“What?” Nothing whispered, confused. She didn’t know what to do.
The sorceress touched her shoulder, gently turning Nothing to face her. “I think in retrospect, tender heart, that it was the only place you could be reborn. Inside another great demon’s house. It must have been safe, like an eggshell, to hold you until you were ready. And Kirin Dark-Smile, because he was young, and you were young, and he partially bound to the Moon, already living in a twilight of sorcery, had just enough aether and instinct to give you a true name. Bind you.”
Nothing sucked in a surprised breath. “I want my Kirin.”
“Because you have to want him.”
“No.”
“Yes. He named you; he bound you.” Something hard tinged the sorceress’s words. Frustration, or anger, maybe. “He’s powerful because he knows he doesn’t fit where he is told he must.” The sorceress smiled sadly. “That was my first step along this path too.”
“What’s your name?” Nothing demanded. “Tell me. If I was your consort, I must have known. Tell me again.”
“Not while you are his. I won’t let him use you against me.”
Frustration clamped Nothing’s teeth together. She made fists and squeezed until her bones hurt. “Give me something!” she cried.
The sorceress said, “Kirin helped me with this one.”
“Helped you with…” Nothing glanced back at the false prince as he arranged blueberries in a line against the edge of the table, then ate them one by one. Lazily, with the affectation of boredom. It hurt her to see it. Under her heart, like a heat in her stomach. “Why would he…?”
“To save The Day the Sky Opened. I bargained, and that is what he gave me for the warrior’s life.”
“He saved his own life with information about me and saved Sky’s by helping you? Why?”
The sorceress shrugged a slender shoulder, her gaze sliding from Kirin to Nothing. When Nothing hadn’t been looking, her pupils had shifted from red slits to plain black circles. Nearly human, except no human had a single bone-white eye. “He may be a baby sorcerer, but I am not.”
“He gave you the bracelet,” Nothing whispered. The one braided of her hair.
“He did. And suggested I try a fox spirit bound to this simulacrum. Last time I chose a crossroads spirit.”
“To fool me.”
“But, Nothing”—the sorceress lowered her gaze—“you were not fooled.”
Nothing sank to the quartz floor. She knelt, staring at the false Kirin, in pain. It was an ache in her center, radiating out with biting fingers, pinching at her guts and heart, and it drove tears up her throat to fill her nose and eyes until her vision wavered with a smoky burn.
What name to give this feeling? Anger, hurt, betrayal?
She didn’t know. Nothing would be better. To feel nothing, or merely the edges of what other people felt. She was a shadow, a slip of a girl dashing through the walls, climbing into secret chambers folded between rooms and corridors of the seven circles of the palace. Between the world and the world, anchored only to Kirin.
Nobody else had known Kirin was not Kirin. Not then, and certainly they wouldn’t know now.
She couldn’t explain it.
“I have to see him,” she whispered. And she reached for the sorceress to plead.
The sorceress’s eyes widened as Nothing touched the back of her hand.
Blackness swallowed her.
Inside the blackness was heat, and a flower. The flower opened and spilled more flowers, oblong, vivid pink and dark purple, falling in crests, into the blackness—no, born of it, falling into—
Nothing opened her eyes to the cutting curve of the amethyst ceiling. She was reclined in the sorceress’s lap, held in the pool of her skirts, and the sorceress leaned over her, one arm around her shoulders. The strands of thick tricolored hair fell around Nothing, and both the green and the white eye shone with intensity. “Oh, I do not want to take your heart,” she whispered.
“No.” Nothing shoved away, awake fast. The sorceress did not try to catch her, and Nothing slid to the hard ground, half rolling onto her side. She breathed quickly, holding herself still, eyes shut, hands flat to the quartz floor. What had happened? Had she fainted when she touched the sorceress? Why? Nothing swallowed. From her position, bowed over the floor, she asked, “What happened?”
“I didn’t mean to touch you,” the sorceress said.
“You didn’t. I touched you.”
A rustle of silk taught Nothing the sorceress stood up. “I need it. You. To keep the mountain strong, to keep myself alive. Without the demon, the mountain cannot hold. My power wants yours. I know you. I…”
Nothing got to her feet, her back to the sorceress. She looked toward the table: Kirin crouched there like an animal, not like Kirin. On his toes, knees bent, his fingers tented against the floor. She shuddered. He grinned. The fox was obvious in him now. “Take that face away from him,” Nothing said, and without glancing to the sorceress, she left.
In the corridor she tore at the bright-green sash and let it flutter behind her, then stepped quickly out of the skirts. She hurried, loosing the feathers from her hair, then untied the pale-green outer jacket, shrugging free. It, too, fluttered behind her: a shed skin, flapping wings.
Nothing ran in only the thin pink under-robe and silk slip, her shoulders bare and cold, her knees bare too. She passed her room, the library, Sky’s altar chamber. She passed everything. “Down,” she said, and found stairs.
She was not looking for Kirin now—she’d not been able to find him before.
Nothing was looking for herself.
The darkness, the flower, the pain. It was inside her but also here. Inside her mountain.
A string of power, razor sharp. When she thought of it too closely, it bit at her, and her insides seemed to bleed. She kept going.
Down.
The walls changed from granite to sleek obsidian, then layers and facets of huge crystal. There was no light, but she could see.
Nothing stopped. She pressed her hands to a flat face of quartz and pushed. Her hands sank into the crystal and she swept them aside: a door. She’d made a door. Of course she could do such a thing.
It was all hers.
The air froze, cold as death, and she walked through, into deeper darkness tinged with violet. Tinged red in the distance: she followed that.
She followed the string of razors inside her, the bleeding that drew her on. Down. Forward.
The heartbeat crashed into her.
Next, in the massive absence after that single pulse, Nothing understood that the heart the sorceress had used last to shore up the Fifth Mountain’s power was nearly dead. Spring’s heart, nearly dead. Without the demon come home, the sorceress would hunt again for a new heart. Or take Kirin’s.
Down. The violet darkness gave way to red, then to a shimmering greenish light, as though she were underwater.
The corridor opened into a chamber as huge as the third circle of the palace. Stairs curled around the edges, up and up, and in the center was a platform with more stairs leading toward it and away again. A plinth lifted in the middle of the platform, grown from the mountain.
Nothing walked up a set of stairs toward it, eyes stuck to the dark crystal. Inside, trapped like a dead butterfly, was a heart.