I took a few questing breaths. The air did smell powerfully of that unnameable sweetness that suffused Shimora’s scent, so rich it must have leached into the building’s planks. It still smelled somehow familiar, and I found myself breathing as deeply as I could, until I felt not only recovered but giddy and light-headed from the sweetness of the sting.
Beside me, Malina grinned as soon as I straightened, her lips pink and bright against her teeth, her silvery eyes glazed like glass.
“It does smell so good in here, doesn’t it?” she said breathlessly. “It’s . . . wow. It smells like when I first realized . . .”
“When you first realized what?”
She gave herself a little shake. “Nothing. I—nothing.”
I gave her a slantwise frown, but before I had a chance to pry into what she had meant, Shimora trailed her hand over the hobnailed back of a velveteen black-cherry love seat close to the marbled podium.
“Will you come sit, Iris, Malina?” She wrinkled her fine nose a bit. “We’ll have proper names for you soon, but we thought the naming and the scenting could wait until after. You have your ribbons already, after all, and that’s most important. Faisali saw to that, at least.”
“Naming?” I echoed dumbly as Lina and I settled back into the plush contours; there were even two ottomans for us each to rest our feet. “We already have names, too.”
“Yes, ones Faisali chose for you, as she chose Jasmina for her common name. But they aren’t coven names; they don’t capture you as they should.”
Coven. The word felt strange in a way “witch” never had when Mama said it. Eating the moon hadn’t felt like a coven to me, nothing so formal. It had felt like family, my mother and sister holding my hands while we wove wonder through beauty, on a shared loom beneath summer nights.
Coven was something else altogether. And even with the smell of joyous homecoming filling me to bursting with every breath, the bone-deep sense of hearth and home that I somehow recognized even if I’d never seen this place before, I wasn’t sure I liked what it might mean.
“What does that mean, coven?” I asked cautiously. “How is it different from—”
Shimora had moved fluidly to stand behind us, winding her fingers through our hair in a way that sent tingles rushing down my spine. “Let us perform for you, first. All these years without full gleam . . . I can’t imagine how you made do without it, or without us. How that loss must have ached at your core, even if you couldn’t fathom its origin. I understand why Faisali chose that way, but I swear I don’t know how she could have borne it in the end, being so alone.”
She bent forward between us, propped on her forearms, her curls creeping over my shoulder like ivy. Her breath smelled like mint and strawberries when she whispered, “Watch your kin now, if you will. See what you were born to be.”
I only had a moment to exchange a seeking glance with Malina before a raw swell of music washed over us, crystalline violins over a thrilling heart-stir of a beat. It was gorgeous and freezing and uncanny, the aural equivalent of a rave inside a palace of ice.
Then the atrium above us shattered into a moving swarm of light.
The clusters of hollow spheres and onion bulbs that dangled from the eaves filled in a moment, some with little sprigs of suspended flowers, others with glimmering insects: dragonflies with whirring wings, fireflies, butterflies with elaborate tigereye designs. Some of the spheres simply held light, amber nuggets that shed a glow without any visible filament. I dug my nails into my palms to keep the shifting patterns from fractaling into a transcendence that would have eclipsed anything I’d ever called up before.
As if she could sense my struggle, Shimora pressed her cool fingers into my nape, and another fresh-breeze waft of calm swept over me. My blood stopped feeling like it wanted to surge free from my veins.
While we’d been looking up, gaping, a woman had stepped onto the slick marble podium, a petite olive-skinned beauty with glossy black hair braided around her head like an elaborate crown, a few spiral curls bouncing free by her temples. Her strawberry face was much softer than ours, with a tiny chin and wide, full cheeks, a lush scarlet pout, and a button nose. She wore something like a catsuit in bands of sparkling red and gold, sheer over the carved muscles of her abdomen and the powerful density of her hips and thighs.
She gave a deep but sprightly bow, sassy as a wink, one small bare foot pointed in front of her and arms spread and lifted behind. Then she spun once and sprang into the air, launching herself into one of the bolts of silk behind her. In the two blinks it took to wind her limbs through it, all the bolts deepened into a velvet blue like the darkest edge of night, shining with constellations so bright the silk might have turned to damask, pricked full of holes and held up to some massive light.
The illusion was so convincing that when the woman spiraled down, unwinding from the silks in a tumbling plummet, she looked exactly like a falling star spun free of the Milky Way.
As she climbed and fell, leaping effortlessly from silk to silk, the bolts changed along the way like a theatrical backdrop to her celestial play. They melted into plum and peach palettes of dusk and dawn, clotted with clouds, trailing her rise and fall as if she were the sun—then a comet—then a meteor hurtling hot through the atmosphere. Then they formed the brilliant sky above a green canopy of trees, and she fluttered easily between them like a tropical bird—before rising upward like a phoenix, against the roaring fire that raged beneath and around her.
“Oh my God,” Malina whispered next to me.
“Holy shit,” I agreed, just as quietly, my heart racing. This wasn’t a gleam but a Gleam, a magic of an entirely different order of magnitude from anything Lina and I had ever done. “How is she doing this?”
“Manipulation,” Shimora said. “Of sight, in Ylessia’s case. We’re all manipulators of the senses, to evoke sensation, emotion, or both. That’s the nature of the gleam, to sway perception toward beauty. Ylessia could do it without her silks, if she wanted; she doesn’t need to move at all to project a vivid illusion on any backdrop. The elders are always stronger because they’re higher, closer to the source.” Something like envy tinged her tone.
“But it’s so much lovelier with the silks, don’t you think?” she continued more lightly. “And that’s what we’re made for, after all. The striving for beauty in all things.”
I frowned at that, but just then an entire universe in miniature painted itself across the bolts, exquisite solar systems and whirlpools of galaxies like an orrery brought to life against pitch black. A supernova pulsed at the center of it all, and when it finally burst—a yellow heart scorching outward into blinding red, blue, and green—Ylessia catapulted free of the silks and landed lightly on the podium, as if the dying star had given birth to a new one in her shape.
I wondered if this was a good time to clap. This was a performance for us, for sure, but it felt somehow both bigger and more sacred than that.