“You can’t ask me to do that,” she spat back, lips skinned back from her teeth. “I nearly couldn’t stand it when he left me for the first time. I’ll have to feel it all again to dance it for you. I have to do it all a second time around.”
“Then maybe that’s the sacrifice you have to make,” Niko said. “For Lina and for Iris. Because if you abandon them now just to spare yourself that pain, when there might be another way, then you’re no better than Mara herself.”
Dunja hid her face in her hands, and for a moment she was just a girl again, nineteen years old and cold and lost. “How much do I have to give up,” she murmured into her hands. “Just how much.”
Then she gathered the final remnants of her poise, and stood.
Between one breath and another, Dunja went so still it was as if she held herself separate from the air, so even the breeze couldn’t touch her. The only sign of life was the pretty pulse beneath her chin, and with her head held high, I could see it ticking like a clock’s second hand beneath her skin.
When she finally began to move, it was in a single smooth, explosive moment, a lily unfurling in fast-forward. A series of delicate steps, ball to heel, took her out of our little campfire circle, where she became the centerpiece of a diorama against the pines—a glittering ice sculpture with flowing, snowy hair against the backdrop of brown and green. A glistening strand of a spiderweb came loose from where it spanned two branches above her, drifting lazily down until it settled into her hair.
“Sing with me, little niece, if you will,” she said to Malina. “I could use the accompaniment.”
She splayed her fingers once, and then again. Then she arranged her hands in front of her, back-to-back like a butterfly’s wings, to begin her dance.
SHE WAS ALONE when she woke, and the waking hurt. A cave loomed all around her, its stalactite teeth thicker than her arm, ice sparkling inside its every cranny from the faint light that filtered through the entrance. She hurt so much inside that as she rose up on her forearms, she expected them to quake beneath her weight. But they felt strong; so did her legs. Strong, and almost perfect, even when the furs—the ones they’d wrapped her in, after they’d climbed her up the mountain—fell away from her. She should have felt the cold, but there was no trembling, no spray of goose bumps, no feeling to her skin. Even the furs she clutched to her as she stood, rabbit and fox and ermine, felt like nothing as she held them.
At least Jasmina would never know any of this. Perhaps she was already well away, having fled as they had planned, while the others carried Dunja to her casket of ice.
She wandered the cave with pelts trailing behind her, feeling nothing beneath her feet. And nothing under her palm as she ran it over rough and frozen rock, then palmed the curves of fat, white icicles. At the entrance, she leaned outside into the gale; even the swirling white of icy flurries wouldn’t lash at her face.
The wall felt like nothing against her back, when she slid down against it to draw her knees up to her chest. And yet inside she felt just like herself, afraid and stubborn and so alone; and at least when she leaned her cheek on her knee, she could feel her own skin and how it was warm.
He was meant to be waiting for her here, she thought. He who had chosen her. But the cave was empty save for herself, and the stone pedestal on which she’d had her rest. Still, as her gaze swept through the corners, in one she caught a flickering she hadn’t seen before. There, right there, the air seemed bright and blurry, like the shimmering of a heat mirage above an asphalt road.
As she watched it, it gathered more unto itself, until she made out a silhouette. It seemed to her like a shadow play, the way it grew and shrank and changed its shape. But the closer she looked, the more it seemed like something—someone?—that she knew. As soon as she’d thought it, color flowed into form, and the flicker became a breathing boy.
“You,” she said, and her heart began to race. It was nice to know it could still do that.
“Me,” the shadow-boy agreed, and stepped from the corner in full flesh. She wove her hands in her lap and cowered against the nothing stone. He crossed the cave to crouch in front of her, dark curls falling over his brow.
“You’re just like I remember,” she told him. He’d been so staggering, so unforgettable, that day Salia showed her the Bolshoi Ballet. A Russian boy with near-black eyes and a patrician face, cheekbones like facets and a cleft chin. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dancer-slim. “But how can you be here?”
He offered her his palm, dark eyebrow raised. She laid her fingers on it, and he was so warm and there her insides quickened again. He wrapped his long fingers around her hand and brought it to his lips, tracing their crests with her own fingertip.
Even as her eyelids went heavy she jerked her hand back, frowning at him.
“Too forward?” he asked, one side of his mouth quirking. “I’ve been known to rush. Usually in the sense of ‘untimely,’ but I don’t like to limit myself.”
“You’re not that boy,” she concluded. “Even if you do look like him.”
He laughed out loud, rich and deep. “No, I’m not. But you do know who I am, you who danced so well for me. You who won me fully with your dance.” He watched her warmly, brow furrowed. “I could hardly wait to have you here.”
The thought of his anticipation made her giddy. “And how long have you been waiting for me?”
“Two days, and forever,” he said. “A very long time, all things considered.”
She put her hands on his knees. It felt outrageous, to do so to a near stranger, but this boy belonged to her already. “What do we do now?”
“Well, you’re meant to be my gift.” He gave her a broad grin, his teeth straight and very white. “So, I expect you’ll woo me, show me all that you can do.”
“Is that so?” She pouted at him, tilting her head. “Perhaps it won’t work that way, this time. Perhaps you’re the gift, meant to be mine.”
“Then, maybe, if I’m going to be your gift,” he said, drawing so close their foreheads nearly touched, and she could smell the warmth and boy of him, “you should tell me what you mean to call me.”
SHE WOULD CALL him Artem, like the boy who danced. She knew it even before he brought her to the strangest desert she had ever seen.
“Is it real?” she asked, turning in a circle. The sand wasn’t any color it should have been; the dunes around them blazed with rainbow bands of turmeric yellow, magenta, lilac, violet, and vermilion. In the distance rose rich, green mountains, surrounded by what looked like the tangle of jungle. She couldn’t remember how they’d gotten here. He’d touched her, maybe, in the cave, cupped her face and told her to close her eyes.
Or maybe not. It didn’t matter.