“SO WHAT DO YOU CALL ALL THIS?” I SWEPT MY FREE HAND out to indicate the sandstone cliffs and buttes that hunched over the shimmering boneyard around us. My other hand was knit loosely through Fjolar’s. I’d found that as long as I maintained skin-to-skin contact with him, I could walk his world comfortably without being overcome by it.
Fjolar didn’t like it, and that was a savage little satisfaction in itself. On the one hand, it galled him to have to tend to my frail mortal self when I wasn’t even properly filling the role he’d brought me here to perform. I might have given him the single gift of those bloomed bones, but even that had drained me quickly. I’d lost his bright smile almost as soon as I won it, once the bloom withered away.
On the other hand, he still enjoyed touching me. Every once in a while, he’d slip up, forget himself, and lightly sweep his thumb over my knuckles as we walked, before remembering what a dull disappointment I was turning out to be and nearly dropping my hand in a snit.
What was worse, even with the full knowledge of all that was wrong here, and despite my forcefully banked fury at him, I couldn’t thwart the slight surging in my belly toward his touch.
But that was all right, I told myself, quelling jabs of guilt. Whatever I betrayed while I was here wouldn’t count if it meant he kept talking to me, even if grudgingly, showing me the true workings of this world until I could find my own way out.
I had to do this. I had to be the courtesan I would have been anyway, to find a way to free myself. Luka would understand. He would.
“It’s called Wadi El Hitan,” Fjolar replied, startling me out of my thoughts. “The Valley of the Whales. And I didn’t call it that; that’s its proper name. Where you come from, it’s in Egypt, a hundred miles or so south of Cairo. It’s where whales lost their legs, where they turned from creatures that walked the dust to ocean-dwellers, eons ago.”
I scoffed. “There’s no way a place on earth looks like this. Everyone would know.”
His mouth quirked a bit, eyes glinting cobalt. “Well, I took some artistic license, of course. I picked the best of it for this replica, and chose what kind of sky I thought you’d like best above it. Was I somehow wrong, yet again?”
“No,” I murmured. “You weren’t. Bones that don’t make sense—but do now that you’ve explained it—and under a sky as impossible as this? It’s perfect.”
It was. I couldn’t have asked for a better kind of morbid.
“I thought you might think so. Do you remember the bone nest?”
I hadn’t thought about the nest for years, but as soon as he mentioned it, the memory sprang so vivid it might have been made yesterday. Lina and I had been fourteen or fifteen, maybe, roaming around the little bayside park across the street from our house. That day, we had been foraging for ferns, leaves, and early spring buds. Before I took them to the studio to diagram the fractals they would become in glass, we liked arranging the plants together based on ikebana designs we found online. It was always a stealth operation between us; Mama interpreted any striving toward Japan as a frantic squirming away from her.
I was picking through a still-frosted viburnum shrub, my cheeks glowing with cold—that winter had been unusually chilly and lingering for Cattaro, hanging over the city like a misty hand—when I found it. A nest had tumbled down from one of the surrounding trees, dislodged by a gust, and had tangled with the base of the shrub. Gingerly, I picked it out. It was brittle to snapping from cold, and would have dusted apart like dried flowers from anything but the lightest touch.
Somehow, the speckled eggs inside hadn’t shattered in the fall. And twined through the bramble of grasses, twigs, and caked mud, tiny bones held the structure together like a truss. Some were sharp and slender as toothpicks, and others had the rounded edges of what might once have been minute, hollow skulls lined with little teeth. I couldn’t tell what small animal they had come from. But seeing them there, part of the nest’s essential fabric, chased away the chill. Even as I acknowledged how morbid it was—and kind of cheesy, even—to be so happy to hold the dead nest in my numbed hands, I couldn’t help my joy.
Lina had come to lean over my shoulder then. “Ooh, Riss,” she breathed. “Do you think the eggs are still alive? We could take them home. We could wrap them—”
“No,” I broke in. “I shouldn’t have disturbed it. Let’s leave it all right here.”
Lina had squinted at me, skeptical; I’d never been the one to let scruples get in the way of bringing something scavenged home. But I didn’t want to find out if the eggs were alive. Because they almost certainly weren’t, and knowing for sure would have burst the moment’s fragile magic. It was the potential of it that gripped me, the beauty of new life cupped inside a cradle knit from death.
“How do you know about that?” I whispered to Fjolar, my throat thick with swallowed tears for that moment, for my missing sister. “I never told you that.”
