A FEW HOURS LATER, I WOKE NOSE TO NOSE WITH LUKA, snug in the sleeping bag we’d somehow managed to cram ourselves into together for a nap. As soon as my eyes opened, he smiled, blinking himself languorously awake.
“Your eyelashes are ridiculous,” I informed him, nuzzling the tip of my nose to his. “You look like Bambi’s hotter brother. It’s completely unfair, and constitutes much of what’s wrong with the world.”
“And you have pine needles in your hair.” He gave me another slow smile, shifting against me. “It looks real pretty.”
“Oh, I can tell you think so. They’re not only in my hair, either,” I added, squirming.
He grimaced. “That can’t be good.”
“It was well worth it,” I murmured, leaning in for a kiss.
Dunja popped up above us like a bad-omen crow, the black pashmina rewrapped around her head and shoulders. “So the children have consummated their tendresse,” she said. “Thank the gods. The tension was about to give me a migraine, and I didn’t even think I could get those anymore.”
Luka and I scrambled apart, to the extent that two full-length individuals confined to a sleeping bag can scramble any distance. “Sorry to have imposed on you,” I muttered.
“Not to worry.” She gave me one of her quick, brilliant smiles. “I’m a staunch supporter of young love. Your sister is somewhere nearby with her lady; I’ve been keeping watch and nothing has come for us. I think, perhaps, that we might be safe.”
Luka and I squirmed our way out of the sleeping bag after that, and Lina and Niko wandered back over to rummage with us through the van’s supplies for snacks. Lina gave me a sly look through her lashes as I handed her a packet of dried apricots, humming something that sounded suspiciously like “Peaches and Cream.”
I fought back a smile. “You’re the worst, you know that?”
“What, me? When I’m not even judging you for being such a copycat? Just remember who had their own Damjanac first.”
Still, I saw her slip a subtle high five to Luka as she passed by him, and the sight of it warmed my insides much more than it should have. I felt generally tender, as if the clay casing I’d packed around my heart for years had finally cracked open, and what was beneath it was so raw it felt even the slightest, passing breeze of emotion.
Or maybe that was what it always felt like, knowing you might lose everything when you’d only just discovered all there was to live for. The sheer brilliance of the light against the darkness was almost too much to stand.
I was sitting on the ground between Luka’s knees, with my back to him, when Dunja returned from one of the perimeter checks she had been running periodically; I could feel his legs tighten around me as she finally appeared from between the trees like some gorgeous, unlikely nun, the pashmina hiding her hair.
Her flawless face was bleak as she reached our clearing. “They’re coming,” she said grimly. “I can hear them gathering, the ground carrying their sound. It’s all of them now, full coven strength. Whatever we did yesterday must have accomplished something, and now they come to hunt us. I can hear Izkara baying.”
Luka dug his hands into my hair, as if he could feel the collapse of my heart in my chest. “Baying?” I asked faintly.
“Izkara is one of the first nine tiers. Mara’s great-great-granddaughter. She can gleam by taking on animal form, any combination that she dreams to life. Like a sphinx, or a griffin, but without limitation. Whatever menagerie suits her will.”
“Like Naisha?” Malina said.
“Not like Naisha. Her gleam is hollow, a pretty fancy, while Izkara’s is ancient enough to be real. If she grows claws of any kind, you had better flee before you think to test whether they can rend you from stem to stern.”
Niko twined her arms around Malina’s neck as if she had no intention of ever letting go, from where she sat tightly snuggled on my sister’s lap. “So, what do we do, then?” she demanded. “Now can we run?”
Dunja closed her eyes, and even in that inhuman, altered face, I saw the leaching of her stony strength. “I don’t know what to do. Jasmina—what we planned, the makeshift spell, that was the only hope. And now there’s nowhere to run from them.”
“How much time do we have?” Luka asked above my head.
