by Lana Popovic
He chuckled through his nose, lifting my hand to press a kiss to my knuckles without breaking our gaze. His lips grazed the sensitive skin between my fingers, and a tingle spiraled through me like a whirlybird seed. It was the first time he’d touched me in such a purposeful, romantic way since I’d come here, and somehow, even with everything I was playing at, it made me catch my breath.
“It is taking some getting used to,” he admitted. “I’d gotten very comfortable having everything just so, exactly as I liked it. Easy, you could call it. But I like that you ask me things.” His blue gaze was so unwavering I could feel that initial tingle flare into an ember in the pit of my stomach. As if he sensed my response, he dropped his head and angled his lips to mine, close enough to feel the sweep of his breath without sealing it into a kiss. His pale hair brushed my cheek—whiskey and smoke—and my insides swam, giddy. “Maybe I want a friend like you.”
“Do you really?” I murmured back.
“I said ‘maybe,’” he retorted with a wry twist. “And I wouldn’t call your body a nuisance, flower girl.”
I pulled back with a laugh and tipped my chin up at the sky. “Oh, that’s half nice of you. Now, take a look.”
His eyes followed mine, the tendons in his neck cording in a very appealing way. Above us, I had drawn down the moons into a carousel of waxing and waning, fingernail crescents, full and gibbous. Circle within circle, a sky full of moon-shaped fairy lights. I set them rocking up and down like carnival horses, and between them I flung up fountaining explosions of the rosy mountain laurel and snowy veratrum that spilled over the garden’s walls.
Under my fireworks, his face glowing vivid with delight, he slid one hand into my hair and dipped down to kiss me.
I shouldn’t have let it happen; this was far too much to give him. He was a thief, a lovely liar, an unrepentant user of my kin.
But I found I couldn’t help the fervor with which I wanted it. I caught my breath against his mouth; he tasted like I remembered from home, but even better and so much more, shocking sweetness and heat along with the softness of his tongue. His lips were gentle and yielding against mine, but I could feel the force of his grip around my waist and at my nape, and I curled into him like ivy creeping over slabs of stone.
I didn’t understand how I could want him at all, after everything he’d done to me. It shouldn’t have been possible to reconcile so much rage with so much wanting. All the flirting wasn’t me; it was a role I had chosen for myself so I could find my way home. I knew that.
But he felt so goddamned undeniably good.
His hands slid down my sides and over my backside, and I could feel him cup my thighs in readiness to pick me up. Anticipating the lift, I tightened my arms around his neck—and then abruptly remembered the last time someone had held me that way.
With my back scraping roughly against a pine trunk and my legs locked around a leaner pair of hips, as Luka whispered in my ear how much he wanted me.
I unwound myself from him as if he had caught fire, stumbling back. “I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s, it’s too soon, and—”
Something brushed lightly against my back, and I whirled around in surprise. Massive, trumpeted yellow blossoms yawned at me, glowing faintly in the dark and exhaling scent into my face. I could feel Fjolar’s hand grip my shoulder, pulling me away, but it was too late.
In my shock, I’d already gasped.
And drawn a deep, prickling breath of poison directly into my lungs.
I had a moment to consider that this poison smelled rich and sweet, with pinpricks of lemon rind—before my pupils dilated so hard I could actually feel them blow my irises into oblivion. Nausea tore through me, dropped me to my knees onto sharp pebbles. My thoughts scattered wildly, like a flock of birds startled into sudden, shrieking flight. I couldn’t hold on to anything for more than a moment—my name, where I was, what even was happening to me. Nothing but the sense of a terrible, impending doom cresting over me like a gargantuan wave, shimmering black and near-invisible against the deeper darkness of the night.
It was going to pull me under. It was going to drown me.
I had never been so terrified in my entire life.
And if I was going to die, I wanted nothing more than my sister.
