Mara trembled with the effort to move, the tiny muscles in her face quivering, but only her eyes shifted to track Dunja as she whipped forward, looped a lock of Mara’s hair around her little hand, and ripped it out by the root, then tucked it into her pocket.
With an enormous, straining yank, all the tendons in her neck and chest cording like rope, Mara tipped her head back and shrieked like a banshee. The dance-illusion shattered at once. Ship and sky and water vanished like mist, and the candlelit room snapped back into place. The baubles of the chandelier knocked hard against one another, cracking and raining down over her and Dunja in a shower of glass. A tangle of black roses began snaking from Mara, transparent at first and then blushing full and dark, rounding into existence. The rest of the coven began shaking themselves free from their stupor, as wave after wave of love rolled off Mara, pungent and irresistible.
Destroy the usurper, the scent urged. If you love me true, strike her down where she stands. DESTROY HER.
The urge to leap to Mara’s defense was so overpowering I was ready to spring at Dunja before Malina actually snatched me by my hair and wrenched me back.
“No, Riss,” she managed, between panting breaths and snippets of defiant song. “No. You don’t really want to do that.”
Next to us, Dunja’s eyes flicked back and forth, assessing the ranks descending on us. “Well,” she said mildly, “this won’t do.”
She leaped away from Mara and the throne in a neat, airborne somersault. As she landed, she brought one foot down with a cracking boom that reverberated through the hall. It echoed over and over, spreading away from Dunja in nearly visible ripples, and each wave brought down the advancing women as if it were a physical blow. They collapsed over one another, tumbling to the ground as if they’d been struck.
Only the two of us and Mara, near Dunja’s epicenter, were unaffected. Lina and I flinched back, hands knotted, as Mara swept to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf’s and chest heaving beneath the dress’s sparkling mesh, hands curved into claws at her sides. Yet her words sounded like a caress. “Come now, daughter,” she said to Dunja, sweetly through clenched teeth. Every fine hair on my body stood at attention. “Would you do this to me, your old blood-mother, the one who gave you such gifts of love and life?”
“You might call it love, first mother,” Dunja said, rolling to readiness on the balls of her feet. “I call it something more like slavery.”
She spun on her heel like a whirlybird, flinging herself around the axis of her own body before delivering a massive backhand to Mara’s cheek. Mara’s head snapped back, and the force of the blow swept her up and away from the throne, until she rolled to a stop in a tangle with her lion guards.
Dunja wiped the back of her hand against the silk of her pants, than hawked and spat in Mara’s general direction. She searched for me over her shoulder, eyes blazing as they met mine. “Now, Iris. DO IT NOW.”
I reached out and squeezed Lina’s hand until I heard her indrawn hiss; I needed her to galvanize me again, to spark that primal, indomitable instinct to protect her above all else. Once I felt it roar to life, I turned inward and unspooled the wisteria of my will, letting it loose in a flood like a river choked with petals, a crashing tsunami of branch and blossom that rolled over everything. It rushed over Mara’s throne and the women in the banquet hall like a living net, a floral cage that pinned and trapped them even as it cleared a path for us.
Dunja grasped both of our hands, and the three of us ran together, heading toward the massive chalet doors and then out into the night.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WE BOUNDED THROUGH THE DARKENED FOREST, BETWEEN tree trunks and past fallen, moss-furred pines. Moonlight poured between the trees, bright as headlight beams. On the lower levels, where the sun couldn’t reach during the day, the branches grew bare of needles, instead curved and sharp like thorns. Forest mulch, a mix of fern, pine needles, and bursting mushrooms, squelched beneath our bare, pounding feet.
Far ahead of us Dunja flashed between the pines with white hair whipping behind her, following no route that I could see, fleet-footed and agile as a deer. My own breath had already grown ragged and Malina kept tripping beside me over the hem of her ridiculous metal-feathered dress. Dunja had paused in our headlong tumble only for long enough to unweave the ribbons from our hair, her fingers flying inhumanly fast before she plucked them all out and dropped them on the floor, grinding them viciously underfoot. After that, it had been running and running, until my knees felt like aspic.
“Could you possibly move an iota faster, pretties?” Dunja tossed over her shoulder. “She’ll cut herself free soon with those sharp old claws, and once she does, she’ll rouse the others.”
“Would you like to carry us on your back, auntie?” I called back between pants. “Because we don’t get any faster than this.”
We finally burst into a little clearing, choked with mud and massive, weathered logs. A battered white van was parked there, backed against the logs. Dunja unlocked the doors and we piled into the crowded insides, scrambling over stuffed animals and threadbare pillows. There was a collection of pots and pans in the farthest back, along with a carton of provisions, dried meats and fruits, juice boxes, and canned vegetables. It smelled like baby powder, chili pepper, and soap.
“Where did this come from?” Malina asked her. “This looks like someone’s home.”
“I bought it from some American tourists after I left Perast,” Dunja replied. “A traveling family, I think. With children.”
“And they just gave it to you? Along with all their things?”
“I may have stolen it a bit,” she admitted vaguely. “But I left money in its place, I think. Learning to drive it properly was the larger problem, though everyone emerged from that relatively unscathed.”
Malina and I exchanged uneasy glances as to what that meant as I tucked a matted-haired Barbie into the seat pocket to make more room for us.
“We’ll be staying in the woods for a while,” she continued as she fired up the ignition. “Now that your ribbons are gone, Mara won’t be able to track you through them any longer. But ?abljak is too small for us to hide there properly until all this is over, however it all ends. The coven is known there, the chalet a ‘retreat’ for rich eccentrics. Someone might tattle on us for the right price.”