Nothing gaped. She felt the cold wind and smelled the icy evergreen air of the mountain. Behind her warmth billowed out from the cavern.
“You must have taken a large bite,” the sorceress said, leaning coolly back against the rail as if the balcony were a throne.
“The pear?” Nothing’s voice was hoarse.
“The pear.”
“It’s magic. I’m really here.”
“Part of you.”
“How long?”
“Hard to say. But it will work with a smaller slice, enough for you to see me, speak with me. No matter how far from the mountain you travel.”
“Why?”
“So you can visit me.” The sorceress frowned. “Do you not wish to?”
Instead of answering, Nothing asked, “Is this what we were making with the patterns cut into the floor? The long-sight spell?”
The sorceress slid her hands along the rail and nodded. Draped only in the robe and moonlight, the sorceress appeared human. Just a young woman, not the wife of a demon, not a changeable witch familiar to dragons and unicorns.
Nothing couldn’t believe she’d flung herself at Skybreaker for the sorceress.
But she’d been so sure it was the right thing to do. She’d not been sorry at all. She’d laughed! She remembered her glee, the triumphant flavor of her laughter. Is that what it meant to be a demon? Joy in violence?
What if Skybreaker had killed the sorceress? No other girls would be killed for their hearts. The mountain would be free, and so would Nothing be.
It didn’t hurt Nothing to imagine such a thing, though she’d thought she was growing to care for the sorceress. Had it merely been proximity and the vibrations of the mountain heart?
“I miss the mountain already,” she said, to cover her sudden discomfort.
The sorceress smiled flatly. “I have missed you for so long I hardly notice anymore.”
“Not me. It isn’t me you’ve missed,” Nothing insisted. “I’m different.”
“Yes, you are different. I like it, though.” The sorceress shrugged one shoulder. “Come back. Leap off the barge and return to me. Let the prince go home at the side of his heroic lover.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I want to go back to the palace. I have to. I belong there, with Kirin.”
“You love him.” The sorceress’s voice burned.
Nothing stopped breathing for a moment, caught by the vicious word love. It seemed as though the sorceress were having this conversation with someone else—someone beloved. Nothing said, “Of course I do. That was never in doubt.”
“Isn’t it?” The sorceress’s eyes cut up, dangerous.
“Do you think my true name could make me love?” Nothing stepped closer, then stepped back again. “When I break his mastery over me, I won’t love him anymore?”
The sorceress narrowed her eyes. “I did not think when I found my demon again that it would love someone else.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were remembering.” The sorceress looked away. Her lithe body turned slowly, gracefully, away from Nothing. She stared out over the balcony, every piece of her tense.
“Oh,” Nothing whispered. “I… remember the volcano. I remember power. The feel of it. That’s not love.”
The sorceress was silent.
Nothing clenched her fists, wishing she weren’t so cold. Why couldn’t the memory of fire and magma warm her again? She said, “Isn’t it good? That I can love someone else? If I was a demon and you gave me new life, isn’t it good that I have such a capacity for love? I love the red-wash of the palace walls and the rumble of the great demon. I love Whisper and the sound of wind through the smoke ways. I love the Lily Garden. And Kirin, yes, and Sky, too, now. Or maybe I have for a long time but didn’t realize it. I fell in love with the lava field and the mirror lake the moment I saw them.”
“But not me.”
“That doesn’t mean… I never could.” It felt cruel to pretend Nothing could make such a promise. She said, “Every time I think about love, I think of something else that fits within it. Have you truly never loved more than one other thing?”
The sorceress pushed off the rail, stalking toward Nothing. “My one thing filled me up. I was consumed, and that is where power was born. On the edge of devastation, from the desperate urge to be more, to make more.”
“That sounds like obsession, not love,” Nothing whispered. “It sounds frightening.”
“Yes,” the sorceress whispered back, dragging the word into a tender hiss. “Frightening, exhilarating.”
Nothing’s pulse raced, knocking through her blood like thunder. The sorceress’s pupils elongated, turning bloodred. Her teeth were jagged shark’s teeth, and she reached for Nothing with a hand tipped by curved black talons. She skimmed their points against Nothing’s cheek, teasing and sharp. Nothing shivered, flushing because she liked knowing the slightest pressure, any sudden slip, and those talons could flay her skin from her bones. She liked it very much.
“Kirin doesn’t do this to you. Your old life, old friends don’t. There is nothing in the palace of the empress that draws you like I do.”
“That’s not true,” Nothing said, and the words did the trick: the talons sliced into her. Tiny lines of pain flared.
The sorceress whispered, “Don’t you want to be loved more than anything else in the world?”
Nothing shivered. Blood slowly slipped down her jaw and onto her neck. The sorceress shifted her hand so that it was the soft pad of a finger that touched Nothing, then drew the finger toward Nothing’s mouth.
“When you are far from me, remember what you were and what you long for,” the sorceress whispered, leaning nearer.
For a moment Nothing imagined allowing herself to be what the sorceress promised: not a demon, but a lover. A consort to be cherished and touched. She could be a part of something magnificent, and not only a shadow, a word whispered here or there, a bargain of information, a flash of bare feet, but an intrinsic part. The core. A core made in tandem with someone else.
She remembered splattering magma and stone so hot it creaked and cracked. A restless heat, aching to expand, to explode. Her heart was a volcano, waiting. She did want it.
Her eyes flew open.
Nothing was on the barge, splayed on her back, panting up at the stars and hanging moon.
The feeling was gone. Nothing’s hand curled around the pear as if she could hold on to the feeling. She clutched it against her stomach, eyes shut, and calmed slowly down. Her cheek stung, and touching it, Nothing discovered she bled slightly. Only a smear, from the sorceress’s talons.
Nothing ached with emptiness. For the first time she felt like she had only half a heart.
But she didn’t understand why.
The barge swayed like a cradle, and the wind and frogs were her lullaby. Nothing tucked the pear into her pocket again and sat up. Carefully she crept to the prow and huddled there, staring out into the wind. The moon wavered on every ripple of the river, like a thousand silver-white scales.
THIRTY-ONE
IT WAS BORING ON the barge, especially by the second day. Nothing did not tell her companions about the pear or her visit with the sorceress. She knew it had been real, but she kept it as her secret.