by Lana Popovic
Outside, I sat on Jasna’s porch swing, setting myself to swinging with a push of bare toes against the cool cement. The night was pure, with enough of a pine breeze to slice through the lingering reek of char. I could smell honey and night-blooming flowers, even cold running water somewhere far from here.
That was another artifact of the kingdom: my senses had never waned to what they’d been before. Scents were stronger, noises louder. Everything was somehow more. Sometimes I even thought in cadence, in rhyming stanzas, as if I’d never stepped out of that magical, performative groove.
The chair sank beside me, groaning, and I startled. I’d been so caught up in considering my own heightened senses that I hadn’t heard Luka step outside. The irony of it made me laugh a little, lightly.
Luka turned to look at me, draping an arm over the back of the chair. So careful where he placed it, not quite close enough that I could feel it behind my neck. Moonlight limned his cleverly chiseled features, ran silvery fingers through his shock of hair.
“Something funny, Missy?” He smiled a little, an echo of the half-dimpled smile he used to give me. “Whatever it is, don’t let me ruin it. It’s nice to hear you laugh.”
I opened my mouth to reply, and just as quickly realized I had nothing to say.
Silence collected around us like sediment, and he looked away.
“Do you still love me?” he asked eventually, blunt and quiet. I could hear the trepidation in his voice.
I let the pause settle in like an exhale between us, thinking.
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. “I think I do, under everything else. But it feels far away right now. Or very deep down, maybe. Like bedrock. I know it’s there, because it’s always there. But I can’t exactly feel it.” I glanced over at him, steeling myself for his pain, grateful that I didn’t have Malina’s ability to hear it. “I’m sorry, Luka. Do you . . . do you still love me?”
A muscle ticked beneath his jaw, but his face stayed placid in profile. He didn’t look at me again. “Of course I do, Missy. I always do. But at the same time, I don’t know, either. It’s—things happened, while you were gone. I missed you, badly. Terribly. There was someone . . .” He trailed off, swallowing.
“It’s all right,” I murmured, feeling a faint, grazing pain. Like the scrape of a cat’s tongue, but not unpleasant. Jealousy too far removed to wound. “You were alone, and whatever you did, it was what you needed to do. Believe me, I understand. I understand so much.”
And I did. For all the lies and endless manipulation, I still missed Fjolar like a phantom limb. His smell, the sardonic lilt of his voice, the roughness and tenderness of each caress. His demands, his wonder at the sight of me, the clench and twist of his many betrayals.
It was so near the surface, eclipsing everything else beneath it. I couldn’t see past its mass, or through its remembered, distorted light.
It would pass, I knew. I would heal, and become something else, again.
Because everything changed. That was the true beauty of this living world, even if I wasn’t quite ready to appreciate it yet.
“Do you think . . . ?” Luka began. “Do you think, someday . . . ?”
I reached for his hand. It was warm and large, but not like Fjolar’s. His palm was less coarse, his fingers longer and slimmer, laced differently with mine. He wrapped his other hand around my wrist and squeezed, hard enough that I nearly gasped. He did remember, then.
So did I.
“Yes,” I said, soft as a breath. “I do think, someday. But not now.”
He sat with me for a while longer, watching the wheeling of the stars across the sky. They twinkled in the shimmering way they always did in this world; the astronomical term for it was “seeing,” I remembered. A strange way to put it, but nice.
As if even while we watched them, the stars saw us back.
I STAYED OUTSIDE for hours, long after Luka left. He squeezed my hand in parting, but didn’t try to kiss me or speak. We weren’t each other’s to kiss—not now, though maybe someday.
And there was nothing left to say.
I was still there when Mara slipped outside, all in black, a satchel slung over her shoulder. She startled when she saw me, exactly like a normal, mortal woman, clapping a hand over her heart.
“Lisarah,” she began, then caught herself. “Iris. I did not think to find you out here. You, or anyone.”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Inside didn’t seem like the place to be. Not that anywhere seems the place to be, at least for me. And you, sorai? Leaving us like a thief in the night?”
The phrase brought back the memory of all the times Mama had said it, nocked it at me like an arrow for sneaking outside. The thought of her prodded pain back to life, the blister of her loss that lived inside me.
Mara wavered for a moment, as if caught between the desire to leave without explaining herself—the woman she’d been before hadn’t owed explanations to anyone—and the urge to shrug on the skin of someone new.