For just a heartbeat, his eyes lingered over my features in that heated way I remembered from when we’d met. “I know many things about you that you never had to say out loud. More than anyone else could know.”
“So does that mean”—my cheeks flared—“does that mean you could read my mind before? When we were connected?” An even worse thought occurred. “Can you still do it?”
His face iced over in an instant. “Not since you fractured the spell. And even then, it wasn’t like I had some script of you. But I could see you, like a collage, or a mosaic of the images that had shaped your mind over the years. There was so much more in there, of course, but I sifted for what I needed to help me build the perfect world for you.” He snorted scornfully. “For all the good it’s done either of us.”
So much more in there, of course. It made me want to unwind my fingers from his—the idea of him roving through my mind like a child with grubby fingers, as if he had the right to be there. Like an invader, or a colonizer.
“And what about Malina?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even, as if the question stemmed from simple curiosity rather than revulsion. “Did you do the same to her?” Somehow, the idea of him rummaging through my sister’s thoughts offended me even more, knowing how she had felt about him from the start.
He shook his head, and I relaxed a fraction. “She was the one who caught my notice first, when she fell in love,” he said. “But when I came to find you both, she was already spoken for. I could have had her anyway—if I had chosen her, the spell would have ousted her earlier love—but I wanted you from the start. Since that silly party, when you tasted like trash brandy and offered to make the Christmas lights into a galaxy for me.” He cast me a barbed glance through pale lashes. “Formalities needed to be observed, but you were always the one I planned to choose.”
I couldn’t help softening slightly at that—until I remembered the cleaving between me and Malina, when we believed the choice of which of us would be sacrificed was truly ours to make. The pounding exhilaration and driving terror of the contest Mara had put us through when we couldn’t decide. The look on my sister’s face the morning she’d found me on the beach, spent and shivering from having given Fjolar too much of what he’d asked for.
And the unselfish way Luka had offered himself to me, the mutual claiming of each other that night in the forest. I’d only started learning what it felt like to love Luka before Fjolar tore me from him. But if I wanted to see him again—to have him back, and my sister by my side—I needed to muffle the rising mutiny inside me.
I forced my shoulders to relax, smoothed my face into earnest openness. “I might not like the way all this was set up, that’s true. But I do like knowing you would have picked me regardless, and spun all this glory up for me. And I . . . I know I’m being a burden, but I’m getting better, I think. And I’d love to see more. Will you show me?”
The fawning, he liked. His eyes lit like candles sparked to life in a dark room, reined-in excitement spreading over the devilishly stark, handsome lines of his features. So that was what it took to wield him. Lies, half lies, and the heart note of a pure truth.
The same things he had done to me, I realized with a start. Well, I could do it too, if it meant he’d trust me enough to tell me whatever he was holding back about this place.
But he didn’t trust me, not yet. He turned away, swallowing, wiping at his mouth with the back of his free hand. “Let’s go, then. We’ll have to walk to the boundary that leads to the next piece of the realm. If you were here only in soul, I could whisk you along with me with just a thought.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “But with you as you are, it’ll have to be a trudge.”
“Sounds about right, doesn’t it?” I teased. “A marathon of trudging: the Iris experience.”
Yet despite his casual disdain, I thought I felt his hand tighten slightly around mine.
WITHOUT THE INDICATORS of reliable shadows, clocks, or a mutable sky, it was almost impossible to keep time as we walked through the bone desert. Every moment blurred into the next in smeary succession.
Then the black gates reared up from the sand as if they had every right to be there.
The strangest part was that until the gates leaped out at us, I hadn’t seen them in the distance. They should have started out as a speck on the horizon, growing larger as we neared. Instead, they simply hadn’t been there at all, right up until they were—wrought-iron both linear and ornate, worked into a gridded framework like a maze, and twined through with ivy vines, elaborate padlocks, and snakes with flicking tongues.
“‘These plants can kill,’” I read from the two signs inlaid into each gate, the stark lettering arranged around a leering skull and crossbones. “Fjolar, what is this?”
“A poison garden.” I heard the hint of a smile in his voice. He was particularly pleased with himself over this one; I’d have to remember that, I thought sourly. Ply him with compliments on his special poison ivy. “Full of the most unruly, tricky plants—ones that burn and maim and prick, that still the heart and steal the breath. All while looking like such pretty things.”
“Oh, I love gardens,” I breathed. “The deadlier, the better. I hope this one has flowers.”
He tipped a wink at me in the daredevil way that still had an effect, deep in the pit of my belly. “Of course it does. Even ones that like to bite, like you.”
