by Lana Popovic
My insides twisted with helpless sympathy. Maybe she hadn’t always been the best mother, or even a very good one. But she was mine, and she needed the best of me now.
I let go of Niko’s hand and went to sit with Mama, scooting myself up onto the table next to her without quite touching her. From this close, I could see that her uncanny stillness was an illusion created by the most minute trembling. She was shivering so hard and constantly that it actually blurred her outlines and made her seem too still.
Gingerly, her hand crept onto my leg, and I nearly hissed with cold where she grazed my skin beneath my borrowed skirt. Then I caught her hand, turned it over, and tucked it between both of mine.
Amrisa approached us, her face schooled back to kind briskness. “May I dowse you now, Faisali?” she asked.
Mama gave a single, tight nod, and her fingers curled through mine.
Amrisa closed her eyes and lifted her hands, holding her palms an inch apart as if she were about to pray. That wasn’t it, though, I didn’t think. I’d never seen any of them pray, for one, and the way she felt sounded more like a calibrating hum. Whatever her instrument was, she was tuning it.
Eyes still shut, she cupped both hands around Mama’s face, not quite touching, lifted a hair’s-breadth from her skin. As she slowly traced my mother’s outlines, something like a silvery sheet of water sprang to life, following her almost-touch. I heard the familiar catch of Niko’s breath, and I nearly gasped myself. I’d never seen anything like this. The living water flowed and flickered over my mother in strange patterns—whorling in eddies around the roses’ heads, braiding into tangled, transparent ropes that looped over and under each other.
All leading to Mama’s chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a rapt near-whisper, afraid to break her concentration.
“Dowsing, of a sort,” Amrisa replied absently, hands moving like a sculptor’s. “Energy is life, and all life energy. I’m looking for your mother’s meridians, the flows that sustain her. I can see them this way, and manipulate them for healing. And—”
She broke off, eyes rolling from side to side beneath her lids. “Oh,” she breathed, “oh, so that’s it . . .”
“What is it, daughter?” Mara’s tripled burr came from over my shoulder. I hadn’t even heard her enter, but now I could sense her behind me. The insistent drumbeat beckon of love. “Tell me what you see.”
“She lives off your will, Mother,” Amrisa whispered, awestruck, her curled lashes fluttering. “When you wounded her but didn’t let her die as she should have, you bound her life to your will. And when the spell was damaged, the force that caused the fracture—the sheer torrent of Lisarah’s own will, her infinite bloom—seized Faisali and hauled her back from the brink.”
So it had been Riss who brought Mama back, I thought, astonishment clanging through me. Her magic like electric paddles during cardiac arrest. Except our mother no longer even had a real heart.
“The portion of your will that sheared off and cleaved to Faisali now sustains her,” Amrisa continued in the same hushed tones. “A cutting of your mighty will, serving as her heart, her lungs, her blood. While you live, Mother, so will she live. When you die, so will she die too.”
The roses. I’d known they were manifestations of Mara’s will, just as the wisteria were Iris’s. But Mama wasn’t the trellis for them to cling to—they were her trellis. And I’d been right to think of them as her new veins. They were her new everything, keeping her alive—or something like alive.
No wonder she’d gone so strange. Weird as Dunja, in a wildly different way. Like the glass in Riss’s furnace, their humanity had been tempered. Nothing could skim so close to death like they both had and step away unchanged.
And now they were both something else altogether.
“And deeper still . . . ,” Amrisa continued, then broke off with a ragged gasp. Her eyes flew open, and she actually staggered back, clapping a trembling, long-fingered hand over her mouth. “I cannot do it, Mother,” she whispered. “I cannot touch it. I don’t know what it is, and it is too cold to dowse. I have never felt anything like it.”
“It is cold,” Mama agreed, and I ached at the hollow desolation beneath that bland tone. “And it hurts inside me. It hurts.”
The emphasis on the last word was almost inaudibly slight. But compared to the flat line of the rest of her timbre, it might as well have been a shriek.
