I WAS AN ISLAND IN A LAKE OF LIGHT.
Skeins of hair floated around me, or at least, the memory of hair. I remembered having hair, could almost still feel it with the nook of my mind tasked with keeping me solid and whole, stopping me from melting into the liquid gold. If I still had hair, then I maybe also had parted lips, gilded lashes, and wide-open eyes, reflecting an ocean’s churning expanse of light. My arms and legs felt loose and boneless, the blinding glitter around me enough to keep me afloat without any movement of my own.
My contours were fuzzy, blurred and overbright. But wherever I was, I hadn’t become a part of it yet.
Yet with my mouth so full of glow, I wasn’t all that sure I even wanted to cling to my own form. I felt so safe here, so exalted and secure, like something tiny tucked inside a jar full of fireflies.
At the image, a memory sprang up, lancing me through with longing: Malina and me kneeling and shushing each other’s giggles, combing fireflies out of midnight air with fumbling little-girl fingers, like pomegranate seeds sifted from water. Then another: my sister’s twisted face when she had seen me stolen, Fjolar wresting me away from her.
Something touched me then, and the phantom limb of my body jerked in shock.
The light coalesced into almost shapes, and then some thing made from molten stars surged toward me. Its eyes met mine, huge and shot through with streaks of paler light, with cloverleaf pupils like crossed figure eights. The light it was poured from had a sinuous cast, and as it nudged and nosed me, I thought,
dragon?
snake?
Now that it was here beside me, I had something to use for measure. As colossal as it was, coiling carefully around me like a leviathan that had made me its pet, set against this boundless world it might as well have been a sea monkey bobbing in a water bauble. Beyond it I caught a sense of vast citadels, buildings with columns wide around as redwoods, that would have dwarfed the mountains of my Montenegro at least a thousand times.
This world was so tremendous that I was smaller than its most minute component parts. Only this little thing could even see me with its naked eye.
Yet tiny as I was, I could feel how this realm and its sentinel creature loved me, and yearned for me to stay.
Daughter, it said to me, somehow both a whisper and a bellow. So loud it would have tolled in my eardrums if I’d had them, so low it sifted over me like a touch as much as sound. Welcome, our daughter!
But beneath my growing awareness of both bounty and magnitude, and wedged under the explosive joy of being so wanted, I could feel something else—a world fathoms below like this one’s negative, a teeming, oil-slick rainbow as starving as this place was full.
There was power down there, too. It ravened and reached, for anything beyond itself.
It was so hungry. And it saw me.
Then a grip I’d completely forgotten tightened like a manacle around the memory of my hands. And with a yank so sharp it left a trailing vacuum in my wake, I left both the dark and light behind.
I HAD MY body back. Or I had something, anyway, something that could feel.
Maybe it was a tithe for how effortless that first step had been, Fjolar tugging me through the arch of my own wisteria into that golden soak. Maybe this agony was the toll, this sense that my core filaments had been unwound and then woven carelessly back together. My bones ached as if the marrow inside them had swelled by three sizes, and my skin felt peeled back to expose glistening nerves. Compared to everything else, my throat hurt in an almost minimal way, a raw, stripped ache that I would have dismissed as barely devastating if I’d been able to make myself stop screaming.
Fjolar’s voice boomed from somewhere above me, echoing in my chest. “Iris! Flower girl, what’s the matter with you?”
With a monstrous effort, I shoved my knuckles into my mouth, bit down on them until teeth met bone, and eked one eye open. Through the film of tears, I could see the wavering outlines of his face hovering above me. As he dipped closer, the tips of a stray lock of his hair brushed my cheek.
Just that glancing touch, the slight scratch of hair over inflamed skin, was far too much to take.
“Get away!” I shrieked. “Don’t touch me!”
Then I plummeted into something between sleep and unconsciousness, like a burned-out meteor thudding into soil.
IT WAS THE smell of the sand that woke me.
I opened my eyes slowly, the root of every eyelash a bright pinprick of pain. As soon as the sleep evaporated, my senses snarled to life. The cool breeze battered my exposed cheek, and where my face rested, I could feel the individual imprint of every grain.
And the smell of it . . . glass came from sand, and so I knew what it was made of, rocks and crushed shells and crumbled sea-cliff stone, swept together by wind and water. But I had never known sand to be so pungent, an acrid, mineral tang mingling with the salty kelp smell of fish and the sea.
Bile welled up in my throat, and I took shallow mouth-breaths until I felt like I could prop myself up without everything inside me rushing out. Slowly, I eased up to sitting. With every gritty blink, the blurred world around me slid into sharper focus.
By the time I’d fumbled my way onto my knees, my vision had reached the piercing clarity of a fever dream—enough to make out the nicks in the sun-bleached ribs that curved around me. They cradled me like a bone shelter from the lurid purple of the sky, so riddled with streaks of stars that I thought of it for the first time as a true celestial body. Something with its own circulatory system of glowing arteries and veins.
“Oh, what?” I rasped to myself, dragging a hand over my flaming face. “What the fuck?”
I gripped one of the ribs and shakily levered myself up. Once I was standing, the ribs came up to my thighs, and a knobbly column of vertebrae trailed many feet away from me, half buried, so long that at some point spine must have turned into tail.
Thousands of others jutted from the sand, an eroded graveyard rising from dunes frosted with mica. Shielding my eyes—that ultraviolet sky made it hard to tell what time it was, but still the light was glaringly bright—I turned in a shaky circle. Nothing but sandy crops of rock and desert spitting up chimera skeletons, flippers scattered beside bones that looked like they had once been finely articulated feet.
