Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(70)
It was all too beautiful to bear.
“How?” I finally said, when my face was slick with tears. I turned back to face Shimora, drawing my legs up. “They’re so young. They can’t all be our family, how would that be possible? And what is it all for?”
“That isn’t for me to answer,” she said, running her finger down my damp cheek. “We just wanted you to truly see it, what a gift it is. How worth it it always is for both, the one chosen and the one who lives.”
Dread dropped into my belly like a swallowed ball bearing. Beside me, Malina caught a shuddering breath. “What does that mean?” she barely whispered. “The one chosen?”
“Let me take you to meet Sorai, dear heart. No one but her should tell you.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’D SEEN HER IN A STOLEN MEMORY. I’D EVEN SEEN HER IN the flesh, for a moment, on the bastion’s ramparts in the Old Town.
But not like this. She hadn’t been so close, then. She hadn’t been anything like this.
Shimora had led us up one of the two sweeping staircases that winged to the second-floor landing, and from there we’d made our way to the fifth floor. But as soon as we stepped into Sorai’s chamber—my mind wouldn’t let me think of it as a mere room—I felt purged clean of the casually strewn wonders that we’d seen. There had been so much, all of it pulsing in my vision, frantic to fractal: silver platters of cracked-open geodes with winking crystal teeth; vast sculpture-scenes made entirely of stained glass; huge models of constellations etched bas-relief into the chalet’s walls, precious stones wedged in like placeholders for stars.
None of them compared to Sorai.
She knelt with her back to us, inky hair tinged plum by the dusk creeping in through the series of slanted skylights above her, cut into the chalet’s roof. Even without facing us, pure power rolled off her in tremendous waves, like a desert wind, or the clanging of some silent, behemoth bell. The air nearly trembled around her with its force. It was hard to look at her directly; it was as if we saw her through a porthole, elongated from the curving of the glass.
And all around her, the room writhed with black roses. They were glistening and unruly, twining through the air as if they needed no espalier to hold them, no soil in which to sink. Petals, stems, and branching roots were all black and suspended, as if the maze of thorns trapping Sleeping Beauty’s castle had erupted into midnight bloom.
Maybe it had, if Sleeping Beauty had once been our mother.
Mama lay on the floor in front of Sorai, her chestnut hair fanned out and shining against the mahogany floorboards. She looked both cold and flawless, as if someone who’d once adored her flesh-and-blood face had carved her exact likeness from snow and ice. A shroud of roses covered her, and it was almost lovely until I realized that their roots and thorns drove into her, piercing flesh and digging deep. The network of veins around each puncture branched out black beneath her skin as if whatever lived in the roses flowed through her too.
Then the roses crept over her entirely, closing ranks like a living, floral casket and hiding her from us.
“What did you do?” Malina moaned, half sobbing. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing, child,” Sorai said, in a burred, resounding triptych of voices. Malina and I staggered back as one; I hadn’t seen any of the steps it took Sorai to stand and cross the room toward us, the roses parting neatly for her. She’d been kneeling one minute, and in the next she faced us, close enough that I could feel her exhales on my own lips—her breath smelled exactly like that dizzying sweetness that underpinned everything else: our ribbons, Shimora’s perfume, the entire chalet. She wore eggshell ivory, glowing pale against all the flowers that nudged and strained toward her like eager children, a long-sleeved, narrow gown that clung to the contours of her body and pooled at her bare feet.
Her eyes were just like ours, but they also weren’t, set against the deep, dark skin of her imperious face. They didn’t seem like human eyes so much as a window into the soul of winter.
“Nothing,” she said again, and warmth spread through me at her voice, a fire-flower of ecstasy unfurling in my chest. “Something was done to her, and now I fight against it. Do you see these roses? They are my will, made flesh. And so I still her with my will, keep her at rest. Until you do what must be done to save her.”
“I don’t understand,” Lina and I whispered in tandem. It was so difficult to think with Sorai’s eyes on me, and nearly impossible to fumble for words, my mind smooth and sifting as sand pouring through a sieve. I kept fighting the urge to kneel, to fling myself at her feet. My knees trembled of their own accord.
At some point Lina had taken my hand, and now she squeezed it, speaking for me as I struggled. “Who are you? Who are we to you? And who did . . . this to our mother?”
“I am Sorai, the highest, first daughter of Mara.” Eyes shifted between us like frost gathering on glass. “And that’s what you are, too. Far daughters of Mara the sorceress, called by some the strongest witch who ever lived, the pride of her tribe four thousand years ago.”
I barely remembered moving or sitting down, time spinning like a whirligig around us, but suddenly Lina and I sat cross-legged in front of her on crimson cushions. In each of her hands, Sorai held one of ours, though Lina still hadn’t let go of me where our fingers were linked. The roses moved all around us like animal things, creeping over our shoulders, brushing our cheeks. They weren’t an illusion, unless illusions could feel more real than my own skin; I felt their softness and the sharp potential of the prick behind each curved thorn. I heard the rustling of the leaves as they twined around us both.