Come get me, the song called out. Come claim me, lover, and have me for your own.
It was so sensual it made me want to squirm out of my skin, that something like it should come from my sister, but it didn’t. Because right now, she was someone else. Not Malina, but truly Azareen. Someone distant as a star, as far from me as other galaxies, and infinitely more beautiful than the sky in the clearest night.
Where are you, Dunja? I thought desperately. We need you.
Because if she didn’t come for us in time, I was going to lose my sister. Because how could I ever compare to this.
Malina finally completed her slow circuit of the hall, and with a final parting trill of song—like the sweet, guileless thrill of fingertips pressed to lips, a kiss blown toward a lover to be borne along the wind—she settled back next to me on her knees with a heavy head, dropping her chin. Now that she was near me again, I could see the toll the song had taken. Her chest still heaved with labored breaths, and the hollow of her throat had pooled with sweat. Single tracks of tears silvered her cheeks, and I thought how much this must have cost her, betraying her real love like this. It had been far from effortless, and the sight of it made a sinkhole of fear gape in my belly. She’d given everything she had, because she thought this might be real. That Dunja wasn’t coming.
Mara made a pleased, humming sound, like a queen bee glutted and secure in the confines of her hive.
“Lisarah of Faisali,” she purred at me. “Born second, but no less bold for it. Rise, and begin.”
I came to my feet, not bothering with feigning grace. It wasn’t built into my limbs, and I didn’t think now was the time to try plying artifice. For a moment I just stood with my eyes closed, letting myself breathe; feeling the gossamer folds of leaves and ivy draped around me, the thorns that circled my skin, even the thick black around my lids. Thinking of the way my pale eyes would flash when I finally opened them.
I wasn’t some elusive maiden-sprite flitting, mesmerizing, through a copse of trees. Nor was I cool, trickling streams, or lips parted expectantly for a kiss. So what was I? What could I be to save her, to win us this?
“Lisarah,” Mara began, a stratum of something like uncertainty glinting through the ancient, limestone layers of her voices. “Will you—”
Without answer, I snapped my head up, and shattered the sky.
The constellation of chandeliers and baubles dangling from the ceiling may as well have been designed to fractal. I let loose all the gleam at once, splitting and multiplying them without mercy—glass and metal into endless, massive rows of domes and spires, the trapped butterflies and iridescent beetles bursting into a shimmering, winged army that looked like it might conquer us like a locust plague. The entirety of the ceiling grew like stalactites striving in fast-forward, into a celestial city built of crystals, like a heaven of my own making.
As I pulled at it with all I had, it came rushing down the atrium toward us, as if this crystalline new world might crash-land onto ours.
To meet it, I turned my gaze to the ring of flames around Mara’s dais, and began blooming them one by one. Tongues of fire swirled around one another like blazing prayer wheels, and as they overlapped they formed a scorching, spitting wall of orange, red, and gold, a hellfire that rose to meet the heaven I’d built from above. Within the flames, those diamond-sparks I’d seen before magnified into a blinding shimmer, until the entire inferno glittered like a hellscape contained inside a ruby. Together, ceiling and floor obscured Mara entirely, trapping her behind the fire and glass.
I didn’t move with it like Lina had, and I couldn’t have even if I wanted to—it took all I had simply to hold this marvel, and then some to keep it spinning. But it didn’t matter, because this showed everything I was.
That I was wicked.
That I was wild.
That I would not be curbed.
Dimly I could hear the gasps of wonder, the shrieks from the lionesses beside Mara, even delighted, raptured laughter from others in the crowd. And I began to think that maybe I could finish it this way, that maybe I could simply close the fractals around her. Trap her and Death both inside this cage.
Then those three clicks again—Mara’s fingernails on steel—before she snuffed my bloom out in the space of a breath, the ceiling retreating meekly back to where it hung static, the flames diving back into the confines of their bowls.
“ENOUGH,” she boomed. “ENOUGH, MY WILDLING. THE WINNER HAS BEEN CHOSEN, AND IT IS—”
Then Dunja landed neatly in the center of the hall like a fallen star, between us and Mara, and the world froze around us all.
She stood poised so perfectly she could have been a statue rather than breathing flesh, en pointe with one leg swept high behind her head. Both her arms were flung up too, curved above her in a soft oval, fingers nearly interlaced. Her head was tilted so the snowfall of white hair could spill freely down her back. Her spine arched like a bow, and the muscles in her bare midriff stood out from strain, above billowing harem pants and below the slip of beaded band that covered her breasts.
She launched into a series of movements, a flawless finesse that defied anything we’d seen in the pageant the day before. Barefoot steps took her through effortless flips, arms and hands and the tilt of her head sketching the shapes of another world, as if she were painting with her body. The trappings of the ballroom blurred and then fell away, until she danced on the surface of water, beside an abandoned ship that had grown a tangled forest from its rusted iron innards. The chandelier—the atrium itself—had been replaced by a blue sky with a slender row of clouds above its horizon.
The desolate beauty of it was so intense it ached. Nothing I’d seen so far could have compared to the immensity of her dance, the illusion she conjured with every movement.
The women all around us were caught, rapt, in poses of fascination. Dunja swept by them, whirling and swooping, and even when she dipped so close her passage stirred their hair, none of them moved—eyes wide and lips parted with wonder, some with hands clutched to their chests.
She dropped into a mocking bow as she finally reached Mara. The lion-women beside her were simply women now, on their knees with faces mesmerized. “I don’t do well on ice, Baba Mara, you should know that much,” she said. “At least not since you left me gathering frost in that godforsaken cave.”