sides. Yet her words sounded like a caress. “Come now, daughter,” she said to Dunja, sweetly through clenched teeth. Every fine hair on my body stood at attention. “Would you do this to me, your old blood-mother, the one who gave you such gifts of love and life?”
“You might call it love, first mother,” Dunja said, rolling to readiness on the balls of her feet. “I call it something more like slavery.”
She spun on her heel like a whirlybird, flinging herself around the axis of her own body before delivering a massive backhand to Mara’s cheek. Mara’s head snapped back, and the force of the blow swept her up and away from the throne, until she rolled to a stop in a tangle with her lion guards.
Dunja wiped the back of her hand against the silk of her pants, than hawked and spat in Mara’s general direction. She searched for me over her shoulder, eyes blazing as they met mine. “Now, Iris. DO IT NOW.”
I reached out and squeezed Lina’s hand until I heard her indrawn hiss; I needed her to galvanize me again, to spark that primal, indomitable instinct to protect her above all else. Once I felt it roar to life, I turned inward and unspooled the wisteria of my will, letting it loose in a flood like a river choked with petals, a crashing tsunami of branch and blossom that rolled over everything. It rushed over Mara’s throne and the women in the banquet hall like a living net, a floral cage that pinned and trapped them even as it cleared a path for us.
Dunja grasped both of our hands, and the three of us ran together, heading toward the massive chalet doors and then out into the night.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WE BOUNDED THROUGH THE DARKENED FOREST, BETWEEN tree trunks and past fallen, moss-furred pines. Moonlight poured between the trees, bright as headlight beams. On the lower levels, where the sun couldn’t reach during the day, the branches grew bare of needles, instead curved and sharp like thorns. Forest mulch, a mix of fern, pine needles, and bursting mushrooms, squelched beneath our bare, pounding feet.
Far ahead of us Dunja flashed between the pines with white hair whipping behind her, following no route that I could see, fleet-footed and agile as a deer. My own breath had already grown ragged and Malina kept tripping beside me over the hem of her ridiculous metal-feathered dress. Dunja had paused in our headlong tumble only for long enough to unweave the ribbons from our hair, her fingers flying inhumanly fast before she plucked them all out and dropped them on the floor, grinding them viciously underfoot. After that, it had been running and running, until my knees felt like aspic.
“Could you possibly move an iota faster, pretties?” Dunja tossed over her shoulder. “She’ll cut herself free soon with those sharp old claws, and once she does, she’ll rouse the others.”
“Would you like to carry us on your back, auntie?” I called back between pants. “Because we don’t get any faster than this.”
We finally burst into a little clearing, choked with mud and massive, weathered logs. A battered white van was parked there, backed against the logs. Dunja unlocked the doors and we piled into the crowded insides, scrambling over stuffed animals and threadbare pillows. There was a collection of pots and pans in the farthest back, along with a carton of provisions, dried meats and fruits, juice boxes, and canned vegetables. It smelled like baby powder, chili pepper, and soap.
“Where did this come from?” Malina asked her. “This looks like someone’s home.”
“I bought it from some American tourists after I left Perast,” Dunja replied. “A traveling family, I think. With children.”
“And they just gave it to you? Along with all their things?”
“I may have stolen it a bit,” she admitted vaguely. “But I left money in its place, I think. Learning to drive it properly was the larger problem, though everyone emerged from that relatively unscathed.”
Malina and I exchanged uneasy glances as to what that meant as I tucked a matted-haired Barbie into the seat pocket to make more room for us.
“We’ll be staying in the woods for a while,” she continued as she fired up the ignition. “Now that your ribbons are gone, Mara won’t be able to track you through them any longer. But Žabljak is too small for us to hide there properly until all this is over, however it all ends. The coven is known there, the chalet a ‘retreat’ for rich eccentrics. Someone might tattle on us for the right price.”
“How exactly will ‘all this’ be over?” I asked her. “How did it even begin?”
