THEY DRESSED ME IN FLOWERS, AND WOUND ME IN THORNS.
“Wild as she is,” Sorai had said, “she may as well look like something that clawed up out of the dirt on its own.”
Ylessia had bathed me in water scented with meadowsweet, her cheekbone eggplant-bruised where one of my branches must have whipped her in the face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her as I clung to the edges of the tub, bobbing in the froth of bubbles with my skin flushed and slick. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
But she wouldn’t answer, or even look at me. Even when she finally caught my eyes in the mirror as she dressed my hair, I couldn’t quite decipher her gaze. There was an awestruck sort of terror there, that much I could see, but beneath it . . .
It looked like a vast, scorching vat of jealousy.
When she was done I looked like I’d crawled naked through the world’s primordial forest, dressing myself only with what I could pick or pluck. Gossamer-green folds wound strategically around me, as if a spider had spun a web of silk and leaves, laced together with curls of ivy. My hair was braided loosely up and away from my face, beneath a crown of purple morning glories and their heart-shaped leaves, with wicked little berry sprigs tucked in here and there. Torques of thorns surrounded my biceps and my wrists, and something like barbed corn silk twined around my calves, like the straps of the gladiator sandals I’d worn in what felt like someone else’s life.
And my eyes were blackened with such a dense, matte liner that my irises all but glowed, like something that crept silent and hungry behind the night-rustle of leaves. Even my lips glistened a diluted red, as if I’d licked them with blood still lingering in my mouth.
It was the most beautiful I’d ever been, everything so tailored to me I might have grown it from my body, but I couldn’t quite tell why it all felt so wrong.
“There,” Ylessia said flatly, stepping away from me. “As lovely as you’ll ever be, if we can call it that.”
I reached up to touch the deceptively simple tangle of my hair; my hand sparkled violet and green where it caught the light, from the shimmering minerals in the lotion she’d rubbed on me. It smelled too sweet for something just meant to moisturize; curious, I brought the back of my hand to my mouth and gave it a little lick. It tasted like the candied violets Mama used to make as a garnish for her spring sunset sorbets.
“You sugared me?” I demanded. Somehow this was infinitely more terrifying than anything had been so far, this proof on my tongue that I wasn’t myself any longer, but an offering. And that was the fount of all the dissonance, I abruptly understood. They may have decked me out like something that could sting or prick, but that was purely for show. I wasn’t meant as a thorned rose but as a lychee fruit, all tender sweetness once the spikes peeled back.
And I had not just volunteered, but fought so hard for this.
It would be better, I reminded myself. It would be worth it. Whatever happened, it would be to me and not to my sister.
“Not to worry, Lisarah,” Ylessia replied tartly. “Nothing can truly sweeten all those years of brine beneath. I assure you it will not sink in too deep.”
I held her eyes in the mirror until she dropped her gaze. “Is there any particular reason,” I began, girding my voice with steel, “that you’ve now decided to be such a spectacular bitch? It’s not really the quality one hopes for in a great-great-great however-many-times grandmother. Especially not when getting ready to step willingly off a cliff.”
Her face softened a measure, and she opened her mouth as if to say something before closing it with a neat click of her teeth. “It isn’t your fault,” she finally said, low. “You’re right, you don’t deserve this from me. Especially not now.”
“So, what is it, enlighten me. It might be my last request.”
She shook her head once, and turned away. “It’ll be another few hours yet,” she said quietly. “Sorai must ready herself for the ritual, as well, along with the rest of us. Enjoy what you can until then. Enjoy all of it.”
I sank onto the ottoman as she left, feeling more desperately alone and scared than I had ever been.
I COULDN’T THINK what else to do, so I made myself eat as dusk gathered outside, dousing the mountain peaks that had burned bloody with the force of a high-altitude sunset. I wasn’t really hungry, even with six days of barely considering food since all of this had begun, but if I did it—if I won—who knew if eating was something I’d ever get to do again.
And if I lost, I couldn’t see how I would want to ever eat. Or live. Even though the choice wouldn’t be mine by then.
They’d left me a silver catering cart loaded with delicacies, like some sort of decadent prisoner’s last meal. There were fat strawberries, hollowed out and filled with white chocolate cream; I ate those first, swallowing them nearly whole. Then tiny glazed doughnuts spread with foie gras and sweet, gritty fig; beef tartare topped with a trembling orange yolk and spicy buttered toast points; miniature brownies with truffle shells tucked inside that burst and bled hazelnut cream when prodded with a fork.
