IT WAS NIGHT IN THIS DIFFERENT SECTION OF THE KINGDOM too, but stripped of stars and the boneyard’s unnatural purple light. Instead, we stood beneath a million moons: waxing, waning, and dark; full and nearly full. Some were streaked with ghostly swipes of clouds, others circled by moonbow halos. The tinge of the sky around each was subtly different, as if all these had been culled from separate nights before being threaded together to dangle above us like a child’s lunar-phases mobile.
Like the kind Lina and I had slept under in our shared cradle, another handmade gift to Mama from Čiča Jovan when my sister and I were still so little.
“Is this because of the mobile?” I asked Fjolar, and even I could hear the wonder in my voice, limned over the dense ache of missing my sister.
“It is, flower.” His tone was the warmest I’d heard from him since I landed here, I noted with a stab of satisfaction. It was doing its work, the nymph version of myself that I was painting for him. Bit by tiny bit, he was thawing for me. “And also because I wanted you to be able to see this garden as it should be seen, moonlit and under cover of the night.”
I managed to peel my gaze from the orb-and-crescent splendor of the sky, enough to take in the bower around us. We stood on a pebbled, winding path, hemmed in and overhung by plants left to grow largely unfettered. At the center of the garden, if you could call it that, a massive, ornate sundial loomed—its gnomon a caduceus with a serpent wound around it, striping the base with twisted shadows from the crisscrossed light of the many moons. Glossy leaves and blossoms stirred in the warm, summery breeze, and the entire garden hummed with that rush of air running like fingers through swaying, rooted living things. The air smelled both sweet and astringent, from layer draped over layer of poison-laden scent.
And the flowers grew everywhere in a tangled profusion, dripping down the walls and weighing down the shrubbery, creeping up Roman columns that didn’t seem to lead to anywhere, crawling into long-abandoned, crumbling birdbaths and dry fountain beds. The blossoms were all a slightly muted rainbow of color, but the bright flood of moonlight made their shades much more vibrant than they should have been at night.
“It reminds me a little of our garden back home,” I said through a sudden well of tears. “The one behind Mama’s house, where we used to sit when she still let us eat the moon with her.” What had happened to her, with the half breaking of the spell? Had she died fully, without either me or Lina by her side? I bit the inside of my cheek at the thought. I couldn’t mourn her, too, not now. It was just too much.
“I know. Though the closest you would have come to what grows here would have been your oleander tree.”
“‘These plants can kill,’” I repeated. “Is this place real too, then? Like the bone desert?”
“Again, it’s my own take of something real—but tweaked for your pleasure,” he said with an acerbic twist and a flick of a glance in my direction, in case I’d forgotten all the trouble he’d gone to for me. “There’s a garden like this one at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, planted by a very twisty duchess. It’s full to brimming with poisonous plants, over a hundred different kinds. Laurel, hellebore, datura, nicandra. Most are poisonous from root to berry, flower to stem.”
“Are all those here?”
“Some, and many others, too. I chose the prettiest for you. And the real poison garden is much more manicured than this. Can’t have its keepers keeling over from stray tendrils.” He gave my hand a tug, waiting for me to step closer to him. “But you’ll be fine, as long as you don’t try to sniff things and we keep to the path. And as long as you stay by me.”
“Do I detect ulterior motives at work?”
That startled a low scrape of a laugh out of him. “It wasn’t foremost on my mind, no.”
“Oh, if you say so.” I slid my hand free of his and took his elbow instead. “Why don’t you show me some of your favorite ones?”
We wandered together down the path, pausing every few feet so Fjolar could introduce me to a new specimen. He touched things heedlessly to show me what they were, unfurling curled-up leaves and splaying petals that could have melted his skin like tallow. Even when the giant hogweed in his hand—frilly umbrellas of white flowers like Queen Anne’s lace, above hairy, purple-splotched stems—should have given him blisters, blinded him, and scarred him. Even when the blue clusters of monkshood perched like butterflies on their green spears had roots so poisonous they could kill an entire village if steeped in its drinking well.
But he wasn’t human. None of them could leave their mark on him.
