I’D SEEN HER IN A STOLEN MEMORY. I’D EVEN SEEN HER IN the flesh, for a moment, on the bastion’s ramparts in the Old Town.
But not like this. She hadn’t been so close, then. She hadn’t been anything like this.
Shimora had led us up one of the two sweeping staircases that winged to the second-floor landing, and from there we’d made our way to the fifth floor. But as soon as we stepped into Sorai’s chamber—my mind wouldn’t let me think of it as a mere room—I felt purged clean of the casually strewn wonders that we’d seen. There had been so much, all of it pulsing in my vision, frantic to fractal: silver platters of cracked-open geodes with winking crystal teeth; vast sculpture-scenes made entirely of stained glass; huge models of constellations etched bas-relief into the chalet’s walls, precious stones wedged in like placeholders for stars.
None of them compared to Sorai.
She knelt with her back to us, inky hair tinged plum by the dusk creeping in through the series of slanted skylights above her, cut into the chalet’s roof. Even without facing us, pure power rolled off her in tremendous waves, like a desert wind, or the clanging of some silent, behemoth bell. The air nearly trembled around her with its force. It was hard to look at her directly; it was as if we saw her through a porthole, elongated from the curving of the glass.
And all around her, the room writhed with black roses. They were glistening and unruly, twining through the air as if they needed no espalier to hold them, no soil in which to sink. Petals, stems, and branching roots were all black and suspended, as if the maze of thorns trapping Sleeping Beauty’s castle had erupted into midnight bloom.
Maybe it had, if Sleeping Beauty had once been our mother.
Mama lay on the floor in front of Sorai, her chestnut hair fanned out and shining against the mahogany floorboards. She looked both cold and flawless, as if someone who’d once adored her flesh-and-blood face had carved her exact likeness from snow and ice. A shroud of roses covered her, and it was almost lovely until I realized that their roots and thorns drove into her, piercing flesh and digging deep. The network of veins around each puncture branched out black beneath her skin as if whatever lived in the roses flowed through her too.
Then the roses crept over her entirely, closing ranks like a living, floral casket and hiding her from us.
“What did you do?” Malina moaned, half sobbing. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, child,” Sorai said, in a burred, resounding triptych of voices. Malina and I staggered back as one; I hadn’t seen any of the steps it took Sorai to stand and cross the room toward us, the roses parting neatly for her. She’d been kneeling one minute, and in the next she faced us, close enough that I could feel her exhales on my own lips—her breath smelled exactly like that dizzying sweetness that underpinned everything else: our ribbons, Shimora’s perfume, the entire chalet. She wore eggshell ivory, glowing pale against all the flowers that nudged and strained toward her like eager children, a long-sleeved, narrow gown that clung to the contours of her body and pooled at her bare feet.
Her eyes were just like ours, but they also weren’t, set against the deep, dark skin of her imperious face. They didn’t seem like human eyes so much as a window into the soul of winter.
“Nothing,” she said again, and warmth spread through me at her voice, a fire-flower of ecstasy unfurling in my chest. “Something was done to her, and now I fight against it. Do you see these roses? They are my will, made flesh. And so I still her with my will, keep her at rest. Until you do what must be done to save her.”
“I don’t understand,” Lina and I whispered in tandem. It was so difficult to think with Sorai’s eyes on me, and nearly impossible to fumble for words, my mind smooth and sifting as sand pouring through a sieve. I kept fighting the urge to kneel, to fling myself at her feet. My knees trembled of their own accord.
At some point Lina had taken my hand, and now she squeezed it, speaking for me as I struggled. “Who are you? Who are we to you? And who did . . . this to our mother?”
“I am Sorai, the highest, first daughter of Mara.” Eyes shifted between us like frost gathering on glass. “And that’s what you are, too. Far daughters of Mara the sorceress, called by some the strongest witch who ever lived, the pride of her tribe four thousand years ago.”
I barely remembered moving or sitting down, time spinning like a whirligig around us, but suddenly Lina and I sat cross-legged in front of her on crimson cushions. In each of her hands, Sorai held one of ours, though Lina still hadn’t let go of me where our fingers were linked. The roses moved all around us like animal things, creeping over our shoulders, brushing our cheeks. They weren’t an illusion, unless illusions could feel more real than my own skin; I felt their softness and the sharp potential of the prick behind each curved thorn. I heard the rustling of the leaves as they twined around us both.