After what felt like a lifetime of refusing Mama’s food to make the most pointless point, once I got going I couldn’t get enough. I washed all of it down with whole glasses of cold water, flavored sweet and tart with an elderflower cordial.
I might have eaten myself to bursting if one of the wrought-iron inlays in the wall hadn’t shuddered, then swung open like a seamless panel to let my sister in, and Naisha right behind her.
Lina and I gaped at each other for a silent moment. Her hair was pinned up in elaborate curls, beneath a slim, gleaming circlet like a halo. She wore a gown cut low over her creamy spill of cleavage, a metallic black bodice above a full skirt like chain mail—if every link were a perfect feather worked intricately from platinum. Bracelets shaped like feathers circled each wrist, too, and though her eyes were lined as mine, it was precise, the black swooping into curlicues toward her temples. Her cheeks were dramatically flushed, and her lips gilded.
“Are you meant to be channeling a bird?” I said, just as she asked, “What even is that, like sexier Poison Ivy?”
We burst into tears at exactly the same time, and she flung herself into my arms. Above her shoulder, I saw Naisha wipe at her narrow, finely chiseled face, her eyes swimming with tears.
I could think about what that meant in a moment.
But first I held Malina tight, cheek pressed against hers, both of us bubbling with sobs and laughter. “I’m supposed to be a dark angel, I think?” she said. “You know, because I, uh, sing like one? It would be a little hilarious if only I could breathe.”
“Right, of course, and I’m a very dangerous wildflower. But an edible one, that’s the important part.” I sighed deeply into her hair, breathing in its warm scent. Everything in me loosened, as if a terrible coil tightened around the barrel of my insides had been cut free. “I’m so glad you’re here with me, Lina. But what are you doing here? I didn’t think you’d—I didn’t think we’d even see each other, before.”
I jerked my chin at Naisha, who looked like Eve before the apple: a floor-length cream sheath clinging to her fine-boned frame, her platinum hair loose and festooned with flowers and glistening strips of snakeskin along with the scent-ribbons. “And why are you here? Were you Lina’s fluffer? I really drew the short straw with Ylessia, I will say that much.”
Lina drew back away from me, her face shuttering as she shook her head. “No, it was Xenia who readied me.” She nearly spat out the word; clearly she had enjoyed it about as much as I did. “Naisha came to see me after that, Riss. Something’s happening here—it’s not what we think. It’s not what they told us. They’re lying, they all are. And especially her.”
The ribbons in my hair nearly writhed in protest at the maligning of Sorai. “What do you mean? Why would she lie? And wouldn’t you have heard it before now, if something was that wrong?”
“I have been hearing something off, ever since we got here, but it’s all so . . . everything’s so muddied, there’s so many of them, it’s hard to hear properly. I still don’t understand what’s happening, exactly, but Naisha has something to show us. While they’re all still busy.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, hugging myself. Everything in me thrashed against doubting Sorai. Even listening to Malina was beginning to become physically painful, like a fit of ague.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Naisha. “Why are you betraying her, if that’s what this is?”
She pressed her rosy lips together, her eyes huge and mournful. “Because I watched you grow up,” she said simply. “Malina, mostly, but you too, Iris. I watched you be free, and saw the happiness you managed to find in the world despite all your limitations. With your own names, without being molded into Lisarah and Azareen. Without being curated like the rest of us. So I want to—I want to show you something. I don’t belong to her like I once did, and I won’t again for a while yet. I still remember myself from all those years, enough to want to give you a choice, a true one, while I still can.”
I frowned at her. “I don’t understand. What are you trying to say?”
“I can’t—” She smacked a fist into one palm, groaning in frustration. “I can’t go further than this. If you want to know, we have to go now. We’re running out of time.”
Lina took my hand, squeezing hard. “I don’t think she can say anything more, Iris. But I trust her; she sounds right. So I’m going to go with her, but you don’t have to, because this time it is your choice. Trust Sorai, or come with me and find out whatever it is.” She spread her hands, eyes guileless and bright. “Whatever you want to do.”
I took a long breath and let it out in a quivering rush.
“I want to go with you.”
THE CHALET WAS practically a warren, a terrarium of secret passageways carved into its walls. I wondered how the whole thing didn’t collapse onto itself, riddled as its foundation was with holes, and whether Sorai knew of all or any of these.
