Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(103)
He set his jaw. “I’m not going to leave you. I want to help.”
“You already did—you let us see all this in a different way,” I answered gently. “And that was what we needed. But I think you know it, too, that we need to do this alone, the three of us.”
“Princess,” Lina said gently as Niko struggled before melting against her. “Please. Don’t make this so hard. Come say good-bye this time.”
Luka crouched down next to me and cupped my face with one hand, curling the other tightly around my neck. I inhaled at the force of his kiss, the taste of him, the warmth behind it. The full heat and fervor of his love, as he kissed me on each cheek and between my eyes. And even before he said so, I knew he’d do it. He’d leave me alone to this, because that was what I asked of him.
“Don’t you dare think these were good-bye kisses,” he said when he drew back. “It was just to tide me over. And because I love you.”
“I hope so. And I love you, too.”
EVEN IN THE twilight, the world spread below us was stunning from this high up. For a little while, I hadn’t even thought that we would make it. The earlier stages of the ascent had been almost pleasant, green and winding paths up the mountain that zigged and zagged to bring us higher without the impression of terrible danger. But the last leg of the climb had been so steep and severe—just scree slopes with hand-and toeholds you had to feel out carefully to find, that should have required actual climbing equipment if we’d had the time for that—that Malina had simply frozen against the mountain with her face pressed against the still-warm stone, whispering that she couldn’t go farther, she just couldn’t.
Eventually, Dunja and I had arranged ourselves beside and below her against the cliff face, and carefully moved her hands and feet for her as she clung to the side like a limpet. I’d never been very afraid of heights, but the little fear I’d had seemed to have dissipated. Instead I felt a vast, yawning sense of awe inside me, as if my soul had opened its mouth wide to breathe all this in.
“Bobotov Kuk,” I said as we scrabbled over its lip and onto its face. “Holy shit.”
The summit pyramid of stone was larger than it seemed from the valley below, but not by much. There was enough room for the three of us to huddle toward its center, with a ring of open space around us. The summit stood between two slightly lower peaks—the Nameless Peak and the Maiden, Dunja informed us—and together the three made a jagged mountain wall to the west, dropping off into a plummeting slope toward the green-fuzzed ?krka Valley and the glacial pools of its two lakes below, one massive and one small. Beyond them the rest of the Durmitor range soared, mountain after mountain like the earth’s own stone fractals, into the fall and fire tones of the dying day on the horizon.
“I know I was full-throttle about this,” Malina gulped, “but I’m very, very scared right now. We’re so high up, and it’s—I could fall—I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing anything other than that.”
“I would never let you fall,” Dunja said, sliding a hand down Malina’s hair. “I promise you. And once I start the dance, you’ll pick up the thread from me. It’ll be all right.”
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.