Dunja materialized on Mama’s other side in a spectral blur, a pale, small hand landing on her sister’s shoulder. Petals thrust up through the gaps between her fingers. “What is it? What’s wrong with her?” she demanded, speaking to Mara, who’d moved to stand in front of us. Barefoot but wrapped in layers of cashmere, soft suede, and fur, she looked not just better but completely restored. All her visible skin shone smooth and burnished bronze, like it had never known a single burn. And her hair was thick and sleek, just like it’d been before.
Mara shook her head, confusion skating across the broad, glacial planes of her face. Her eyes had shifted so that one was black as obsidian. “It cannot be,” she murmured, as if to herself.
“What can’t?” Dunja pressed.
“It should be inside me, not Faisali,” Mara continued, as if Dunja hadn’t said anything. “If it is not, why have I not warmed entirely?”
Neither of them was even talking to me.
Sick to death of being swept to the side, as if explanations didn’t involve me even when I was sitting next to my own mother, I turned to Mama and listened hard. I knew what she sounded like. If something was inside her, I would hear it.
She looked back at me, wide-eyed. The mournful, fluting trills that sang of Jasmina, the broken remnants of who she was, floated toward her surface. But I could still hear that roaring wind beneath it, snatching at them. And the longer I listened to it, the louder it grew. Whistling and whining, keening like wolves in winter, their cries muffled by wild flurries of tumbling snow.
I knew what that was. Seasons had a sound, a melodic motif to them. The way people smelled the changing of the seasons in the air—the tang of springtime green or the must of dying leaves—I heard them before they came.
And I knew which one was inside my mother.
“It’s winter,” I broke in, my voice faint and upturned with shock. “Isn’t it? It’s winter inside Mama. How is that possible?”
Mara’s ancient eyes turned to rest on me. Like always, I could actually feel the weight of her regard. “It must have come from me,” she said simply. “Before the spell fractured, I held an immensity of it inside me. The true essence of winter, as much as I could stand. When my death-son took your sister, he held up his end of the bargain—perhaps just enough to salvage a piece of the spell, to retain a slice of winter. And when the spell began to fracture, it must have traveled along the easiest conduit there was”—her eyes shifted to Mama—“the cords of will connecting me to you, Faisali. And there, in you, it lodged. Because we are bound together, I can still feel its remnant, but what is left of it is in you now.”
Moving by instinct, I turned toward Mama and pulled her closer. Drawing her tight into a hug as I hummed the toasty contentment of palms out over a beachside bonfire. Her dark feathery eyelashes fluttered with the relief of that brief memory of heat.
“Get it out of her,” Dunja ground out, danger gathering in her face like a thunderstorm on the horizon. She might have become mostly a thing that loved Death, but she was also a thing prone to fury, I thought. It reminded me of Riss, the quick wick of her temper. Maybe she’d inherited it from our aunt, before dancing for Death had burned out everything but Dunja’s extremes. “Call it back, melt it, snuff it out. I don’t care how you do it, old mother, but I won’t let you torment her any further.”
“Please, sorai,” I forced out between the notes of my warming song. I’d call her that, if she fixed my mother. I’d call her anything she wanted. “Just chase it out of her, please?”
“I cannot do that for you
, fledgling, or for her,” Mara said, and all three of her voices were gentle at different registers. “She might not survive it. And even if she did, we need the winter left inside her. It must be why he is not upon us already. That wintry vestige continues to weigh on him like chains. And you can see it in your own spell-struck eyes, can you not? One has thawed already. And the other does too, but slowly. It is so with all of us.”
I raised a trembling hand to my own eye, as if I could touch the altered color. So that was what it meant.
Our eyes were an hourglass of ice instead of sand, counting down the moment that Mara’s monster would come home to roost.
I listened closely to her for the telltale discord of a lie, but everything she said rang sibilant with truth. And I remembered the legends we’d read about Mara’s many names, what the myths had made of her over the millennia. Goddess of nightmares, of death—and of winter. No wonder we’d only been able to scorch her surface with our makeshift spell, the one we’d cast with Dunja on the bank of the Black Lake.
