by Lana Popovic
She didn’t need to eat. She didn’t need to drink. She only needed herself, and him.
The love was becoming her own, and real.
And still her hair was mostly red.
“I want to see what you do,” she told him once, taking him by the hand. “Helping them all die. Making them die. Whatever it is, I want to be by your side.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” He pulled her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. “It’s happening right now, and in every other moment. It’s not a thing I do, but the thing I am. All the other parts of me that you don’t see—that’s where they are instead of loving you.”
“You and your multitudes,” she teased. “But why can’t you take me with you, then? With all the rest of you?”
“Because if I did that, my foxfire love, then that would kill you, too.”
“Is that why we never see anyone else? Why it’s always just you and me? I’m just forgetting what other people do, a bit. And maybe I wish that I could see them.”
“And I would give that to you if I could, my heart. But this is the way she willed it to be.”
“Take me somewhere else, then,” she said, “where we can really be alone. Somewhere far away from here, where no one’s ever been before.”
THERE SHOULD HAVE been no light inside that tree. But she could see it perfectly, how its trunk was like a vault around them, wide and silent as a church. Bright beetles with green and pearly shells climbed the inner skin; they would have terrified her once. Now she wished, with part of her heart, to feel their tiny feet scrabbling against her palm.
“It’s the biggest banyan that there is,” he told her. “Is this much alone enough for you?”
She laid her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down until he sat. “It is.”
“But why—”
“Just watch,” she said. “I’ll show you what I meant.”
She danced for him inside the tree, but the tree wasn’t what she danced. She showed him how she’d stroke him with her hair, trailing her hands like vines, how she’d like to feel the warmth of him pressed against her from behind. How she’d wrap her legs around his hips, tilt her chin and arch her back; how she’d let him kiss her until she wept, and even more than that.
Much later, she rested her chin on his bare chest and watched him watching her. “What is it, foxfire?” he said. He had a very darling dimple, she’d found, when he smiled at her this certain way. “What’s in those she-wolf eyes?”
“Do you love me, Artem?”
He frowned. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve told you a thousand times. Do you love me?”
“But you could say that for all of them,” she argued, “the ones who came before me. And if that’s true, then what’s the use in me loving you, too? It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. Unless you chose to choose only me, then all this is just her game.”
“I did love them, yes, that much is true,” he said carefully, feeling her tense against him. “When Mara offered this to me, beauty and love in place of solitude, these became the rules. But you—you’re the first, in all this time, who made me love her to the soul. I wouldn’t lie to you, my foxfire. That’s the full truth that I hold.”
“If only you could die for me to prove it,” she teased. “Too bad you’re not allowed.”
“That would indeed be a drastic measure,” he agreed. “But for you, I would. If you demanded it of me, at least, and if I found I could.”
“And what about me?” she pressed him. “What about when I’m gone? You’ll take up with the next one? You’ll just carry on?”
“I’ll mourn you for an eternity,” he whispered. “I’ll howl for you in the hearts of mountains, and weep for you into the lakes.”
“An eternity and two days, you mean. Until the next one takes my place.”
They were quiet for a long time, and so still, that a long coral snake slithered over her feet. It might have made her shriek and shudder once, but now she could barely bother to take heed.
“What would you have me do instead?” he asked her. “What would please you more?”
“That you never take another, of course,” she said. “And never let me go.”
“I can’t, my lover. I wish I could, but she bound me with her will.” He ran her hair through his fingers, braiding the white streaks with the red. “I’ll lose you, and you’ll leave a space behind, a space for a new daughter to fill.”
She pulled away from him fiercely, and drew up her spine, and tried to remember how it felt to be brave. “Then don’t dare say you love me, because you don’t,” she spat. “You just love what you happen to have.”
