Malina must have had the same idea. She brought her fingers to her lips and kissed them, then held them out to Ylessia, who gave a smile like gilded sunshine with deep dimples on each cheek, dipping into another pert bow.
The pageant continued after that, relentless. I barely remembered to breathe, with the joy clamoring inside me so loud. This was what I’d missed, through all those years of my fading gleam. The ability to steal the breath of the world, to stun, to stab with beauty. To revel in the birthright, wallow luxuriously like these women did.
Though they weren’t exactly like us, I realized, as the next took to the podium. She wore a leather corset over a frothy emerald tutu skirt, her feet in matching green ballet slippers laced up her sturdy calves. Her knotted hair was dyed glossy teal, shaved on one side and on the other full of magpie things, feathers and coins, insects made of wire and little chips of colored glass. Her lips were wine-dark and her nose pierced through the septum, and she was round-limbed and curved everywhere, heavy breasts and strong, full hips. Sleeve tattoos raced down both her arms, tsunamis and lightning storms and flowers on tangled vines. I loved it all, but somehow none of it had the razor edge it might hold in real life, on a punked-out woman brushing shoulders with me in the street.
In its way, it was no less studied than Shimora’s spare elegance.
I forgot the thought when massive wings spread behind her, raven-black like a fallen angel’s and at least twelve feet in span. She spread her arms along with them, wrists cocked and palms held up, the fingers splayed petal-soft. Standing en pointe, she preened in a circle like a music-box dancer, showing them off from every angle. They rippled, feather by feather, from glossy black to dove white, then whirred into iridescent dragonfly wings, two on each side. And then she grew silky, near-transparent bat wings, threaded with fine veins, that she curled around herself, peering up coyly above their bony tips with black sequins glittering above her eyes.
Both Malina and I gasped as she flung them out into dragon wings, so massive that they nearly reached the atrium’s third floor, a faint smoke rising from them. But even when she beat them toward us, like fanning a flame, I couldn’t see even a slight budging of her frame. They weren’t going to lift her no matter what she did, and no hot air stirred toward us, either.
“It’s not real,” I whispered. “Is it? And why just wings?”
“Seems, like, very specific,” Malina said, then added hastily, as if she might hurt someone’s feelings, “but gorgeous, definitely.”
Shimora sighed behind us, another faint strawberry waft. “It is very specific, and yes, that’s all Oriell can do—project illusions directly behind her, extensions of her own frame. Not only wings, of course, she has a surprisingly broad repertoire within her limitations. But this is her prettiest for you. The gleam has . . . honed itself over the years. A dilution of necessity. And Oriell’s one of our youngest, only three blood-tiers above you.”
“Three blood-tiers?” I asked.
“She’s my mother,” Shimora said simply. “Your great-grandmother.”
Shock yawned inside me again, like a vast pit, but there wasn’t time for it.
The next performer already knelt on the podium, strawberry-blond hair drawn back into an austere bun, her face sharp-angled as a Valkyrie’s. Her skin was thoroughly freckled, nearly nutmeg against her fine-cut lips. She was naked above the waist, save for silver earrings like chandeliers, trailing demurely over her chest and breasts down to her bare knees. In measured movements, she laid a series of ornate bells in front of her. Cocking her head to the side, she lifted a slim, arched brow, lips pursed into a sultry smirk. Then she spoke a careful litany of words, like picking a path across slick river rocks, ringing a new bell to mark each syllable.
She was polyphonic just like Malina, I realized, before my head fell back, a wave of pure sensation rolling across my skin. I bit back a moan as a thousand invisible, silken streamers trailed with almost painful languor over me at once. She spoke again, a burbling rush this time and with different bells, and I plunged into warm water fizzing with bubbles. It was so real I could feel my hair lifting as if to drift like seaweed around me, even though I could look down and see myself dry.
She didn’t really need those bells, either, I thought. Like the winged one hadn’t needed ballet shoes, or the falling star her silks. But I was beginning to understand. All these women were like clockwork—like our mother must once have been—painstakingly matching tools and their own movements to their gleam. Every head tilt and loose curl meant something, each bent joint an evocation.
Trained to entertain.
There were others, after. A brunette in the middle of a flighted swarm, butterflies, moths, and bees flitting around her like buzzing clothes as she twined herself through hoops and a trapeze. A bobbed redhead wound her body through slow, snaking contortions as she flung up ground ice that magnified into a flurry twirling lazily around her, fat, lacy snowflakes as large around as basketballs—followed by a handful of sand that blinked into a massive array, a confetti of broken bits of seashells, rock-candy crystals, and polished pink fragments. Another cast shadows like simulacra all around her, black silhouettes that fell in step beside her and followed every rolling tumble that she made.
It was all too beautiful to bear.
“How?” I finally said, when my face was slick with tears. I turned back to face Shimora, drawing my legs up. “They’re so young. They can’t all be our family, how would that be possible? And what is it all for?”
“That isn’t for me to answer,” she said, running her finger down my damp cheek. “We just wanted you to truly see it, what a gift it is. How worth it it always is for both, the one chosen and the one who lives.”
Dread dropped into my belly like a swallowed ball bearing. Beside me, Malina caught a shuddering breath. “What does that mean?” she barely whispered. “The one chosen?”
“Let me take you to meet Sorai, dear heart. No one but her should tell you.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’D SEEN HER IN A STOLEN MEMORY. I’D EVEN SEEN HER IN the flesh, for a moment, on the bastion’s ramparts in the Old Town.
But not like this. She hadn’t been so close, then. She hadn’t been anything like this.
Shimora had led us up one of the two sweeping staircases that winged to the second-floor landing, and from there we’d made our way to the fifth floor. But as soon as we stepped into Sorai’s chamber—my mind wouldn’t let me think of it as a mere room—I felt purged clean of the casually strewn wonders that we’d seen. There had been so much, all of it pulsing in my vision, frantic to fractal: silver platters of cracked-open geodes with winking crystal teeth; vast sculpture-scenes made entirely of stained glass; huge models of constellations etched bas-relief into the chalet’s walls, precious stones wedged in like placeholders for stars.