Finally she moved to sit beside me. And even now, stripped of her tripled tones, she smelled like love, largesse, and light. I breathed it in, sweet fruit and frankincense, and when she drew me close to her, I didn’t resist. My head dropped onto her shoulder of its own accord, my eyes half closing as she stroked my hair with her ember’s touch.
“I am leaving,” she admitted, resting her cheek on my crown. “You love me still, my far-daughter—even you, who once nearly tore me apart, because you cannot help but love me. And while you all ring yourselves around me, none of you will live so freely as you now can and should. And I . . .” She heaved a long, heavy sigh. “I no longer wish to be this family’s sun. There are things I would do, and people I would find. It will be good, for everyone, to make a life without me at its eye.”
“I understand,” I said simply, marveling at how much change had already befallen us. I’d hated her once, tried to burn her with all the forceful loathing of my heart.
And now I was so close to her I could feel her silken throat clench with held-back tears.
She didn’t want to leave us, not really. Because she loved us more than anything, as was her nature to do. But she’d do it, because we needed it, and to give what was needed was in her nature too.
“You do?” she whispered into my hair, and for a moment I heard an echo of Mama in her rich, husky human voice.
“I do.” I bit my lip and let myself cry. Just a single tear for now, hot and smarting down my cheek, but there would be more. “Because I’m leaving too.”
Epilogue
TWO SISTERS STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF A WITCH’S COTTAGE. One outside, the other in. Their hands entwined across the threshold, a sprig of sage above them.
“Do you have to go?” one whispered. Tears glistened in her dark eyes, and her lower lip—cherry-cleft—trembled like a child’s.
“I do,” the other one replied. Her angled face looked composed, but her pale hazel eyes were just as glossy full. “Do you have to stay? You could leave too, and come with me. We could see everything, all the things we talked about.”
“The things you talked about, you mean,” the first reminded. “The things I want to see are here. How they grow, how I can use them, the gods they belong to. They’re what I want to know.”
The other lifted their joined hands to her lips and kissed them. “Then I’ll know where to find you once I’m done. But first, I want to see my tree.”
A chill, Montenegrin wind rushed down from where it curled around a jagged mountain peak, blown from the earth that claimed both sisters as its own. It lifted their hair like a mother’s gentle hands, and dried the tears on both their cheeks.
And if anyone had asked the sisters if their many mothers loved them, both knew what they would say.
Acknowledgments
Sequels are tricky beasts. Both my wonderful editors warned me about this before I started writing, and I believed them, because they’re brilliant women who tend to be right about pretty much everything
. But, I told myself, this would really be more like a third book than a second, since I’d already rewritten Wicked so extensively. I would probably be okay.
I was definitely not okay. Shudder.
To my clients whom I blithely patted on the head and assured that the sophomore slump would pass soon and everything would be fine, just fine—I’m really sorry, you guys, and thank you for your love and generous support as I struggled and moaned and generally muddled my way through until I finally fell in love with this book. (By the way, if you’re looking for a source of consistent wonder, Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton was my reference for many of Iris’s forays in Death’s kingdom. It’s gorgeous, and you should check it out.)
Huge thanks, too, to Claudia, Melissa, and the whole Katherine Tegen team for handholding me throughout. The past year was a rough one for everyone, and still you handled this project—and me—with such grace and generous amounts of TLC. And brainstorming! Thank you for the plot twists, ladies, and here’s to many more.
My thanks to Holly/Galadriel and my sweet, hilarious, fiendish Tay—love you, and am so happy to call you my friend even when the leaves are falling and stuff.
And of course, to my friends, family, and Caleb, who got me through this book—especially my mom, Reader of All the Drafts; my BFFs in Boston and elsewhere; and the ’Berries—thank you so much for your love, support, and constancy. I’m so lucky to have you all.
About the Author
Photo by Gary Alpert
LANA POPOVIĆ is the author of Wicked Like a Wildfire. She 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.
Lana was born in Serbia and spent her childhood summers surrounded by the seaside and mountain magic of Montenegro. She lived in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania before moving to the United States, where she now calls Boston home, subsisting largely on cake, eyeliner, and aerial yoga. Visit Lana at www.lanapopovicbooks.com or follow her on Twitter @LanaPopovicLit.
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Books by Lana Popović
Wicked Like a Wildfire
Fierce Like a Firestorm
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIERCE LIKE A FIRESTORM. Copyright © 2018 by Lana Popović. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art by Lisa Perrin
Cover design by Heather Daugherty
* * *
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959099
Digital Edition AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-243689-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-243686-3
* * *
1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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