by Lana Popovic
But it wasn’t enough.
My head was pounding as if it would split apart, and I could feel warm rivulets come sluicing from my nose. And there was something—something more—beyond the kaleidoscope of freedom that spun around us like a top.
I could feel her rather than see her, crawling up the cliff like a spider. Whatever bond we’d woven, Dunja and Malina and I, Mara could feel it too.
“She’s coming,” I whispered, then—“I think she’s here—”
And then the first wave of love broke terribly over us.
LISARAH MY DAUGHTER, LISARAH MY LOVE, it roared in my ears and bones and mind, WOULD YOU UNSPOOL YOUR MOTHER IN THIS WAY, WHO LOVED YOU AND SACRIFICED SO YOU COULD HAVE LIFE?
“You’re not my mother,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “And you don’t love me.”
The assault continued, and now I could see her hands and the scraggly, singed leftovers of her hair as she clawed herself up and over onto our summit. I LOVE YOU THE MOST, THE MOST OF THEM ALL, AND EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE TO ME, I WOULD GATHER YOU IN MY LAP AND HOLD YOU AGAINST MY HEART. WOULD YOU TRULY STAB ME IN MY BREASTBONE, LISARAH, DAUGHTER? WOULD YOU TRULY WATCH ME DIE?
Now she stood at the very edge, still in the black dress she’d worn the other night, tattered and ripped from her hillside climb. The entire surface of her skin was burned; that was what our spell had done, latched onto her and roasted her alive while leaving her own spell intact. Beneath the scorch, a network of black veins like worms had risen to the surface of what had once been skin, but somehow even with that she was still beautiful, all sleek and exposed sinew, reaching hands and that perfume of love. She could dance like Dunja too, I saw, only disjointed and somehow inside out, sparse hair thrashing and limbs bending in an unlikely, backward way, as if someone had thrown a strange and gorgeous thing under a strobe light so it stuttered.
And behind that dance I saw something I remembered: a vast, endless field of black roses that glistened wet under a dim sky, so tangled and thorny they reached the dark, distant dregs of creation before doubling back, like a serpent of flowers swallowing its own tail.
So that was the shape of Mara’s will, then.
Well, it wasn’t the shape of mine.
The flowers I had in front of me—they were a beginning, but they couldn’t reach far enough. But there was one that could, one that grew in my father’s soil. Because it was his, it was also mine. It didn’t matter that I’d never seen it in person. I could grow it in my mind.
Slowly, as if I were gathering molten glass at the end of my pipe, I snaked a massive underground root system in my mind. Its reaching tendrils grew into a twisted trunk, then burst into a vast profusion of branches, gnarled wood giving way to wisteria waterfalls that bloomed for miles. My hands were clenched into fists so tight I could feel the piercing sink of my nails into my skin, the hot blood that welled around them. And I could hear myself screaming with the strain, but still I pressed forth with my freedom tree. Its flowers twined and wove like living things, over and under the bramble of Mara’s roses, shooting up and away from me like the sparking threads of my own synapses.
This was the framework that supported her will—the only way to end was overwhelm it, make it mine.
YOU ARE MINE, the roses shrieked in Mara’s ancient voice as they withered on their vines.
No, I am mine, I told them, as I strangled them with rushing fireworks of purple, pink, and white. Not yours, old mother, but always mine.
We were so close I could have kissed her, though she didn’t touch me; just faced me with her burned, seeping hands hovering over my shoulders, looking into my eyes. I could see her then as she had been so many years ago, a beetle-browed child with dark hair, improbably lovely and kneeling by a stream. Hauling slick fish in baskets, skinning felled game that steamed in the icy air, curing hides in stinking cauldrons. And watching so many of her sisters die. She’d had six of them since she remembered herself, but four had died bearing their children, one from a wound gone putrid, and the sixth from pains that ate away all her insides.
Until she was the only sister left. The only one left of her whole line.
And then she had her own children, and they died too, a girl, a boy, another girl.