“With one of you fair ladies falling in love, I believe,” she replied as she shifted the van into gear. The engine sputtered alarmingly, but turned over. “That was when you first drew his notice. Like I said, Jasmina and I had sworn an oath to each other: the one chosen would love Death so fiercely he wouldn’t want another, and the other would run and hide from the coven, live freely and never have children. So I told him I’d be the last, and he believed me—you two were the first to ever grow up outside of coven, disconnected from Mara. He couldn’t feel you through his connection with her, didn’t even know that you existed. And he was so happy with me, content enough he even claimed he wanted me to be the last. Because after me no other would compare.”
I looked over at Lina, whose hand was at her mouth. “Mama told us never to fall in love,” she said faintly. “Is that why?”
“That’s why,” Dunja confirmed. I watched her in the rearview mirror, her lips twisting with sadness. “When he felt one of you fall, he just couldn’t help himself. He had to see you, to go look for himself. He’s like a spoiled child that way, drawn by each new thing. No matter how much he claims to love the one he has.”
A lightning shudder of chills flashed through me, a tingle of familiarity. A spoiled child, drawn by each new thing. I knew a bit about what that looked like. In fact, I knew exactly what it looked like. “So Death really is a person?”
The car lurched as she turned onto a rutted semblance of a road. Some little forest animal dashed across the path in front of us, its brushy tail disappearing last as it plunged into a thicket of fern and wild strawberry.
Dunja tilted her head back and forth sinuously, considering. Even that simple gesture was hypnotic to watch. “He certainly seemed so to me, though I don’t believe that’s entirely true. Mara’s spell forces a communion, a bond between the embodied essence of an immaterial force and the soul of a material creature. He only agreed to it because she beseeched the old gods to lend him flesh and then made him love her enough to be willing to grant immortality, in return for such prizes as her daughters are. It’s all beyond true comprehension. But it felt like . . .”
She gave a wisp of a sigh, and the softness of it was unmistakably wistful. “It was like the most vivid fever dream, yet the truest dream I ever had. Truer than the small, faint flicker of a life I lived before it. It’s almost hard to hate her, for all she stole from me—from all of us—when being with him was the singular glory that it was. It might be a terrible wrong, a craven evil to breed daughters for such a selfish purpose. But I won’t lie and say it wasn’t the happiest I’ve ever been.”
She missed him, badly. There was a terrible longing beneath the bright surface, like the hottest heart inside a star.
“What did he look like?” I asked her, my heart still pounding.
“He appeared to me like a boy I’d once admired—a form that was particularly pleasing to me. I couldn’t tell you if that’s how it always works, but I suspect it might be. We’re as much a part of the pairing as he is; his flesh echoes whatever we desire, whatever is best to incite and seal in the love.�
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My stomach churned with bile. Fjolar had always seemed so familiar to me, almost remembered, and now that original, underlying memory struck like a spearhead. I’d watched a boy once, many years ago, walking along the Riva. A Scandinavian tourist, the most handsome boy I’d ever seen, jostling along with friends who’d never be brighter than they were in his shadow. He’d looked at me and smiled admiringly, the smile spreading wide across his broad and bony face, lighting his gas-flame eyes.
He’d seen me, liked me, enough that I never forgot. And everything else Fjolar had been—the eyeliner, the bracelets, those jagged, lovely tattoos; even the story about a younger brother, a cruel mother, the similarities in our names—had all been designed to appeal to me.
Malina may have been the one who fell in love, but I’d been the one he’d sought out, and wanted for himself. Did that mean I could have saved Lina, no matter what? Did it mean I might even have enjoyed it? And at bottom, what did that make me, that I’d been so ready to dive into him at the expense of anything else?
“How did you leave at all?” Malina asked Dunja. “It doesn’t sound like that’s a choice the ‘offering’ would have.”
“Once he was gone, his kingdom couldn’t hold me any longer,” she said simply. “It’s like a trapped bubble, a pocket between our world and the next, dependent on its occupants. A space he and Mara made together—a bit like you blowing your glass, Iris, forming new space with your breath and solidifying it—as a haven for him and each companion. Without him in it, it means nothing, and so I woke—to find him, and to bring him back.”
“And how do you plan to do it?”
“By stealing Mara’s spell from her and shifting it to me. Though the spell flows through her, it needs the pinions of her other daughters, the ones who also become undying after they offer up their own. Like an electrical grid. I want to close the loop with just him and me inside it. No more succession; no more immortality. Just he and I forever in his kingdom—and freedom for the two of you.”