Mia’s voice was low, desperate. “Angelyne, listen. I was wrong to belittle you for wanting the things I didn’t want. There’s nothing wrong with longing for a husband who loves you, or children, or a closetful of pretty gowns. But this isn’t that life. This is a travesty of a marriage—a husband you must enthrall every hour of every day, just like our mother did. It’s a mockery of the life you want. You deserve so much more.”
Angelyne wavered. Mia saw it in her face—the wanting, the ache.
Then Zaga’s voice sliced into them with deadly precision.
“It is as I suspected. As long as you two have each other, you will never choose anyone else. Your heart will belong to your sister over your sisterhood.” She pressed her hands together. “There is only room in the river kingdom for one queen. The choice I leave up to you.”
“I don’t understand,” Angelyne said.
“One of you lives. One of you dies.”
Mia’s skin was on fire. The heat of Zaga’s gaze felt like being flayed alive. So this was what hatred felt like. She’d been wrong about that, too. Hatred wasn’t cold. It was immolation.
She’d been wrong about everything.
Hate, love, anger—they intermingled in a person’s blood, twining together, a symphony of fire and smoke and ashes. Why did it hurt so much, being human? It was astonishing anyone survived a life at all.
A sob rose in Mia’s throat. She thought of her sister lying still, blue eyes gone blank forever. She saw Angie’s pale face, trapped in this moment of death. No matter what Angelyne had done or what sins she had committed, the world without her was a world bled of its color. There was no music. No laughter. A piece of Mia’s heart had died with her mother, and if she had to give up Angie, she knew she would lose the rest.
Hatred will only lead you astray. Love is the stronger choice.
Love is a lodestone, a force so powerful nothing can stop it. Not even death.
A chill perched on Mia’s shoulder, birdlike. It nipped at her neck. Her father’s words hummed beneath her skin, with one subtle but significant substitution.
Magic is a force so powerful nothing can stop it.
Not even death.
“Perhaps,” Zaga said, “it will help you make your decision if I show you just how powerful magic can be.”
She moved slowly toward Wynna’s tomb, her injured leg hissing across the floor. She unclenched her fist, and the moonstone glinted in the palm of her hand.
“I gave this stone to your mother twenty years ago. One more way I tried to keep her: to shower her with gifts. Back then, the lloira was not strong enough to heal me.”
She stroked the moonstone. “But it is much stronger now. Every time your mother healed someone, she grew stronger, as did the magic stored inside her stone. But a stone divorced from its owner is dangerous. If you take a lloira from the Dujia who owned it, the magic can become warped into something unrecognizable, promising only illness and suffering, even death.”
Mia stole a glance at Angelyne, whose face was inscrutable.
An unnatural light gleamed in Zaga’s eyes. “If the two are reunited, however, it will rekindle the magic in the stone.”
She leaned forward, putting one hand on Wynna’s name. With the other she held the lloira to the tomb. Her shadow fell over the carving so that Mia could no longer see the bird or the moon or the snow plum tree.
When Zaga stepped back, the moonstone was no longer in her hand.
Mia blinked. The stone was clinging to the tomb. She took a step closer and saw why: Zaga had placed the moonstone into the depression of the moon.
A perfect fit.
“The dust and bones of a Dujia can be powerful,” Zaga said, a smile curling her lips. “Especially one as powerful as your mother.” When she closed her eyes, she looked almost serene.
Suddenly Mia saw everything clearly. Zaga wanted to be healed. This was what she had always wanted: to reunite Wynna’s stone with Wynna’s body in the hopes that she could activate the healing magic of the stone. It made a kind of morbid sense: having the moonstone wasn’t enough. Zaga had to steal into the Kaer herself and press the stone into Wynna’s tomb, so she could finally watch her black clotted veins fade to a healthy eggshell blue, a gossamer river of life flowing from wrist to heart. Precious bones. Precious dust.
Mia was flooded with a compassion so searing it took her breath away. Zaga wanted what anyone wanted. To be whole.
There was only one hitch.
It wasn’t working.
Zaga’s eyes flew open. She was as gaunt as ever, her emaciated arm still hanging lifeless by her side. “I do not understand,” she murmured. “I have brought them back together. Wynna lies in this very tomb.” She closed her eyes, lips thin as she pressed them together, willing all her hopes into this one desire.
Mia shivered as another memory snaked through her. The night before the wedding, she’d found her father in the crypt. Your mother isn’t here, he’d said.
Mia’s thoughts moved quickly, an arrow arcing from one target to the next. Her eyes flew to the bird carved into her mother’s tomb. It was a ruby wren. Of course it was. Mia scrolled through all the facts she’d memorized: The ruby wren lived in the snow kingdom; it was the only bird that hibernated in winter; it had four chambers in its heart, like a human being; unlike a human being, it could still its heart for months on end to survive the bitter winter. And of course, it was her mother’s favorite bird.
Still its heart.
Months on end.
Mia nearly choked.
The ruby wren stopped its own heart to survive.
Instinctively she dropped to her knees in front of her mother’s tomb.
She traced the carving of the snow plum tree, letting her fingers flutter down the deep grooves, the way she had done a dozen times since arriving at the Kaer. But this time she let her fingertips linger in the hollow of the little bird.
She rested her forehead against the stone, mere inches away from where Zaga was leaning heavily. Quietly, Mia dipped her fingers into her pocket, and closed her hand around the ruby wren.
Fojuen was a special stone. Vitreous, with brittle tenacity, and—as her mother had taught her—deadly sharp. But it was more than its mineral properties. Fojuen was born in the violent, unruly heart of a volqano. It made a Dujia’s heart pump faster and the blood flow quicker, heightening her magic. A talisman carved from fojuen would make it far easier for a Dujia to stop a fellow Dujia’s heart.
Or her own.
But what if fojuen were paired with another stone? A stone with healing properties? A stone that drew its power from the moon, storing up magic that might mend a broken body, heal a hurting mind . . . or revive a stilled heart?
Fojuen to stop your heart, and lloira to restore it. Perhaps, with these two stones, a Dujia might give the appearance of ending her own life, when in truth she was merely hibernating.
“That is enough.” Zaga was angry her plan had not worked, that her body was still broken. “Get up off the floor. Make your choice. Only one of you will leave this crypt.”
Mia hardly heard the words. Her heart thrummed against her ribs. The hypothesis ballooning in her chest was wild, forged of instinct and desperation, which in the end made it not much of a hypothesis. It was scientifically suspect, flawed, irrational—and simmering with hope.
“Very well,” she said. “Good-bye, Mother.” She touched the cold stone one last time, discreetly fitting the ruby wren into the depression of the bird, just long enough for her to prove her theory.
The bird was a perfect fit.
Mia let the wren drop back into her palm and closed her fist. As she did, she scooped the moonstone out of its nook and palmed it as well. Zaga failed to notice the two stones clenched in Mia’s hand as she stood and turned her back on her mother.
But her mother wasn’t there. She had stilled her own heart—but not to kill herself. She had stilled it to save herself. She had stopped her heart from beating . . . but only until it was safe for it to beat again.
Mia felt the truth in the core of her being. Her father had known. He had commissioned a mason to carve the clues on her mother’s tombstone: a bird, a moon, a snow plum tree. No, not clues—ingredients.
A murderous wren.
A healing moonstone.
And a map.
Under the plums, if it’s meant to be. You’ll come to me, under the snow plum tree.