I could feel the roiling fathoms of her grief, see her hone her manifold gifts, the way she could wield love. And once she had more daughters, the fierce and burning need that drove her, to never lose her own again—to never die, nor let her own die young.
Something else flickered deep there, too, so far beneath that all I could see was a trailing shadow, like a passing shark swimming miles under the sea.
“But what about us?” I whispered to her. “The ones who you gave away. Was it really worth the price?”
“Everything is give and take, my blood,” she rasped. “You can only pay for life with life.”
More images of her times washed over me, and I could feel myself softening toward her, even as my wisteria coiled tighter around the rose mesh of her will. I could hear her howling sobs as she cradled a stillborn baby to her chest, the sweeter croon of her lullaby as she stroked a living daughter’s fluffy hair.
And I wanted that. The cradle, the stroke, the lullaby. I wanted all that mother-love.
“Iris!” Dunja shrieked at me. “Break it, break it now! There’s no more time!”
I tore my eyes away from Mara and looked to my sister and my aunt. Dunja was flinging herself through frantic arabesques, her floating hair blazing with starlight, and Malina’s face, contorted, was bathed in the same pale light. Behind them, others crested the peak—those would be true witches, of the first nine. My aunt and sister wouldn’t be able to stand against all of them.
Rage kindled inside me, the roaring urge to protect them: these two who truly loved me, not the false mother with her lies.
I turned back to the oldest of all my kin, our ancient, greatest grandmother, with her blistered face and bottomless eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I wish I’d known you back then. But I think, now, it’s time to stop.”
I bore down on all my flowers, forced them to choke and cover tighter, until the roses beneath them nearly breathed their last. But as I came to the breaking point, I discovered that it would take even more than I’d thought it would take.
Strip her arms bare of glitter or silver, I thought desperately. That was it. It had to be.
Her will was not merely flung wide, but anchored in her skin, and it wouldn’t succumb to me until the last pieces were plucked out.
“Dunja,” I forced out, as if through a howling wind rushing down my throat, “her diamonds. Get. Them. Out.”
I could see her eyes dawn bright with understanding, and the next arabesque brought her behind Mara. She locked her arms around our first mother, as Mara had once done to me, and pinning her flailing, black-streaked arms, Dunja began to dig and pluck with blinding speed. Mara thrashed against her like something primal caught in an iron-maiden vise. Her voices droned into a hellmouth clamor, tinged with a terror so pure it nearly wrested the flower reins from me.
“LISARAH—IRIS—DAUGHTER, DON’T,” she shrieked, her eyes and mouth impossibly wide. “WHAT I DO IS MORE THAN YOU COULD UNDERSTAND—REMEMBER HOW YOU DID NOT EVEN KNOW YOUR OWN MOTHER’S MIND—”
I thought of all the things I’d heard of Mara, the legends and rumors and lies. She wasn’t a goddess of nightmares and winter. Nor was she a selfless savior who’d offered herself and her own for the sake of her people. And she wasn’t what Dunja thought, either, a grasping, greedy monster bent on never dying, no matter how many of her daughters she had to sell.
And I thought of the way she had her sacrifices cared for in the caves, sending her other undying daughters to trim their nails and hair and see to them. She didn’t have to do that; she could have simply left them there. But that effort, even if it went unrecognized by the offering herself, was still a choice she’d made. Like the overtures, maybe, that my own mother had made toward me
, and that I’d just either failed to see or chosen not to see.
Nothing was ever simple. There was no such thing as the one and only truth, and that too was a freedom in itself.
I bore down just once, a single exhale so brutal and sharp that I could smell the last gust of perfume as the endless black roses died. There was nothing left but the infinite lattice-breadth of my wisteria, the dripping blossoms stirring in the mountain wind, and the branches meshing together to form an arch—and within that open space, a distant star-struck sky above a sea.
And Fjolar, stepping through it.
