Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(3)
She gave me a sleepy half smile, a glossy black curl sliding over her rounded cheek. My sister had the sweetest face, a gentler rendering of our mother’s that drew from our father mostly in the slight slant of her gray eyes. Her full lower lip was cleft like a cherry, and it made all that beauty somehow both playful and kind. You could easily see the shared blood between us, and maybe on the surface, you might even mistake us for the same substance.
But like water and alcohol, the resemblance ended there.
“Maybe I like staying home?” she said. “Maybe I have better things to do with my nights than tag along to your spite parties?” It always got under my skin when Lina talked in questions; she’d picked it up from years of playing ambassador between me and Mama.
“Oh, like maybe walking on eggshells around Jasmina the Peerless while she plans the next day’s menu and ignores you?” I mimicked. “And I don’t go out just to spite her, you know. Not everything I do is about her.”
“Seems like it is, these days,” Lina said quietly. She dropped her eyes, black lashes fanning lush against her cheeks, her fingers twisting into the sheets. Her hands were the unloveliest part of her, wide palms and spidery violinist’s fingers with cuticles run ragged from her nervous nibbling. My own had gathered a respectable collection of burns and nicks from glassblowing and working at the café, but they were still fine-boned and pretty, the nailbeds slim. I won when it came to hands. At least there was that.
“A little easy for you to say, isn’t it? You can still sing like you used to, back when she still let us practice with her.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice, like one of Mama’s orange rinds before she candied them. “I can’t make anything bloom other than flowers anymore, and even then only I can see it.”
Except for when I drink just enough, I didn’t add. Or smoked so much that my thoughts sparked around each other like a school of minnows, slippery and silver, impossible to grasp.
You can sing like you always could, and still she doesn’t even hate you.
“I’m sorry,” Lina whispered, struggling to meet my eyes. I knew she could feel the roil of my emotions, that it chafed her not to sing it back at me or soothe me, but sometimes I couldn’t curb myself just to ease her. “I know that’s hard for you. But maybe it’s better this way? I can sing, but that’s all it is—weird, maybe, but just song. There’s nothing for anyone to see. But you, it used to be like New Year’s Eve when you made things bloom. And you know we can’t be all flash and glitter like that. It’s not safe for any of us.”
I clenched my teeth until my jaw burned. Safety was Mama’s eternal refrain. It was why we’d only eaten the moon together at nighttime in the tiny garden behind our house, hidden by the trellis of creeping roses and oleander, back when Lina and I were little. “Only in the dark, cveti?u, and only with each other,” Mama would whisper in my ear, holding my hands in her strong grip as I bloomed the starlight dappling through the canopy of leaves above. “That’s the only place we’re safe.”
I couldn’t remember the last time our mother had called me “little flower,” or touched me with such tenderness. As if I had grown into a cactus instead of something softer, and she didn’t want to risk my spines.
“The townsfolk with the pitchforks, I know,” I said. “Lovers and neighbors and friends, all turning to burn the witches. But don’t you wonder sometimes if it’s worth it, giving up so much? When we still have to keep folding ourselves so small all the time?”
Lina looked away, a soft flush rising on her pale skin. “Of course it’s worth it,” she murmured. “Beauty’s worth it even in the smallest scale. You have your glass, I have my violin. It’s enough, like Mama always said.”
Yet even as she said it, she began humming under her breath. The back of my neck prickled, and a wash of goose bumps spread down my arms. Even after all these years, hearing Lina harmonize with herself always gave me chills, the way it sounded like three voices in one. This melody was subtle, three layers of a bittersweet arpeggio that split and reflected my emotions like a prism: the anger, the loss, and the biting sense of injustice, along with a gentle apologetic undertow that was her own offering.
There was another hue to it, too, a tinge of guilt that didn’t feel like mine. Even as the song melted my annoyance with her like spun sugar in water, I frowned, trying to place it.
She caught herself abruptly and cut off the melody.
“Sorry,” she said, clenching both hands in her lap until her knuckles turned white. “I know you hate it when I do that. Do you—will you be going to the square after your shift today? If Nevena stays longer at the café, I could leave early and bring my violin, come keep you company?”
Coming from Lina, this was a fairly high-level peace offering. I sold my glasswork figurines to tourists in the Old Town’s Arms Square, and Malina’s singing and playing always meant I’d sell more that day. It made customers pliant, more willing to part with their money for a pretty piece of glass. Mama had no idea we ever did it, of course. And if it felt a little swindly to sway people like that, it only added to my thrill. Lina had never liked that part of it as much as I did, even if she was only making it easier for people to do what they already wanted. It baffled me how much this bothered her; what was the point of power at all, if she shrank back from it anytime it caught and flared?