“I saw a man eat six naked-lady bulbs once, on a dare,” he said, fanning out the blossom’s delicate pink petals, shaped a little like a stargazer lily. “His ‘mates’ thought the name was just hilarious raunch, had no idea what flower it was. It’s beautiful and common enough, easy to grow and easy on the eyes, but it’s one of the nightshades, amaryllis belladonna. Lays waste to the heart when eaten.” He flicked both eyebrows up, gave me a roguish twist of a smile. “A lot like any lady’s love, naked or otherwise. He collapsed ten minutes later, twitching, foaming at the mouth. They thought he was playing with them, until he died.”
He led me past foxglove, hemlock, and bloodroot, telling me how each could heal or kill—though mostly kill—and it struck me that he knew because he had seen every single instance of death brought about by these pretty poison vessels. This garden was full to bursting of his instruments.
And it was clear how much he loved them.
“Do you enjoy it?” I said to Fjolar, tugging us both to an abrupt stop so I could turn and look up into his face. “When people die? Or animals, or anything, I guess? Does it feel good to you somehow?”
All expression slid from his face in an instant, leaving his features stark and stunning, empty of emotion. I thought to myself, his death mask, before it occurred to me that he was always so much more startlingly handsome when he was keeping some part of himself hidden from my reach. The opposite of how I felt whenever I looked at Luka’s open, tender face. I had always been able to see him feeling, watch thoughts drifting over his face like clouds streaking across a clear sky.
And yet. That sense of the buried unknown that followed Fjolar like a shadow, the slippery, delicious danger of it. Even when the spell took hold and bound me to him, I wouldn’t have put it past myself to like something like him for its own sake, too.
“And I know you can’t tell me details, no ‘great truths,’” I went on. “I’m just curious what it feels like, to be you.”
The breeze riffled through his pale eyelashes, and his eyes narrowed like a wolf’s. For a moment, the focus of his gaze seemed to fall infinitely far away. Unimaginably distant from me. “It feels like being everywhere at once,” he said. “Perched on the shoulder of every dying thing. Living in the lungs of every creature drawing its final breath. No one’s asked me that before, you know. None of her daughters.”
“Well, they wouldn’t, would they? It doesn’t seem to me like much talking ever happened here.” This was broaching risky territory; if I ventured too far, I might blunder into the quicksand of his irritation and suffocate in it. But I had to pry him open further, enough that he’d be willing to tell me things that mattered. “Not enough time for it, what with the wedding contest, all the honeymoon years, and then the obligatory dying of the bride to make room for the next one.”
He grimaced at that, baring those bright teeth. “You make it sound so . . . shallow. When it was the opposite of that.”
I shrugged. “It was what it was: lots of long and very beautiful one-night stands. But I don’t think it was ever more than that for you before my aunt, and even Dunja was willing to dance herself dead for you. Then all of a sudden, you’ve got me. The nuisance of my body, all these questions I have for you . . .” I gave him a wicked, impish smile—and realized with a shock that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t at least partly real. “It’s almost like we’re getting to be friends.”
He chuckled through his nose, lifting my hand to press a kiss to my knuckles without breaking our gaze. His lips grazed the sensitive skin between my fingers, and a tingle spiraled through me like a whirlybird seed. It was the first time he’d touched me in such a purposeful, romantic way since I’d come here, and somehow, even with everything I was playing at, it made me catch my breath.
“It is taking some getting used to,” he admitted. “I’d gotten very comfortable having everything just so, exactly as I liked it. Easy, you could call it. But I like that you ask me things.” His blue gaze was so unwavering I could feel that initial tingle flare into an ember in the pit of my stomach. As if he sensed my response, he dropped his head and angled his lips to mine, close enough to feel the sweep of his breath without sealing it into a kiss. His pale hair brushed my cheek—whiskey and smoke—and my insides swam, giddy. “Maybe I want a friend like you.”
“Do you really?” I murmured back.
“I said ‘maybe,’” he retorted with a wry twist. “And I wouldn’t call your body a nuisance, flower girl.”
I pulled back with a laugh and tipped my chin up at the sky. “Oh, that’s half nice of you. Now, take a look.”
His eyes followed mine, the tendons in his neck cording in a very appealing way. Above us, I had drawn down the moons into a carousel of waxing and waning, fingernail crescents, full and gibbous. Circle within circle, a sky full of moon-shaped fairy lights. I set them rocking up and down like carnival horses, and between them I flung up fountaining explosions of the rosy mountain laurel and snowy veratrum that spilled over the garden’s walls.
