by Lana Popovic
She had made the feather real, transmuted it from dream to matter with her gleam.
And if she strove that much harder, I could sense that she would lift.
“MORE, ORIELL, AND THEN MORE STILL,” Mara boomed beside me. She could feel the power building too. “LISTEN TO YOUR KIN, LET HER HELP YOU RISE!”
Whatever Oriell’s tears had initially been, now she was clearly crying from the strain. Her wings were beating so hard they buffeted the room with whooshing air, all our hair and clothes billowing up. With a very unladylike grunt of grueling effort, she crouched and then launched up—
And stayed there, lifted, arms flung out, delight blazing in her face.
Her wings gusted us with every beat, one leg bent at the knee and the other pointed like a gymnast’s to the floor, the untied green ribbons of her pointe shoes swaying beneath.
Striving for beauty even now.
Seeing her up there, so exactly like an angel—if angels had tattoos and piercings, and tattered leotards—shocked me so hard it snatched the song from me. And as soon as the song broke off, so did her flight.
The wings vanished in an instant. Feathers wisped into curls of blue, black, and white smoke that died midair. And Oriell tumbled to the ground with a clipped shriek of pain, as her ankle twisted under the collapse of her full weight.
Fourteen
IT WAS NOT QUITE TIME TO MOUNT THE HUNT.
Before the moment struck, he needed to summon soldiers.
After some sifting through her ingested memories, he had led Vera back to her dwelling place, in a simple cinder-block building outside the blackened walls of a stone settlement. This city they called Cattaro had the savor of the ages to it, the smoky sense of a place well-cured by the passage of the centuries.
And he recognized the craggy mountains well, the ones that reared like the rocky limbs of half-buried titans against the city’s back.
He had climbed them all once to reach her, and soon he would scale them once again.
No one had troubled them on their way, not that it would have slowed them unduly if anyone had. Still, he had preferred finding seclusion undisturbed. Though Vera’s light had momentarily appeased the Lightless’s unslakable hunger, Herron had found that without the sharper edges of its need spurring him on, he was troublingly far from full strength. Some corded weight wrapped around him, invisible. A rope of something clear and cold, like rattling blocks of ghostly ice strung on an equally ghostly chain.
As if the pillar that had once pinned him still partially remained, haunting him like a specter of its former form. It would take at least a week to gain enough strength to make more pet soldiers like Vera, even if he started now on summoning his bannermen.
Now he sat on Vera’s carpeted floor, garbed in clothing she had found for him—things of her time that fit him well enough, belonging to a lover or one of her kin—with a very reluctant calico kitten squirming on his lap. It was the only one young enough not to have vanished into some nook or cranny as soon as he crossed the threshold.
“No need for so much concern yet, tiny sweetling,” he purred at it, fondling a neck barely thicker than his thumb. The cat wasn’t inclined to do any purring of its own; its bright yellow eyes were round as an owl’s, the pupil drowning out the iris. Every once in a while it let out a frantic little mewl, and its heart thrummed so fast inside its tiny chest he could hear it, like the whirring of crickets. “For the moment I am content to simply enjoy the feel of you.”
In response, it hissed and drove its claws into the webbing of his hand.
“Oh, very rude of you, brash creature,” he said, clucking his tongue at it. “And perhaps not so useful in preserving your little life.”
Where the claws had pierced his skin, scarlet welled up, rimmed with pearling, inky black. The tendrils of Lightless strained toward the kitten’s velvet nose, and before he could call them back they had already plunged. The cat went rigid in his cupped hands, back bowed as far as it would go.
Its soul was much less dense than Vera’s had been, light and porous as dandelion fluff, and in moments he had consumed the totality of what it had known and loved. Its delight in madcap, dashing runs and the thrill of the hunt; its predilection for ladybugs and beetles. Its aloof but devoted attachment to its former mistress; the lazy sweetness it had felt in finding slants of light in which to sprawl.
Then all its muscles relaxed at once, little body going slack even as the amber eyes turned to clots of black.
