Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(104)
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.
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?”