I followed the metallic swish of Lina’s feathers, which caught the little light there was, and the clink of the rattling key ring Naisha carried. We bore sideways and down, taking winding, narrow stairways until we reached what had to be the basement, the air drafty-cold and smelling of dank, pressed dirt.
There, Naisha paused in front of a weathered wooden door, bolted in three places. I could hear her hitching breath as she worked three different brass keys into the locks, grunting in a very ungraceful fashion at the effort of turning them.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I whispered behind her and Malina, frantic, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “What if she knows we’re here? What if she knows that I’m—that I’m betraying her like this—”
“That’s the ribbons talking,” Naisha whispered back, leaning into the final lock. “I took a few of Malina’s out, so it’s not quite so bad for her. That’s why I could come to you at all before I rejoin the others. Mine were taken out while I was posing as Natalija; they’re too much bright magic to be cloaked by my gleam, even under a masquerade glamour as complex as mine, and your mother would have seen them through it. So, I had time to get to know my own mind a bit. Unclouded by all the love.”
“Why wouldn’t you have known your own—”
The door finally screeched open, and I caught my breath.
The room was full of glowing ice, a giant block shot through with the black roses of Sorai’s will. They streaked through the expanse like a network of oily veins—or like prison bars for the woman trapped within. She had frozen in a half crouch, leaning forward, her arms flung up with fingers splayed and white hair flaring around her like the sun’s corona. Her dainty little jaw jutted forward, and her eyes were open wide and unmistakably full of fury. She was so close to the ice that I could make out the creases in her delicate lips, the individual golden threads of her eyelashes, and the silver striations in her gray eyes.
It was Dunja. And like all the other women here, she also had our eyes.
“She’s one of us,” I whispered, pressing my palms against the ice. It was blisteringly cold but didn’t leave my hand damp or stick to my skin. It wasn’t real ice, any more than the roses were actual flowers, but instead another manifestation of Sorai’s will, of her desire to hold this girl captive. Because she was a girl, maybe only a little older than us, if that.
“And not just that, I think,” Malina said softly, leaning forward until the tip of her nose nearly touched the ice. From that vantage point, I could see the shocking similarity between her profile and Dunja’s, the identically gentle slope of their noses and the sharp double crests of their upper lips. “Look at her, really look. Do you remember that picture of Mama’s sister, Anais? It’s her. The one who was supposed to be the last sacrifice; the one they said had burned out right before all this started. Her hair is white, but it’s her.”
We both turned to Naisha, who gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut, then gave a single flinch of a nod.
“Why would you all have lied about that?” I demanded. “And why would she have tried to kill our mother?”
Naisha shook her head miserably, her mouth opening and closing without sound. Her face was leached of color, save for two spots burning overbright on her cheeks, and beads of sweat shimmered above her upper lip. She looked like a tubercular Victorian bride in her last gasp.
“I don’t know.” Lina laid her own hand flat against the ice. “Naisha clearly can’t say, look at her. But I think it means they lied about a lot of things. And I don’t think she was the one who tried to kill Mama, either.”
“Why would you say that?”
She turned to me, her face bathed in the reflected glow of the ice, as if the woman inside was luminous somehow, shedding her own light. “We only think it was her at all because that’s what Sorai told us, right? But we know Mama saw her twice, even went to visit her at that hotel. And more than that . . . this is Mama’s sister, her own twin. Would you ever have tried to kill me, Riss? Because nothing you did could bring me to that. I would cheat and lie and steal to keep you safe. Kill, even, if I had to, but never you. And I think you’d do the same for me.”
Swallowing tears, I remembered the way Mama had hugged this woman, clung to her. The way they’d whispered into each other’s ears. And I believed her; I believed my sister.
“What do we do now?” I asked her.
She set her jaw. “Now we set her free, and then we see what happens.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Are you? Because it’ll have to be you who does it. I can’t sing to something that can’t hear me, I think, and Naisha told me what you did with the fractal wisteria. Maybe you can try it again, whatever you did that time.”
The doubts still spun like a maelstrom inside me, even with the evidence of lies right before my eyes. And it was that, more than anything, that somehow made me want to do it—the fact that I couldn’t even trust my own mind. I could see Naisha’s struggle now—she’d wrapped both arms around herself and shook in place like a last frail autumn leaf, her mouth twisted in a rictus—and remembered her face all those years ago in the Arms Square when she stood next to Sorai, her features so smooth even as don’t tell me what to do resounded beneath them. If she had fought so hard to bring us here, we owed it to her to forge ahead.
