INSISTENT TIDE CAME TO fetch Nothing for dinner. Finally! Nothing had begun to think the day would drag on and on—not that the Selegan River was poor company, but she needed to see Kirin.
First the old woman dragged Nothing back to her room, where a gown was folded over the makeup chair. Insistent Tide put her fists on her hips, glaring through her wrinkles at Nothing. “Strip,” she ordered.
Taking her own turn at grumbling, Nothing obeyed. Insistent Tide thrust a cup of water at her and Nothing drank every drop. The cool water was refreshing, and she shook herself like a dog, rolling her neck and shoulders. She stretched her fingers and reached for the ceiling, then bent in half to touch the floor.
“Finished?” Insistent Tide asked.
Nothing stood and lifted her chin.
The old woman stared. Her long wrinkles shaped her face around her frown. But her dark eyes glittered with amusement. “New underclothes there,” she finally said, pointing at some pale silk bits atop the smallest trunk.
Nothing put them on, wiggling her hips a little to appreciate the softness. The thin silk slip tied over her breasts and fell in a narrow shaft nearly to her knees. She smoothed the material against herself, enjoying the sensation. Insistent Tide brought a sleeveless under-robe nearly as thin, but in shell pink, wrapping it around her waist tightly. Over that went a pale-green jacket that left most of her collar bare, hugging her shoulders only a little. Then a set of black and silver wrapping skirts tied at her waist with a bright-green sash embroidered with white lilies. Nothing obliged Insistent Tide tonight by sitting at the makeup desk while the old woman braided and pinned a few pieces of her hair and used a silk-and-horn band to hold it all in place. Then she put coral red on her lips and green around her eyes. Nothing supposed the old woman thought she was being funny, using the same colors as Nothing’s outrageous demon face the night before. This time they fit well with the gown.
“Do you have feathers?” Nothing asked, thinking of the dragon’s feather. She’d left it with Sky, for he was the one who needed the dragon’s friendship most.
Insistent Tide grudgingly supplied a few sleek green primary feathers. She tucked them into Nothing’s hair in an off-center crest. “Strange,” the old woman said.
“Perfect,” Nothing agreed. She wanted to greet Kirin as prettily as she could, as it would be a pleasant surprise for him after so many weeks alone. He did like pretty things. Her chest felt tight with excitement. She’d missed him so much while he was gone on his summer trip with Sky, aching every day in the littlest ways, and then when the imposter returned, fear and uncertainty had overtaken her longing. But now: she might vibrate herself through the floor with anticipation.
Insistent Tide gave her little black slippers, but as soon as Nothing was in the corridor, she took them off and continued to the geode room barefoot.
Her heart pounded as she entered; she searched every amethyst glimmer and violet shadow for Kirin.
But the geode was empty except for the same low, set table with the same thin golden cushions.
Nothing tapped her fingers against her thighs, wondering how long to wait and what she should do. Certainly not begin eating or drinking. She walked across the clear quartz floor, watching her toes peek out from the hem of her skirts, and imagined walking across the sharp facets of amethyst below instead. At the far edge, she crouched, relishing the slick of silk against her legs, and reached for the nearest spear of amethyst. Her fingers were cool against it! The crystal was warm and humming. And it was no constant hum, but a rhythm like a pulse.
Before she knew it, her own pulse answered, trying to match the slow heartbeat. Nothing closed her eyes, listening. It soothed her, dazed her, like instant meditation.
“Nothing,” Kirin said.
She stood and whirled, nearly tripping on her skirts. There he stood: tall and lean, in a long robe of black and red, his trousers loose, hems falling over bare feet. He smiled at her, and Nothing dashed for him, ready to fling herself into his arms.
But she stopped.
Several feet away, she stood still and stared, pulse pounding, stomach rolling. Cold sweat beaded along her spine.
“Nothing?” He frowned. He stepped toward her.
Nothing parted her lips to say his name but couldn’t.
He was perfect: vivid brown-and-gold eyes held hers, gently curled lashes blinking hardly at all. His skin was healthy, bright moon-white; his brows lifted elegantly; his hair fell over his shoulders in heavy black layers. He was still rather weedy in his height, not entirely grown into it. There was the familiar cock of his shoulders, and he leaned on one hip. His slightly pink lips tilted as he smiled at her.
His hands were relaxed, elegant and strong looking. It was him. Everything about him was him.
Her hair-bracelet wrapped his left wrist, just over the knob of bone.
And still Nothing could not say a thing. She could not take the final steps.
“Nothing?” asked the sorceress softly.
The word tore her eyes from Kirin to the sorceress.
Power radiated from her luminous face, the round prettiness of her copper cheeks and red lips overwhelmed by those monstrous eyes. Her black-brown-red hair was a mass of coils like tentacles snarled around her head. She wore bold green, blue, and black in lustrous layers, and a single fire-red gemstone hung on a chain over her heart, like a crystalized fist of blood.
She was entirely distracting from Kirin. That shouldn’t have been possible.
