SHIMORA LED US BACK TO ONE OF THE GUEST ROOMS, THE atrium echoing with the stony silence between us three. There were others of us here—I could nearly feel them through the ribbons—but they’d all withdrawn. We passed no one else on our way down to the third floor. Malina wouldn’t speak or look at me, even as Shimora swung open a baroque bronze door into a haven of pewter and plum. The walls were silvery gray, with a textured, violet accent of velvety fleur-de-lis wallpaper behind the two king beds’ cushioned, dove-gray headboards. A dripping crystal orb like a fractaled snowball hung above the bed, shedding gentle light, and I looked away from it as it flickered, eager to split and multiply under my gaze.
Lina perched on the edge of the plush purple ottoman against the footboard, her back rigid, while I slid sideways onto one of the beds, spreading my palms over the impossibly soft, peeled-back duvet, worked with glinting silver thread. Everything was so beautiful here, so forcefully luxurious. How had Mama ever resigned herself to the way we lived in Cattaro? No wonder she had accepted Jovan’s gifts despite herself, and labored so intently over her tailored dresses. After growing up in this silken cocoon, our whole world must have seemed so ragamuffin to her, all uneven seams and stains.
“Where does it happen?” I said stiffly. “If we—once we decide to do it, where would we go?”
“Into the Ice Cave. It’s in a fold of stone near Bobotov Kuk, the highest point of the Durmitor range. Over eight thousand feet up.” She nodded her chin out the window. “You can see Bobotov Kuk from here, that wedge of stone like a pyramid balanced on its end.”
I didn’t look. Instead I tilted my head back against the soft give of the headboard, wishing I could sink through it. I felt like a whole cairn of stones had stacked up inside me, so heavy with grief and resignation that I couldn’t imagine ever standing up again. I knew we had to do this; there wasn’t a choice.
And it would have to be me. I’d spent so long testing myself against our mother, flinging myself against the rock of her until it left me first bloody and then scarred. Even if I was softer inside than I had ever thought, most of me was tough as resin, scorching and malleable as the gather of my molten glass. I would last, and serve for years and years, as long as I could.
Especially if it meant Malina would live.
It had to be me.
Tears welled hot, pooling in my lashes. I dashed them angrily away, taking deep, slow breaths as Shimora lingered in the doorway of our room. “Is there anything else I can get you?” she said, stroking the sculpted fall of copper curls over her shoulder, her nude nails sparkling in the chandelier’s light. “Anything you need? Anything we can—”
“What is it like?” I broke in. “What happens to the sacrifice?”
Shimora drew her glossed lip between her teeth, shaking her head. “I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know. None of us do. The chosen leave their bodies behind in the cave, fall into a deep sleep from which they never wake. When their service is over, they simply stop breathing. And during the sleep, though they don’t age, their bodies change. Their hair and nails grow, their muscles even strengthen. We cut their hair for them sometimes, when it grows too long.”
“Their muscles strengthen? Wouldn’t they atrophy? Isn’t that what happens in a coma?”
She gave me a wistful smile. “It’s not a coma, dear heart. The chosen’s mind and soul are elsewhere, and wherever they are—whatever the essence of her is doing—it changes the clay of her body. That’s all that I can tell you. It’s all that we know.”
We fell quiet. With a little nod to us, Shimora slipped out and gently clicked the door shut behind her, leaving us alone. Malina and I sat silently together. Everything felt impossibly vivid, and just as impossibly slow. If we’d had an hourglass, I thought that we’d be able to track each grain’s descent, and that each would take an hour to fall.
And then I said, “It’s going to be me,” at the same time as Malina said, “I’m not letting you do it.”
She whipped her head over her shoulder, and we stared at each other. Her lips tightened, a muscle in her jaw twitching, and then she sprang up, fists clenched. “I knew it,” she spat. “It’s just like you to go ahead and decide for the both of us, as if it doesn’t even matter what I say.”
“That’s not fair,” I protested. “You’re making it sound like I want to do this.”
“You do want to do it,” she accused, “because it means you can keep on being Iris the Martyr. Because, what, you think you know everything? You think maybe you deserve this somehow? I think you bought into all of . . . all of Mama’s bullshit over the years. I think you really believe you’re worth less than me.”