I don’t know what I had been expecting as he swung the gate open—a rusty squeal, maybe, or an ominous creak lifted from one of Niko’s favorite horror movies—but instead there was an absolute absence of sound that felt somehow even more unnerving. As if whatever noise the gate should have made had been swallowed by some gaping void.
And over his shoulder, through the opening, I could see the spreading expanse of sparkling sand and jutting bones, a streak of ultraviolet sky pinwheeled with stars. Looking at the mirrored desert beyond the gate made me queasy in a deep-down way, like my mind had been carved up into puzzle pieces and shuffled just slightly out of alignment.
Frowning, I turned to him. “But that’s just more of the same.”
“Only because we haven’t passed through yet. We’re still in this piece of the world, not the neighboring one, and on this side of the seam, this piece is all that exists. Ready to see something else?”
“Ready, sir.” I snapped off a crisp salute. “Lead the way to the bitey flowers, sir.”
He rolled his eyes, fighting a smile. “The mouth on you,” he muttered as he stepped through the gate, tugging me behind him. “Almost enough to make me miss the old days.”
What old days would those be, I wanted to snap, the ones where your brides were too force-fed with love to even think of talking back?
Instead, I swallowed the venom and took a step to follow.
And lost everything with it.
There was no sight, or touch, or smell, or sound. I couldn’t even taste the inside of my own mouth. And now that I couldn’t feel it in a chest I no longer had, or hear it rushing in ears that were long gone, I knew that I’d always kept the fondest company with the beating of my heart. I had to be somewhere, because there was still an “I” to think so in the first place. But beyond the fact that I existed, there was simply nothing else.
I had never imagined such a loneliness.
When Fjolar finally pulled me through—it might have been seconds or lifetimes, or the cascading rush of near-infinite eons later—I was sobbing so hard I thought my heart would burst, and my throat was raw from screams stolen by that void.
For a moment, he watched me guardedly, something close to panic flickering across his face. And I realized, through the tears, that for all the lives he’d culled since the birth of time, he’d likely never seen a living girl cry like this in front of him.
Because of him.
He reached for me cautiously, then when I didn’t shy away, drew me up against him until my face tucked into the space between his neck and shoulder. I burrowed into him, far past caring who I took comfort from. I locked my arms around his waist and keened against his chest, gulping in the smell of him. Terrified of lapsing back into nothingness, that awful abyss of total deprivation.
“I didn’t think it would be so terrible for you,” he said quietly, stubbled cheek pressed to my forehead. “But of course it would. You’re not made of what I’m made.”
“What . . . was . . . that?” I whimpered. “Where . . . ?”
“Some call it the veil, or space between worlds. Though of course it isn’t really a veil, or true space,” he said. “I call it the Quiet. It’s what I use as thread every time I remake this patchwork kingdom. Without it, the component pieces would slide apart, dissipate. Evanesce back into the ether from which I conjured them.”
“So why didn’t I feel it when I first came here?” I murmured into his chest. “There was all that light, and that hungry dark somewhere below it, but nothing like that—like that nothingness.”
“It’s because on the way here, I led you through existing fissures in the Quiet.” He wasn’t going so far as to stroke my back, but his hands were very warm where they rested. And his voice sounded like an apology. “Like wormholes between your world and this one. Here, the Quiet is fine as spider silk, threaded through the fabrics of this world—between its distinct pieces, stitching them together. There are no openings in the seams here. No other way to cross it except by plunging through.”
“And being in it doesn’t make you want to die of being alone?” I whispered, before I thought of how silly that would sound.
He huffed a laugh through his nose. “It just feels like quiet to me. Hence the name. It feels like the closest I ever come to home.”
If that felt like home to him, I wondered with an icy shudder, what must it be like inside his head? The roaring silence of a black hole that had eaten every last speck of light? No one ever grieved for black holes, but what would it feel like to crave light so badly, when it was the deepest of your nature to inhale it into nothing whenever it ventured too close? No wonder he had made that deal with Mara. No wonder he had wanted us.
And no wonder Dunja had loved him so hard, even as she scrabbled tooth and nail to keep her nieces from ever taking her place.
He finally ran a hand down my back, and I flinched at his touch in surprise. Mistaking the shock for recoil, he let me go, stepping away so abruptly I nearly stumbled. The delicate bubble of rapport between us burst. “Take my hand if you need to,” he offered coolly. “I don’t want you falling over. Especially not here.”
Nodding jerkily, I laced my fingers through his. A damp breeze like seaside summer lifted my hair, and I liked it so much I tipped my head back and let my eyes slide closed.