There was something so morbidly decadent and improbable about it, all these picked-clean pieces of lost life strewn over sparkling desert. The patterns of the remains were so precise that the gleam thrashed inside me, yearning to fractal it all. To whip this burial ground up into a hurricane of rib cage within rib cage, chained by links of interlocking tails and wreathed with gusts of speckled sand.
I could smell them too, I realized. I could smell all these bones, their petrified reek. Even after all the years it must have taken to scour them so clean, I would have sworn they still stank of blood and copper.
It brought everything flooding back: Mama on the floor of the café, wings of blood unfurling to either side, suspended in some chrysalis between death and life. Malina and me hunting Dunja through Montenegro, stripping back layers of lies. Following, hand over hand, the tangled ropes that tied us to the coven of our family, until we finally reached the central knot that was Mara.
Mara, our far-mother, who’d sold daughters to Death so she and hers would never have to die. Mara, who had let Fjolar whisk me away even as Dunja, Lina, and I broke the spell that bound us all.
That was where my logic stuttered. If the spell was truly broken, how was I even here? Because this was Fjolar’s kingdom; it had to be. The haven in which he whiled away the lifetimes of his performing brides.
As if I had summoned him with the thought, I could see his shadow lengthen beside mine. It fell bulbous and too long, at an angle that made no sense without a central light source in the sky to cast it.
“Flower girl.” Beneath the thin-skinned veneer of calm, I heard the simmer of excitement. He was thrilled—no, elated that I was here. “Are you better yet?”
I wheeled to face him, the entire world swimming giddy with the movement, as if I were the focal point of a colossal kaleidoscope. Fractals of skeleton and sand chased my vision, like the tracers I’d seen the one time I dropped acid with a group of Belgian tourists passing through Cattaro. So long ago, now, it felt like, and who knew how far away.
Lina had taken care of me that night, when I’d come crashing down from the high like a tightrope walker taken by a sudden gust. I swallowed a sob at the thought of my sister, her reedy violinist’s fingers cool and gentle on my sweaty temples as she sang me into calm. Soothing and sweet as a springtime breeze.
And just as far away, while I was stuck here with him.
“Am I ‘better yet’?” I spat at him, so flushed with fury I’d have lunged over and swung at him if just keeping my feet planted under me wasn’t demanding the use of every muscle. “Oh, yes, I’m all set now, thank you. Except that you took me, you stole me from my sister and brought me here where everything hurts and everything smells, it’s all too bright, and why is everything so much?”
“Because I thought you’d like it that way, flower,” he shot back, and I felt a moment of precarious give inside me at the familiar challenge in his eyes—somehow even bluer here than they had been in my world, bright and variegated like delphinium crossed with fennel flower, still edged in smudged black liner. Otherwise, he looked exactly like I remembered, like he’d belong best at a rave held in a mead hall. Platinum hair tucked behind the spirals of his gauged earrings and brushing broad shoulders, the nearly neon purple light flinging the Nordic bones of his face into stark relief. His lips the only point of softness.
“Isn’t too much of everything exactly what you claimed to want?” he demanded. “Though I admit I didn’t foresee the . . . side effects of bringing you here in such full blush.”
“Full blush?” I echoed, my voice still warbly with rage. The edges of my vision throbbed like strobe lights, but I found if I kept my gaze locked on his face, it wasn’t quite as maddening. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve never done it this way before. None of Mara’s daughters ever came here with me in the flesh. When their souls crossed over with me, their bodies always stayed behind. But you . . .” His eyes flared with jubilance, and this time he didn’t bother to feign restraint. “You’re all the way here. Body and soul, both right here with me. I’ve brought you with me fully.”
He paused and gave me an expectant look, one pale eyebrow lifted, as if waiting for me to discover that I was actually giddy with delight at how completely he had me trapped.
For the first time, I looked down at myself. I was still wearing the plain white tank top, jeans, and too-big pink-and-black sneakers I’d found rummaging through Dunja’s sort-of-stolen van. Both the clothes and my bare arms were covered in a fine, gritty layer of silvery sand. I dusted off one forearm experimentally, and just like the rib that I’d used as a crutch, the sand felt mostly like what it was. Too keen and too gritty, but undeniably real.
But this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I remembered Dunja’s dance, the way she had painted for us the sweeping, dream-spun magic of this place, the beautiful vacuum of it—just a backdrop for her performance. Nothing here had been real for her; she hadn’t been able to touch, smell, taste, or hear anything but Death, in the form he’d taken to match the lover she’d most wanted.
He had been the focal point of her entire existence during the years she’d spent dancing for him.
It was nothing like that for me. For all that I wanted to slap that slick self-satisfaction off his face, looking at Fjolar felt nearly normal. Or as close as I could come to it, here where “natural” light looked like it’d been filtered through an amethyst prism.
“You sound pretty damn euphoric about that, Fjolar—Death—whatever I call you now,” I said bitterly, wrapping my arms tight around myself. “Like maybe I’m supposed to thank you for stealing me so thoroughly. But it feels like poison here, all wrong. I need to leave, right now. You need to take me back.”
He laced both hands behind his neck as layers of expression settled over his face, so many things at once that I didn’t want to see. Smugness, radiant pleasure, and underneath it all, a bedrock base of dense defiance.
“No.”
Pure despair cascaded over me. “Fjolar, please. Being here is going to kill me, I can feel it. I need to go home.”
And I need Lina, and Luka. Luka, whose see-you-soon kisses, right before I climbed up to Bobotov Kuk with my sister and my aunt, still felt warm on my cheeks and between my eyes.
“You aren’t understanding.” His face turned stony. “I never had to keep a lover here against her will—and why would I do it now, with you so sullen and ungrateful? I’m not saying that I won’t take you back.”
“Then . . . what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I can’t.”