“As daughters of Mara and youngest scions of her blood, your names are mine to choose,” Sorai continued. “You who were named Malina, and who was born first—your true name is and should be Azareen.”
As soon as she said it, I knew it to be fundamentally true, the same way I knew a clap of thunder meant lightning even if I hadn’t seen it strike. Deep inside, I’d always believed that I was the oldest, even if we’d had no way to know. But now we did, because those three syllables somehow held all of Malina caught inside them, a spoken cross-section of everything she was. From the lush sweetness surrounding an unyielding core of strength, like the peach around a pit, to the luxuriant certainty of always knowing what she wanted, and quietly having it whenever she wanted it. Such silent disregard for consequence, so easy to mistake for something pliable.
My sister had never truly been anything like soft.
“You see how strong words are,” Sorai said. “Such a sturdy vehicle for beauty. And an even better one for will. Even mortals know the worth and weight of phonemes, to string them together for natural power though they can’t instill them with their own will. Ask the Arabs of their hamza, almost like a soul-sigh, and they will tell you—it can break a heart all by itself.”
“But Azareen isn’t a real word,” Malina protested, though I could hear from her voice how it had moved her. I had no idea where she found the strength to do anything but marvel at Sorai. “You made it up.”
“Of course I did, and of course it is real, and of course it means you, fledgling.” The purring multilayers of her voice took on a gentle chiding note. “Will you smell this too, and feign that you can’t find yourself in it?”
She offered Malina—Azareen, my mind railed. You know her name is Azareen—a tiny crystal vial, lifting its stopper. My own nostrils flared as I recognized the scent; it was the same as the perfume on Malina’s ribbons, though much stronger. Sweet pea, vanilla, apple, and verbena, deceptive sweetness over a sharp, astringent base, with the faintest hint of Sorai’s scent swirled in. Just as Naisha’s ribbons had conjured her up back in her apartment in Cattaro, the scent filled my mind’s eye with Malina even as she sat beside me, her eyes and hands and tumbling blue-black hair, the blinding dazzle of her smile.
Sorai closed Malina’s fingers around the vial, then turned to me, fixing me with her gaze like a butterfly speared under glass. “And you, little one, an altogether different thing. Your true name is and should be Lisarah, and you’ll use this for your anointing.”
It was such a strange thing to hear yourself spoken, in three such simple syllables. Especially when you didn’t sound like anything you thought you knew. If Malina was a peach I was a scuffed-up walnut, wrapped in a shell of rough but porous strength. I could take hammers and pliers, even be ground underfoot without cracking—but the meat inside was mild and sweet, all desire to protect and yield and please.
My sister’s exact opposite.
My own vial landed gently on my palm and all of me wafted out, top notes of tobacco accord and copper, and beneath it carnation, plum, and cherry blossom. It smelled like the sleek black wing of my hair over one shoulder, my apple cheekbones, the long and sinuous lines of all my limbs.
Abruptly I remembered Mama’s bedtime story of coaxing our gleam, the platter of her offerings, the hibiscus flower and the cherry. Maybe this was where it had come from; maybe this was the gift she’d wanted to give us, in whatever form she could. “Did you do this for Jasmina, too? For Faisali, I mean? The naming and the scenting?”
“Of course, when she was old enough to understand and wear the ribbons that bind us together, that connect us to each other’s blood and link all the way back to Mara. Among many things, there’s honey in each one, harvested on our grounds the day the daughter was born—the birthplace home is as much a part of a witch’s soul and heart as anything else. I’ve done this for Faisali, and your grandmother, Shimora, and your aunt, Anais. For every single one of you, ever since all this began. This is your welcome to our coven, to your true family.”
“And what is all this, really?” I said softly, marveling. “How many of us have there been? And how are we—you—all still alive, and young?”
She took our free hands again, opening another current of shocking warmth between us. “Years and years ago, those with blood like ours were half divine, as near to the gods as to mortals. The source of our magic is a place as much as it is an element—the people of this time might call it another dimension, perhaps, or even a universe, above or below or woven through ours.”
She waved a dismissive hand, as if she had about as much use for these newfangled words as for the people of this time. “What matters is that all the gods, the old and new: they swim in it, are made of it, and never die. Mortals might reach for it and sometimes find the conduits, take little sips of it here and there, make small ripples of magic happen. But we’re born with it already rushing through our veins. We may not live where gods and magic dwell, but we’re born to it all the same.”
