“Why are you doing this?” I asked Naisha. “Why are you betraying her, if that’s what this is?”
She pressed her rosy lips together, her eyes huge and mournful. “Because I watched you grow up,” she said simply. “Malina, mostly, but you too, Iris. I watched you be free, and saw the happiness you managed to find in the world despite all your limitations. With your own names, without being molded into Lisarah and Azareen. Without being curated like the rest of us. So I want to—I want to show you something. I don’t belong to her like I once did, and I won’t again for a while yet. I still remember myself from all those years, enough to want to give you a choice, a true one, while I still can.”
I frowned at her. “I don’t understand. What are you trying to say?”
“I can’t—” She smacked a fist into one palm, groaning in frustration. “I can’t go further than this. If you want to know, we have to go now. We’re running out of time.”
Lina took my hand, squeezing hard. “I don’t think she can say anything more, Iris. But I trust her; she sounds right. So I’m going to go with her, but you don’t have to, because this time it is your choice. Trust Sorai, or come with me and find out whatever it is.” She spread her hands, eyes guileless and bright. “Whatever you want to do.”
I took a long breath and let it out in a quivering rush.
“I want to go with you.”
THE CHALET WAS practically a warren, a terrarium of secret passageways carved into its walls. I wondered how the whole thing didn’t collapse onto itself, riddled as its foundation was with holes, and whether Sorai knew of all or any of these.
I followed the metallic swish of Lina’s feathers, which caught the little light there was, and the clink of the rattling key ring Naisha carried. We bore sideways and down, taking winding, narrow stairways until we reached what had to be the basement, the air drafty-cold and smelling of dank, pressed dirt.
There, Naisha paused in front of a weathered wooden door, bolted in three places. I could hear her hitching breath as she worked three different brass keys into the locks, grunting in a very ungraceful fashion at the effort of turning them.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I whispered behind her and Malina, frantic, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “What if she knows we’re here? What if she knows that I’m—that I’m betraying her like this—”
“That’s the ribbons talking,” Naisha whispered back, leaning into the final lock. “I took a few of Malina’s out, so it’s not quite so bad for her. That’s why I could come to you at all before I rejoin the others. Mine were taken out while I was posing as Natalija; they’re too much bright magic to be cloaked by my gleam, even under a masquerade glamour as complex as mine, and your mother would have seen them through it. So, I had time to get to know my own mind a bit. Unclouded by all the love.”
“Why wouldn’t you have known your own—”
The door finally screeched open, and I caught my breath.
The room was full of glowing ice, a giant block shot through with the black roses of Sorai’s will. They streaked through the expanse like a network of oily veins—or like prison bars for the woman trapped within. She had frozen in a half crouch, leaning forward, her arms flung up with fingers splayed and white hair flaring around her like the sun’s corona. Her dainty little jaw jutted forward, and her eyes were open wide and unmistakably full of fury. She was so close to the ice that I could make out the creases in her delicate lips, the individual golden threads of her eyelashes, and the silver striations in her gray eyes.
It was Dunja. And like all the other women here, she also had our eyes.
“She’s one of us,” I whispered, pressing my palms against the ice. It was blisteringly cold but didn’t leave my hand damp or stick to my skin. It wasn’t real ice, any more than the roses were actual flowers, but instead another manifestation of Sorai’s will, of her desire to hold this girl captive. Because she was a girl, maybe only a little older than us, if that.
“And not just that, I think,” Malina said softly, leaning forward until the tip of her nose nearly touched the ice. From that vantage point, I could see the shocking similarity between her profile and Dunja’s, the identically gentle slope of their noses and the sharp double crests of their upper lips. “Look at her, really look. Do you remember that picture of Mama’s sister, Anais? It’s her. The one who was supposed to be the last sacrifice; the one they said had burned out right before all this started. Her hair is white, but it’s her.”
We both turned to Naisha, who gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut, then gave a single flinch of a nod.
“Why would you all have lied about that?” I demanded. “And why would she have tried to kill our mother?”
Naisha shook her head miserably, her mouth opening and closing without sound. Her face was leached of color, save for two spots burning overbright on her cheeks, and beads of sweat shimmered above her upper lip. She looked like a tubercular Victorian bride in her last gasp.
“I don’t know.” Lina laid her own hand flat against the ice. “Naisha clearly can’t say, look at her. But I think it means they lied about a lot of things. And I don’t think she was the one who tried to kill Mama, either.”
“Why would you say that?”
She turned to me, her face bathed in the reflected glow of the ice, as if the woman inside was luminous somehow, shedding her own light. “We only think it was her at all because that’s what Sorai told us, right? But we know Mama saw her twice, even went to visit her at that hotel. And more than that . . . this is Mama’s sister, her own twin. Would you ever have tried to kill me, Riss? Because nothing you did could bring me to that. I would cheat and lie and steal to keep you safe. Kill, even, if I had to, but never you. And I think you’d do the same for me.”
Swallowing tears, I remembered the way Mama had hugged this woman, clung to her. The way they’d whispered into each other’s ears. And I believed her; I believed my sister.
“What do we do now?” I asked her.
She set her jaw. “Now we set her free, and then we see what happens.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Are you? Because it’ll have to be you who does it. I can’t sing to something that can’t hear me, I think, and Naisha told me what you did with the fractal wisteria. Maybe you can try it again, whatever you did that time.”