“She’s stealing things, too,” Malina said. “Icons, a saint’s bones, my violin, and one of Iris’s sculptures. Why?”
Sorai’s face went steely. “The shape of her magic is not known to me. We do not know who she is, or how she learned of us at all. But she is strong, strong enough that I needed to hunt her down myself in order to contain her, and that is a rare thing. It took myself and nearly ten of our eldest to trap her, but we have her now.”
I thought of Dunja, that sweet smile, the softness with which she’d spoken to me. “The day I saw her, though . . . she and Mama hugged, before they fought. Could they have known each other, somehow?”
The tight corners of her mouth softened. “Perhaps that was how she learned of us. Faisali would have been fastidious about secrecy, but being closed off from coven is a devastation of loneliness. We belong with each other, and the ache of solitude is strong. Perhaps she slipped up the once, became friendly with this woman, told her about us. In any case, she would not speak when we caught her.” Her voice turned to tar. “And now she certainly cannot.”
I thought of Fjolar, his stories of his witch mother. Maybe he had been tied to Dunja somehow, wrapped up in Mama’s death just like Malina had thought. “Sorai, there was someone else the past few days. A boy. He recognized the gleam, wanted me to do it for him. Is it possible that—”
Her face sank into uncanny stillness. The roses hovering around us froze, then vibrated like tuning forks in response to her tension. “Tell me of him. Everything.”
She listened stonily as I spoke about him, a distant storm brewing in her eyes. I explained how he’d asked me to gleam for him, how his presence made me flare stronger.
Finally, she said, “It sounds as if the woman’s plan was pronged, and somehow this boy was meant to siphon off your power while she did the rest of her work. It would explain how she managed to elude us for so long, if she was working in concert with another. You said he told you his mother was a witch—perhaps she instructed her son to beguile you, then bring you to her when she was ready, as some final element to her spell. Many spells are blood-fueled; she may have meant to kill you as an offering, to power hers. But you are safe here with us, and we will find him as we found her.”
So that was what he had wanted from me. It was stupid, that it should feel like such a burning betrayal. I had barely known him, and he had left me so stripped and weak that last time. Yet it still ached heavily in the pit of my stomach, the idea that he hadn’t wanted me in any true way. That he had just been playacting for my benefit, luring me into a cage with blinding smiles and peacock displays.
That he had never thought I was both beautiful and wild.
“And now?” I clenched my teeth to keep my voice from breaking. “What happens next?”
“Now you decide, children, which of you will be the sacrifice. Without the power of Faisali’s consent, her willingness to give up a daughter, there must be no wavering between you. You must determine it between yourselves. There can be no cracks between you, not even a hairline’s worth of fissure.”
My chest felt like a pounded anvil, and beside me Malina dropped her face in her hands and whispered something, a single word that I couldn’t make out.
My throat was so tight I could barely breathe. “And if we don’t?”
“If you cannot come to an agreement, either between yourselves or by competing against one another in a show of skill, Death will lapse permanently on its end of the bargain. Faisali will wake to endless agony; I can barely hold her quiet as it is, even with my will bearing down on her. And the curse will spread like wildfire to anyone else you love. To anyone that any of us have ever loved, if they still live.”
Jovan’s, Nevena’s, and Niko’s faces flashed in my mind, one by one.
And Luka, with his quirked half smile, the sun-bleached sheaf of summer hair falling into his hazel eyes.
Then finally Mama, when her eyes were soft, when she was the living, breathing center of every room rather than a mute, rose-smothered mound trapped between deathlessness and agony.
“So how long do we have, then?” I asked her. “Is there a deadline? Some sort of point of no return?”
Sorai spread her hands. “There may be. In the past, the transfer from one sacrifice to another has always been nearly immediate. As soon as one expired, the next one would take her place in a matter of days, at most. We are already past time, and I can only fend off the curse for so much longer until Faisali wakes. And once she wakes, it will be done. Our time will have run out. So be quick about deciding between yourselves, fledglings. Be as quick as you can.”
TWENTY-FOUR
SHIMORA LED US BACK TO ONE OF THE GUEST ROOMS, THE atrium echoing with the stony silence between us three. There were others of us here—I could nearly feel them through the ribbons—but they’d all withdrawn. We passed no one else on our way down to the third floor. Malina wouldn’t speak or look at me, even as Shimora swung open a baroque bronze door into a haven of pewter and plum. The walls were silvery gray, with a textured, violet accent of velvety fleur-de-lis wallpaper behind the two king beds’ cushioned, dove-gray headboards. A dripping crystal orb like a fractaled snowball hung above the bed, shedding gentle light, and I looked away from it as it flickered, eager to split and multiply under my gaze.
Lina perched on the edge of the plush purple ottoman against the footboard, her back rigid, while I slid sideways onto one of the beds, spreading my palms over the impossibly soft, peeled-back duvet, worked with glinting silver thread. Everything was so beautiful here, so forcefully luxurious. How had Mama ever resigned herself to the way we lived in Cattaro? No wonder she had accepted Jovan’s gifts despite herself, and labored so intently over her tailored dresses. After growing up in this silken cocoon, our whole world must have seemed so ragamuffin to her, all uneven seams and stains.
“Where does it happen?” I said stiffly. “If we—once we decide to do it, where would we go?”
“Into the Ice Cave. It’s in a fold of stone near Bobotov Kuk, the highest point of the Durmitor range. Over eight thousand feet up.” She nodded her chin out the window. “You can see Bobotov Kuk from here, that wedge of stone like a pyramid balanced on its end.”
I didn’t look. Instead I tilted my head back against the soft give of the headboard, wishing I could sink through it. I felt like a whole cairn of stones had stacked up inside me, so heavy with grief and resignation that I couldn’t imagine ever standing up again. I knew we had to do this; there wasn’t a choice.
And it would have to be me. I’d spent so long testing myself against our mother, flinging myself against the rock of her until it left me first bloody and then scarred. Even if I was softer inside than I had ever thought, most of me was tough as resin, scorching and malleable as the gather of my molten glass. I would last, and serve for years and years, as long as I could.