She tilted her head, considering it. “An hour, maybe. Perhaps a little more. It’ll take them time to mass, and with so many abreast, they’ll have to scour the forest on foot.”
“So dance it for us,” Luka said above my head. I tipped my chin back, craning to look at him. His face had fallen so still and furious that it was terrifying, like rage somehow carved into rock. “That’s the one thing you haven’t done. Show us all what it was like, between you and Death.”
Her face shuttered. “Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s the one thing we’re missing,” he said. “You’re the only one who’s been there and back. Maybe there’s something we could learn from seeing it.”
“You can’t ask me to do that,” she spat back, lips skinned back from her teeth. “I nearly couldn’t stand it when he left me for the first time. I’ll have to feel it all again to dance it for you. I have to do it all a second time around.”
“Then maybe that’s the sacrifice you have to make,” Niko said. “For Lina and for Iris. Because if you abandon them now just to spare yourself that pain, when there might be another way, then you’re no better than Mara herself.”
Dunja hid her face in her hands, and for a moment she was just a girl again, nineteen years old and cold and lost. “How much do I have to give up,” she murmured into her hands. “Just how much.”
Then she gathered the final remnants of her poise, and stood.
Between one breath and another, Dunja went so still it was as if she held herself separate from the air, so even the breeze couldn’t touch her. The only sign of life was the pretty pulse beneath her chin, and with her head held high, I could see it ticking like a clock’s second hand beneath her skin.
When she finally began to move, it was in a single smooth, explosive moment, a lily unfurling in fast-forward. A series of delicate steps, ball to heel, took her out of our little campfire circle, where she became the centerpiece of a diorama against the pines—a glittering ice sculpture with flowing, snowy hair against the backdrop of brown and green. A glistening strand of a spiderweb came loose from where it spanned two branches above her, drifting lazily down until it settled into her hair.
“Sing with me, little niece, if you will,” she said to Malina. “I could use the accompaniment.”
She splayed her fingers once, and then again. Then she arranged her hands in front of her, back-to-back like a butterfly’s wings, to begin her dance.
SHE WAS ALONE when she woke, and the waking hurt. A cave loomed all around her, its stalactite teeth thicker than her arm, ice sparkling inside its every cranny from the faint light that filtered through the entrance. She hurt so much inside that as she rose up on her forearms, she expected them to quake beneath her weight. But they felt strong; so did her legs. Strong, and almost perfect, even when the furs—the ones they’d wrapped her in, after they’d climbed her up the mountain—fell away from her. She should have felt the cold, but there was no trembling, no spray of goose bumps, no feeling to her skin. Even the furs she clutched to her as she stood, rabbit and fox and ermine, felt like nothing as she held them.
At least Jasmina would never know any of this. Perhaps she was already well away, having fled as they had planned, while the others carried Dunja to her casket of ice.
She wandered the cave with pelts trailing behind her, feeling nothing beneath her feet. And nothing under her palm as she ran it over rough and frozen rock, then palmed the curves of fat, white icicles. At the entrance, she leaned outside into the gale; even the swirling white of icy flurries wouldn’t lash at her face.
The wall felt like nothing against her back, when she slid down against it to draw her knees up to her chest. And yet inside she felt just like herself, afraid and stubborn and so alone; and at least when she leaned her cheek on her knee, she could feel her own skin and how it was warm.
He was meant to be waiting for her here, she thought. He who had chosen her. But the cave was empty save for herself, and the stone pedestal on which she’d had her rest. Still, as her gaze swept through the corners, in one she caught a flickering she hadn’t seen before. There, right there, the air seemed bright and blurry, like the shimmering of a heat mirage above an asphalt road.
As she watched it, it gathered more unto itself, until she made out a silhouette. It seemed to her like a shadow play, the way it grew and shrank and changed its shape. But the closer she looked, the more it seemed like something—someone?—that she knew. As soon as she’d thought it, color flowed into form, and the flicker became a breathing boy.
