The doubts still spun like a maelstrom inside me, even with the evidence of lies right before my eyes. And it was that, more than anything, that somehow made me want to do it—the fact that I couldn’t even trust my own mind. I could see Naisha’s struggle now—she’d wrapped both arms around herself and shook in place like a last frail autumn leaf, her mouth twisted in a rictus—and remembered her face all those years ago in the Arms Square when she stood next to Sorai, her features so smooth even as don’t tell me what to do resounded beneath them. If she had fought so hard to bring us here, we owed it to her to forge ahead.
And if this really was our aunt suspended in front of us, the least we could do was hear what she had to say.
I closed my eyes and pushed into that inward reach, struggling to frame what I wanted, to force it outward into the heart of the world. It was harder this time, without Malina’s song to goad me, to make me certain of what shape my will wanted to take and what my goal was—and feeling my faltering, she began to sing. The battle march of it fortified me, stealing into the crumbling cracks of my own foundation like ivy twining through a building and shoring it up.
“What is that?” I forced out through my teeth.
“It’s defiance,” she said. “It’s what you used to sound like when you and Mama fought.”
“I sounded like a bagpipe war song? Could be worse.”
Fragile little buds of wisteria unfurled from where my palms touched the ice, and with another fierce push that made all the veins in my body expand with the effort—free this woman, free her, let her loose, want it more than anything—I drove my will into the ice block’s weakest points, the ones emptiest of Sorai’s roses. Cracks raced through the surface as if it had been tapped along a faultline with a chisel and a mallet—and without warning the whole of it shattered, raining winking crystal particles that vanished before they hit the floor.
Lina and I had both reflexively flinched away, shielding our faces from the fallout, while Naisha cowered against the door behind us. When we turned back, Dunja stood free, blinking slowly like something ancient and predatory waking from a long sleep.
Despite myself, I pressed my back against the wall as she picked her way toward us, hips rolling, precise as a tightrope walker. This close, I could see all the finer details of her face. Her eyebrows were as white as her hair, and her face was shaped sweetly, exactly like my sister’s, with the same cherry-cleft lower lip.
“Iris,” she said to me in that low, rich voice. “Malina. Quite absurdly trussed up, the both of you, but still so very lovely. Which is to be expected, but still—no harm in admiring my nieces.” Her eyes slid behind us, over to Naisha. “And I see you have a partially willing accomplice. Which is better than none, I suppose. Even if she might collapse at any moment, by the looks of it.”
“Please tell them everything,” Naisha whispered. “I . . . I have to leave. I can’t hold on much longer, but I swear I won’t—I swear I’ll keep this secret until you get them out. That much I can do for them.”
“Do it, then,” Dunja snapped. “And keep as far away from her as you can. Blend with the others. She can’t see you quivering like this, or she’ll know something’s afoot.”
Naisha nodded once and, throwing a last plaintive look at me and Lina, fled back into the corridors.
Lina’s hand sought out mine; our aunt wasn’t frightening, exactly, but she had such an aura of power to her, of a different breed entirely than Sorai’s. It crackled like ozone in the air before a rainfall, sharp and anticipatory, prickly on my skin. Still reeling from the effort of will that had freed her, I struggled to think what I wanted to ask her, where to even start.
She was examining me now, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “You set me free, with the infinite bloom. I thought only she could use that, and I’ve never seen any but the first nine tiers actually manifesting will. I wonder what makes you different. . . .”
“Why aren’t you dead?” Malina broke in. “Or with Death?”
“I was with him,” Dunja said, her tone laced with such longing my stomach knotted with sympathy. “And I should have been the final one. That was what your mother and I decided, between the two of us. That it would end with us, that we would be the last. That there would be no more sacrifice.”
“But how?” I strained to understand. “One of us would have had to take your place, to keep Mara’s bargain with Death. To counterweigh the curse, so that no one we loved would die without dying.”
“Is that what they told you?” Her face went stark and bitter. “That there was a curse of some kind, that we do this for some noble purpose?”
Malina and I glanced at each other, then she nodded. “Sorai told us that—”
Without warning Dunja’s head whipped up, arching her throat, like an animal catching a high-pitched, distant sound. “It’s starting very soon,” she said grimly. “Not yet, but soon. They’ll come looking for you within the hour, perhaps less. There’s no time now for explanations at your leisure. I can explain it all once I have you away from here. Away from her.”
“But if one of us doesn’t go tonight, Mama will wake up to agony, and the curse—”
She flashed forward and caught me by the jaw, her grip like steel, but so precise it didn’t hurt. “There’s no curse, sweetness,” she said through her teeth. “Just Mara’s simple bargain with Death: one daughter every generation, in exchange for her own immortality and that of all her other daughters. Your mother is only undead because Mara herself attacked her, and then suspended her in a deathless loop—to give both of you reason enough to offer willing sacrifice, without the requisite years of being brainwashed by all her poisonous love. Unlike you, daughters raised in coven don’t need to be incentivized. You’ve seen them all; you’ve seen what it took from Naisha to rebel. They’re trained from birth to be pliant, lovely, flawlessly obedient.”
Still held captive in her hand, I stared into her crystalline eyes. They seemed to go endlessly deep, made me think of the infinite lattice of carbon in diamonds. I could feel the wisp of her breath on my face, and it somehow seemed uncanny that she even needed to breathe. “How is that possible, when Mara was the first sacrifice? Her daughter, Sorai, said—”
“It’s entirely possible, on account of that being another whole-spun lie for your benefit. Your ‘Sorai’ is Mara—that’s the honorific we all used for her. The highest, the first mother, the one who begat us all and then ensnared Death into letting her sell us to him.”
“She’s not lying,” Malina said, her voice abstracted with concentration. “She sounds like glass rung with a spoon. Nothing muddy here at all.”
“I’m honored to offer my fetching cadences to you, little pretty,” Dunja said dryly, dipping into a mock curtsy. “And I’m glad to know you can even hear me, with that love-struck garbage in your hair. I assume it’s because you’ve only had a few days with it, it hasn’t taken root properly. You may want to please her terribly, but you don’t yet have to do it; entertaining the notion of revolt doesn’t make you feel as if defiance or betrayal would tear you apart from within. The ribbons are dipped in your soul perfume, and each of our scents has a drop of her wretched come-hither blood in it. It’s the first way we become tied to her, an open conduit through which she compels love. That’s how she can sense you through them, beckon you toward her.”