I frowned. “So, we’re immortal? We don’t die?”
She held up a hand, and I cut myself off in an instant. “No, child. We’re long-lived and more robust than most, but of course we would die otherwise. Everything natural in this world does. But all those years ago, another great witch snagged upon a woman in our mother Mara’s tribe, a mortal beauty who had won the love of a man this powerful, outlander witch had wanted for herself. The jealous witch grew fat with fury and called upon the old gods to curse the poor woman, such that everyone she loved, including the man, would be dogged by death, given to accident, illness, and injury. And once they were mortally wounded, they wouldn’t die but live on in relentless agony, suspended between this world and the next.”
Just like Mama. Dead and undead all at once. Pain speared through me, hooked like a harpoon.
“Like Mama,” Malina said, echoing my thoughts even as my mind raced ahead. “Does that mean that she—that she can feel the things that happened to her?”
“And what does this woman’s curse have to do with us?” I added.
Sorai shifted her head once, just enough to spill her hair over her other shoulder. Even that small movement, the slick, snaking fall, was staggering to watch.
“The curse was vast and vicious,” she said. “So colossal it killed the witch who wrought it even as it took hold of that wretched mortal woman and her kin. It would dog her and her bloodline, ruin everyone around her that she loved, lay waste to our mother Mara’s tribe. And Mara was her people’s healer, their beating heart. She couldn’t stand by and merely watch. So she worked her own spell, an even larger one—shifting the curse to herself and her own line. It was a tremendous thing, a blazing sacrifice. Something only she could have done.”
I thought of Mara kneeling naked on that icy plateau from the dream, heat rising from her, those ground bones and powders with their patterns in the snow, blood sluicing down her arms. “What was the sacrifice?” I whispered, roiling with dread.
“Twofold, child,” Sorai answered, eyes sliding over to mine. “First, to summon an immaterial force—to give it flesh, make it attend to her—she offered raw material: the burned remnants of my youngest sister, weaned only a few months before. From her ashes, she clothed Death with mortal flesh, made it human enough to reckon with. To bargain with. To be swayed by the temptations of lovely flesh and blood.”
“Her own daughter?” Malina said. “She killed her own daughter for it?”
Sorai’s gray eyes held steady even as her voices dipped into a sibilant hiss. “The power we have isn’t always kind, child. It demands that we do what must be done, for those who can’t do it for themselves. The burden and the gift of the half divine.”
The legend of Mara and the spring god Jarilo she had birthed flicked through my mind; this wasn’t that, but it was something close. Mara had borne something into life, though it wasn’t exactly a son.
“Once Death stood before her, she offered it a trade: if she became its helpmeet, its courtesan and lover, Death would keep the curse at bay. When she wore out—for not even a half-divine woman could walk by Death’s side forever—a daughter of hers from each generation would take up the mantle. And so, from then on, there would always be two. One to carry on our line, the other to become the sacrifice.”
I knew where this was going, could see it, could feel it already. Desperately I scrabbled for anything else to keep the looming truth at bay. “So how are you still alive? Why is everyone young?”
“Because the curse could not be broken—it could merely be waylaid, like damming a river to change its course. Instead of preying on us and those we love, Death would do the opposite and simply pass us by. Whichever sister remained behind would become undying, upon the sacrifice of one of her own daughters. No peaceful death for the remaining daughter, but also no agony. We would stay young and hale forever, and Death would have a bride.”
She reached out and with a fingertip light as a breath, traced my profile from the space between my eyes down to the crests of my lips. All the wispy hairs at the back of my neck stood on end like lightning rods. “And not just any bride, but a singular one, who could weave magic into beauty. One versed in the arts and sciences, music and games, taught to speak of anything. The most exquisite sample of her kind, the brightest candle until she burned down to the wick. Down to the quick.”
“And we all agree to do this?” I whispered hotly. Not even the lapping currents of Sorai’s home-love could still this fury, the idea that someone might wrest Malina from me. “We have to give up our daughters and our sisters, and then live with it forever? How can anything be worse than that? Why don’t we just let it die? Stop having daughters, take the curse to the grave with us?”