“You,” she said, and her heart began to race. It was nice to know it could still do that.
“Me,” the shadow-boy agreed, and stepped from the corner in full flesh. She wove her hands in her lap and cowered against the nothing stone. He crossed the cave to crouch in front of her, dark curls falling over his brow.
“You’re just like I remember,” she told him. He’d been so staggering, so unforgettable, that day Salia showed her the Bolshoi Ballet. A Russian boy with near-black eyes and a patrician face, cheekbones like facets and a cleft chin. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dancer-slim. “But how can you be here?”
He offered her his palm, dark eyebrow raised. She laid her fingers on it, and he was so warm and there her insides quickened again. He wrapped his long fingers around her hand and brought it to his lips, tracing their crests with her own fingertip.
Even as her eyelids went heavy she jerked her hand back, frowning at him.
“Too forward?” he asked, one side of his mouth quirking. “I’ve been known to rush. Usually in the sense of ‘untimely,’ but I don’t like to limit myself.”
“You’re not that boy,” she concluded. “Even if you do look like him.”
He laughed out loud, rich and deep. “No, I’m not. But you do know who I am, you who danced so well for me. You who won me fully with your dance.” He watched her warmly, brow furrowed. “I could hardly wait to have you here.”
The thought of his anticipation made her giddy. “And how long have you been waiting for me?”
“Two days, and forever,” he said. “A very long time, all things considered.”
She put her hands on his knees. It felt outrageous, to do so to a near stranger, but this boy belonged to her already. “What do we do now?”
“Well, you’re meant to be my gift.” He gave her a broad grin, his teeth straight and very white. “So, I expect you’ll woo me, show me all that you can do.”
“Is that so?” She pouted at him, tilting her head. “Perhaps it won’t work that way, this time. Perhaps you’re the gift, meant to be mine.”
“Then, maybe, if I’m going to be your gift,” he said, drawing so close their foreheads nearly touched, and she could smell the warmth and boy of him, “you should tell me what you mean to call me.”
SHE WOULD CALL him Artem, like the boy who danced. She knew it even before he brought her to the strangest desert she had ever seen.
“Is it real?” she asked, turning in a circle. The sand wasn’t any color it should have been; the dunes around them blazed with rainbow bands of turmeric yellow, magenta, lilac, violet, and vermilion. In the distance rose rich, green mountains, surrounded by what looked like the tangle of jungle. She couldn’t remember how they’d gotten here. He’d touched her, maybe, in the cave, cupped her face and told her to close her eyes.
Or maybe not. It didn’t matter.
He reclined against one of the dunes, all in white, a loose shirt and pants that looked like they kept him cool. It seemed like it should be hot here, though of course she didn’t feel heat anymore. “Certainly it’s real. At least for me, and now for you.”
She looked down at herself. A white band sparkled over her breasts, as if the ground dust of diamonds had been woven into the fabric, throwing icy facets of fire from the sun. The pants that ballooned around her legs, cuffed tightly at her ankles, were silk so fine they felt like water on her skin. “Where are we, then? And did you pick this”—she gestured at herself—“all this for me?”
“These are the Seven-Colored Earths of Mauritius. I thought you might like it here.” He ran a hand through his hair, haloed by the midday blaze. “Makes a nice change from all that cold. And no, I didn’t pick your clothes for you. That was what you wanted. Seems to me you like to shine.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, raising her chin. “You don’t know me.”
“But I’d like to, if you’ll let me.”
“Seems to me I have no choice.”
He laughed again, that deep, warm rumble, and she liked the surprise that washed like waves across his face. He wasn’t used to laughter, then. That was something she could change.
Then she danced the desert for him, painted its dunes with a brush of flying hair, its colors with each flick of the wrist, and with the skin that she laid bare. She should have felt the sharp grains under her soles—arcs of color sprayed with each sure step, so she knew that they felt her—but it was as if she danced on nothing at all.