And if this really was our aunt suspended in front of us, the least we could do was hear what she had to say.
I closed my eyes and pushed into that inward reach, struggling to frame what I wanted, to force it outward into the heart of the world. It was harder this time, without Malina’s song to goad me, to make me certain of what shape my will wanted to take and what my goal was—and feeling my faltering, she began to sing. The battle march of it fortified me, stealing into the crumbling cracks of my own foundation like ivy twining through a building and shoring it up.
“What is that?” I forced out through my teeth.
“It’s defiance,” she said. “It’s what you used to sound like when you and Mama fought.”
“I sounded like a bagpipe war song? Could be worse.”
Fragile little buds of wisteria unfurled from where my palms touched the ice, and with another fierce push that made all the veins in my body expand with the effort—free this woman, free her, let her loose, want it more than anything—I drove my will into the ice block’s weakest points, the ones emptiest of Sorai’s roses. Cracks raced through the surface as if it had been tapped along a faultline with a chisel and a mallet—and without warning the whole of it shattered, raining winking crystal particles that vanished before they hit the floor.
Lina and I had both reflexively flinched away, shielding our faces from the fallout, while Naisha cowered against the door behind us. When we turned back, Dunja stood free, blinking slowly like something ancient and predatory waking from a long sleep.
Despite myself, I pressed my back against the wall as she picked her way toward us, hips rolling, precise as a tightrope walker. This close, I could see all the finer details of her face. Her eyebrows were as white as her hair, and her face was shaped sweetly, exactly like my sister’s, with the same cherry-cleft lower lip.
“Iris,” she said to me in that low, rich voice. “Malina. Quite absurdly trussed up, the both of you, but still so very lovely. Which is to be expected, but still—no harm in admiring my nieces.” Her eyes slid behind us, over to Naisha. “And I see you have a partially willing accomplice. Which is better than none, I suppose. Even if she might collapse at any moment, by the looks of it.”
“Please tell them everything,” Naisha whispered. “I . . . I have to leave. I can’t hold on much longer, but I swear I won’t—I swear I’ll keep this secret until you get them out. That much I can do for them.”
“Do it, then,” Dunja snapped. “And keep as far away from her as you can. Blend with the others. She can’t see you quivering like this, or she’ll know something’s afoot.”
Naisha nodded once and, throwing a last plaintive look at me and Lina, fled back into the corridors.
Lina’s hand sought out mine; our aunt wasn’t frightening, exactly, but she had such an aura of power to her, of a different breed entirely than Sorai’s. It crackled like ozone in the air before a rainfall, sharp and anticipatory, prickly on my skin. Still reeling from the effort of will that had freed her, I struggled to think what I wanted to ask her, where to even start.
She was examining me now, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “You set me free, with the infinite bloom. I thought only she could use that, and I’ve never seen any but the first nine tiers actually manifesting will. I wonder what makes you different. . . .”
“Why aren’t you dead?” Malina broke in. “Or with Death?”
“I was with him,” Dunja said, her tone laced with such longing my stomach knotted with sympathy. “And I should have been the final one. That was what your mother and I decided, between the two of us. That it would end with us, that we would be the last. That there would be no more sacrifice.”
“But how?” I strained to understand. “One of us would have had to take your place, to keep Mara’s bargain with Death. To counterweigh the curse, so that no one we loved would die without dying.”
“Is that what they told you?” Her face went stark and bitter. “That there was a curse of some kind, that we do this for some noble purpose?”
Malina and I glanced at each other, then she nodded. “Sorai told us that—”
Without warning Dunja’s head whipped up, arching her throat, like an animal catching a high-pitched, distant sound. “It’s starting very soon,” she said grimly. “Not yet, but soon. They’ll come looking for you within the hour, perhaps less. There’s no time now for explanations at your leisure. I can explain it all once I have you away from here. Away from her.”
“But if one of us doesn’t go tonight, Mama will wake up to agony, and the curse—”
She flashed forward and caught me by the jaw, her grip like steel, but so precise it didn’t hurt. “There’s no curse, sweetness,” she said through her teeth. “Just Mara’s simple bargain with Death: one daughter every generation, in exchange for her own immortality and that of all her other daughters. Your mother is only undead because Mara herself attacked her, and then suspended her in a deathless loop—to give both of you reason enough to offer willing sacrifice, without the requisite years of being brainwashed by all her poisonous love. Unlike you, daughters raised in coven don’t need to be incentivized. You’ve seen them all; you’ve seen what it took from Naisha to rebel. They’re trained from birth to be pliant, lovely, flawlessly obedient.”