What was a lit match against a winter gale?
And as Mama shuddered next to me, I wondered—if this was only a slice of what had been in Mara, how had she ever borne it? And why?
“Why?” I asked out loud. “Why would you do something like that? Agree to so much cold, for so long?”
“I did not merely agree to it,” she said, lifting her chin to an imperious height. “I willed it so. It was needed to right the wrong that I had caused.” As if she could hear the rest of my litany of questions, she turned toward the door. “Come now,” she commanded, inclining her head. “The time has come to tell.”
I slid off the table to follow her, reaching back for Mama’s cold hand. Dread weighed inside me at her touch, heavy as swallowed lead. Because I hadn’t heard just winter, either. Even deeper down than that, and much more distant, there had been something else—an echo of what I’d heard the first time I’d seen Mama newly risen. That rasping, hissing darkness, something hungry and venomous.
The sound of whatever Mama’s winter was working to suppress. The noise of the thing slithering toward us all.
Nine
Iris
IT WAS NIGHT IN THIS DIFFERENT SECTION OF THE KINGDOM too, but stripped of stars and the boneyard’s unnatural purple light. Instead, we stood beneath a million moons: waxing, waning, and dark; full and nearly full. Some were streaked with ghostly swipes of clouds, others circled by moonbow halos. The tinge of the sky around each was subtly different, as if all these had been culled from separate nights before being threaded together to dangle above us like a child’s lunar-phases mobile.
Like the kind Lina and I had slept under in our shared cradle, another handmade gift to Mama from Čiča Jovan when my sister and I were still so little.
“Is this because of the mobile?” I asked Fjolar, and even I could hear the wonder in my voice, limned over the dense ache of missing my sister.
“It is, flower.” His tone was the warmest I’d heard from him since I landed here, I noted with a stab of satisfaction. It was doing its work, the nymph version of myself that I was painting for him. Bit by tiny bit, he was thawing for me. “And also because I wanted you to be able to see this garden as it should be seen, moonlit and under cover of the night.”
I managed to peel my gaze from the orb-and-crescent splendor of the sky, enough to take in the bower around us. We stood on a pebbled, winding path, hemmed in and overhung by plants left to grow largely unfettered. At the center of the garden, if you could call it that, a massive, ornate sundial loomed—its gnomon a caduceus with a serpent wound around it, striping the base with twisted shadows from the crisscrossed light of the many moons. Glossy leaves and blossoms stirred in the warm, summery breeze, and the entire garden hummed with that rush of air running like fingers through swaying, rooted living things. The air smelled both sweet and astringent, from layer draped over layer of poison-laden scent.
And the flowers grew everywhere in a tangled profusion, dripping down the walls and weighing down the shrubbery, creeping up Roman columns that didn’t seem to lead to anywhere, crawling into long-abandoned, crumbling birdbaths and dry fountain beds. The blossoms were all a slightly muted rainbow of color, but the bright flood of moonlight made their shades much more vibrant than they should have been at night.
“It reminds me a little of our garden back home,” I said through a sudden well of tears. “The one behind Mama’s house, where we used to sit when she still let us eat the moon with her.” What had happened to her, with the half breaking of the spell? Had she died fully, without either me or Lina by her side? I bit the inside of my cheek at the thought. I couldn’t mourn her, too, not now. It was just too much.
“I know. Though the closest you would have come to what grows here would have been your oleander tree.”
“‘These plants can kill,’” I repeated. “Is this place real too, then? Like the bone desert?”
“Again, it’s my own take of something real—but tweaked for your pleasure,” he said with an acerbic twist and a flick of a glance in my direction, in case I’d forgotten all the trouble he’d gone to for me. “There’s a garden like this one at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, planted by a very twisty duchess. It’s full to brimming with poisonous plants, over a hundred different kinds. Laurel, hellebore, datura, nicandra. Most are poisonous from root to berry, flower to stem.”
“Are all those here?”