“Do you truly think you are the first to have attempted such active problem-solving, child?” she demanded, flat. “We cannot do this. If our line were allowed to die, the curse would simply reach out its barbs and latch onto someone else. It is nearly a living thing in its own right, mindless magic, all hunger and no reason—we thwart it by living. We keep it at bay.”
“Then why did Mama run from it?” Malina asked, and I noticed with a start that she was using a fundamental and an overtone without singing, as if in response to Sorai’s striated voice. “Why didn’t she tell us anything about this? Why did she stop teaching us to gleam?”
“It was as Lisarah says—your mother loved your aunt more than anything. The decision is made within the three, between mother and both daughters, as to which is best equipped to serve. It is a willing sacrifice for all; it must be, for the spell to work as it was wrought. But though they decided together to offer Anais, once it was done your mother could not be consoled. She chose to raise her own daughters outside of coven, alone, with the understanding that she would return you once it was time. She wanted you raised to love each other freely, without knowing that one would have to lose the other. For that, she was willing to sacrifice everything we offer. The safety of the coven, the comforts. The love.”
I thought about Mama’s furies, the alternating tides of her moods, my insides buckling with the understanding of what she had tried to do for us. She’d tried to give us the little snatch of freedom we could have, and it must have cost her beyond anything I could imagine. It might even have been worse than what she was protecting us from.
And she had known. She had known all that time that she would lose one of us, that we would lose each other. It must have hurt so much to love us as we grew older, knowing what she did. Maybe impossible in my case—always twisting away from her, squirming toward the gleam when all she wanted was to protect me while she still could. When I was so much more dangerous than Malina’s music with the glittering firework of my fractals, so much more likely to draw attention.
All of her stories had been distorted, distant, bent like the light from some far-off star. But they had always been true in part, and told from love. And I had let myself sink so far into hating her.
I thought the guilt might choke me.
“And love?” I said thickly, thinking of the story of Anais’s death—Anais who hadn’t truly died, but who had been lost to Mama all the same. “Is it true that love stokes the gleam?”
“No, little one. Faisali simply didn’t know how else to protect you in the outside world. In coven, it is safe for us to gleam as we should—not only safe, but necessary, for us to learn and bloom fully. But on the outside, we must be careful. This world is not one that can accommodate what we are. Faisali could not risk you falling in love and showing some falsely trusted mortal your true nature, for fear of what might happen to you. We can be terrifying in our beauty, outside of the safety of the coven. You could have been taken against your will, to be captured and studied and contained, perhaps even taken somewhere where we couldn’t find you once it came time. And then the curse would rage free.”
Beside me, Malina gave a hitching sigh so deep I turned to her. She’d gone pale, but her cheekbones burned high, like points of candle flame held beneath her skin. “So why . . .” Her voice caught. “Why am I stronger than Iris, then?”
“Because of Naisha, little one.” Sorai cocked her head to the side like some lovely bird of paradise. “Your Natalija, your music teacher. We wanted to respect Faisali’s wishes and let her raise you away from us, but once she stopped teaching you, we couldn’t risk not having at least one of you fully prepared for when the time came. So we sent Naisha to watch over you, to coax your gleam with her nearness, to instruct you silently with her own grace and bearing. Your gleam, Azareen, was the easier to nurture without drawing more attention to you, more prying eyes.”
“That’s why you came to check on us,” I said, realization dawning. “That time in the Arms Square, years ago.”
“Yes. We did not want to ask Faisali to return you to us any earlier than we had to, but at the same time, we could not afford to let your gleam dwindle entirely, Lisarah. I stripped the memory of our visit from you out of respect for Faisali, but allowed the yearning to remain, the desire to seek the gleam, to fan your spark. I made sure you would not forget yourself, even if she could not bring herself to teach you, knowing what it was for.”
“The flowers,” I murmured. “Is that why flowers would still fractal for me? Even if no one else could see it?”
“Yes. A flower is a natural fractal, a perfect, self-contained emblem of life and beauty—something easy for your gleam to latch onto. And then once the interloper attacked your mother and we all set out to trap her, it was time to allow you to remember fully—to let you make your way back to us. We could not guide you, could not force you. In Faisali’s absence, you had to come to us willingly, entirely of your own accord, in order for the sacrifice to function properly once it was time. Because there are only two of you, every iota of your willingness matters that much more, without your mother to form the third point of the triangle and make a binding decision together.”
“So it was Dunja,” I whispered, stomach clenching. “Why would she try to kill Mama?”