Still held captive in her hand, I stared into her crystalline eyes. They seemed to go endlessly deep, made me think of the infinite lattice of carbon in diamonds. I could feel the wisp of her breath on my face, and it somehow seemed uncanny that she even needed to breathe. “How is that possible, when Mara was the first sacrifice? Her daughter, Sorai, said—”
“It’s entirely possible, on account of that being another whole-spun lie for your benefit. Your ‘Sorai’ is Mara—that’s the honorific we all used for her. The highest, the first mother, the one who begat us all and then ensnared Death into letting her sell us to him.”
“She’s not lying,” Malina said, her voice abstracted with concentration. “She sounds like glass rung with a spoon. Nothing muddy here at all.”
“I’m honored to offer my fetching cadences to you, little pretty,” Dunja said dryly, dipping into a mock curtsy. “And I’m glad to know you can even hear me, with that love-struck garbage in your hair. I assume it’s because you’ve only had a few days with it, it hasn’t taken root properly. You may want to please her terribly, but you don’t yet have to do it; entertaining the notion of revolt doesn’t make you feel as if defiance or betrayal would tear you apart from within. The ribbons are dipped in your soul perfume, and each of our scents has a drop of her wretched come-hither blood in it. It’s the first way we become tied to her, an open conduit through which she compels love. That’s how she can sense you through them, beckon you toward her.”
“Why would Mama have put them in for us, then?” I asked.
“Oh, try to keep up, baby witch,” she snapped at me. Her porcelain-doll face was so unsettling from this close up, the youthful delicacy of our own age paired with those deep, distant eyes. “Of course she didn’t give you ribbons—that would have been one of the coven, to set everything spinning in motion before they tried to catch me. Your mother was attempting to hide you as best she could, all these years. After the monumental failure of having had you in the first place, that is.”
Malina let out a distressed little sound next to me. Dunja sighed, her face warming over a fraction. “I’m sorry, sweetness,” she murmured. “No need to say such barbed things to you, you who asked for none of this. Might we agree I’m perhaps a tiny bit on edge? Of course, having you wasn’t truly Fai’s—Jasmina’s fault. We never even considered that it might play out as inevitable, just like everything else. Like the proverbial spindle, as it were.”
“Lina,” I said miserably, “how do we know to believe her? I still feel it, all this . . . devotion. It makes me feel like we’ll be hurting Sorai. Mara. Whoever she is.”
Lina turned to me. “We’ll believe Dunja because I can hear her, and I know she’s not lying, Riss. She sounds entirely pure, unlike any of the others. The sound of her truth is stronger than what the ribbons make me feel. I believe Naisha, and I believe her.”
She searched my eyes with that beloved, familiar clear gaze. My sister’s eyes were so much like my own, but not the same. “I know I’ve let you down before, but remember Fjolar. Remember that I knew not to trust him. This is my ‘I told you so’ moment, sister. Crappy timing, but here we are. Can you trust me enough to be strong for the both of us, to let that be our foundation?”
I wavered, my hands over my face, desperate to hide. I didn’t know how to do this, when I wasn’t the one being strong.
“I could sing you into it,” she said gently, tugging down my hands until I could see her again. “But I’m not going to. Again, this is your choice.”
Looking at her, I remembered that I’d once read how twins, after four or five months of sharing a womb, reached for each other every day, held hands and touched each other more than they touched themselves. My sister and I had been together as little tapioca clusters of cells, bumping against each other as we swam in salty amniotic seas. No matter who else I loved—real love, not the false kind Mara had foisted upon us—I would never love anyone as much as my sister.
And if I loved her like that, it stood to reason that I could trust her when I couldn’t even trust my own instinct or judgment.
“I know,” I said finally. “I choose you. I trust you.”
Malina folded me to her, then pressed a fierce kiss to my forehead. “Thank you, Riss. We’ll get through this, I promise, okay? So what do we do now?” she asked, turning back to Dunja. “How do we get out?”
“I won’t be able to fight through them if we come at them head-on,” she said. “I’ll need the ambush advantage. And I’ll need the two of you.”
My mouth sucked itself dry. “The two of us to do what?”
“To compete, of course, as she means you to. To keep her occupied. To play your parts to perfection until I can make my way toward the center of her web, and then get us out of here in as few pretty pieces as I can.”