Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(88)
I didn’t move with it like Lina had, and I couldn’t have even if I wanted to—it took all I had simply to hold this marvel, and then some to keep it spinning. But it didn’t matter, because this showed everything I was.
That I was wicked.
That I was wild.
That I would not be curbed.
Dimly I could hear the gasps of wonder, the shrieks from the lionesses beside Mara, even delighted, raptured laughter from others in the crowd. And I began to think that maybe I could finish it this way, that maybe I could simply close the fractals around her. Trap her and Death both inside this cage.
Then those three clicks again—Mara’s fingernails on steel—before she snuffed my bloom out in the space of a breath, the ceiling retreating meekly back to where it hung static, the flames diving back into the confines of their bowls.
“ENOUGH,” she boomed. “ENOUGH, MY WILDLING. THE WINNER HAS BEEN CHOSEN, AND IT IS—”
Then Dunja landed neatly in the center of the hall like a fallen star, between us and Mara, and the world froze around us all.
She stood poised so perfectly she could have been a statue rather than breathing flesh, en pointe with one leg swept high behind her head. Both her arms were flung up too, curved above her in a soft oval, fingers nearly interlaced. Her head was tilted so the snowfall of white hair could spill freely down her back. Her spine arched like a bow, and the muscles in her bare midriff stood out from strain, above billowing harem pants and below the slip of beaded band that covered her breasts.
She launched into a series of movements, a flawless finesse that defied anything we’d seen in the pageant the day before. Barefoot steps took her through effortless flips, arms and hands and the tilt of her head sketching the shapes of another world, as if she were painting with her body. The trappings of the ballroom blurred and then fell away, until she danced on the surface of water, beside an abandoned ship that had grown a tangled forest from its rusted iron innards. The chandelier—the atrium itself—had been replaced by a blue sky with a slender row of clouds above its horizon.
The desolate beauty of it was so intense it ached. Nothing I’d seen so far could have compared to the immensity of her dance, the illusion she conjured with every movement.
The women all around us were caught, rapt, in poses of fascination. Dunja swept by them, whirling and swooping, and even when she dipped so close her passage stirred their hair, none of them moved—eyes wide and lips parted with wonder, some with hands clutched to their chests.
She dropped into a mocking bow as she finally reached Mara. The lion-women beside her were simply women now, on their knees with faces mesmerized. “I don’t do well on ice, Baba Mara, you should know that much,” she said. “At least not since you left me gathering frost in that godforsaken cave.”
Mara trembled with the effort to move, the tiny muscles in her face quivering, but only her eyes shifted to track Dunja as she whipped forward, looped a lock of Mara’s hair around her little hand, and ripped it out by the root, then tucked it into her pocket.
With an enormous, straining yank, all the tendons in her neck and chest cording like rope, Mara tipped her head back and shrieked like a banshee. The dance-illusion shattered at once. Ship and sky and water vanished like mist, and the candlelit room snapped back into place. The baubles of the chandelier knocked hard against one another, cracking and raining down over her and Dunja in a shower of glass. A tangle of black roses began snaking from Mara, transparent at first and then blushing full and dark, rounding into existence. The rest of the coven began shaking themselves free from their stupor, as wave after wave of love rolled off Mara, pungent and irresistible.
Destroy the usurper, the scent urged. If you love me true, strike her down where she stands. DESTROY HER.
The urge to leap to Mara’s defense was so overpowering I was ready to spring at Dunja before Malina actually snatched me by my hair and wrenched me back.
“No, Riss,” she managed, between panting breaths and snippets of defiant song. “No. You don’t really want to do that.”
Next to us, Dunja’s eyes flicked back and forth, assessing the ranks descending on us. “Well,” she said mildly, “this won’t do.”
She leaped away from Mara and the throne in a neat, airborne somersault. As she landed, she brought one foot down with a cracking boom that reverberated through the hall. It echoed over and over, spreading away from Dunja in nearly visible ripples, and each wave brought down the advancing women as if it were a physical blow. They collapsed over one another, tumbling to the ground as if they’d been struck.
Only the two of us and Mara, near Dunja’s epicenter, were unaffected. Lina and I flinched back, hands knotted, as Mara swept to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf’s and chest heaving beneath the dress’s sparkling mesh, hands curved into claws at her sides. Yet her words sounded like a caress. “Come now, daughter,” she said to Dunja, sweetly through clenched teeth. Every fine hair on my body stood at attention. “Would you do this to me, your old blood-mother, the one who gave you such gifts of love and life?”
“You might call it love, first mother,” Dunja said, rolling to readiness on the balls of her feet. “I call it something more like slavery.”
She spun on her heel like a whirlybird, flinging herself around the axis of her own body before delivering a massive backhand to Mara’s cheek. Mara’s head snapped back, and the force of the blow swept her up and away from the throne, until she rolled to a stop in a tangle with her lion guards.