Dunja gasped, then flung Mara away from her, like a child bored with a doll. Mara curled sobbing in a heap, cradling her shredded, bleeding arms against her chest. “Oh, daughter,” she whispered brokenly to me, her eyes sliding closed, and though her voices were still many they’d been wrung of all their power. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
The dread on her face rocked me like nothing else I’d ever seen from her. I had a sudden overwhelming, terrible sense, like drowning in tar, that I’d gotten everything wrong.
Dunja reached Fjolar but locked in place as if she’d hit a wall before she set even a foot over the wisteria threshold. He cast her a wistful, dismissive glance. “Not you, my love,” he said. “Not anymore.”
She let out a single, rending sob, and collapsed to her knees. “But why?” she wailed, white hair wind-whipped across her face and sticking to her lips. “You loved the dance. And I gave you everything.”
“You did,” he said simply. “And thank you for it. But I chose her, already.” He looked up at me, glowing eyes shadowed by the overhang of his brow, and held out a hand. “You ate our wedding cake, my flower girl. Don’t tell me you forget so quick.”
The tang of skyr and crushed smear of blueberries flooded through my mouth, and suddenly I found myself standing before him, my hands folded in both of his. His breath blew hot across my face, and he smiled into my eyes. My own wisteria pressed me forward, sending me tripping into his arms. Between us, I saw something like the opposite of an abyss—a crowded, choking sea of relentless light—and knew I’d have to survive it before I even stumbled into the sea that lay beneath his kingdom’s stars.
The last thing I heard as he pulled me through was Malina calling my name, before her voice cut out as fully as if it were sliced clean through with glass.
EPILOGUE
Malina
I COULDN’T HEAR MY SISTER.
All my life I’d heard her, steady as the rush of blood in my own ears. Iris had sounded like the rain. Sometimes storms, sometimes light patters, sometimes the sweet, lashing gales after a long drought. Sometimes even the kind that came with rainbows. The kind you wanted to feel on your face while you held the rest of your body underwater in the summer sea.
Rain could be so warm. No one ever really talked about that.
But she’d always been there, water rushing against the windows of my soul, shushing me to sleep. In one form or another, she’d flooded me with sound, like a waterfall that kept me safe in my own cave. A water shield that made me invisible, that let me do whatever I wanted. That hid the way I burned so freely inside myself.
And now I couldn’t hear her.
The agony was like nothing I’d ever felt, but what was I supposed to do with it? Tears would sound too much like she had sounded. I couldn’t even cry for her, or I’d never get up again, peel myself away from all this stone beneath my cheek.
I didn’t actually remember having fallen down at all, but then there were hands picking me up. Had I been on the ground? Had I passed out? I must have, if there were coven daughters lifting me to my feet with strangely gentle hands. One of them still had a half-snout and fangs. “So you’re the one who was baying,” I said woozily to her. “Aren’t you supposed to be rending me from stem to stern or something?”
“No one shall be rending anyone,” a tripled voice rang out, and I turned. Mara was there, somehow slightly less like a charred, melted plastic doll in the starlit dark. “The worst is done; the damage is wrought. There will be no more evil wreaked. Not by us, at the very least.”
“Of course the worst is done!” I shrieked at her. I hadn’t meant to scream like that, but now it felt like the only sound I was likely to make for a while. “Riss is gone gone gone, he took her away! I need her back! Give her back to me!”
“We all need her back, child,” she said, again in those calm but ravaged tones. It was so strange I bothered to listen below it, just for a second. Beneath she sounded like a careful detonation, a building scheduled for demolition caving, controlled, unto itself. “We need her now because he is free. I have failed. My net has failed. I can feel him stir already under the fathoms.”
“Fjolar?” I demanded. My voices were pure cacophony, a music box shattering under a hammer, all snapped cords and smashed-up gears. “Death, or whatever? Obviously he was free before, at least free enough to stalk Riss and then take her. And so what, you don’t have him trapped, so now you don’t get to live forever anymore, you miserable hag?” I tossed my head back and hawked thickly, spitting in her face. “Do you think I care what happens to you now?”
