Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(26)

I didn’t want to wake her so early, but I needed to be outside. I needed the world firm and real beneath my feet, to breathe warm morning air until I could calibrate to this new normal.

Throwing a heather-gray cashmere wrap over my nightgowned shoulders, I eased the bedroom window open and dropped lightly onto the smooth stones of the courtyard. ?i?a Jovan lived in a pied-à-terre in one of the renovated stone buildings near the Northern River Gate, the Old Town’s back entrance. It was right across from our favorite pizzeria, the Bastion, named after the fortifications that led out of the Old Town along the clear, green water of the ?kurda. The air was always cooler here, like spray to the face, and it already smelled like baking calzones: the insides a molten mass of cheese, prosciutto, and mushrooms spiced with oregano, and a rich dollop of sour cream on the top.

Whatever eagle eyes the police had posted to watch over our house had apparently called it a night long before dawn. I could see one drooping at his post, snoring in his chair in Jovan’s wild little garden. Other than him and the bakers inside the pizzeria, the small square was deserted beneath the blazing pink and orange of a sky shot through with veins of molten gold.

There shouldn’t have been anyone around watching me. But there was.

I could feel it, a tingle over the crown of my head that spread down the back of my neck like a flurry of pins and needles. People had stared at me plenty over the years, at me and Malina both, and I was intimately familiar with how the weight of eyes usually felt. But this was different, so intent I almost felt as if I was being touched, caressed by fingernails running lightly through my hair and down my nape.

It felt so weirdly delicious yet uncomfortable that I froze, scanning the square. Nothing stirred against the gray of the stone blocks, other than the whisper of lacy curtains behind open white shutters across the way, and a scattering of wildflowers nodding in Jovan’s garden. They pinwheeled into an unruly whorl as soon as my gaze landed on them, and I looked hastily away.

Then a flicker of movement drew my gaze up to the bastion itself, the rounded stone fortification with its crenelated edges. I’d never seen anyone up there before, but now a woman leaned on the edge right above the river gate, hair even blacker than my own spilling over like an inkfall.

I walked across the small square like a sleepwalker until I stood in front of the gate, my neck craned so I could look up at her with parted lips and squinted eyes. To her right the craggy mountains reared, patches of green against the sheer stone screes, and her silhouetted form was draped in dusky blue and silver, a loose Grecian dress pinned around her neck. From where I stood below her, the angle threw the architecture of her bones into stark relief, and I realized I knew her. I knew that powerful jaw, the full mouth and regal flare of the nostrils, the unyielding cheekbone sweep and thick black brows above pale eyes.

Then somehow her perfume reached me, as if it could seek me out despite the direction of the wind. With déjà vu rolling over me like a lurching tide, I didn’t just know but I remembered.

FOUR YEARS AGO Lina and I had sat in the Arms Square on my threadbare blanket, hawking my glass flowers while Lina sang wanting songs at passing strangers. We’d already had a good day of it—three fractal poppies sold, scarlet with jet-black centers like singularities, and two lady’s slipper orchids I’d sweated over for weeks—when they came.

Counting our coins and dinar bills, neither of us noticed until their shadows fell over us, and that sweet scent tightened around us like a grasping hand. It smelled like sandalwood and honey and bergamot, bright honeysuckle above and the tang of blood oranges below. It smelled so good it nearly hurt, and I could feel my lungs expanding painfully with the effort to draw it in, my bronchioles unfurling like cherry-blossom buds.

The black-haired woman had worn a gown then too, so extravagant it should have been silly in the milling crowd of T-shirted tourists, but it wasn’t. Its full skirt was lined with stripes of shining peacock feathers alternating with raven black, as if she were heading to a masquerade. Her arms were swathed to the elbow with fingerless gloves, black leather and lace fine and dense as filigree. Deep copper shoulders glowed smooth above a satin hem.

But none of it compared to the sheer force of her face, a kind of bold that seemed almost wild: cheekbones flat and broad as steppes, a wide-bridged nose with a small bump between her eyes, a lush and perfect mouth. And those pale, pale eyes, black-rimmed and water gray. Exactly the color of my mother’s, or Malina’s, or my own.

And there was that hearthstone smell, like warmth and trust and mother-love. I wanted to be even closer to it, I realized. I wanted the black-haired woman to sit down with us, to somehow pull both me and Malina onto her lap as if we were still little girls who could fit.

“Look at them, Naisha,” she whispered to the other in a rough-edged purr layered with more tones at once than I could count. It was a bit how Malina sounded when she sang, but I didn’t think she could talk this way, and she wasn’t anywhere near so multiple. “Look at how faint and little they are, that all these shamblers barely even see them. They should be so much lovelier by now.”

“It’s not their fault, Sorai,” Naisha murmured back. She was lovely too, a blonde carved out of ivory, platinum, and silver. She had the same wolf-gray eyes, but her narrow features were both delicate and sharp, as if a sculptor had whittled her face using only a very pretty knife. She wore a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breastbone and rolled up to her elbows, and in her worn-down, shapeless jeans she still looked like someone’s queen. “She isn’t teaching them, like I told you.”