Still he said nothing, and she rounded on him, forcing them face-to-face. “The one who comes after wouldn’t be some stranger; a daughter of my blood will take my place. And this is what you’d offer her, my successor and my niece? False love and empty places, no kind of choice and this vacuum of peace? If you love me, then prove it. Don’t look for another, for I can tell you, there will not be one. Once this is over, all of you and me, all of this will truly be done.”
“I’ll be alone then, after you, if that’s what you want,” he said, and she could hear the tears beneath his voice. “Darkness entire, no more beauty, or love—but if that’s what you ask, then that’s my choice.”
“You won’t be alone, because I’ll love you, even once I’m gone.” She climbed onto his lap and kissed him hard, and he clasped her against his chest.
But when she looked up at him, he’d lifted his head and his eyes were only halfway there—as if he were searching toward the next.
THEN HE ASKED her to dance him the tides of the oceans, and vanished while she danced.
THIRTY-ONE
RIGHT AFTER THE BURST OF MOVEMENT THAT PAINTED HER waking—eyes springing open and mouth shaped into a gasp—Dunja fell to her knees like a doll whose strings had been cut.
Lina and I rushed to her side. She was breathing hard and sharp, as if every breath cut deep, and tears streamed down her face. I wrapped my arms around her without a second thought, like I’d done for Malina a thousand times before, and she clutched me back tightly, hot face tucked into my shoulder. I’d never been close enough to smell her before, and beneath the scents of grass and pine and old fire, her skin and hair smelled so much like Mama’s.
“It hurt to wake back in the cave,” she whispered through the tears. “Like knives and glass and poison inside me. And I was still strong, so strong, but everything hurt. And I hate him and I miss him, I miss him so much.”
I rocked her back and forth as she sobbed, shushing into her ear. I wanted to murder Mara for doing this to her, and him—him I wanted to suffocate with my bare hands. “You really loved him, didn’t you? You really wanted him for your own.”
I could feel her ragged breathing slow a little. “It was Mara’s doing first, and then I did it for Jasmina. But then, I truly did, for myself. I still do.” She gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “And I would never wish him upon you, ever.”
“I understand,” I murmured back. “I don’t particularly think I’d like to share, either.”
This time, I startled genuine laughter out of her, full-throated and musical even with the tearful tinge. “We are greedy,” she said. “All of us, starting with her. Always wanting the fullness of things, everything to its extremes.”
But wasn’t that true of most people? I thought. Why else would we wage war and fight for freedom and kill each other over the true name of God? Because we all wanted everything, and for everything we wanted to be right.
“So after you woke up,” Malina said gently. “What happened then?”
Dunja blinked away the last of the tears, wiping delicately at her face. “There was someone in the cave with me, I think she’d come to trim my hair. Denari, Mara’s great-granddaughter. She was rearranging the furs when I woke all the way up. I scared her, and she attacked me and I—” She swallowed. “I threw her hard against the wall, like she weighed nothing
. That’s how I knew how strong I’d gotten. Then I made my way to you.”
“Reverse engineering!” Luka announced triumphantly.
Dunja, Malina, and I all turned to frown at him in such a synchronized way that we must have looked like real family for the first time. Even Niko, sitting beside him, gave him a dubious squint, squinching up her nose.
“That’s what we were trying to do,” he said, and I recognized that tamped-down glow, the restrained ember of his excitement when he delved to the bottom of something. “With Mara’s legends. We were trying to literally undo the spell by breaking it down into components, and creating an equal and opposite ritual to what Mara did. But the problem is that you were imitating her. Mimicking. And you were using the wrong set of tools to do it, a different kind of magic.”
Luka sprang to his feet like a coiled spring, and even though I still had no idea what he meant, watching him pace as his mind whirred so quickly made me want to back him into some trees myself.
“It’s freedom,” he said suddenly, looking up at us with blazing eyes. “That’s the opposite. True love is freedom, loving someone enough to do what’s best for them—to let them go, if that’s what they need. Mara’s love is just another kind of slavery, a falseness, a perversion of the word.”
“But what then?” Niko asked. “What do you do with knowing that?”