She wiped it away calmly, no trace of anger anywhere on her, nowhere in her sound. Nothing but devastation, and that buckling iron chassis of control. “It’s not about what happens to me, child. And my feckless boy—my death-son made of the flesh I lent him—is not what we should fear.”
I flinched away from her, but she caught me in an iron grip, made me meet her gaze. She stroked lightly at the edges of my face, and for the first time I saw the dead weight in her eyes, thousands of years of exhaustion floodlit by the moonlight. “It’s what happens to you, and this whole unready world, when a king of demons walks its face again.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe so many thanks that simply being in a position to give them feels like the most wonderful daydream. First of all, my eternal gratitude to Melissa Miller for her dazzling editorial genius; she took an ember of a book and fanned it (very vigorously) into something so much bigger, more elaborate, and more intensely glittery than I could ever have accomplished on my own. I am forever indebted to her vision and her trust that I could pull this off. One day, she will know exactly how many all-nighters and 3 a.m. spring rolls went into the making of this book.
Many thanks, too, to Claudia Gabel for taking on me and the twins with such open, gracious warmth, as well as to Kelsey Horton, Rebecca Aronson, and the rest of the magnificent team at Katherine Tegen Books and HarperCollins. Tremendous thanks to the foremost lady, Katherine Tegen herself, for welcoming me into her fold and allowing me to keep almost all the scandalous bits. And to Lisa Perrin, for the cover of my dreams.
Many thanks to everyone at Waxman-Leavell, especially Holly Root, aka Publishing Galadriel.
So many, many thanks to Taylor Haggerty, queen of inside jokes, and a finer, fiercer agent and dear friend than I could have dreamed up for myself. Thank you for your lovely mind, kindest heart, and murderously funny wit—and for believing in me since the beginning. See you at the green dot, T, and here’s to many more so-shots.
I’m beyond grateful to the brilliant Kayla Olson, Natasha Ngan, Siân Gaetano, and Alyssa for being lovely enough to read for me, and for their invaluable feedback and critique. And to the effervescent (no other word does her justice) Jilly Gagnon for sitting by my side when everything seemed so terribly hard, and for plying me with her inimitable brand of comedy, mostly to do with mossy grottos. Girl, you are a treasure beyond compare. Never leave me lest I wither pitifully on the vine.
I’d never be here without the friends who still love me—who somehow always manage to love me, sometimes to superhuman extremes—even when I disappear into the writing cave for days and/or weeks. You know who you are, and rest assured that I will buy you all the wines. I’m beyond lucky to have you.
Thank you to bat, for turning my blood to glitter in the best way. Apparently there is such a thing, and appare
ntly it’s awesome.
All my thanks to my wonderful family and kin—first and foremost to my tireless, scarily smart, and endlessly benevolent parents, to whom this book is dedicated, for nurturing such a weird and witchy child. I’m particularly indebted to Lidija Popović, mother of mothers, queen of the universe, for reading everything I’ve ever written, loving it effusively, and only looking at me funny every once in a while; and to Momir Popović for shouting about my writing from the rooftops until my ears burned. Thanks to my younger brother, Marko, for driving me to books as a child and to drink as an adult—just kidding, I couldn’t be more proud to be your sister. To my grandmothers, Djuja Crnković and Kosa Popović, who let me roam around making up stories and creeping out the neighbors, and who always made me feel so beloved. To my grandfathers, Milisav Popović and Anton Crnković, may you rest in peace and I so hope I made you proud.
And finally, most importantly, thank you to Montenegro, particularly Kotor (Cattaro) and Žabljak, for being the cradle of (half) my bloodline, and for lending me the backdrops for this book. Any geographical mistakes and tweaks are mine, and please forgive the liberties I took with local stories and legends.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Gary Alpert
LANA POPOVIĆ studied psychology and literature at Yale University and law at Boston University. She is a graduate of the Emerson College publishing and writing program and works as a literary agent with Chalberg & Sussman, specializing in YA.