None of them compared to Sorai.
She knelt with her back to us, inky hair tinged plum by the dusk creeping in through the series of slanted skylights above her, cut into the chalet’s roof. Even without facing us, pure power rolled off her in tremendous waves, like a desert wind, or the clanging of some silent, behemoth bell. The air nearly trembled around her with its force. It was hard to look at her directly; it was as if we saw her through a porthole, elongated from the curving of the glass.
And all around her, the room writhed with black roses. They were glistening and unruly, twining through the air as if they needed no espalier to hold them, no soil in which to sink. Petals, stems, and branching roots were all black and suspended, as if the maze of thorns trapping Sleeping Beauty’s castle had erupted into midnight bloom.
Maybe it had, if Sleeping Beauty had once been our mother.
Mama lay on the floor in front of Sorai, her chestnut hair fanned out and shining against the mahogany floorboards. She looked both cold and flawless, as if someone who’d once adored her flesh-and-blood face had carved her exact likeness from snow and ice. A shroud of roses covered her, and it was almost lovely until I realized that their roots and thorns drove into her, piercing flesh and digging deep. The network of veins around each puncture branched out black beneath her skin as if whatever lived in the roses flowed through her too.
Then the roses crept over her entirely, closing ranks like a living, floral casket and hiding her from us.
“What did you do?” Malina moaned, half sobbing. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, child,” Sorai said, in a burred, resounding triptych of voices. Malina and I staggered back as one; I hadn’t seen any of the steps it took Sorai to stand and cross the room toward us, the roses parting neatly for her. She’d been kneeling one minute, and in the next she faced us, close enough that I could feel her exhales on my own lips—her breath smelled exactly like that dizzying sweetness that underpinned everything else: our ribbons, Shimora’s perfume, the entire chalet. She wore eggshell ivory, glowing pale against all the flowers that nudged and strained toward her like eager children, a long-sleeved, narrow gown that clung to the contours of her body and pooled at her bare feet.
Her eyes were just like ours, but they also weren’t, set against the deep, dark skin of her imperious face. They didn’t seem like human eyes so much as a window into the soul of winter.
“Nothing,” she said again, and warmth spread through me at her voice, a fire-flower of ecstasy unfurling in my chest. “Something was done to her, and now I fight against it. Do you see these roses? They are my will, made flesh. And so I still her with my will, keep her at rest. Until you do what must be done to save her.”
“I don’t understand,” Lina and I whispered in tandem. It was so difficult to think with Sorai’s eyes on me, and nearly impossible to fumble for words, my mind smooth and sifting as sand pouring through a sieve. I kept fighting the urge to kneel, to fling myself at her feet. My knees trembled of their own accord.
At some point Lina had taken my hand, and now she squeezed it, speaking for me as I struggled. “Who are you? Who are we to you? And who did . . . this to our mother?”
“I am Sorai, the highest, first daughter of Mara.” Eyes shifted between us like frost gathering on glass. “And that’s what you are, too. Far daughters of Mara the sorceress, called by some the strongest witch who ever lived, the pride of her tribe four thousand years ago.”
I barely remembered moving or sitting down, time spinning like a whirligig around us, but suddenly Lina and I sat cross-legged in front of her on crimson cushions. In each of her hands, Sorai held one of ours, though Lina still hadn’t let go of me where our fingers were linked. The roses moved all around us like animal things, creeping over our shoulders, brushing our cheeks. They weren’t an illusion, unless illusions could feel more real than my own skin; I felt their softness and the sharp potential of the prick behind each curved thorn. I heard the rustling of the leaves as they twined around us both.
“As daughters of Mara and youngest scions of her blood, your names are mine to choose,” Sorai continued. “You who were named Malina, and who was born first—your true name is and should be Azareen.”
As soon as she said it, I knew it to be fundamentally true, the same way I knew a clap of thunder meant lightning even if I hadn’t seen it strike. Deep inside, I’d always believed that I was the oldest, even if we’d had no way to know. But now we did, because those three syllables somehow held all of Malina caught inside them, a spoken cross-section of everything she was. From the lush sweetness surrounding an unyielding core of strength, like the peach around a pit, to the luxuriant certainty of always knowing what she wanted, and quietly having it whenever she wanted it. Such silent disregard for consequence, so easy to mistake for something pliable.
My sister had never truly been anything like soft.
“You see how strong words are,” Sorai said. “Such a sturdy vehicle for beauty. And an even better one for will. Even mortals know the worth and weight of phonemes, to string them together for natural power though they can’t instill them with their own will. Ask the Arabs of their hamza, almost like a soul-sigh, and they will tell you—it can break a heart all by itself.”
“But Azareen isn’t a real word,” Malina protested, though I could hear from her voice how it had moved her. I had no idea where she found the strength to do anything but marvel at Sorai. “You made it up.”
“Of course I did, and of course it is real, and of course it means you, fledgling.” The purring multilayers of her voice took on a gentle chiding note. “Will you smell this too, and feign that you can’t find yourself in it?”
She offered Malina—Azareen, my mind railed. You know her name is Azareen—a tiny crystal vial, lifting its stopper. My own nostrils flared as I recognized the scent; it was the same as the perfume on Malina’s ribbons, though much stronger. Sweet pea, vanilla, apple, and verbena, deceptive sweetness over a sharp, astringent base, with the faintest hint of Sorai’s scent swirled in. Just as Naisha’s ribbons had conjured her up back in her apartment in Cattaro, the scent filled my mind’s eye with Malina even as she sat beside me, her eyes and hands and tumbling blue-black hair, the blinding dazzle of her smile.