“That’s not—I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.” My entire face was tingling. “I just want to protect you—”
“I never asked you to protect me!” She stalked to the center of the room, turning in a furious little circle. I’d never seen her so frantic before, like a doll wound up too tight. “We’re twins, Iris! You’re not even my older sister. I’m the older one. And I’m the one who . . .” She took a shuddering breath, wringing her curls with one hand. “I’m the one who got to have everything I wanted. I’m the one who always let you take every fall.”
I bit down to keep the tears back, but I couldn’t stop my lips from quivering. “What do you mean?”
She turned her back to me. “I thought it was my fault,” she said, muffled. “My fault that my gleam didn’t go when yours went, even after Mama stopped teaching us. Because I fell in love, Riss. I fell in love, and Mama never even punished me for not fading like you did. She never tried to break me down, to make me hate myself. To make me feel unworthy of anybody’s love. I think she thought she didn’t need to, not like she did with you.” She huffed out a bitter half laugh. “She thought I was the safe one.”
“I . . .” Something like a firestorm began boiling inside me. “What? You fell in love? Was it—” I clenched my fist against my mouth, thinking of all the stolen glances between Luka and Lina, the way she’d stepped effortlessly into his arms to hug or dance, the way he’d kissed the gleaming top of her head. My insides quivered like they might cave in. “Was it Luka?” I finished, in a dry whisper.
She whirled around to face me. “Of course it wasn’t Luka! Luka loves you, he has since we were little.”
Love.
Luka loved me.
It felt like I’d spent years trying to remember a word that was always poised on the tip of my tongue, yet just the slightest bit out of mental reach. It had been the secret center of everything he’d given me—every gift of an exotic flower, every math lesson that allowed me to translate a fractal notion into glassblown life, every warm imprint of his hand on the back of my neck—and I’d always averted my gaze, let it settle in my blind spot, dubbed it best-friendship. I had known it, but I couldn’t let myself know. Because I’d sworn to my mother and sister that I wouldn’t. So I’d let myself live in that gray with him, in the shaky middle ground from which I wasn’t technically betraying anyone. But gray was gray. He’d been offering me color all that time, and I’d spent all that time turning it away.
How could I have done that to him, along with everything else? How could one person hurt another in such a full, wide spectrum of ways?
Lina’s face softened at the look on mine. “I know, Riss. I know you wanted to love him back, so bad—I could see it every day. It made me want to die, how much it hurt you. But you listened to Mama, you actually did what she wanted. Even while you fought her about all the things that didn’t matter, you did exactly what you were told. You wouldn’t let yourself love him, or anyone. You were always alone, except for me.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “What are you talking about? I may not have been allowed to have him, but you didn’t have anyone, either. That was how it was. You and me, alone together.”
“I wasn’t alone!” she shot back. “I had Niko!”
“I had Niko, too. We weren’t best friends, but still, that’s not the same as love.”
She groaned in frustration. “God, Riss, listen to me for once. It is the same, it’s exactly the same. I love her, okay? I’ve loved her since I was fifteen. Longer than that, really. And she—she loves me, too. We . . . we just told each other a few days ago. Really, finally said it, for the first time.”
The shock was so numbing and intense I felt like someone had rung some massive church bell inside me. On some level, I found it hilarious that this should rock me more than anything that had happened so far, but there we were. I actually shook my head, as if that would clear it. “You—you and Niko? You’re in love? Why . . .” I scrubbed my hands over my face, stretching it tight over the bones beneath. “Why wouldn’t you tell me that?”
“Because I felt so guilty for betraying all of us,” she said softly. “Falling in love, sharing my gleam with Niko, singing for her every day. Doing all the things that Mama said put us in danger, when you didn’t get to have anything. Not love, not magic. And also because you’re so much like her, sometimes.”
“Like who?”
“Like Mama. All that control, all the time. You make your mind up about things, and it’s like concrete setting. Whatever impression gets left, whatever indent, it’s there forever. The way you think I’m a coward because I don’t want out of Cattaro like you do, for one. Because I don’t think about Japan like it means freedom and salvation and everything Montenegro doesn’t mean for you. Don’t shake your head, I know it’s true. I’ve heard you feeling it at me. And I don’t mind that you think those things about me—we’re not one person, Riss, we can feel different things—but Niko . . .” She glanced up at me, suddenly tentative. “I didn’t know what you would think of us together.”