With a shrug, he slung its featherweight over one shoulder like a stole. It was still warm and soft against him, and he liked the tickle of its fishing-wire whiskers and its breath.
“A good deal less spirit in this one than in you, pet,” he noted to Vera. “Though that is as it should be.”
From her perch high in a corner of the ceiling, where two walls met, she quirked her head at him in mute acknowledgment of his voice, arms and legs splayed backward and out like a clinging bat’s. Her hair was still damp and tangled, hanging like lichen on either side of her face, shading the empty glitter of her eyes.
Those eaten by the Lightless not only lost the light they had, but they also changed in other intriguing ways. Vera’s body had already been youthful and toned, and with the influx of black flooding its veins and muscle, bones and ligaments, she had become both strong and much more pliable than before. Her joints were no longer locked into the angles they had once been forced to bend, and gravity had become more of a strong suggestion than an ironclad command.
“Come down, pet,” he said to her. “Come sit with me. You will serve well, and I could do with a few more like you. But for my bannermen, I require something with a bit more venom and fang.”
She sprang down into an easy, silent crouch, then scuttled toward him on all fours with a discordant sort of grace, joints popping back and forth as she crawled. It always made him so happy how readily the consumed obeyed. Even better than riding a properly broken horse.
Once she settled next to him, he rested a hand on her peach-fuzzed nape. He could feel the taint of the Lightless inside her writhe up to meet his grip, and with it, the power flared up like logs tossed onto an already lively flame.
As in any other summoning, there was strength in numbers.
When the rings of ink around his arms began to flicker and revolve, he knew that it was time.
THOUGH THEY MIGHT not know precisely what it meant, even mortals knew—or felt—that there were places where the veil between the worlds thinned all the way down to sheer.
A church had once been built on such a place. Perhaps as a battlement to stave off the curling dark beneath. Or perhaps from the mistaken perception that the closeness of something so otherworldly meant that this other something must be good.
Or perhaps it was simply to pay respect to what had been there first, which was a tower built from stone and skulls.
The skulls belonged to nearly a thousand fearless men, who had lost their heads there well over two hundred years before. When Ottomans first claimed those lands, pockets of rebels rose to harry them in the hills, nipping at their underbellies and gnawing at their flanks. But during that first uprising on a place called Čegar Hill, once it had become clear that the battle would be lost—and his men impaled in warning to others, as was their opponents’ custom—the rebel Serb commander ordered a retreat. He sealed himself and his men deep within their entrenchment and ignited its powder magazine.
To deliver himself and his people to heaven, and ferry their foes to hell.
Once the last of the dust had cleared, and the last of the bodies settled, an Ottoman general surveyed the battlefield. While there might be nothing to display on stakes, he decreed, a monument of warning would be erected just the same. What remained of the rebels would be beheaded, and their skulls embedded into a tower built to mark where they had fallen. When his men had finished, the tower stood fifteen feet tall. Studded with more than nine hundred rotting heads in fourteen rows.
Build
ing such a testament to blood thirst, on ground abutted by the world of straining Lightless, further sheered the veil.
Their world beneath, or beside, or above—even to Herron, who had once plunged into its depths like a diver for black pearls, how it aligned with this one had never been made clear—was a dense, coiled, cohesive thing. No light nor air, water nor earth. Just a tangled mass that was entirely animate, with no space in between. Like a nest of snakes dipped in both slick and sticky tar, squirming and hissing around each other, restless and always prepared to spring through even the shortest-lived opening.
Though they were legion, they were also only one. A very single-minded mind driven by a single dream.
The dream of freedom in some elsewhere rich with luscious light on which to sup, and filled with spacious room in which to move.
Though in this place, at the base of Čegar Hill, the veil was near-translucent, that alone was not enough to grant them passage through. They needed a call, a full-fledged invitation. Someone on the other side to slice a welcoming slit, wielding the blade of their own will.