LINA, I screamed, either aloud or in my mind. I couldn’t tell if I could really speak. My mouth and tongue felt lockjaw stiff. For the first time since I had been reeled here, drawn through worlds like a fish dragged by the line, I was terrified and desperate enough to reach for my wisteria.
Before, it had always been because my sister needed me, badly enough that I would split myself open to let the gleam grow out from my center.
Now I was the one who needed her.
The roots of the wisteria were still threaded where I had left them, coiled into a tight ball at my very center. Maybe they always lived there now, my core their sustaining loam. Through blackness and bright bursts of terror, I reached into the wisteria of my will and flung it frantically outward.
Before, my gleam—the infinite bloom, as Mara called it, the imposition of my will over space and time—had always rushed away from me so that I could see it spreading, slender branches forking away and bisecting each other, dripping whorls of pastel blossoms like the most delicate floral monsoon. This time, what I wanted most was to go with them, to be borne along with the rapid budding of their growth. Even as I drew and threw them out and out, I continued clinging to them, feeling the bark imprinting into my palms, the satiny give of the petals I pulped with my grip.
Take me with you take me with you take me with you
Take me to her take me take me to her
And then, there she was.
My sister knelt in an herb garden, her back to an ornate birdbath and moonlight crowning the spill of her hair. Two silver candles burned on either side of her, and a goblet of dark wine sat in front of her knees. Her mournful face was tilted up at a sky hooked by a crescent moon. I startled at that; the moon had been nearly full when Fjolar took me, I remembered from the nighttime battle with Mara on Bobotov Kuk. And this one had waned down to nearly new.
While what felt like barely a day had passed for me, I was seeing my sister weeks into her future.
It wasn’t even the strangeness of it that doused me with icy shock. It was that I’d lost so much time with her already.
Her hands were lifted with palms up; I could see her so clearly that I could trace their familiar lines. She wore a loose, white lacy dress that could have been a nightgown, and looked just like the woodland nymph she’d once sung herself to be for Death. A speared wrought-iron fence circled the garden behind her, and a dense, dim forest loomed above it from behind.
I called to her, or tried to call. It emerged warbling and strange, words suspended in bubbles, like talking underwater. I had the disjointed feeling of being trapped in a lucid dream, as though only part of myself was here. My consciousness, or at least a sliver of it—while the rest of me huddled miserably on the poison garden’s floor, curled like a fist around a full-body muscle spasm with pebbles digging into my side.
Her hands dropped and she frowned a little, tensing, as if she heard something in the distance. Then she looked up, and her eyes went wide with surprise. She stumbled to her feet with none of her usual grace.
“Riss!” Her gaze kept flickering to the left and right of my face, as if it couldn’t find a solid place to land. I went to take a step closer to her—or merely thought about it, there didn’t seem to be a difference—and suddenly she coalesced right in front of me like a ghost.
Judging by her expression, it was more likely me who’d been the ghost.
I tried to touch her shoulder; my hand drifted right through it. She let out a clipped little half scream, her eyes never quite settling on my face. Finally she closed them, hissing through her teeth, her own face clenching with frustration.
“You’re everywhere, Riss, in a thousand different broken places. It’s so hard to look at you. I c
an’t tell which one you really are.”
A thousand different broken places. Whatever part of me the wisteria had brought here looked multiplied to her, and mute. A silent fractal of myself.
I couldn’t hug her, and she could barely see me, but I let myself steal just a moment for us both, tipping my forehead right to where it would have met hers if I was really there.
“I miss you so much,” she whispered. A film of tears lined her lashes, glinting in the starlit night. “You need to find his soul. Please find it, please, there’s still time, find it and bring it back—”
Then a horror cascaded over me, a spiked, encroaching dark calling out to me in a ravenous roar. I recognized it instantly, knew it as the black hunger that lived beneath that golden world I’d swum through to reach Fjolar’s kingdom. But this time it was so much stronger—this time it felt so dreadfully close. It tugged at me in its familiarity, like some sickening beacon. Like the forgotten memory of a nightmare, the primal terror of terrors, resurrected.
