Day and night, Shine thought of the sorceress. If someone flashed past in a vivid emerald necklace or wearing ivory combs, Shine saw her evergreen eye and her bone-white eye. She lay in her abandoned bathroom, wrapped in soft new blankets, and whispered stories of her day as if she related them to the sorceress. Sometimes the great demon was listening, and Shine rolled over, pressed a hand to the wall, and told it what she’d learned about reborn hearts and demons falling in love. She played games with it, childish games she invented, and remembered her sorceress saying, My demon played too.
She knew the sorceress needed her, but Shine had to stay just a little bit longer. It would all work out. They would all be fine. Her, the sorceress, Kirin, and Sky.
The sorceress would make it, she’d promised.
She saw the sorceress again at the end of her first week in the palace, in a room Shine had never found when she was at the mountain herself. Blue crystals glowed along the ceiling of the cavern, lighting up rows of flowers growing in boxes. The flowers were strangely shaped, made of feathers or scales, scarlet maple leaves, slithering tongues, and worst of all, tiny blinking eyes. The air smelled sweet and sour, oddly pleasant. The sorceress tended a long box of drooping daisies with petals the color of salmon meat and tiny stamen singing a sad song. With delicate silver scissors, the sorceress trimmed red from the edges of the petals.
“What is it?” Shine asked.
The sorceress did not lose her concentration. “Fellwort, and it makes a tincture to keep me awake.”
“You look like you need sleep.” Shine disliked the heavy darkness under the sorceress’s eyes, which made them seem huger, more monstrous. The monstrousness didn’t bother her: it was the unintentional nature of it. As if the sorceress couldn’t help appearing exhausted.
The sorceress hissed suddenly as she trimmed too much from a pink petal. She set the scissors down, and Shine saw a faint trembling in her hands.
“Sorceress,” Shine said, ducking under the row of flower boxes. She stood with stinky dirt on her knees but took the sorceress’s hands in her own. “Rest.”
“I am fine, Night Shine.” The sorceress regarded Shine coolly, and her eyes again seemed bright, awake.
Shine tried out a smile, and the sorceress returned it slightly.
She asked after the rest of the garden, and the sorceress walked her along the rows, pointing out natural flowers and magically sourced, adding details about their care and uses. Shine slipped her hand into the sorceress’s, and the sorceress stroked her thumb down Shine’s but did not speak of it.
The bluish crystal light cast even, shallow shadows, and Shine listened for the heartbeat of the Fifth Mountain. She could not hear it, perhaps because this was a long-distance spell. She stopped and said, “Kirin needs me.”
“So do I,” the sorceress said.
But she seemed all right, and strong, and Shine said, “I’ll be here soon.”
“Good,” the sorceress said, and Shine disliked even more than the shadows under her eyes how light and uncaring the sorceress’s tone was. As if there was no trust, as if the sorceress did not believe Shine would return.
“I promise,” Shine said, even as she woke up again in the palace.
Every day Shine was given new clothing to make her beautiful, and her hair re-dyed black, her face powdered as pale as Kirin’s. She learned to like the taste of lip paint, which was good because she did not learn how to avoid eating it off or stop smearing it on the rim of her glass. Whisper was allowed to dress her, and it was considered an honor. She never tried to put Shine in anything stiff with hidden architecture, for Whisper understood without asking that Shine wouldn’t tolerate bindings or corsets or shoulder wings or starched layers like rose petals.
Her only real frustration was the restricting net. She couldn’t even practice siphoning enough power to fill a cup of tea! But Shine knew after the investiture ritual she’d tear through the sigils and join the sorceress. There on the Fifth Mountain she would gain skills and eventually thread power from the wind to fuel her transformations, or heal great injuries, or maybe move the course of a river. She had her entire life to learn. Maybe she would live for hundreds of years!
When Shine imagined her future, it cycled like seasons: winter with the sorceress, summer with Kirin, sometimes changing it up, staying or going for longer, and even traveling to the farther corners of the empire, or making herself into a shark and swimming across the sea. She was a demon reborn; she could do it! She would bless the empire, and Kirin, and make sure he was happy and healthy, and his eventual First Consort, and Second, and children. Shine could see the future of the empire itself spool out if she tried.
She would have the sorceress with her for it.
That felt right. The missing thing inside her could be filled up by the sorceress. Somehow. Like a puzzle box, Shine would simply have to keep reworking herself until they fit.
Once the Selegan River spirit had told her dragons were possibility and potential, and Shine finally understood what that felt like. In her was the potential of all the world.
Two nights before the full moon and the investiture ritual, Shine held the pear in her hand.
It was almost gone.
One good bite or two small ones. She considered waiting but wanted the sorceress to know when to expect her. So Shine carefully bit into the pear, enjoying the flavor as always, and once the taste had vanished down her gullet, she opened her eyes into the library of the Fifth Mountain again. She said immediately, “The pear is nearly finished, so I may not have much time. I’ll leave the palace in three days. Expect me in a little less than a month. I can travel more quickly than a human girl now.”
The sorceress looked up from her work, tired, but she smiled, and her evergreen eye and her bone-white eye both gleamed. Little spiking feathers darkened her cheeks, and her teeth were sharp. “That pleases me, Night Shine. Will you marry me when you arrive?”
Shine laughed and said, “Probably not yet! But you will have every day to change my mind.”
When Shine woke up, she carefully wrapped the final small bite of pear in a cloth of fuchsia silk and kept it with her always. Just in case.
FORTY-THREE
THE MORNING BEFORE KIRIN’S investiture ritual, Shine was awakened from a dream of the mirror lake and the sorceress by a sound at the boarded-over, rusty, unused door of the abandoned bathhouse. She thought at first that the great demon was laughing in a hollow-walls sort of way.
But the noise stopped and then started again, in a distinctly knocking-for-entry pattern.
Shine sat up, rubbed her hands down her face, and walked around piles of broken tiles and the laundry line tied between pillars on which she’d hung her new clothes. She put her hand on the dusty old door and called, “Hello?”
Sky’s muffled voice answered, “Night Shine.”
For a moment she didn’t answer, she was so surprised.
“Shine?” Sky called again, soft and urgent.
“Yes, Sky. I’m here. The door—how did you know?” Did everyone in the palace know she was slipping out of her guest chambers to sneak here to sleep every night?
“Can I come in?”
Shine slid her hand down the old wood. “I can’t open it. Is everything all right?”