“It would have to be an effort of will,” I said slowly, my heart beginning to pick up speed. “Maybe that’s how she sealed this deal in the first place, by casting her will so far and wide that it set this cycle in place in perpetuity. And that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t it, with the infinite bloom? Imposing my will on things? Isn’t that what you said, Dunja? That the infinite bloom is the ultimate gleam, imposed on space and time?”
Dunja’s eyes sharpened on me. “Yes. Exactly so. The infinite bloom is the basal gift, the one that lets Mara cast at her highest order of magnitude. It lets you bind far past yourself, to bind the universe to your will.”
“So why do I have it now, when I never did before? I mean, I could always make things bloom, but I couldn’t do what I did with the—with that wisteria that comes from me. It’s like Mara’s roses, I assume, but why can I do it?”
“You’ve never been so desperate before, most likely, and you’ve spent your life weakened, away from coven and suppressed by your mother. To apply your gleam fully to the infinite bloom, you have to cast from truest yearning. The deepest desire of your soul. The thing you want more than any other thing, perhaps even than to live.”
So that was it, then—it had always been protection. Every time I had summoned the wisteria, it had been because I needed it badly, to shelter Malina. To put myself between her and whatever was coming.
But maybe I could want to save myself, too.
“So, maybe . . . maybe we could all go bigger,” I said slowly. “I think I already did it once, Dunja. I opened a portal to somewhere—somewhere that might have been his kingdom, even. Because I wanted to beat Malina. I wanted to will myself to be the one to go, to save her.”
“That’s it, then,” Luka said. “It must be. Because that’s what fractals are—an expression of infinity. You can see it, Iris. And if you can see it . . .”
“Then maybe I can touch it,” I finished. “But even if I can, what am I supposed to do once I’m there? I knew what I wanted, the last time I did it. I wanted to make sure I was the one who went. But this—I’m not sure I know how to want this, properly.”
“You’ll have us,” Malina replied. “To help you. Mara sold us into slavery; maybe we can do what Luka says, and break those bonds by turning them into freedom. I could sing it. Dunja can dance it.”
“But where do we do this? In the cave?”
“No.” Luka shook his head. “The Ice Cave is hers—that’s still playing by her rules. We need to take it up another level. Set it all up above her. Go even higher.”
Malina groaned. “Oh, I was afraid of that.”
Niko’s head snapped up. “There’s not going to be enough room for me and Luka,” she said flatly. “Is there.”
I shook my head, biting back tears. “No. Not if Dunja will be dancing.”
He set his jaw. “I’m not going to leave you. I want to help.”
“You already did—you let us see all this in a different way,” I answered gently. “And that was what we needed. But I think you know it, too, that we need to do this alone, the three of us.”
“Princess,” Lina said gently as Niko struggled before melting against her. “Please. Don’t make this so hard. Come say good-bye this time.”
Luka crouched down next to me and cupped my face with one hand, curling the other tightly around my neck. I inhaled at the force of his kiss, the taste of him, the warmth behind it. The full heat and fervor of his love, as he kissed me on each cheek and between my eyes. And even before he said so, I knew he’d do it. He’d leave me alone to this, because that was what I asked of him.
“Don’t you dare think these were good-bye kisses,” he said when he drew back. “It was just to tide me over. And because I love you.”
“I hope so. And I love you, too.”
EVEN IN THE twilight, the world spread below us was stunning from this high up. For a little while, I hadn’t even thought that we would make it. The earlier stages of the ascent had been almost pleasant, green and winding paths up the mountain that zigged and zagged to bring us higher without the impression of terrible danger. But the last leg of the climb had been so steep and severe—just scree slopes with hand- and toeholds you had to feel out carefully to find, that should have required actual climbing equipment if we’d had the time for that—that Malina had simply frozen against the mountain with her face pressed against the still-warm stone, whispering that she couldn’t go farther, she just couldn’t.