I couldn’t believe the notion had never crossed my mind before—that the reason Malina barely noticed men might be that they genuinely weren’t interesting to her. I’d thought it was growing up around Mama that had done it, the endless castigation, the relentless shaming. Of course, that had been meant for me—Mama hadn’t seen the need to chisel away at her more malleable girl, or maybe couldn’t bring herself to do it to us both—and it had worked.
I’d never fully given anyone my heart.
But Lina was my sister, my twin, the first thing I’d seen when I opened my eyes in our shared womb. I’d held her by the hand before we were even thrust into this world. I should have felt the need to look deeper, to think of her as more than the most vulnerable extension of me, a weaker limb I needed to favor. Especially when that was so far-flung from the truth.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” I said softly. “I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me. But if you had, I would have been happy for you, Lina, I swear.”
“And you don’t care? That she’s a girl?”
“Of course I don’t. Does Luka care that his sister’s with a girl?” I replied tartly, as all the furtive half gestures, the bit-back sentences, fell into place.
She winced. “He wanted to tell you. And he almost did, a bunch of times. He thought it was wrong of us to hide it from you, but Niko made him swear he wouldn’t say anything until I did. Only because that’s the way I wanted it.” She huffed out a little breath. “She hated hiding it, so much. And you know how hard Niko can hate things. I spent a lot of time paying penance by watching horror movies with her. A lot.”
“So what were you waiting for? What did you think I was going to do?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t want you to judge me for being so indulgent, for letting myself do what I wanted. And sometimes . . . sometimes you make things bigger than they need to be. I was a little afraid you’d, I don’t know, be loud about it once you got on board? Throw me a one-person parade, just so you could fight anyone else who judged me for it.”
I took a shaky breath. “I might be Iris the Martyr, but this does make you a bit of an asshole, Lina.”
She sputtered out a little laugh. “Yeah. I guess it does.”
“What is it really like, though?” I twisted my hands together in my lap. “Being in love, I mean.”
She crawled over the bed to meet me halfway, then laid her head tentatively on my shoulder. I wriggled down farther to rest my cheek against her crown. “I don’t know if I can tell you about love in general. But I can sing you what it’s like for me. Being in love with her.”
I nodded once. I could feel her smile against my shoulder, and as I closed my eyes she began to hum the fundamentals, overtones layering in. Usually her singing transcribed directly into emotion, but this time it was even more vivid, images blooming on the insides of my eyelids, as if she were showing me what she’d seen as well as felt. Maybe being here was making her stronger, too.
I caught a mosaic of glimpses, little glittering stained-glass pieces that each reflected some part of Malina’s love. There was Niko in a white triangle bikini top, her slight midriff taut and brown beneath it, a jewel winking in the shadow of her navel. A sarong was draped below the tuck of her waist, and she danced for my sister, the slim flare of her hips rippling to some beat I couldn’t hear, each dainty foot perfectly placed. Her silky hair fell over one sloe eye, but the other was large and dark and heavy-lidded, narrowed with her smile. I could feel the exact way it had made my sister’s heart race.
Then Niko breaking the water’s surface, her chin tipped up and mouth opening for breath, slick hair glossy as an otter’s, water trembling in her lashes.
Niko feeding my sister a dewy, amber slice of peach, laughingly pulling it out of reach before she finally let Malina have it, sealing it with a kiss.
Niko’s face drawn and blurred with tears, her little hands clenched into furious fists before Malina caught and uncurled them, brushing her lips over the knuckles. When had that been, I wondered vaguely; maybe after her and Luka’s mother died.
A hundred flashing glimpses of Nikoleta Damjanac, and then a hundred more, of her swimming and laughing and dancing with my sister, their fingers always entwined.
And then a final image of Niko’s sleeping profile: the pert outline of nose and lips against the pillow, her lashes fanned like a paintbrush, her fist baby-curled beneath the chin. And with it, the first swell of love my sister had ever felt, the moment in which she realized that this was the girl who held her heart. That was what the smell downstairs had made her remember, this precise moment of falling.
