by Lana Popovic
My own gleam took care of me, until Fjolar pulled me through.
WE STEPPED OUT together into bracing cold. I stumbled a little, squinting; the sky was blindingly blue, and whirled with white. Not just snowflake flurries, but also strings of thousands of white flowers suspended by nothing from above. Lilies, orchids, and daisies, peonies and magnolia, hundreds of others I knew by sight if not by name. Their petals looked soft and living, despite the shimmer of snow dusted like powdered sugar over them. The air was sunlit, in a diffuse, consistent way that somehow came from everywhere at once, though I didn’t actually see a sun.
A snowflake struck me squarely in the eye, burning with cold. As if to match, the rest of me immediately broke into tooth-chattering chills. My bones felt like they’d been swapped out for blown-glass substitutes.
“Ah, damn it.” Fjolar turned to peer into my face, his hair blown back by the wind. Captive crystals winked in its white-blond threads, his narrowed eyes a blue more electric than the sky. Even bare-armed, in the same black tank and charcoal trousers he’d been wearing since I got here, he looked perfectly at home set against all the snow. “Now you’re freezing. You were so feverish before. I thought for sure you’d like a little more chill.”
I couldn’t help a weak chuckle at the sheer consternation sweeping across his face. “Sorry to be so tricky with my meat. This is a little more chill than I needed, I think. I don’t suppose you’d have something warm for me to wear?”
His features clouded, then cleared just as abruptly. “As a matter of fact, I do. Wait here a minute, flower.”
He strode away from me, leaving me to look around, blinking against the snow. Sky flowers aside, we were in the oddest little glade I’d ever seen. The trees and shrubs around us, traced with a crisp, slim edging of white, seemed like they’d been crafted to upend expectations of how plants were meant to look. Some of the trees grew from slim trunks into a stiff, bushy inverted canopy, like umbrellas blown inside out. Others had fat trunks, lumpy and gray, like disembodied elephant legs growing from the ground. At their tips, they split into incongruously delicate branches riotous with bright pink blossoms.
“Those, he had to have made up,” I mumbled to myself.
“He did not, in fact,” Fjolar informed me, appearing from behind to drape a cloak around my shoulders. I burrowed into it, burying my fingers in it to the knuckle. It was lined with some luxuriant tawny fur, sliding heavenly soft over my bare arms. “Those are dragonblood trees, and the gray flowering ones are desert roses. They’re all from Socotra, one of your world’s weird little treasures; almost everything that grows on the island doesn’t grow anywhere else. And you’ll recognize the flowers in the sky. Those are especially for you.”
I did. They were a dazzling, larger-than-life mimicry of Rebecca Louise Law’s work. She was an artist who worked with flowers, which she turned into first living and then dried sculptures as they aged according to her precise design. Her pieces were some of my favorites; I’d wondered when I was younger if she saw flowers like I did, in fractals she could capture.
The fact that this was another mosaic tile of my mind he’d stolen from me and repurposed—like a magpie lining his nest with the contents of my brain—might have stoked the smoldering ember of my anger if I hadn’t been both starving and so thirsty. Manifesting the infinite bloom took strength, and this time I’d used it while poison-struck. If I didn’t get something to eat or drink, I felt like I might keel over and freeze on my way to the ground.
When I said so to Fjolar, he closed his eyes for a long moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Of course you need food and drink,” he muttered. “Of course you do.”
Realization dawned. “And you don’t have any here. None of the others needed anything like that.”
He shot me a genuinely rueful smile. “I never had to build a world for a real girl before. But I’ll find you something. You stay put and rest.”
He left me sitting beneath a limestone overhang to shelter from the snow while he went foraging. I tucked the furs snug around me and leaned back woozily against the rock, letting my eyes slide closed. Beneath all the physical discomfort, I ached for my sister. Instead of slaking the feeling of missing, that brief fever dream of her had churned all the pain back up like fresh-turned earth.
