“I have not poisoned you, nor drugged you in any way.” To prove it, the sorceress took her own fish glass and drank half of the wine, just more than Nothing had swallowed.
The sorceress let go of her glass and it floated toward Nothing. She said, “Drink.”
Nothing plucked it from the air and put it to her lips, breathing the heady fumes. Her sip was barely there, barely a taste.
“The soup is my favorite,” the sorceress said. She lifted her bowl in a slight salute before setting it down and taking a lovely crystal spoon.
Nothing stared at the reddish-brown broth. It smelled like beef and peppers. Not what she expected from the table of a sorceress who could have anything, presumably. There ought to have been songbird eggs and fluffy pastries, thinly sliced fish laid out in a rainbow, jellies and towers of fruit Nothing had never seen before.
“Eat,” the sorceress commanded gently.
Nothing did not lift her spoon.
“Kirin will eat what you eat.”
“What?” She lifted her gaze to the sorceress.
“I have told the prince that he will be served what you eat. So feed him.”
Nothing ate. It was good, spicy, and surely better for a starving prince than any of the magical, strange food she’d imagined. Halfway through the deep bowl, she slowed down. The sorceress had been eating too, and when Nothing paused, the sorceress patted her lips with a napkin.
“Why do you have him?” Nothing asked.
“I thought I needed his heart.”
“But you don’t.”
“I need what his heart will bring me.”
“What?”
The sorceress blinked, and her eyes were more human seeming, without the long red pupil, though still one was bright green and the other dull white. They could be, under certain circumstances, those of a very strange woman. It shifted the sorceress’s face to less magnificently beautiful and more approachable. “An answer. That is what I look for in the hearts of all maidens.”
“An answer to what?”
“A curse, of course.”
Nothing froze. “You’re cursed?”
“Yes.”
“What is your curse?”
The sorceress smiled wryly.
“You can’t say,” Nothing grumbled.
“I can tell you a story. Eat.”
Somehow the sorceress had acquired a new glass of wine, though Nothing’s broken glass remained where it had fallen.
Nothing put another spoonful into her mouth.
“Once a girl climbed into the core of the Fifth Mountain asking to speak with the demon. She wanted to be a sorcerer and bargained with the demon to teach her magic in return for a wife.”
“You’re the wife of the Fifth Mountain!” Nothing interrupted.
The sorceress’s eyelashes fluttered: Nothing hadn’t noticed how long and curving they were before. Like the line of a soaring raven’s wing. “The demon agreed, and they married, and she learned so much it could not be told in words. The sorceress and her consort were happy, and powerful, for many years, and so the sorceress decided what many sorcerers do: she would find a way to give her demon life again—a form of its own. But demons are not meant for such things. Spirits live; demons exist. They make new homes in the houses of others. They devour. They take. To live is to give, to create, and so it is a trap to think it possible to give life again to a demon. But the sorceress asked herself, is love not giving too? Is it not creation? If a demon can love, can it not live?”
The sorceress paused. Nothing stared at her. Despite having eaten so much, she felt empty. “Was she certain demons can love?” Nothing whispered.
“She believed it, which is better than knowing,” the sorceress said. She drank more wine before continuing. “The sorceress began her attempt, gathering power she could barely contain, to make a living form for her demon. Storms racked the Fifth Mountain, and its core burst and burned, and when the sorceress finished, instead of embracing her from a cradle of new life, the great demon of the Fifth Mountain was simply gone.”
“You said the demon was home!”
“It is. Now.”
Nothing scowled.
“When the demon vanished, the sorceress searched high and low, across the empire, but could not find it. She asked dragons; she begged the wind to take her pleas to the Queens of Heaven and demanded answers of the rain-forest gods. She even sent messengers to the Four Living Mountains, though their sorcerers hated her. None knew. Finally, the sorceress succeeded in summoning a unicorn, and it offered her a single piece of wisdom: You will find your answer in the heart of the most beautiful maiden.”
The sorceress paused to sip her wine again, and Nothing was breathless.
“It was a very unicorn answer, for they are drawn too well to beauty themselves. Nevertheless, the sorceress hunted for years. She hunted beautiful maidens and asked for their hearts.”
“Asked?” Nothing nearly spat the word.
“Asked,” the sorceress continued. “Bargained. Seduced.”
“How can anyone give their heart? Their actual heart? Don’t they die?” Nothing stopped, thinking of Spring.
“That is a different story,” the sorceress said gently. “Shall I tell it instead?”
Nothing was torn, wanting to hear about hearts, too, about seduction. But she shook her head, no. Kirin mattered more.
The sorceress said, “The hearts she was given fueled the Fifth Mountain and kept the sorceress’s magic bright. But none held her answer. None pointed to what had happened to her demon consort. Until the height of this summer, when she found the most beautiful maiden she’d ever seen.”
“You. You found.”
The sorceress leveled her uneven gaze on to Nothing. “I found,” she said silkily. “And this maiden, this beautiful maiden, said she was a prince, not a maiden. I said, ‘Both, then, maiden and prince.’ But the prince replied, ‘Not quite one or the other, but I am the Heir to the Moon. I want to be—must be—he to the world no matter what else, and so call me such. Remind me what the world expects of me.’ ”
Nothing glanced down at her soup, hurt that he’d never said such things to her. Had he thought she wouldn’t understand?
With a soft sigh, the sorceress continued. “The prince’s sadness reminded me of my own, and so I brought him here to my mountain, thinking at last I had found the right heart. The heart of a maiden that was not the heart of a maiden, in a prince between both. We spoke of men and women, night and day, life, death, good and bad, and I reminded him that power lies in change, in shifting, in more than two possibilities. The empress and her court—humans—force contrast, force two-sided thinking, as if the world could possibly conform to such a thing! What is twilight? I asked him. What is a shadow? What is a tree with both flower and seed? I asked him if perhaps he was not a prince, but a sorcerer like me, and perhaps his heart was where my demon hides? He was the right age, after all. To have been born when my demon vanished.”
Nothing believed it.
For a moment she absolutely believed it: Kirin was a demon reborn.
He was power and beauty, and trouble. Mischief and wickedness, wildness and passion—and stuck, too, in between. And he took and took and took. She felt her own heart stutter and set down her spoon; she could not possibly eat.