Eventually, Dunja and I had arranged ourselves beside and below her against the cliff face, and carefully moved her hands and feet for her as she clung to the side like a limpet. I’d never been very afraid of heights, but the little fear I’d had seemed to have dissipated. Instead I felt a vast, yawning sense of awe inside me, as if my soul had opened its mouth wide to breathe all this in.
“Bobotov Kuk,” I said as we scrabbled over its lip and onto its face. “Holy shit.”
The summit pyramid of stone was larger than it seemed from the valley below, but not by much. There was enough room for the three of us to huddle toward its center, with a ring of open space around us. The summit stood between two slightly lower peaks—the Nameless Peak and the Maiden, Dunja informed us—and together the three made a jagged mountain wall to the west, dropping off into a plummeting slope toward the green-fuzzed Škrka Valley and the glacial pools of its two lakes below, one massive and one small. Beyond them the rest of the Durmitor range soared, mountain after mountain like the earth’s own stone fractals, into the fall and fire tones of the dying day on the horizon.
“I know I was full-throttle about this,” Malina gulped, “but I’m very, very scared right now. We’re so high up, and it’s—I could fall—I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing anything other than that.”
“I would never let you fall,” Dunja said, sliding a hand down Malina’s hair. “I promise you. And once I start the dance, you’ll pick up the thread from me. It’ll be all right.”
I sat down cross-legged next to her, giving her leg a squeeze.
The three of us simply sat together, quiet, until I could smell and hear things I never could before. The breeze was cooling with the advent of night, and the air smelled of pine sap and moss and ferns, the rank sear of a fox from somewhere far below. I even thought I caught the alkaline tang of water from the lakes in the far, low distance, and I could hear the stirring of the needles with the wind, the brush and rustle of birds and insects in the trees, maybe even the lumbering shuffle of something hungry, big, and hidden.
At the very base of the mountain, we could see the coven swarming. They were tiny from up here, but there w
ere so many, and they moved so fast, like insects engulfing a carcass. Soon they would be up here with us, and then the reckoning would begin.
At some point, I realized that we’d settled into a rhythm, inhales and exhales like a tide, breathing slowly with each other. I thought I could even feel my sister and my aunt, the bright pulse of each of their minds, the slow and steady throbbing of their hearts.
Dunja moved first, but the stirring didn’t break the spell. She unfurled all at once, twirling as she stood; her white hair drifted as though it were gravity defiant and alive, something lazy and languid with its own mind. With her first step, I had a sense of scorching sand and translucent veils, as if she danced for a sultan in some baking desert.
That would be one of her freedoms, I suddenly realized; to dance all that beauty for someone else, because she’d chosen not to hide it.
Malina felt it too, the freedom of it, and she began to sing in pursuit.
We shifted then from the desert sands, the peaks and cliffs around us melting away like a spun-sugar confection, until Dunja danced on a minaret’s onion dome—above a flat-roofed, baked-brick city stretching beneath a blazing sun, her arms wide and hair whirling like a platinum halo. Then there was a jungle, so dense and lush its canopy was almost solid; she took us with her as she danced upon it, leaping from glossy palm leaf to branch to vine, and all the while Malina’s song followed. From beaches to villages to waterfalls, to roaring, white-frothed rivers and skyscraper cities and masquerade balls.
We could go there; we could be there; we could choose warmth and life instead of ice.
Anywhere was open to us, anywhere that we chose. And I thought of Luka, and how he would let me go.
Come on, little witch, I heard Dunja urging in my mind. Make this the truth for us. Make choice and anywhere the only truth.
Even as the sky unfolded a plumage of stars over us, I focused on my wisteria, watching pinks and purples fracture and multiply, blooming and unfurling and stretching with no end. The branches made overlapping bridges, and the blossoms endless whirlpools; together they formed ladders that could have spanned farther than from Earth to moon. And I pushed them harder, climbed them with my mind, strove to touch where they were going like I never had before.