“Some, and many others, too. I chose the prettiest for you. And the real poison garden is much more manicured than this. Can’t have its keepers keeling over from stray tendrils.” He gave my hand a tug, waiting for me to step closer to him. “But you’ll be fine, as long as you don’t try to sniff things and we keep to the path. And as long as you stay by me.”
“Do I detect ulterior motives at work?”
That startled a low scrape of a laugh out of him. “It wasn’t foremost on my mind, no.”
“Oh, if you say so.” I slid my hand free of his and took his elbow instead. “Why don’t you show me some of your favorite ones?”
We wandered together down the path, pausing every few feet so Fjolar could introduce me to a new specimen. He touched things heedlessly to show me what they were, unfurling curled-up leaves and splaying petals that could have melted his skin like tallow. Even when the giant hogweed in his hand—frilly umbrellas of white flowers like Queen Anne’s lace, above hairy, purple-splotched stems—should have given him blisters, blinded him, and scarred him. Even when the blue clusters of monkshood perched like butterflies on their green spears had roots so poisonous they could kill an entire village if steeped in its drinking well.
But he wasn’t human. None of them could leave their mark on him.
“I saw a man eat six naked-lady bulbs once, on a dare,” he said, fanning out the blossom’s delicate pink petals, shaped a little like a stargazer lily. “His ‘mates’ thought the name was just hilarious raunch, had no idea what flower it was. It’s beautiful and common enough, easy to grow and easy on the eyes, but it’s one of the nightshades, amaryllis belladonna. Lays waste to the heart when eaten.” He flicked both eyebrows up, gave me a roguish twist of a smile. “A lot like any lady’s love, naked or otherwise. He collapsed ten minutes later, twitching, foaming at the mouth. They thought he was playing with them, until he died.”
He led me past foxglove, hemlock, and bloodroot, telling me how each could heal or kill—though mostly kill—and it struck me that he knew because he had seen every single instance of death brought about by these pretty poison vessels. This garden was full to bursting of his instruments.
And it was clear how much he loved them.
“Do you enjoy it?” I said to Fjolar, tugging us both to an abrupt stop so I could turn and look up into his face. “When people die? Or animals, or anything, I guess? Does it feel good to you somehow?”
All expression slid from his face in an instant, leaving his features stark and stunning, empty of emotion. I thought to myself,
his death mask, before it occurred to me that he was always so much more startlingly handsome when he was keeping some part of himself hidden from my reach. The opposite of how I felt whenever I looked at Luka’s open, tender face. I had always been able to see him feeling, watch thoughts drifting over his face like clouds streaking across a clear sky.
And yet. That sense of the buried unknown that followed Fjolar like a shadow, the slippery, delicious danger of it. Even when the spell took hold and bound me to him, I wouldn’t have put it past myself to like something like him for its own sake, too.
“And I know you can’t tell me details, no ‘great truths,’” I went on. “I’m just curious what it feels like, to be you.”
The breeze riffled through his pale eyelashes, and his eyes narrowed like a wolf’s. For a moment, the focus of his gaze seemed to fall infinitely far away. Unimaginably distant from me. “It feels like being everywhere at once,” he said. “Perched on the shoulder of every dying thing. Living in the lungs of every creature drawing its final breath. No one’s asked me that before, you know. None of her daughters.”
“Well, they wouldn’t, would they? It doesn’t seem to me like much talking ever happened here.” This was broaching risky territory; if I ventured too far, I might blunder into the quicksand of his irritation and suffocate in it. But I had to pry him open further, enough that he’d be willing to tell me things that mattered. “Not enough time for it, what with the wedding contest, all the honeymoon years, and then the obligatory dying of the bride to make room for the next one.”
He grimaced at that, baring those bright teeth. “You make it sound so . . . shallow. When it was the opposite of that.”
I shrugged. “It was what it was: lots of long and very beautiful one-night stands. But I don’t think it was ever more than that for you before my aunt, and even Dunja was willing to dance herself dead for you. Then all of a sudden, you’ve got me. The nuisance of my body, all these questions I have for you . . .” I gave him a wicked, impish smile—and realized with a shock that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t at least partly real. “It’s almost like we’re getting to be friends.”