I COULDN’T DO IT. NO MATTER WHAT I DID, THE JAR remained in one obstinate, uncracked piece.
So I was sitting with my back against the altar, splay-legged like an exhausted child, when Fjolar appeared silently in front of me, his presence displacing a rush of air.
I glared up at him through the hair plastered across my face, sticky with sweat. I’d bashed the jar into the wooden pews, kicked it, stomped on it. I was so tired I could barely move. The jar was now in my lap, wedged between my knees, where I’d been turning it around to examine it. I thought I knew the catch to it now, what that series of deceptively decorative holes was really for.
The jar needed a tiny, sharp-pointed key, and would only open if unlocked.
“So that’s your final trick,” I said bitterly, picking damp hair from between my lips. “I can’t even open it without you.”
He dropped into an easy crouch in front of me, rocking onto the balls of his feet. His hair was up, the way I liked it best, and his eyes were unusually bright, that blazing azure slick as stained glass.
It took me a moment to recognize the gloss as tears.
“You can’t,” he agreed, lifting a hand. His bracelet swung from his strong, veined wrist, the arrowhead like a pendulum. “The key to it is mine.”
I lifted both hands to hide my face, unable to quell the rising tide of tears. Everything was lost. Everything. “And you won’t give it to me, will you? You wouldn’t even come here with me. Why would you help me now?”
So gently, he pried my hands away from my face, then held them curled tightly between his own, resisting easily when I tried to pull them back. “I didn’t say that, flower. The key is yours if you want it. Just say the word.”
Astonished, my eyes flew up to his. “Please, Fjolar. I have to take the soul back. When I tried to open the jar by breaking the glass, I—I don’t know. I did something, made things worse for Lina. I know I did.”
“You did,” he confirmed. “You set Herron free, and realigned this kingdom’s clock with yours. The battle will begin soon, in your world. But it hasn’t yet. We still have a bit more time—if you’ll let me have it, as a final gift. A parting present.”
“Why would I let you have anything?” I snarled at him. “Why would I give you gifts? You let me come here alone. You let me try to break the jar. You—”
“Because giving you the key means the end of me,” he interrupted. “Keeping that soul trapped is the only reason I exist in this form. Once you have the soul—and once you leave—I die, flower girl.” He huffed out a little laugh. “The only death that Death itself will know. And if you want to go now, I understand. But if you’ll stay a little longer—just a little while—I’d like to tell you about this last place. So you understand. I won’t take long, I swear.”
I wavered, torn between my pounding urgency and the open plea in his face. Even after everything, the notion that after this he’d stop existing made me quake in a way I wouldn’t have expected. It struck the part of my own heart that could—and almost did—love him.
“I know it’s a courtesy I wouldn’t have shown you if our roles were reversed, flower,” he said quietly. “But you aren’t me. You love to give, live for it. It’s one of the thousand reasons I love you.”
I watched him for another moment, gauging him for tricks. I’d been fooled so many times before—how could I know this wasn’t just another sleight of his hand? More of his endless smoke and mirrors?
But I believed him, yet again. And I couldn’t help letting him have this one last chance to prove he deserved all the trust I’d wasted on him.
So I reached for his hand, let him pull me up with the jar cradled under my arm.
“Show me, then.” I said. “But be quick about it.”
“A GERMAN KING had a gallery once,” he murmured, moving to stand behind me as I rested the jar back on the plinth. “An entire pavilion dedicated to thirty-six beautiful women, in the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. Some were singers and actresses, not just ornaments. And others were close to him—his daughters, wives, mistresses.”
“Well, that makes sense, then,” I said acerbically. “All performers, one way or another. But why make this a church?”
He tilted his head up to the ceiling. “Well, for one, I thought you might like this.”
I followed his gaze. Two chandeliers hung above us, flickering with candles and dripping with crystals; I hadn’t even seen them when I came in alone. But their framework was exceptional, elegant with violence: clusters of bullets fused together into bristling flowers, bayonets and blades thinned out to form curlicues and arcs.
