Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(83)
The room was full of glowing ice, a giant block shot through with the black roses of Sorai’s will. They streaked through the expanse like a network of oily veins—or like prison bars for the woman trapped within. She had frozen in a half crouch, leaning forward, her arms flung up with fingers splayed and white hair flaring around her like the sun’s corona. Her dainty little jaw jutted forward, and her eyes were open wide and unmistakably full of fury. She was so close to the ice that I could make out the creases in her delicate lips, the individual golden threads of her eyelashes, and the silver striations in her gray eyes.
It was Dunja. And like all the other women here, she also had our eyes.
“She’s one of us,” I whispered, pressing my palms against the ice. It was blisteringly cold but didn’t leave my hand damp or stick to my skin. It wasn’t real ice, any more than the roses were actual flowers, but instead another manifestation of Sorai’s will, of her desire to hold this girl captive. Because she was a girl, maybe only a little older than us, if that.
“And not just that, I think,” Malina said softly, leaning forward until the tip of her nose nearly touched the ice. From that vantage point, I could see the shocking similarity between her profile and Dunja’s, the identically gentle slope of their noses and the sharp double crests of their upper lips. “Look at her, really look. Do you remember that picture of Mama’s sister, Anais? It’s her. The one who was supposed to be the last sacrifice; the one they said had burned out right before all this started. Her hair is white, but it’s her.”
We both turned to Naisha, who gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut, then gave a single flinch of a nod.
“Why would you all have lied about that?” I demanded. “And why would she have tried to kill our mother?”
Naisha shook her head miserably, her mouth opening and closing without sound. Her face was leached of color, save for two spots burning overbright on her cheeks, and beads of sweat shimmered above her upper lip. She looked like a tubercular Victorian bride in her last gasp.
“I don’t know.” Lina laid her own hand flat against the ice. “Naisha clearly can’t say, look at her. But I think it means they lied about a lot of things. And I don’t think she was the one who tried to kill Mama, either.”
“Why would you say that?”
She turned to me, her face bathed in the reflected glow of the ice, as if the woman inside was luminous somehow, shedding her own light. “We only think it was her at all because that’s what Sorai told us, right? But we know Mama saw her twice, even went to visit her at that hotel. And more than that . . . this is Mama’s sister, her own twin. Would you ever have tried to kill me, Riss? Because nothing you did could bring me to that. I would cheat and lie and steal to keep you safe. Kill, even, if I had to, but never you. And I think you’d do the same for me.”
Swallowing tears, I remembered the way Mama had hugged this woman, clung to her. The way they’d whispered into each other’s ears. And I believed her; I believed my sister.
“What do we do now?” I asked her.
She set her jaw. “Now we set her free, and then we see what happens.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Are you? Because it’ll have to be you who does it. I can’t sing to something that can’t hear me, I think, and Naisha told me what you did with the fractal wisteria. Maybe you can try it again, whatever you did that time.”
The doubts still spun like a maelstrom inside me, even with the evidence of lies right before my eyes. And it was that, more than anything, that somehow made me want to do it—the fact that I couldn’t even trust my own mind. I could see Naisha’s struggle now—she’d wrapped both arms around herself and shook in place like a last frail autumn leaf, her mouth twisted in a rictus—and remembered her face all those years ago in the Arms Square when she stood next to Sorai, her features so smooth even as don’t tell me what to do resounded beneath them. If she had fought so hard to bring us here, we owed it to her to forge ahead.
And if this really was our aunt suspended in front of us, the least we could do was hear what she had to say.
I closed my eyes and pushed into that inward reach, struggling to frame what I wanted, to force it outward into the heart of the world. It was harder this time, without Malina’s song to goad me, to make me certain of what shape my will wanted to take and what my goal was—and feeling my faltering, she began to sing. The battle march of it fortified me, stealing into the crumbling cracks of my own foundation like ivy twining through a building and shoring it up.
“What is that?” I forced out through my teeth.
“It’s defiance,” she said. “It’s what you used to sound like when you and Mama fought.”
“I sounded like a bagpipe war song? Could be worse.”
Fragile little buds of wisteria unfurled from where my palms touched the ice, and with another fierce push that made all the veins in my body expand with the effort—free this woman, free her, let her loose, want it more than anything—I drove my will into the ice block’s weakest points, the ones emptiest of Sorai’s roses. Cracks raced through the surface as if it had been tapped along a faultline with a chisel and a mallet—and without warning the whole of it shattered, raining winking crystal particles that vanished before they hit the floor.