As if all the world slept around her, and she its dancing dream.
When she finished and dipped into a bow, he clapped like a child, his face bright with rapture-glow. “How beautiful,” he whispered. “None of the others danced quite like you, before.”
You see now, a dark voice rilled coolly through her mind. I bade him love you, just like so.
She shrugged it off like an unwelcome cloak. She could do it all herself, make him love her on her own. Keep Jasmina safe and free wherever she was, far from here in some new home.
“Do you want to see another?” she asked, dropping lightly to her knees before him. “I’m not tired, not at all. You could take me elsewhere if you wanted.”
“So, have you decided, then?”
“Decided what?” She wanted to stroke his hair, his face, but it was still too early yet.
“What you want to call me.” He smoothed her hair back from her temples, and she nudged his palm like a cat. She would let him touch her first, she thought. She could live with that.
“I’ll call you Artem,” she said.
Artem, who’s mine.
But she didn’t tell him that.
IT WASN’T UNTIL later that she understood. They were real, the two of them. It was the world that was the dream.
HE TOOK HER to a sere mountaintop, a cradle for three lakes that couldn’t keep their color. One was the brightest teal she’d ever seen; another green, the other black. But as the sky sped over them, from dawn to dusk to velvet night, she saw them shift their hue like lizards into brown and red and blue.
“Are you sure you didn’t make this for me?” she asked. “This place can’t be real.”
“Oh, it is,” he assured her. “Real, and very deadly, too. Those are the Kelimutu lakes, and all three will eat you to the bone.”
“They’ll eat someone else, maybe,” she called over her shoulder as she stepped into the blue one. The water pooled around her, darker than the sky above, and she didn’t feel a drop. “But not me.”
She didn’t notice, at least not yet, the streak of her hair that had begun to turn.
AFTER THE LAKES, he took her under the ocean, into the heart of a drowned Lion City. There she danced for him in a banquet hall filled with water, and found, as her hair floated and bubbles rose around her, that she no longer needed breath.
They never slept. She danced place after place for him, never needing rest. After the ocean, he took her to a village of houses with blue walls and inner dunes of sand. She danced this inside desert for him as he chased her from room to room, his laughter echoing when she hid-and-sought from him.
“If you like games, foxfire,” he said when he caught her, “then I know just where to take you next.”
It was a vast, abandoned amusement park, choked with weeds and red with rust, beneath the ancient ring of a Ferris wheel. She climbed its metal spokes and danced its shape for him, swinging from cabin to cabin without fear even as the metal groaned beneath her feet.
“And you like the rides, too, I see,” he said. “Let’s look for bigger ones to find.”
People left all sorts of things behind, she found, as she wound her way through roller-coaster tracks that sprawled over whole empty miles, while he watched her, clapping, from the ground. Even a domed ballroom beneath a lake, its walls water-stained and windows leaking dappled light, guarded above the surface by a hunched Neptune with a spear. And forts on spindly telescope legs stranded in the sea, and stained-glass train stations with curling ivy but no trains, and stone mills that sprouted grass instead of grinding grain, and peeling wooden houses like matryoshka dolls in Russian forests.
She didn’t need to eat. She didn’t need to drink. She only needed herself, and him.
The love was becoming her own, and real.
And still her hair was mostly red.
“I want to see what you do,” she told him once, taking him by the hand. “Helping them all die. Making them die. Whatever it is, I want to be by your side.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” He pulled her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. “It’s happening right now, and in every other moment. It’s not a thing I do, but the thing I am. All the other parts of me that you don’t see—that’s where they are instead of loving you.”
“You and your multitudes,” she teased. “But why can’t you take me with you, then? With all the rest of you?”
“Because if I did that, my foxfire love, then that would kill you, too.”
“Is that why we never see anyone else? Why it’s always just you and me? I’m just forgetting what other people do, a bit. And maybe I wish that I could see them.”