Under my fireworks, his face glowing vivid with delight, he slid one hand into my hair and dipped down to kiss me.
I shouldn’t have let it happen; this was far too much to give him. He was a thief, a lovely liar, an unrepentant user of my kin.
But I found I couldn’t help the fervor with which I wanted it. I caught my breath against his mouth; he tasted like I remembered from home, but even better and so much more, shocking sweetness and heat along with the softness of his tongue. His lips were gentle and yielding against mine, but I could feel the force of his grip around my waist and at my nape, and I curled into him like ivy creeping over slabs of stone.
I didn’t understand how I could want him at all, after everything he’d done to me. It shouldn’t have been possible to reconcile so much rage with so much wanting. All the flirting wasn’t me; it was a role I had chosen for myself so I could find my way home. I knew that.
But he felt so goddamned undeniably good.
His hands slid down my sides and over my backside, and I could feel him cup my thighs in readiness to pick me up. Anticipating the lift, I tightened my arms around his neck—and then abruptly remembered the last time someone had held me that way.
With my back scraping roughly against a pine trunk and my legs locked around a leaner pair of hips, as Luka whispered in my ear how much he wanted me.
I unwound myself from him as if he had caught fire, stumbling back. “I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s, it’s too soon, and—”
Something brushed lightly against my back, and I whirled around in surprise. Massive, trumpeted yellow blossoms yawned at me, glowing faintly in the dark and exhaling scent into my face. I could feel Fjolar’s hand grip my shoulder, pulling me away, but it was too late.
In my shock, I’d already gasped.
And drawn a deep, prickling breath of poison directly into my lungs.
I had a moment to consider that this poison smelled rich and sweet, with pinpricks of lemon rind—before my pupils dilated so hard I could actually feel them blow my irises into oblivion. Nausea tore through me, dropped me to my knees onto sharp pebbles. My thoughts scattered wildly, like a flock of birds startled into sudden, shrieking flight. I couldn’t hold on to anything for more than a moment—my name, where I was, what even was happening to me. Nothing but the sense of a terrible, impending doom cresting over me like a gargantuan wave, shimmering black and near-invisible against the deeper darkness of the night.
It was going to pull me under. It was going to drown me.
I had never been so terrified in my entire life.
And if I was going to die, I wanted nothing more than my sister.
LINA, I screamed, either aloud or in my mind. I couldn’t tell if I could really speak. My mouth and tongue felt lockjaw stiff. For the first time since I had been reeled here, drawn through worlds like a fish dragged by the line, I was terrified and desperate enough to reach for my wisteria.
Before, it had always been because my sister needed me, badly enough that I would split myself open to let the gleam grow out from my center.
Now I was the one who needed her.
The roots of the wisteria were still threaded where I had left them, coiled into a tight ball at my very center. Maybe they always lived there now, my core their sustaining loam. Through blackness and bright bursts of terror, I reached into the wisteria of my will and flung it frantically outward.
Before, my gleam—the infinite bloom, as Mara called it, the imposition of my will over space and time—had always rushed away from me so that I could see it spreading, slender branches forking away and bisecting each other, dripping whorls of pastel blossoms like the most delicate floral monsoon. This time, what I wanted most was to go with them, to be borne along with the rapid budding of their growth. Even as I drew and threw them out and out, I continued clinging to them, feeling the bark imprinting into my palms, the satiny give of the petals I pulped with my grip.
Take me with you take me with you take me with you
Take me to her take me take me to her
And then, there she was.
My sister knelt in an herb garden, her back to an ornate birdbath and moonlight crowning the spill of her hair. Two silver candles burned on either side of her, and a goblet of dark wine sat in front of her knees. Her mournful face was tilted up at a sky hooked by a crescent moon. I startled at that; the moon had been nearly full when Fjolar took me, I remembered from the nighttime battle with Mara on Bobotov Kuk. And this one had waned down to nearly new.
While what felt like barely a day had passed for me, I was seeing my sister weeks into her future.
It wasn’t even the strangeness of it that doused me with icy shock. It was that I’d lost so much time with her already.
Her hands were lifted with palms up; I could see her so clearly that I could trace their familiar lines. She wore a loose, white lacy dress that could have been a nightgown, and looked just like the woodland nymph she’d once sung herself to be for Death. A speared wrought-iron fence circled the garden behind her, and a dense, dim forest loomed above it from behind.
