I dug my nails into my palms and began—and as soon as I did, the whole of the room kaleidoscoped between us, shattering into a behemoth fractal. And as Ylessia had said, now that I was no longer holding back or panicked, it felt like my human insides had been replaced with an endless, surging flood of light, a rushing river of pure relief.
Diamond trails of green snakeskin blazed everywhere, crisscrossing one another like reptilian bridges, while helices of multicolored beads spiraled through them. The powder grains whirled around each other like miniature tornadoes, near blinding in their brilliance, and as they multiplied, the piles of different stones bathed the room with light—agate, violet, periwinkle, crimson, a spectrum of my own making.
In the very middle, a writhing column of dead butterflies rose up like an organic Chihuly sculpture, surrounded by a chain link of nests with endless arcs of speckled eggs.
And the dew-flecked spiderwebs stretched out around it all, anchoring every corner, encompassing the whole of it like a dangling dreamcatcher.
“Beautiful!” Ylessia whispered, low and fierce. “Now stand. Walk among what you’ve created. Hold your head up and be lovely.”
She stood along with me, moving as I moved. I kept the fractals fracturing, shuffling them like some glorious tarot deck, even as I stepped between them delicately, ducking my head beneath the floating snakeskin arcs, slipping my hands through the pearled strings of the beads, stepping over glowing stone paths that looped around our feet. Ylessia corrected me with light touches as I walked through the world of my own making—lifting my chin, shaping my limbs, guiding me toward grace.
“Be strong, yet soft,” she whispered into my ear. “Be fierce, yet so fastidious. Remember what all this power is for—to serve, and play, and always please.”
Another ripple of rebellion stirred hot in me; I could do all this, whirl the world into orbit around me as if I were a sun, and I had to be soft while I did it? I could whip this gorgeous fury into motion all around me, tug it toward me with my own gravity like a black hole, and I was supposed to be fastidious about it?
That couldn’t possibly be right.
And then I heard Malina’s song.
She could have been rooms or even floors away, and it didn’t matter; it sounded as if an entire army of angels had crashed calamitously into the earth. This wasn’t just a fundamental and an overtone, or two, or even ten—it was an orchestral score from some hybrid of heaven and hell, so staggering and celestial that hearing it crushed my fractals with its aural weight, dissolved them into motes of sparkling dust.
It sounded like the world’s most epic victory march.
She thought she was winning. She was going to win.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I forgot about Ylessia and her instructions; I closed my eyes to the materials outside me and reached inside myself, as if I were striving to close my fist around my own heart. I thought of Sorai and her black roses—and like flinging a javelin from deep within myself, I flung out the repeating pattern of branches and flowers that made a massive wisteria tree, a living, thriving fractal in the shape of my own will.
Ylessia was screaming something—it might have been something like stop!, or please!, if I’d had even the slightest room to care—as slim branches and pink and purple blossoms surged all around us, in the most delicately dangerous headlong rush. They funneled toward the center of the room, where they collided, building a waterfall arch of wood and flower like a wedding wreath. In their center they formed a portal, opening into somewhere I had never seen—a pale, pastel night sky cluttered with stars, as seen from beneath the stony overhang of a sea cave, neon streaks of aurora borealis reflected in the placid water beneath.
I could actually see the splash of the Milky Way, like a sparkling cream dissolving into the thicker liquid of the night.
I moved toward the opening almost without thought, wanting to step through, into what I knew would be the warmest salty water. Ylessia swiped uselessly at me as I walked, foot in front of foot; my sentinel wisteria wound itself around her, tucked her into a distant corner of the room and held her pinned against the wall. There was nothing she could do to me. Her gleam was thin and empty, just an illusion of a dream—mine was whatever I dreamed made flesh, through the sheer pounding force of my own will.
Then black roses flooded over everything, in a fragrant, crushing tide. They slithered swiftly over my flowers, choking them at the vine, and I could feel Sorai’s arms close like a vise around me from behind.
“Enough, child,” she whispered almost under her breath into my ear, and still the many layers of her voice tore through my mind so loudly I thought they might have made my brain bleed. There was fury in her tone, and fear, and beneath it a puzzling, pulsing pride. “You have shown quite enough. No one here could possibly teach you, that much is more than clear. Nothing tamed can curb what grew unfettered. So let us hope that Death has acquired a taste for such wildlings as you are.”
TWENTY-SIX
THEY DRESSED ME IN FLOWERS, AND WOUND ME IN THORNS.
“Wild as she is,” Sorai had said, “she may as well look like something that clawed up out of the dirt on its own.”
Ylessia had bathed me in water scented with meadowsweet, her cheekbone eggplant-bruised where one of my branches must have whipped her in the face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her as I clung to the edges of the tub, bobbing in the froth of bubbles with my skin flushed and slick. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
But she wouldn’t answer, or even look at me. Even when she finally caught my eyes in the mirror as she dressed my hair, I couldn’t quite decipher her gaze. There was an awestruck sort of terror there, that much I could see, but beneath it . . .
It looked like a vast, scorching vat of jealousy.
When she was done I looked like I’d crawled naked through the world’s primordial forest, dressing myself only with what I could pick or pluck. Gossamer-green folds wound strategically around me, as if a spider had spun a web of silk and leaves, laced together with curls of ivy. My hair was braided loosely up and away from my face, beneath a crown of purple morning glories and their heart-shaped leaves, with wicked little berry sprigs tucked in here and there. Torques of thorns surrounded my biceps and my wrists, and something like barbed corn silk twined around my calves, like the straps of the gladiator sandals I’d worn in what felt like someone else’s life.
And my eyes were blackened with such a dense, matte liner that my irises all but glowed, like something that crept silent and hungry behind the night-rustle of leaves. Even my lips glistened a diluted red, as if I’d licked them with blood still lingering in my mouth.
It was the most beautiful I’d ever been, everything so tailored to me I might have grown it from my body, but I couldn’t quite tell why it all felt so wrong.