I could feel its thrashing hunger. Not for me—where my body was, I was safe from it—but for my sister. And for Dunja, Mara, and all my coven kin.
And as if the direction of my thoughts determined where I should be, Malina vanished, along with the garden and its birdbath and tidy rows of herbs. I didn’t feel any sense of movement; it was as if I stood still, and the world around me shifted. When it rushed to a halt, I found myself in the unbroken dark of a mountainside forest, deeper than the moon could reach. I’d never have been able to see anything with my real eyes, but the part of me that was here saw perfectly.
Between the pines, a man straddled a mossed boulder as if it were a throne, his hair long and loose and wild around bare shoulders. He was striking in a rough-hewn way, with brazen bones that made me think of ages long gone. The dark around him writhed like vipers, striking at the air, and thick, crude tattoos ringed his powerful arms.
A throng of people surrounded him, some on the ground, others crouching like animals in the trees, and even hanging from the branches. There was something worse than wrong about the way they held themselves.
If I’d brought my body here with me, my skin would have crawled right off it at the sight of them.
And behind them, even deeper in the trees, enormous things darker than the fabric of the night flailed too many limbs and shrieked.
The man smiled wide at the sound, his face lighting like a fond father’s. “Gather, sweetlings,” he called out. “Gather, pets. Gather closely round! The time for storming almost comes.”
One of the dark things bugled so eagerly, I tried to clap a phantom hand over my mouth before remembering that I wasn’t really here.
The man laughed with both pride and glee, and lifted a finger. “Not yet, not yet, but very soon. Later tonight. We are on the cusp of supping, and this time we are strong—the little spy-witch has broken our last shackles. There will be such meats, and so much light to spill. Enough bright, shining witches to sate us, enough that we may sup our fill.”
I shouldn’t have understood him—the words I heard weren’t the ones he spoke—but I knew what he meant. What spy-witch was he talking about? I thought frantically. Who—
He froze abruptly, cocking his head like a bird of prey. His eyes roved over the forest, and fell unerringly on me, narrowing, then glinting with something like lust turned inside out. And if I had thought I’d been afraid before, in the poison-garden flower’s thrall, I’d never even dreamed what it meant to be truly afraid.
And then, like a rubber band stretched far past its limit, the wisteria of my will snapped me back.
Ten
Malina
“THERE ARE MANY OTHER REALMS THAN THIS,” MARA SAID. “I suppose that is a good place as any to begin.”
We were all gathered in the ballroom, or what they called the Great Hall. Mara’s two hundred or so coven daughters, and the three of us. Niko sat beside me, with Luka to her left, still half glowering. She’d apologized to him before we went in, but contrition wasn’t really my princess’s strongest suit. And “I shouldn’t have said that to you, I know. I’m sorry Riss’s gone, I really am. But could you stop being an asshole now?” wasn’t prime apology material even in the best of times.
Normally Luka knew how she was and took it in stride. But we were so far past “normal” that it sounded like a nonsense word, something that had shed its meaning after you said it to yourself too many times.
If I had any doubts about that, all I had to do was look behind me and meet my mother’s green-and-gray eyes through her rose canopy. Dunja sat next to her, watchful, her milk-and-porcelain face a jarring contrast. Every once in a while Mama trailed her fingers down my back, as if to reassure herself that I was still there. And each time, the ice of her touch made me jump.
It was midmorning, but the skylights had been shuttered and all the curtains drawn, blocking out the sun and any prying eyes. The glass and metal ceiling fixtures spiraling down from the eaves were lit again by someone’s projected gleam. Last time we were both here, Riss had fractaled them into a domed and spired city from the sky. It had been spectacular, even compared to the passion song I’d sung for Death. A tiny part of me had actually been jealous of how beautiful she’d been. I’d always had the prettier gleam before, but how could my music compare to that brutal splendor?