I called to her, or tried to call. It emerged warbling and strange, words suspended in bubbles, like talking underwater. I had the disjointed feeling of being trapped in a lucid dream, as though only part of myself was here. My consciousness, or at least a sliver of it—while the rest of me huddled miserably on the poison garden’s floor, curled like a fist around a full-body muscle spasm with pebbles digging into my side.
Her hands dropped and she frowned a little, tensing, as if she heard something in the distance. Then she looked up, and her eyes went wide with surprise. She stumbled to her feet with none of her usual grace.
“Riss!” Her gaze kept flickering to the left and right of my face, as if it couldn’t find a solid place to land. I went to take a step closer to her—or merely thought about it, there didn’t seem to be a difference—and suddenly she coalesced right in front of me like a ghost.
Judging by her expression, it was more likely me who’d been the ghost.
I tried to touch her shoulder; my hand drifted right through it. She let out a clipped little half scream, her eyes never quite settling on my face. Finally she closed them, hissing through her teeth, her own face clenching with frustration.
“You’re everywhere, Riss, in a thousand different broken places. It’s so hard to look at you. I can’t tell which one you really are.”
A thousand different broken places. Whatever part of me the wisteria had brought here looked multiplied to her, and mute. A silent fractal of myself.
I couldn’t hug her, and she could barely see me, but I let myself steal just a moment for us both, tipping my forehead right to where it would have met hers if I was really there.
“I miss you so much,” she whispered. A film of tears lined her lashes, glinting in the starlit night. “You need to find his soul. Please find it, please, there’s still time, find it and bring it back—”
Then a horror cascaded over me, a spiked, encroaching dark calling out to me in a ravenous roar. I recognized it instantly, knew it as the black hunger that lived beneath that golden world I’d swum through to reach Fjolar’s kingdom. But this time it was so much stronger—this time it felt so dreadfully close. It tugged at me in its familiarity, like some sickening beacon. Like the forgotten memory of a nightmare, the primal terror of terrors, resurrected.
I could feel its thrashing hunger. Not for me—where my body was, I was safe from it—but for my sister. And for Dunja, Mara, and all my coven kin.
And as if the direction of my thoughts determined where I should be, Malina vanished, along with the garden and its birdbath and tidy rows of herbs. I didn’t feel any sense of movement; it was as if I stood still, and the world around me shifted. When it rushed to a halt, I found myself in the unbroken dark of a mountainside forest, deeper than the moon could reach. I’d never have been able to see anything with my real eyes, but the part of me that was here saw perfectly.
Between the pines, a man straddled a mossed boulder as if it were a throne, his hair long and loose and wild around bare shoulders. He was striking in a rough-hewn way, with brazen bones that made me think of ages long gone. The dark around him writhed like vipers, striking at the air, and thick, crude tattoos ringed his powerful arms.
A throng of people surrounded him, some on the ground, others crouching like animals in the trees, and even hanging from the branches. There was something worse than wrong about the way they held themselves.
If I’d brought my body here with me, my skin would have crawled right off it at the sight of them.
And behind them, even deeper in the trees, enormous things darker than the fabric of the night flailed too many limbs and shrieked.
The man smiled wide at the sound, his face lighting like a fond father’s. “Gather, sweetlings,” he called out. “Gather, pets. Gather closely round! The time for storming almost comes.”
One of the dark things bugled so eagerly, I tried to clap a phantom hand over my mouth before remembering that I wasn’t really here.
The man laughed with both pride and glee, and lifted a finger. “Not yet, not yet, but very soon. Later tonight. We are on the cusp of supping, and this time we are strong—the little spy-witch has broken our last shackles. There will be such meats, and so much light to spill. Enough bright, shining witches to sate us, enough that we may sup our fill.”
I shouldn’t have understood him—the words I heard weren’t the ones he spoke—but I knew what he meant. What spy-witch was he talking about? I thought frantically. Who—
He froze abruptly, cocking his head like a bird of prey. His eyes roved over the forest, and fell unerringly on me, narrowing, then glinting with something like lust turned inside out. And if I had thought I’d been afraid before, in the poison-garden flower’s thrall, I’d never even dreamed what it meant to be truly afraid.
And then, like a rubber band stretched far past its limit, the wisteria of my will snapped me back.