When they heard Herron calling to them, they swarmed as one to this tatter-place both thinnest and closest to him. Only three hundred miles or so inland from where he knelt with his hand on Vera’s nape.
And the veil dusted apart like cobwebs, just for a moment, to let the onslaught in.
Had anyone been in the chapel, they would have seen something seep between the creaking floorboards, something that couldn’t seem to decide between liquid and smoke. Some malleable matter infused with intent and mind.
The sinuous black formed a wispy runnel along the well-swept floor and poured its way beneath the cage of glass that shielded what was left of the Skull Tower. It wasn’t life, or light, but those bones had seen a suitably gory death. A thing like that left scraps of soul behind, meaty echoes on which to feed.
The black rushed steadily up the tower like the creeping thorns that once grew into a sleeping beauty’s vicious bower. Of the nearly thousand skulls that had adorned its sides, only a few remained, pocked here and there. Into these remaining ones the Lightless surged, curling into the skulls’ cavities and expanding to fill the empty space. As the skulls grew masks of viscous, iridescent black flesh, mimicking the faces that their owners had once worn in life, each popped free from its crumbling stone pocket when it rounded out too large, and landed on the floor with a moist but solid thwump.
Once they were free, the full resurrection took hold, though the bodies spawned were transformed rather than restored. As warriors, the Lightless needed sturdy spines and limbs and skin, at least for the chassis. Then wings like black sails on pirate ships, and whipping tails, depending on what suited best.
And there was always room for talons and stingers.
Once all of them reared up to full height, the glass box could no longer contain them. They burst out of it, moving as one, and vanished long before the rain of shattered glass fell to the floor behind them.
Fifteen
Iris
THAT LAST TRIP HAD COST ME.
I’d clung with all my will to the balcony above the candlelit atrium. This time, it had been early morning, and Lina had been wearing the same ragged sundress I’d left her in, still looking battered from the battle on the mountaintop. My visits to our world were snipped loose from her time, apparently, and dictated instead by my urgency. Sweeping me to the moment that I most needed to see.
It had been a tremendous effort to maintain the infinite bloom for long enough to hear everything Mara said. But I’d learned what I needed to know, while Mara spoke and then danced the history of our line, the final truth behind our curse.
Her great sacrifice.
Fjolar had been right; it had been nothing like what I thought I’d known.
Nothing was what I thought.
I’d been so cold when the wisteria snapped me back, my teeth chattering so hard I thought my molars might split. Beneath the limestone overhang, Fjolar had sat me on his lap and wrapped us both in the fur cape, curling around me to kindle some warmth. I couldn’t find it in me to protest. I was too depleted to endure the Quiet so he could take me somewhere warmer, and I needed his heat.
And my fury toward him had subsided, awash in too much shock and the revelation of how wrong I’d been.
“Well, that wasn’t from any poison, flower,” he said, once my teeth stopped chattering enough to let me talk. “What happened that time? Where did you go? I couldn’t rouse you, no matter what I did. Your body was asleep, but the rest of you . . .”
“I can fractal to my world, for a little while,” I said hoarsely, shifting around to rest my head against his chest. I couldn’t see any point in lying about it to him. Exhausted as I was, my heart pounded so hard it felt like it might rattle itself loose inside me, as if it were made of rusted clockwork. “Through the infinite bloom. Not all of me. Just . . . a piece of me, I think. My body stays here, the way the daughters’ did in my world when they traveled here with you, I guess. Like I’m doing the opposite of what they did.”
He paused, digesting it. I could hear his own heart speed up against my cheek. “And what did you see this time? Your sister again? The . . . that man who scared you so badly last time?”
“You can stop pretending you don’t know who he is.” I leaned back to lock eyes with him. “I know what’s hidden here now. Mara told the whole coven the truth, and I saw it, heard everything. This kingdom isn’t a stage at all. It’s a prison, for the soul you and Mara ripped from Herron. The soul you couldn’t kill.”