I’d actually had that thought, while she was saving me. The memory of my own pettiness toward my sister stirred the ache inside my chest to a ferocious pain, an anthill poked with a stick.
This time, the glass encasements above us held a darker tinge. The onion bulbs cupped burgundy orbs so dim that the light they shed was nearly black. And the delicate spheres and storm lanterns swarmed with moths and bloated gray butterflies with heavy, furled antennae. Sooty designs were etched onto their wings.
Despite the hall’s airy height, all that dark made it feel shrunk down to the size of some firelit prehistoric cave. Mara presided over the room’s center, swathed in leathers and furs, on the black marble dais shot through with amethyst veins. Candles surrounded her like wax supplicants. Pillars and votives, tapers and tea lights, mismatched candelabra dripping tallow. As if she wanted to pull light around herself, a dome against the dark. Wherever it touched her, the candlelight softened the striking edges of her face into the rounded blush of youth and gleamed in almost liquid rivulets along the black flow of her hair.
“Like spokes on a wheel, some are above us and others below,” she continued. “For whatever the mortal notions of ‘up’ and ‘down’ are worth, in a cosmos unbound by such narrow strictures.”
She skimmed her fingers over the candle flames clustered closest around her. They rose up to meet her touch and fused into a fiery arc, a circle of flame spinning around her.
“There are boundaries like this between them,” she said, her face beautifully sinister in the revolving light. Cheekbones like spades, and ancient, dark-rimmed eyes beneath heavy brows. A jungle cat that had prowled too close to a campfire. “Meant to remain uncrossed by those on either side. ‘The veil,’ the mortals sometimes call it, though it is nothing so sheer and flimsy as the word implies. But strong as it is, it remains fallible, forked through with fissures and passages. Which can become conduits when in the presence of a powerful will.”
She beckoned the circling fire to her. It rushed eagerly into her hand and curled into a molten sphere above her palm, flicking out licks like lizard tongues. From there she drew it out like taffy, then whirled it into a cat’s cradle around her fingers—before condensing and dancing it over her knuckles like a magician’s coin.
“A will like mine,” she said, the fiery coin reflecting in her eyes. “A will that gleams. Because it came from a creature born from light and raised in it. One curious enough to find their way to this dim shadow of a place. And tender enough to fall in love with it and thus give rise to our line.”
“I’m not saying this is an exact translation,” Niko whispered into my ear. “But I think what yo
ur great-grandma’s trying to tell you is that one of your ancestors probably boned an alien.”
I dug my nails in where they rested on her thigh. “Hush, you degenerate,” I whispered back, fighting a smile. She always knew when I needed a little light myself. “She’ll hear you.”
“Yes, she will,” Mara rang out, that resounding voice laced with tartness. She gave the ball of flame a pointed flick in our direction before twitching it back to her like a feather on a string. “Our Azareen’s lover Nikoleta is not entirely wrong. Whoever begat us so long ago would have been lovely beyond reckoning, far past the grasp of human wit. But when names were needed, as they always are, words were made to fit. So when it came to naming something beautiful, bright, and winged—something so clearly not from here—a word already existed as if handcrafted for it.”
The murmur raced around the room. A single word whispered behind hands and breathed into mothers’ and daughters’ ears. Looking around at this gathering of women, uniform in their practiced grace, it wasn’t even very hard to believe. Shining hair, pure skin, and fine-boned hands folded in laps. Every shape and shade of beauty, their scents mingling into an intoxicating, heady perfume.
Maybe something so like perfection really had been painted from a palette of heavenly design.
But then I thought about Riss and me growing up in Cattaro with Mama. Early mornings of work at the café, sleep still gathered in the corners of our eyes. Days on pebbled beaches so scorching hot we wound up with peeling soles. Years of scabby knees and hangnails, calluses and split ends. Yes, we were beautiful—that much I’d always known, even if Riss hadn’t let herself see it. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe we were anything other than human at our core.