Fjolar returned to offer me a strip of cactus, peeled smooth from spines so I could suck out its tangy water. He’d also found some half-frozen fruit that looked enough like stunted pomegranate to risk tasting.
“Remember the time you brought me skyr cake?” I said wistfully, nibbling on the cold, pithy flesh clinging to the seeds and yearning for real food, something doughy and rich to chew. “I want another time like that.”
“That was in your world, and it was a gift for wooing. A patisserie for you wasn’t in the kingdom’s original plans.”
I picked a seed out from my mouth, and started in on the rind. At least I wouldn’t be short on fiber, I thought dourly. “But why can’t you bring me something else from home? You brought this fur earlier.”
He shook his head. “I never left. The furs were already here, part of this piece of the kingdom.”
I paused mid chew. “Why? If I’d come in soul like the others, I wouldn’t have needed any warmth. I wouldn’t even have felt the cold here.”
“You weren’t going to be wearing that cape for warmth, flower girl,” he replied, and when he met my eyes again his had deepened to such a stormy blue that it drew heat to my cheeks. “It was meant to lie between your back and the floor.”
“Oh,” I said faintly, as the thought sprang into vivid life. Him and me on that plush fur. Me beneath him under the swirling, flower-strewn sky. His own back so warm and broad that I would barely feel the sting of falling snow. None of it would reach me, and even if it did, maybe I’d even like little pinprick kisses of ice against the insides of my thighs.
With significant effort, I stamped the image down. These flares of desire disturbed me deeply, when everything else that I felt—the expanse of my fatigue, the longing for home—should have opposed them, canceled them out.
I cleared my throat and broke our shared gaze. “Why couldn’t you bring me something else, anyway?” I asked. “You’re not stuck here just because I am, are you?”
“No, I’m not.” All the heat subsided from his eyes. “I could leave if I wanted, but the existence of this realm demands our presence to sustain it. Both of us, together. If I left it would collapse, with you still in it. You wouldn’t survive it.”
The cold fruit mush went sour in my mouth. “But you left Dunja to come look for me. And she didn’t die.”
“No. When I left, she simply woke back in your world. But that’s because she was here the way she was meant to be, only in soul.”
“But then both of you would have been gone. So how did this place carry on after that?”
His voice took on a slight cautious note. “Because you were there to pick up the mantle, once I chose you. Between each choosing, the kingdom continues to exist in a sort of stasis. Waiting for me to mold it for the next chosen. And while the original spell is mostly broken, you and I arrived here just in time. And as long as we’re still here to stoke it, together, my domain will continue to exist.”
I went rigid, a murky suspicion wisping through me. “And with what, exactly, do we stoke it?”
His face turned wary at the measured danger in my voice. Expressions flitted across his features, almost too many to parse, but I thought I caught the moment in which he decided it was better not to lie to me.
This time.
“This kingdom is meant to be our haven,” he said carefully. “Love between us is its mandate. Just being here draws you to me. It lures us back into well-worn grooves, the rhythms of the dance. And that’s what keeps sustaining this place—the energy generated by the courtship and the performance. Like a positive feedback loop.”
Or like the kingdom was a symbiotic parasite.
It all fell into pla
ce. My punch-drunk desire for him, the burgeoning closeness between us, the singsong cadences I sometimes used when speaking with him. Flaring up intermittently at first, and then growing stronger and more consistent the longer I stayed here.
Like something externally imposed. A wanting not my own.
“So that’s why I feel the way I do about you?” Wrath rose in me, buoying me up. “Because being here is making me want you?”
“It can only amplify what’s already there.” His eyebrows peaked. “You liked me just fine to begin with, flower. There’s no denying that.”
“And you didn’t think this amplification was worth telling me about?”
“If I had told you, you’d just have fought it harder instead of leaning into it,” he said bluntly. “And besides, I like it that you want me. This way is better for both of us.”
The selfishness took my breath away, the cold, inhuman logic of it. While I thought I’d been playing the courtesan for him—something I chose on my own—the kingdom had been twisting me toward him all along. Forcing my artifice into reality with every breath I drew here.
