Then a flicker of movement drew my gaze up to the bastion itself, the rounded stone fortification with its crenelated edges. I’d never seen anyone up there before, but now a woman leaned on the edge right above the river gate, hair even blacker than my own spilling over like an inkfall.
I walked across the small square like a sleepwalker until I stood in front of the gate, my neck craned so I could look up at her with parted lips and squinted eyes. To her right the craggy mountains reared, patches of green against the sheer stone screes, and her silhouetted form was draped in dusky blue and silver, a loose Grecian dress pinned around her neck. From where I stood below her, the angle threw the architecture of her bones into stark relief, and I realized I knew her. I knew that powerful jaw, the full mouth and regal flare of the nostrils, the unyielding cheekbone sweep and thick black brows above pale eyes.
Then somehow her perfume reached me, as if it could seek me out despite the direction of the wind. With déjà vu rolling over me like a lurching tide, I didn’t just know but I remembered.
FOUR YEARS AGO Lina and I had sat in the Arms Square on my threadbare blanket, hawking my glass flowers while Lina sang wanting songs at passing strangers. We’d already had a good day of it—three fractal poppies sold, scarlet with jet-black centers like singularities, and two lady’s slipper orchids I’d sweated over for weeks—when they came.
Counting our coins and dinar bills, neither of us noticed until their shadows fell over us, and that sweet scent tightened around us like a grasping hand. It smelled like sandalwood and honey and bergamot, bright honeysuckle above and the tang of blood oranges below. It smelled so good it nearly hurt, and I could feel my lungs expanding painfully with the effort to draw it in, my bronchioles unfurling like cherry-blossom buds.
The black-haired woman had worn a gown then too, so extravagant it should have been silly in the milling crowd of T-shirted tourists, but it wasn’t. Its full skirt was lined with stripes of shining peacock feathers alternating with raven black, as if she were heading to a masquerade. Her arms were swathed to the elbow with fingerless gloves, black leather and lace fine and dense as filigree. Deep copper shoulders glowed smooth above a satin hem.
But none of it compared to the sheer force of her face, a kind of bold that seemed almost wild: cheekbones flat and broad as steppes, a wide-bridged nose with a small bump between her eyes, a lush and perfect mouth. And those pale, pale eyes, black-rimmed and water gray. Exactly the color of my mother’s, or Malina’s, or my own.
And there was that hearthstone smell, like warmth and trust and mother-love. I wanted to be even closer to it, I realized. I wanted the black-haired woman to sit down with us, to somehow pull both me and Malina onto her lap as if we were still little girls who could fit.
“Look at them, Naisha,” she whispered to the other in a rough-edged purr layered with more tones at once than I could count. It was a bit how Malina sounded when she sang, but I didn’t think she could talk this way, and she wasn’t anywhere near so multiple. “Look at how faint and little they are, that all these shamblers barely even see them. They should be so much lovelier by now.”
“It’s not their fault, Sorai,” Naisha murmured back. She was lovely too, a blonde carved out of ivory, platinum, and silver. She had the same wolf-gray eyes, but her narrow features were both delicate and sharp, as if a sculptor had whittled her face using only a very pretty knife. She wore a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breastbone and rolled up to her elbows, and in her worn-down, shapeless jeans she still looked like someone’s queen. “She isn’t teaching them, like I told you.”
There was something familiar about her voice, sweet and stripped of the other’s inhuman resonance, but the honeyed prison of perfume wouldn’t let me think enough to place it.
“But they do look at us,” I said, as if the blonde hadn’t even spoken. My voice sounded strange and echoing, as if the three of us were underneath a dome, an upended goldfish bowl. It made the air feel like cotton stuffed in my ears. “They stare at us all the time.”
“Of course they do, little one,” the brunette—Sorai—said, and the slight smile she gave me warmed me to my core. Looking at her felt like staring at a darkened sun, watching an eclipse until it turned your eyes to cinders. “You were born to draw the gaze, to snare it like a butterfly in a net. But you are not nearly what you should be. Show them, Naisha. Show them what beauty should be like. Show them all they are missing.”
Naisha’s face stayed impassive, and I would never have noticed the struggle beneath if I hadn’t seen Malina’s eyes on her and heard my sister’s dissonant little trill: Don’t tell me what to do. It seemed strange, that childish note of defiance. Especially since they both looked around the same age to me, not much older or younger than Mama.
Moving so slowly, Naisha unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall, tossing her head so the gleaming corn-silk rope of her hair slid over one shoulder. Her bare torso shone long and lithe, small teardrop breasts tipped in pink. Every gesture was beyond deliberate, the bending of each wrist and crooking of her fingers like the precise steps of the most minute dance. I noticed she had an odd piercing, a tiny diamond embedded into her left wrist, sparking between the forking green threads of her veins. My heart pounded wildly in my chest; I’d seen women topless on the beach sometimes, but they’d never looked anything like this, a perfection vast and heartbreaking as a sunrise.
Beside me, I heard Malina catch a shuddering breath, but still no one else in the square even looked our way.
Patterns began to flicker across the pristine canvas of Naisha’s skin, chasing one another. Tiger stripes of orange and black wound around her waist, then a silver spate of fish scales scattered across her ribs. Long, pale swan feathers fanned out over her chest, then bright-green and glossy black ones swept up her neck. Cheetah spots raced in trails down both her arms, and finally the skin around her eyes turned a stippled, tawny brown and beige, as if she had become part diamondback snake.
As she flicked through the patterns, her eyes and hair changed color to match, flowing from a brilliant, inhuman orange to a flaring peacock green, and even her features seemed to shift, sharpening or flattening out to mimic the animal she was showing for us. Yet it never went all the way; her face stayed beautiful in each incarnation, a gorgeous were-woman hybrid like a creature from one of my storybooks. A shape-shifter prettier than any succubus I’d ever read about.