“And I would give that to you if I could, my heart. But this is the way she willed it to be.”
“Take me somewhere else, then,” she said, “where we can really be alone. Somewhere far away from here, where no one’s ever been before.”
THERE SHOULD HAVE been no light inside that tree. But she could see it perfectly, how its trunk was like a vault around them, wide and silent as a church. Bright beetles with green and pearly shells climbed the inner skin; they would have terrified her once. Now she wished, with part of her heart, to feel their tiny feet scrabbling against her palm.
“It’s the biggest banyan that there is,” he told her. “Is this much alone enough for you?”
She laid her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down until he sat. “It is.”
“But why—”
“Just watch,” she said. “I’ll show you what I meant.”
She danced for him inside the tree, but the tree wasn’t what she danced. She showed him how she’d stroke him with her hair, trailing her hands like vines, how she’d like to feel the warmth of him pressed against her from behind. How she’d wrap her legs around his hips, tilt her chin and arch her back; how she’d let him kiss her until she wept, and even more than that.
Much later, she rested her chin on his bare chest and watched him watching her. “What is it, foxfire?” he said. He had a very darling dimple, she’d found, when he smiled at her this certain way. “What’s in those she-wolf eyes?”
“Do you love me, Artem?”
He frowned. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve told you a thousand times. Do you love me?”
“But you could say that for all of them,” she argued, “the ones who came before me. And if that’s true, then what’s the use in me loving you, too? It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. Unless you chose to choose only me, then all this is just her game.”
“I did love them, yes, that much is true,” he said carefully, feeling her tense against him. “When Mara offered this to me, beauty and love in place of solitude, these became the rules. But you—you’re the first, in all this time, who made me love her to the soul. I wouldn’t lie to you, my foxfire. That’s the full truth that I hold.”
“If only you could die for me to prove it,” she teased. “Too bad you’re not allowed.”
“That would indeed be a drastic measure,” he agreed. “But for you, I would. If you demanded it of me, at least, and if I found I could.”
“And what about me?” she pressed him. “What about when I’m gone? You’ll take up with the next one? You’ll just carry on?”
“I’ll mourn you for an eternity,” he whispered. “I’ll howl for you in the hearts of mountains, and weep for you into the lakes.”
“An eternity and two days, you mean. Until the next one takes my place.”
They were quiet for a long time, and so still, that a long coral snake slithered over her feet. It might have made her shriek and shudder once, but now she could barely bother to take heed.
“What would you have me do instead?” he asked her. “What would please you more?”
“That you never take another, of course,” she said. “And never let me go.”
“I can’t, my lover. I wish I could, but she bound me with her will.” He ran her hair through his fingers, braiding the white streaks with the red. “I’ll lose you, and you’ll leave a space behind, a space for a new daughter to fill.”
She pulled away from him fiercely, and drew up her spine, and tried to remember how it felt to be brave. “Then don’t dare say you love me, because you don’t,” she spat. “You just love what you happen to have.”
Still he said nothing, and she rounded on him, forcing them face-to-face. “The one who comes after wouldn’t be some stranger; a daughter of my blood will take my place. And this is what you’d offer her, my successor and my niece? False love and empty places, no kind of choice and this vacuum of peace? If you love me, then prove it. Don’t look for another, for I can tell you, there will not be one. Once this is over, all of you and me, all of this will truly be done.”
“I’ll be alone then, after you, if that’s what you want,” he said, and she could hear the tears beneath his voice. “Darkness entire, no more beauty, or love—but if that’s what you ask, then that’s my choice.”
“You won’t be alone, because I’ll love you, even once I’m gone.” She climbed onto his lap and kissed him hard, and he clasped her against his chest.
But when she looked up at him, he’d lifted his head and his eyes were only halfway there—as if he were searching toward the next.
THEN HE ASKED her to dance him the tides of the oceans, and vanished while she danced.