“Just watch,” she said. “I’ll show you what I meant.”
She danced for him inside the tree, but the tree wasn’t what she danced. She showed him how she’d stroke him with her hair, trailing her hands like vines, how she’d like to feel the warmth of him pressed against her from behind. How she’d wrap her legs around his hips, tilt her chin and arch her back; how she’d let him kiss her until she wept, and even more than that.
Much later, she rested her chin on his bare chest and watched him watching her. “What is it, foxfire?” he said. He had a very darling dimple, she’d found, when he smiled at her this certain way. “What’s in those she-wolf eyes?”
“Do you love me, Artem?”
He frowned. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve told you a thousand times. Do you love me?”
“But you could say that for all of them,” she argued, “the ones who came before me. And if that’s true, then what’s the use in me loving you, too? It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. Unless you chose to choose only me, then all this is just her game.”
“I did love them, yes, that much is true,” he said carefully, feeling her tense against him. “When Mara offered this to me, beauty and love in place of solitude, these became the rules. But you—you’re the first, in all this time, who made me love her to the soul. I wouldn’t lie to you, my foxfire. That’s the full truth that I hold.”
“If only you could die for me to prove it,” she teased. “Too bad you’re not allowed.”
“That would indeed be a drastic measure,” he agreed. “But for you, I would. If you demanded it of me, at least, and if I found I could.”
“And what about me?” she pressed him. “What about when I’m gone? You’ll take up with the next one? You’ll just carry on?”
“I’ll mourn you for an eternity,” he whispered. “I’ll howl for you in the hearts of mountains, and weep for you into the lakes.”
“An eternity and two days, you mean. Until the next one takes my place.”
They were quiet for a long time, and so still, that a long coral snake slithered over her feet. It might have made her shriek and shudder once, but now she could barely bother to take heed.
“What would you have me do instead?” he asked her. “What would please you more?”
“That you never take another, of course,” she said. “And never let me go.”
“I can’t, my lover. I wish I could, but she bound me with her will.” He ran her hair through his fingers, braiding the white streaks with the red. “I’ll lose you, and you’ll leave a space behind, a space for a new daughter to fill.”
She pulled away from him fiercely, and drew up her spine, and tried to remember how it felt to be brave. “Then don’t dare say you love me, because you don’t,” she spat. “You just love what you happen to have.”
Still he said nothing, and she rounded on him, forcing them face-to-face. “The one who comes after wouldn’t be some stranger; a daughter of my blood will take my place. And this is what you’d offer her, my successor and my niece? False love and empty places, no kind of choice and this vacuum of peace? If you love me, then prove it. Don’t look for another, for I can tell you, there will not be one. Once this is over, all of you and me, all of this will truly be done.”
“I’ll be alone then, after you, if that’s what you want,” he said, and she could hear the tears beneath his voice. “Darkness entire, no more beauty, or love—but if that’s what you ask, then that’s my choice.”
“You won’t be alone, because I’ll love you, even once I’m gone.” She climbed onto his lap and kissed him hard, and he clasped her against his chest.
But when she looked up at him, he’d lifted his head and his eyes were only halfway there—as if he were searching toward the next.
THEN HE ASKED her to dance him the tides of the oceans, and vanished while she danced.
THIRTY-ONE
RIGHT AFTER THE BURST OF MOVEMENT THAT PAINTED HER waking—eyes springing open and mouth shaped into a gasp—Dunja fell to her knees like a doll whose strings had been cut.
Lina and I rushed to her side. She was breathing hard and sharp, as if every breath cut deep, and tears streamed down her face. I wrapped my arms around her without a second thought, like I’d done for Malina a thousand times before, and she clutched me back tightly, hot face tucked into my shoulder. I’d never been close enough to smell her before, and beneath the scents of grass and pine and old fire, her skin and hair smelled so much like Mama’s.
“It hurt to wake back in the cave,” she whispered through the tears. “Like knives and glass and poison inside me. And I was still strong, so strong, but everything hurt. And I hate him and I miss him, I miss him so much.”
I rocked her back and forth as she sobbed, shushing into her ear. I wanted to murder Mara for doing this to her, and him—him I wanted to suffocate with my bare hands. “You really loved him, didn’t you? You really wanted him for your own.”
I could feel her ragged breathing slow a little. “It was Mara’s doing first, and then I did it for Jasmina. But then, I truly did, for myself. I still do.” She gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “And I would never wish him upon you, ever.”
“I understand,” I murmured back. “I don’t particularly think I’d like to share, either.”
This time, I startled genuine laughter out of her, full-throated and musical even with the tearful tinge. “We are greedy,” she said. “All of us, starting with her. Always wanting the fullness of things, everything to its extremes.”
But wasn’t that true of most people? I thought. Why else would we wage war and fight for freedom and kill each other over the true name of God? Because we all wanted everything, and for everything we wanted to be right.
“So after you woke up,” Malina said gently. “What happened then?”
Dunja blinked away the last of the tears, wiping delicately at her face. “There was someone in the cave with me, I think she’d come to trim my hair. Denari, Mara’s great-granddaughter. She was rearranging the furs when I woke all the way up. I scared her, and she attacked me and I—” She swallowed. “I threw her hard against the wall, like she weighed nothing. That’s how I knew how strong I’d gotten. Then I made my way to you.”
“Reverse engineering!” Luka announced triumphantly.
Dunja, Malina, and I all turned to frown at him in such a synchronized way that we must have looked like real family for the first time. Even Niko, sitting beside him, gave him a dubious squint, squinching up her nose.