I felt like such a fool. A child playing grown-up’s games, when no move was hers to start.
“You unbelievable, self-centered bastard.” I breathed. “You still haven’t stopped lying to me. And you honestly think it’s justified.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” he protested, a splotched flush rising up his fair skin. “I simply didn’t tell you. And you can’t leave here, anyway, even if you can snatch glimpses of your sister somehow, so why would I ruin it by telling—”
He clamped down on the rest of the words, realizing what he had already let slip.
“I thought you said that was a dream,” I said slowly. My cheeks ached from strain, and I realized that I’d peeled my lips back from my teeth like a cat. “Talking to Lina, seeing that hideous thing that’s stalking her. Just a poisoned little girl’s bad dream.”
He blinked at me deliberately, implacable, his face shuttering to guard the lie. “It was a dream. I misspoke. I meant—”
I exploded up from the ledge, stalking away only to wheel back on him.
“You knew,” I snarled, abruptly remembering how his hand had tightened on mine while I babbled to him what the infinite bloom had shown me. “You knew something back home was hunting my sister. Have you known this whole time and just didn’t tell me, so it wouldn’t ruin the possibility of fun? I wasn’t going to be much good to you terrified for Lina, was I? How dare you lie to me when it comes to her?”
His jaw tightened, but he wouldn’t speak. It infuriated me so intensely that I actually wound up and kicked a flurry of snow at him. He didn’t even tense, just sat like a stone while it struck him in the face.
All this time I’d been behaving like some helpless, cornered thing, relying on charm and pretty guile while this foul, lovely place wrung emotions from me. But I could do it differently. I could lie the way he did, just as brutally.
And I could threaten.
Now all I needed to do was make him believe.
“You think you can keep doing this,” I ground out, my voice ragged with rage. “Hiding from me what this world is really for, refusing to tell me what you know about what’s happening in my home, pretending all that omission isn’t a lie. And I’ve played the doll for you so far, because it felt fake-good and I thought I had no other choice. But I was wrong about that. There is one other thing I could choose to do.”
He looked up at me, hollow-cheeked, his eyes both stark and guarded. “And what’s that, Iris?”
“I can just stop,” I said, letting the furs drop from my shoulders. The cold struck in an instant, savage way, like something that had been lying in wait, and my skin burst into goose bumps. “I can stop everything, lie down and die. It wouldn’t even be so hard. You might have chipped bits from my mind to make this kingdom, but we both know this realm isn’t meant for me. Eventually I’ll probably starve, but I could stop bothering to keep living long before then.”
“Iris—”
“No,” I forced through clicking teeth. “You might own everything here, including me, but you can’t own this. If I sit down somewhere and just let it snow on me—or leap off a cliff you put there for the sake of scenery—you won’t be able to stop it. You’re death, for fuck’s sake, that’s the best part. You can’t keep me from letting myself die.”
“You wouldn’t . . .” His voice was weaker than I’d ever heard it. “You wouldn’t do that to me, Iris. Or even if you would, there’s still your sister to consider. And that boy.”
Hope flared bright in me. He was using my name. He understood the gravity here, believed what was at stake. I just needed to persist.
“If you won’t tell me whatever it is you know, what good will I ever be to them?” I snapped. “And the way things are looking, I won’t even be seeing them again.”
As I said it, I realized that I believed it too, and I nearly collapsed with the abrupt sense of cleaving, of such comprehensive heartbreak. My heart had been so waylaid—first shunted to the side in my struggle to survive, and then falsely tangled up in Fjolar—that I hadn’t fully let myself know it. But I was going to lose them all; I really, truly was. Not just Luka and Malina, but everyone else, too: Čiča Jovan, Nev, Niko. Mama, if she was somehow still alive. And Dunja, the aunt I had just found, along with all the other coven daughters who might have crossed over to our side.
