No, I am mine, I told them, as I strangled them with rushing fireworks of purple, pink, and white. Not yours, old mother, but always mine.
We were so close I could have kissed her, though she didn’t touch me; just faced me with her burned, seeping hands hovering over my shoulders, looking into my eyes. I could see her then as she had been so many years ago, a beetle-browed child with dark hair, improbably lovely and kneeling by a stream. Hauling slick fish in baskets, skinning felled game that steamed in the icy air, curing hides in stinking cauldrons. And watching so many of her sisters die. She’d had six of them since she remembered herself, but four had died bearing their children, one from a wound gone putrid, and the sixth from pains that ate away all her insides.
Until she was the only sister left. The only one left of her whole line.
And then she had her own children, and they died too, a girl, a boy, another girl.
I could feel the roiling fathoms of her grief, see her hone her manifold gifts, the way she could wield love. And once she had more daughters, the fierce and burning need that drove her, to never lose her own again—to never die, nor let her own die young.
Something else flickered deep there, too, so far beneath that all I could see was a trailing shadow, like a passing shark swimming miles under the sea.
“But what about us?” I whispered to her. “The ones who you gave away. Was it really worth the price?”
“Everything is give and take, my blood,” she rasped. “You can only pay for life with life.”
More images of her times washed over me, and I could feel myself softening toward her, even as my wisteria coiled tighter around the rose mesh of her will. I could hear her howling sobs as she cradled a stillborn baby to her chest, the sweeter croon of her lullaby as she stroked a living daughter’s fluffy hair.
And I wanted that. The cradle, the stroke, the lullaby. I wanted all that mother-love.
“Iris!” Dunja shrieked at me. “Break it, break it now! There’s no more time!”
I tore my eyes away from Mara and looked to my sister and my aunt. Dunja was flinging herself through frantic arabesques, her floating hair blazing with starlight, and Malina’s face, contorted, was bathed in the same pale light. Behind them, others crested the peak—those would be true witches, of the first nine. My aunt and sister wouldn’t be able to stand against all of them.
Rage kindled inside me, the roaring urge to protect them: these two who truly loved me, not the false mother with her lies.
I turned back to the oldest of all my kin, our ancient, greatest grandmother, with her blistered face and bottomless eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I wish I’d known you back then. But I think, now, it’s time to stop.”
I bore down on all my flowers, forced them to choke and cover tighter, until the roses beneath them nearly breathed their last. But as I came to the breaking point, I discovered that it would take even more than I’d thought it would take.
Strip her arms bare of glitter or silver, I thought desperately. That was it. It had to be.
Her will was not merely flung wide, but anchored in her skin, and it wouldn’t succumb to me until the last pieces were plucked out.
“Dunja,” I forced out, as if through a howling wind rushing down my throat, “her diamonds. Get. Them. Out.”
I could see her eyes dawn bright with understanding, and the next arabesque brought her behind Mara. She locked her arms around our first mother, as Mara had once done to me, and pinning her flailing, black-streaked arms, Dunja began to dig and pluck with blinding speed. Mara thrashed against her like something primal caught in an iron-maiden vise. Her voices droned into a hellmouth clamor, tinged with a terror so pure it nearly wrested the flower reins from me.
“LISARAH—IRIS—DAUGHTER, DON’T,” she shrieked, her eyes and mouth impossibly wide. “WHAT I DO IS MORE THAN YOU COULD UNDERSTAND—REMEMBER HOW YOU DID NOT EVEN KNOW YOUR OWN MOTHER’S MIND—”
I thought of all the things I’d heard of Mara, the legends and rumors and lies. She wasn’t a goddess of nightmares and winter. Nor was she a selfless savior who’d offered herself and her own for the sake of her people. And she wasn’t what Dunja thought, either, a grasping, greedy monster bent on never dying, no matter how many of her daughters she had to sell.
And I thought of the way she had her sacrifices cared for in the caves, sending her other undying daughters to trim their nails and hair and see to them. She didn’t have to do that; she could have simply left them there. But that effort, even if it went unrecognized by the offering herself, was still a choice she’d made. Like the overtures, maybe, that my own mother had made toward me, and that I’d just either failed to see or chosen not to see.
Nothing was ever simple. There was no such thing as the one and only truth, and that too was a freedom in itself.
I bore down just once, a single exhale so brutal and sharp that I could smell the last gust of perfume as the endless black roses died. There was nothing left but the infinite lattice-breadth of my wisteria, the dripping blossoms stirring in the mountain wind, and the branches meshing together to form an arch—and within that open space, a distant star-struck sky above a sea.
And Fjolar, stepping through it.
Dunja gasped, then flung Mara away from her, like a child bored with a doll. Mara curled sobbing in a heap, cradling her shredded, bleeding arms against her chest. “Oh, daughter,” she whispered brokenly to me, her eyes sliding closed, and though her voices were still many they’d been wrung of all their power. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
The dread on her face rocked me like nothing else I’d ever seen from her. I had a sudden overwhelming, terrible sense, like drowning in tar, that I’d gotten everything wrong.
Dunja reached Fjolar but locked in place as if she’d hit a wall before she set even a foot over the wisteria threshold. He cast her a wistful, dismissive glance. “Not you, my love,” he said. “Not anymore.”
She let out a single, rending sob, and collapsed to her knees. “But why?” she wailed, white hair wind-whipped across her face and sticking to her lips. “You loved the dance. And I gave you everything.”
“You did,” he said simply. “And thank you for it. But I chose her, already.” He looked up at me, glowing eyes shadowed by the overhang of his brow, and held out a hand. “You ate our wedding cake, my flower girl. Don’t tell me you forget so quick.”