“It’s from the Ružica Church in Belgrade,” he told me. “It doesn’t look quite like this—you’ll know that by now—but there really are two chandeliers there, made by soldiers from shell casings and weapons abandoned on the battlefield. I thought it might remind you of the one you liked so much, at Our Lady of the Rocks. The one made from glass flowers, between lintels hung with gifts from sailors’ brides.”
I did remember it, that hushed, sweet church afloat on its artificial island like a miniature Avalon near Perast.
“And the outside is a replica of the Basilica of Saint Denis in France. The one that holds the mummified heart of a dauphin. So I gave it to you as Herron’s ‘heart.’ I thought it might seem . . . familiar to you this way.”
With a pang, I realized it did. It brought back years of fighting tooth and nail with my mother. Sometimes in Lina’s defense, sometimes in my own, and sometimes just because that was what we did. And all the many times I’d imagined the shape of my own poor, battered heart, the boxes of glass I’d built in my mind to keep it cool and safe.
For a moment it nearly overwhelmed me, how much of me he knew. No one else I’d ever be with would understand me so thoroughly, from the inside out.
No matter what else he had done, there was something to be said for being so known.
He must have sensed the slight softening, his eyes flicking up to mine. “And look where it is,” he murmured, with a ghost of his rakish smile. “Technically it’s been right under your nose this entire time.”
I looked up to see what he meant. Below the stained-glass iris in the window, there was another one, like a little wink to fractals, and I couldn’t help but smile a little at the gesture.
The final portrait in the gallery’s collection.
My portrait wasn’t surrounded by the same gold-leaf frame the others shared. Instead, mine had a border of blown glass, a fractaled profusion of petals and stems that radiated out and away. I was half smiling in the painting, my long face, domed cheekbones, and angular features unusually soft. My hair spilled over one shoulder in a slick of black so glossy it looked almost wet. And my eyes were a light, warm hazel I didn’t recognize, their edges darkened with smudged liner beneath neat black dashes of brows.
In cupped palms, I held a handful of wisteria rising into a fractal like a whirlwind and drifting over my shoulders. Above me it streaked up into the night sky, to burst into pink and purple falling stars.
“Do you remember all of them?” I asked him quietly. “The ones who came before me? Really remember them for who they were?”
“Every one of them,” he replied, just as hushed. “I know you think it’s been nothing but caprice with me, but it was always more than that. I didn’t know them like I know you, because they weren’t really here, not fully. But what I knew while I loved them, I’ve never forgotten.”
“It’s not enough for me to forgive you, you know,” I told him, unable to peel my gaze from my own portrait. “Not even close. But I will say that I love my painting just a little.”
He pressed a kiss into my hair from behind, light as a breath. “Then that’s enough for me, flower girl. More than enough.”
I turned to face him one last time. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, fisting a knuckle against his forehead. “I’m actually afraid, flower,” he said, with a brittle, breathless half laugh. “What an awful feeling. Who would have thought?”
I tugged his hand away from his face and held it in mine. So broad and coarse and strong, with all its many rings. Marked with whorls like a real human hand, one that had been shaped with me in mind. One I’d never touch again, or feel sliding over my skin.
The loss wouldn’t be only his. I didn’t forgive him—I hated him, even—but it still cut deep to be not just leaving, but also destroying him.
“It has to be now,” I said softly. “Even if there was another way, you don’t deserve it. Not after everything you’ve done.”
“I know my penance is part of it.” He met my eyes with that dazzling cornflower blue and pressed my hand up to his cheek. “I’ll just miss you so much, flower. Whatever happens to me, I’ll miss you.”
“I know,” I said. “And I hope—I hope you find something that can pass for peace.”
Before he had a chance to say anything else, I rose up on my toes and gave him a warm, full kiss.
“Good-bye,” I whispered against his warm lips, so soft against his stubble.
Then the cool, sharp point of the arrowhead landed in my palm.
I closed my fingers around it as empty air settled into the space where his lips had been, with the echoing whisper of a sigh.