I sat down cross-legged next to her, giving her leg a squeeze.
The three of us simply sat together, quiet, until I could smell and hear things I never could before. The breeze was cooling with the advent of night, and the air smelled of pine sap and moss and ferns, the rank sear of a fox from somewhere far below. I even thought I caught the alkaline tang of water from the lakes in the far, low distance, and I could hear the stirring of the needles with the wind, the brush and rustle of birds and insects in the trees, maybe even the lumbering shuffle of something hungry, big, and hidden.
At the very base of the mountain, we could see the coven swarming. They were tiny from up here, but there were so many, and they moved so fast, like insects engulfing a carcass. Soon they would be up here with us, and then the reckoning would begin.
At some point, I realized that we’d settled into a rhythm, inhales and exhales like a tide, breathing slowly with each other. I thought I could even feel my sister and my aunt, the bright pulse of each of their minds, the slow and steady throbbing of their hearts.
Dunja moved first, but the stirring didn’t break the spell. She unfurled all at once, twirling as she stood; her white hair drifted as though it were gravity defiant and alive, something lazy and languid with its own mind. With her first step, I had a sense of scorching sand and translucent veils, as if she danced for a sultan in some baking desert.
That would be one of her freedoms, I suddenly realized; to dance all that beauty for someone else, because she’d chosen not to hide it.
Malina felt it too, the freedom of it, and she began to sing in pursuit.
We shifted then from the desert sands, the peaks and cliffs around us melting away like a spun-sugar confection, until Dunja danced on a minaret’s onion dome—above a flat-roofed, baked-brick city stretching beneath a blazing sun, her arms wide and hair whirling like a platinum halo. Then there was a jungle, so dense and lush its canopy was almost solid; she took us with her as she danced upon it, leaping from glossy palm leaf to branch to vine, and all the while Malina’s song followed. From beaches to villages to waterfalls, to roaring, white-frothed rivers and skyscraper cities and masquerade balls.
We could go there; we could be there; we could choose warmth and life instead of ice.
Anywhere was open to us, anywhere that we chose. And I thought of Luka, and how he would let me go.
Come on, little witch, I heard Dunja urging in my mind. Make this the truth for us. Make choice and anywhere the only truth.
Even as the sky unfolded a plumage of stars over us, I focused on my wisteria, watching pinks and purples fracture and multiply, blooming and unfurling and stretching with no end. The branches made overlapping bridges, and the blossoms endless whirlpools; together they formed ladders that could have spanned farther than from Earth to moon. And I pushed them harder, climbed them with my mind, strove to touch where they were going like I never had before.
But it wasn’t enough.
My head was pounding as if it would split apart, and I could feel warm rivulets come sluicing from my nose. And there was something—something more—beyond the kaleidoscope of freedom that spun around us like a top.
I could feel her rather than see her, crawling up the cliff like a spider. Whatever bond we’d woven, Dunja and Malina and I, Mara could feel it too.
“She’s coming,” I whispered, then—“I think she’s here—”
And then the first wave of love broke terribly over us.
LISARAH MY DAUGHTER, LISARAH MY LOVE, it roared in my ears and bones and mind, WOULD YOU UNSPOOL YOUR MOTHER IN THIS WAY, WHO LOVED YOU AND SACRIFICED SO YOU COULD HAVE LIFE?
“You’re not my mother,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “And you don’t love me.”
The assault continued, and now I could see her hands and the scraggly, singed leftovers of her hair as she clawed herself up and over onto our summit. I LOVE YOU THE MOST, THE MOST OF THEM ALL, AND EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE TO ME, I WOULD GATHER YOU IN MY LAP AND HOLD YOU AGAINST MY HEART. WOULD YOU TRULY STAB ME IN MY BREASTBONE, LISARAH, DAUGHTER? WOULD YOU TRULY WATCH ME DIE?
Now she stood at the very edge, still in the black dress she’d worn the other night, tattered and ripped from her hillside climb. The entire surface of her skin was burned; that was what our spell had done, latched onto her and roasted her alive while leaving her own spell intact. Beneath the scorch, a network of black veins like worms had risen to the surface of what had once been skin, but somehow even with that she was still beautiful, all sleek and exposed sinew, reaching hands and that perfume of love. She could dance like Dunja too, I saw, only disjointed and somehow inside out, sparse hair thrashing and limbs bending in an unlikely, backward way, as if someone had thrown a strange and gorgeous thing under a strobe light so it stuttered.
And behind that dance I saw something I remembered: a vast, endless field of black roses that glistened wet under a dim sky, so tangled and thorny they reached the dark, distant dregs of creation before doubling back, like a serpent of flowers swallowing its own tail.
So that was the shape of Mara’s will, then.
Well, it wasn’t the shape of mine.
The flowers I had in front of me—they were a beginning, but they couldn’t reach far enough. But there was one that could, one that grew in my father’s soil. Because it was his, it was also mine. It didn’t matter that I’d never seen it in person. I could grow it in my mind.
Slowly, as if I were gathering molten glass at the end of my pipe, I snaked a massive underground root system in my mind. Its reaching tendrils grew into a twisted trunk, then burst into a vast profusion of branches, gnarled wood giving way to wisteria waterfalls that bloomed for miles. My hands were clenched into fists so tight I could feel the piercing sink of my nails into my skin, the hot blood that welled around them. And I could hear myself screaming with the strain, but still I pressed forth with my freedom tree. Its flowers twined and wove like living things, over and under the bramble of Mara’s roses, shooting up and away from me like the sparking threads of my own synapses.
This was the framework that supported her will—the only way to end was overwhelm it, make it mine.
YOU ARE MINE, the roses shrieked in Mara’s ancient voice as they withered on their vines.