“It’s even more complicated than that, flower,” he said, those stark Valhalla features collapsing into more exhaustion than I had ever seen in him. I might not have gone through with leaping off one of his cliffs, but I could see how much being unable to wake me had worried him. “That generative energy I told you about, that comes from the performance and the courtship—it’s what keeps this kingdom spinning, and pins down his soul with its force. But even the unchosen daughters served a purpose. The syllables of the names Mara gave each daughter to capture her essence, and the scents of the soul-perfumes—they’re living components of her spell.” He picked up one of my chilled hands, bringing my wrist to his nose. “You still smell of yours, you know. And you still sound like Lisarah.”
I thought of when I had first heard the names that Mara had given me and Malina: Lisarah and Azareen. The way those three syllables had seemed to float in the air, echoing; the way they evoked our internal multitudes. That was also when Mara had explained the significance of names, the power in phonemes. I hadn’t considered it before, but every coven name I knew held three syllables—Faisali, Anais, Naisha, all the rest of them—and all of them had that same lingering portentousness, a nearly tangible weight. Like harbingers or sigils.
The perfumes were a similar thing, though not the same. Those seemed to encompass the physicality of what we were.
“Your scents and names were like interlocking gears in the clockwork spell she set in motion,” Fjolar went on. “Every new generation of daughters left behind strengthened Mara’s working, bearing down on that pillar of winter. Keeping Herron’s soulless body trapped on earth, while my companion and I kept his soul trapped here. All of us doing our parts to contain him.”
Until Mama and Dunja—and Lina and I, in turn—had burned everything down. I couldn’t quite feel guilty about it; I hadn’t known the truth. But I could still feel responsible.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I murmured, pinching the bridge of my nose. “About Herron loose? And his soul here?”
“And what would you have done if I had told you about him?” he countered. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have battered yourself to pieces against me, trying to get out of here to protect your sister. If you’d known, you wouldn’t even have bothered pretending for me.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, but my cheeks burned anyway. “You knew what I was doing? The entire time?”
He cast me a dist
inctly fond, indulgent look. “Flower girl. Come on. What do you take me for? Of course I knew your game.”
“So why did you let me keep doing it?”
“Because I liked it, of course. I liked seeing you try to win me over. It was . . .” He tilted his head back and forth, considering. “Cute to watch.”
“It was cute?” I demanded. “Is that why you stole me in the first place?”
“I took you because I wanted you with me,” he replied bluntly. “You know I did. But it wasn’t only that. I could feel that the kingdom hadn’t yet fallen to pieces, and I’m sworn to Mara for however long the spell holds. Your performance itself, and the growing bond between us, were needed to keep the kingdom intact. I wouldn’t forswear the pact unless I was sure it no longer did any good.” His voice darkened. “Especially not if it means letting that interloper have his soul back, so he can steal even more life. Life that should be only mine to take.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so taken aback by the idea of his loyalty to Mara, or the notion that Death had some sort of honor code. But I’d mostly seen only the rampant hedonism, the sullenness when he didn’t get his way, the readiness to whittle us down to the quick while we performed for him. Yet there was more to him than that. The flashes of tenderness, the new willingness to be gentle with me when I needed it.
And I understood even the worst of him more than I cared to admit—how powerful and complicated any desire could be. All those years I’d spent dreaming of my escape from Cattaro, yearning for Japan; it hadn’t only been that I’d wanted to travel, to see another world that might belong to me. It had also been the venal wish to shake myself loose of Mama, and of the burden of always protecting Lina.
It was possible to want a thing badly for many more reasons than just one.
“So,” I began, drumming my free hand on my knee. The back of it was mottled pink and ghostly white, aching with the cold. Desperation lodged, beating, in my throat like a hummingbird. “How is she going to capture him this time? I saw him, Fjolar. He’s—he’s monstrous. And he’s gathering some kind of hideous army, I saw that, too. I think he might even have someone on the inside; he mentioned a spy-witch, and what else could that mean? We have to help them. I know I have to find his soul and bring it back to them—Lina said so—but once we do, then what? I still won’t know how to get out of here.”