“So either swear to me now that you’ll tell me what it is,” I finished, crying silently but hard, the tears frosty on my cheeks, “or get ready to say good-bye to your pleasure palace. Because this world ends with me, doesn’t it? There’s no one else for you to choose. So I’ll be free and you’ll be all alone without any toys—for the first time in how many thousands of years? How will that sit with you, you overgrown spoiled brat?”
He watched me impassively for long moments with his chin propped on a clenched fist, gauging me, his eyes such a piercing blue I could nearly feel the blade of their regard. I stood my ground as best I could, though without his touch the world felt like a bucking winter beast under my feet.
Then he shook his head, just once.
“Bullshit,” he said mildly.
I was so astonished I forgot my tears. “Excuse me?”
“You forget that I know you, Iris, to your core. This was a well-crafted attempt, I’ll give you that.” He gave a mocking, slow clap. “You might even have believed you meant it. But you would never go through with it—not if there’s any chance one of your own might need you alive. I may be selfish, but you aren’t. Like Mara never was. Nowhere near selfish enough to die for no better reason than spite for me.”
He knew.
Damn him—damn everything—he knew better than to believe it. He knew me, and he was right. I would never have done it. How had I even thought I’d fool him? He was the biggest lie that humans told themselves—that he would never come for them.
But with the deluge of helplessness came an equal flood of driving need.
I turned away from him, ignoring the fall of his footsteps as he stood to follow me. “Please,” I whispered to myself, clenching my hands into fists until my nails bit in.
The last two times, my wisteria had burgeoned in response to blind, primal need. This time I was lucid and aware, all this cold having blown the fever from me. But my need was no less forceful, battering through my veins. I had to know what Fjolar was keeping from me—what was threatening my sister. Especially now that I knew the monstrosity was real, and that some spy-witch was helping him; maybe even someone on our side.
I needed the truth so badly, more than anything.
Please.
Slowly at first, and then in a headlong profusion, the flowers flung themselves out of me, twisting and weaving into a grand column that grew around me as if I stood in the heart of a cylindrical trellis. I let myself surge up with them just as I had before, clinging to the outward onslaught of their growth—and then I found myself fractaled down
to one of the atrium balconies above Mara’s Great Hall.
Twelve
Mara’s Dance
THE FIRST DAY SHE SPENT THINKING, AND GRIEVING.
On the second day, she rose.
If these accursed gods of Herron’s could deal with death, then she would find a way to do the same.
She felt the potential of an answer humming in her blood, the gleam lighting her way like lanterns as it often did. The only hope she could muster. If she wished to bargain with a force larger than life, she needed to be able to speak with it. And to call Death to her, and fashion it something like a body, she first needed many things to kill.
On the third day, she hunted with abandon, blessing the generous creatures that crossed her path and let her fell them. She needed their blood; she needed their bones. With every creature she killed and distilled to its most essential parts, she sounded a call to Death, like blowing breath through a spiraled hunting horn.
And as she moved from deer and mink and foxes to birds and snakes and slugs, she came to see that their lives would never be enough. Some things demanded more than was one’s right to give, an offering carved from the heart’s own blood.
And when she heard Amsherra’s squalling milk-cry—little Amsherra, with her father’s fern-green eyes—her womb contracting at the plaintive sound, she knew what must be done.
SHE HAD ASKED Herron to meet her in the clearing that had seen some of their sweetest stolen moments, at the darkest hour of the third night. By then she would be ready, she claimed, to renounce her former life. She would be ready to welcome his gods into herself, to take in all the darkness that she could stand to hold.
If there wasn’t so much else at stake, she might even have sunk so low as to succumb. Two of her daughters might still have been living, but Amsherra’s loss had turned her heart to a bramble in her chest. With every thought of the child she had given unto Death, the tender lining of her lungs felt like it tore anew to bleed again.
She had stolen her youngest daughter’s life for this. And neither all the gods there ever were nor all the stars that pierced the sky could bring it back to her or flush her of that guilt.