“She wants what we have,” Sorai replied bluntly, all her voices dipping low in a crashing, ominous cascade. “I can find no other reason. We tolerate our immortality; she must covet it for herself. She waited for Anais to burn out, as every sacrifice does—and then she tried to kill your mother in order to break the chain of succession, to prevent the mutual choosing that yields the next sacrifice.”
“She’s stealing things, too,” Malina said. “Icons, a saint’s bones, my violin, and one of Iris’s sculptures. Why?”
Sorai’s face went steely. “The shape of her magic is not known to me. We do not know who she is, or how she learned of us at all. But she is strong, strong enough that I needed to hunt her down myself in order to contain her, and that is a rare thing. It took myself and nearly ten of our eldest to trap her, but we have her now.”
I thought of Dunja, that sweet smile, the softness with which she’d spoken to me. “The day I saw her, though . . . she and Mama hugged, before they fought. Could they have known each other, somehow?”
The tight corners of her mouth softened. “Perhaps that was how she learned of us. Faisali would have been fastidious about secrecy, but being closed off from coven is a devastation of loneliness. We belong with each other, and the ache of solitude is strong. Perhaps she slipped up the once, became friendly with this woman, told her about us. In any case, she would not speak when we caught her.” Her voice turned to tar. “And now she certainly cannot.”
I thought of Fjolar, his stories of his witch mother. Maybe he had been tied to Dunja somehow, wrapped up in Mama’s death just like Malina had thought. “Sorai, there was someone else the past few days. A boy. He recognized the gleam, wanted me to do it for him. Is it possible that—”
Her face sank into uncanny stillness. The roses hovering around us froze, then vibrated like tuning forks in response to her tension. “Tell me of him. Everything.”
She listened stonily as I spoke about him, a distant storm brewing in her eyes. I explained how he’d asked me to gleam for him, how his presence made me flare stronger.
Finally, she said, “It sounds as if the woman’s plan was pronged, and somehow this boy was meant to siphon off your power while she did the rest of her work. It would explain how she managed to elude us for so long, if she was working in concert with another. You said he told you his mother was a witch—perhaps she instructed her son to beguile you, then bring you to her when she was ready, as some final element to her spell. Many spells are blood-fueled; she may have meant to kill you as an offering, to power hers. But you are safe here with us, and we will find him as we found her.”
So that was what he had wanted from me. It was stupid, that it should feel like such a burning betrayal. I had barely known him, and he had left me so stripped and weak that last time. Yet it still ached heavily in the pit of my stomach, the idea that he hadn’t wanted me in any true way. That he had just been playacting for my benefit, luring me into a cage with blinding smiles and peacock displays.
That he had never thought I was both beautiful and wild.
“And now?” I clenched my teeth to keep my voice from breaking. “What happens next?”
“Now you decide, children, which of you will be the sacrifice. Without the power of Faisali’s consent, her willingness to give up a daughter, there must be no wavering between you. You must determine it between yourselves. There can be no cracks between you, not even a hairline’s worth of fissure.”
My chest felt like a pounded anvil, and beside me Malina dropped her face in her hands and whispered something, a single word that I couldn’t make out.
My throat was so tight I could barely breathe. “And if we don’t?”
“If you cannot come to an agreement, either between yourselves or by competing against one another in a show of skill, Death will lapse permanently on its end of the bargain. Faisali will wake to endless agony; I can barely hold her quiet as it is, even with my will bearing down on her. And the curse will spread like wildfire to anyone else you love. To anyone that any of us have ever loved, if they still live.”
Jovan’s, Nevena’s, and Niko’s faces flashed in my mind, one by one.
And Luka, with his quirked half smile, the sun-bleached sheaf of summer hair falling into his hazel eyes.
Then finally Mama, when her eyes were soft, when she was the living, breathing center of every room rather than a mute, rose-smothered mound trapped between deathlessness and agony.
“So how long do we have, then?” I asked her. “Is there a deadline? Some sort of point of no return?”
Sorai spread her hands. “There may be. In the past, the transfer from one sacrifice to another has always been nearly immediate. As soon as one expired, the next one would take her place in a matter of days, at most. We are already past time, and I can only fend off the curse for so much longer until Faisali wakes. And once she wakes, it will be done. Our time will have run out. So be quick about deciding between yourselves, fledglings. Be as quick as you can.”