The devastating and glorious yielding of all control.
“That’s lovely, Lina,” I whispered, my voice thick. The illusion fell away as Malina’s singing fractured into tears, until she sobbed into my shoulder. “Shhh. Don’t.”
“I don’t want to leave her, Riss.” Her voice shuddered. “She’ll hurt so much without me. But I can’t let you go, either. You should have your chance to have that too, to feel how much you’re worth. I’ve already had it, so many years of love. It’s your turn now. It’s time for you.”
“No.” I could feel the resolve hardening within as I said it, like cooling glass taking on its final shape. “She can’t do without you; I could feel that much. You’ll have each other, and Luka—he’ll find someone else. It should be me who goes.”
Lina struggled upright, balling her fists against her thighs. “I won’t let you. Not this time. And even if I were willing, think what it would be like for me. I’d have to have babies, Riss, to carry on our line. How could I do that to Niko, drag her into all of this, make her watch me groom my children—ours, maybe, if she were still with me after all that—for sacrifice? Would she even stay with me? And if she did, how could I live and watch her get old, die in front of me? I won’t do it, I won’t. I’ll go—you stay. You have all the things you’ve never had.”
I drew away from her, unsteady. An ache began building in my center, growing outward, until it sank through my skin and bowed my skeleton down toward the earth.
“Really?” I whispered. “After everything you just told me, everything you’ve already gotten to have that I didn’t—you won’t even let me make this one choice? After all that fighting I did, all the struggling, all the barbed-wire shit that meant nothing while you hid in plain sight? Now you won’t even let me be the one to sacrifice, if that’s what I want? I don’t want to be the one to stay behind.”
She shook her head, her eyes pooling, pale and clear as spring water. “You’re not taking the hit for the both of us, not again. Not ever. I’m the prepped one, anyway. I’m the one they groomed just in case, you know?”
Resignation thudded over me, heavy as soil dropped on a casket. “Then I suppose we’ll see what sort of contest happens when sisters can’t decide.”
“ONE DAY TO prepare,” Sorai said through her teeth. This time she stood as we knelt before her on the cushions, the roses wheeling around us. Her eyes glittered with tamped-down fury, and the skin beneath them was dusky with fatigue. “That is all the time I can give you foolish, self-indulgent fledglings—my hold frays already, the curse bucks beneath my will. Faisali has tried to wake four times since I saw you last. Four times in two hours.”
Guilt poured over me, prickly with panic, and beside me Malina made a low sound of distress. We were putting so much at risk because we couldn’t come together the one time it truly mattered. But there was no splitting the difference here. I wouldn’t let her go willingly any more than she would let me.
“Death will be your judge, and you will agree to abide by the decision. There can be no dissent once that is done, do you understand? Not even an inkling of it.”
“I do,” I said softly, my throat tight. Beside me, Malina nodded silently. We weren’t holding hands this time.
“Then go to bed, rise early, and begin. I will send someone for each of you. If you truly wish to fight each other for this, you will do it tomorrow night.”
“What . . .” I cleared my throat. “What will it be like?”
“After your lessons, you will be readied for the ritual banquet, where you will then perform. Everything done to you—and everything you do—shall be in the service of beauty. That is your work now; make yourselves lovely. Azareen has the advantage here, Lisarah. She has been learning from Naisha since she was a child, where you have been given far too much free rein. So, you will do everything in your power tomorrow to smooth all those jagged edges—in which you seem to take such pride—into something fit to be beheld and beloved by Death.”
Even though I’d decided to do this, committed myself fully to fighting to win, everything in me bucked in protest at that imperative. In my lap, I curled my hands into tight fists. I could do it, if that was what it took to save her. I could force myself soft.
“What about me?” Malina asked quietly.
“As I said, you are already primed to win. But your sister has been fierce like you never have. Where she should learn softness, your challenge will be to grow truly bold; now is the time to shed that meek veneer, show us what truly lies beneath.”
“Can I . . .” Malina’s voice cracked. “I’d like another bedroom, please. If you have one to spare, I mean?”
I could feel my insides splitting, cleaving in two. So this was heartbreak. At least now I knew what that felt like.