Nothing forced her attention back to the prince. “Kirin?” she whispered.
“Who else would I be?” He came for her. “Nothing!”
She let him embrace her, flattening her hands on his ribs. He smelled like the mountain, and a sharp tea. His hair brushed her forehead as he curled around her, tightening his hold.
“No,” she whispered against the warm spread of his silk-clad chest.
“No? You found me. You did it. I said Nothing would come for me, and you did.”
Nothing pushed firmly away. The frown he gave her was only slightly confused, married with a growing irritation. Exactly the right reaction. Kirin would be irritated she wasn’t behaving happy or even satisfied to have him again.
Exactly right.
She was still sweating coldly as she backed away and said to the sorceress, “This isn’t him. It’s another imposter!”
The smile that spread across the sorceress’s lips was like an arrow in Nothing’s heart.
“How do you know?” the sorceress asked gently.
Kirin crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re being ridiculous.”
Nothing pursed her lips as her eyes flicked to him again. “I’m sorry, but I know it’s not you.”
“I am perfect.”
“He is perfect,” the sorceress echoed.
“I know,” Nothing said. “But it’s not him.”
“Go sit,” the sorceress commanded.
Kirin immediately went to the table and flung himself down upon a cushion, leaning his long body back to prop on one elbow. He crossed his ankles and watched them arrogantly.
It hurt Nothing to see. But she knew.
The sorceress approached her like a stalking panther. “How do you know?” she asked again.
“I know him better than anybody.” Nothing hugged her stomach as her only defense.
“Explain to me what gave him away.”
“So you can make one to fool even me?”
The sorceress reached for Nothing, and Nothing jerked back just as her fingernails grazed her chin.
“I swear,” the sorceress said, “I will not make another. If you tell me.”
“I…” Nothing licked her lips and stared at Kirin. At the fake Kirin. She couldn’t point to anything in particular. Each detail, as she thought of it, she realized was right. His smile, his attitude, his pose and the way he plucked a blueberry from a shallow bowl upon the table and popped it into his mouth. Everything was exactly as it should be.
Nothing’s eyes pricked with tears. “I just know.”
“It’s because he’s your master,” the sorceress murmured in Nothing’s ear, hovering just behind her: a cool presence, like a shadow blocking the sun.
“What?” Nothing held herself as still as possible. Eyes on the false Kirin, too aware of the sorceress breathing at the nape of her neck.
“You were my lost demon, Nothing, and when you were reborn, Kirin—your Kirin—somehow made you his. Named you, then bound you with the name he gave you. It’s the only explanation for how you know it isn’t him, for why you do not know yourself.”
Nothing realized she was breathing too quickly. “He wouldn’t. He’s my friend.”
“He might not have meant to if he did not know what you are.”
“Only a sorcerer can bind a demon or a great spirit,” Nothing said.
The sorceress laughed. “Kirin, more than anyone but his mother, has a sorcerer’s potential within him. Not only because he is both a prince and the most beautiful maiden, primed to step into the aether between.”
Nothing wanted to argue, but if anyone in the great palace was accidentally a sorcerer, it would be Kirin Dark-Smile. “That shouldn’t be enough.”
“No. But when you consider the Moon, it might have been.”
“The Moon?”
“The great demon of the palace, Nothing. Bound by a powerful amulet to the empress, and to her heir, for generations.”
“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.
She stopped. To the left, far below, an archway glowed with a warmer kind of light. Firelight.
Making her way for that arch, Nothing felt the huge heartbeat again. It shook her bones and she nearly lost her balance, knees bending. But she stumbled on, caught herself against the arch, and everything righted itself.
Nothing stepped out of the huge chamber and into the firelit corridor. She could hardly think, knowing what lay ahead as she walked. Not as quickly as before, one hand touching the rough wall. It curved sharply and deposited her in a small chamber with glinting streaks of diamond veins and bursts of ruby. Behind a mouth of obsidian bars was Kirin Dark-Smile.
This time, it was him.
Torn and death-pale, he leaned against the wall, legs out before him. His velvety green dress was tattered, the red-black-silver embroidered flowers massive like bleeding wounds. Both his hands lay open to his sides, fingers curled loosely. His lips were drained of color, his cheeks hollow, and smears of blushing blue sank beneath his eyes. He was not beautiful. Streaks of ash smeared the left side of his face. His hair was lank.
But the ropes of white and sea-green pearls around his neck glinted cleanly in the light of the single oil lamp in the cell with him. Beside it was a tangle of blankets, a bowl less pristine than the one in Nothing’s room, and an empty plate.
Nothing crept nearer, as silent as possible, that she might stare for longer.
Her prince breathed shallowly but evenly. Sleeping.
Relief stole her breath, and a crescendo of love grew so loud in her bones she ached with it.
She wanted to brush his hair, kiss him awake, strip the filthy clothing from him and take him to that cold mirror lake to scrub every speck of dirt and ash and tears off his skin. Feed him, hold him, make him warm again.
The string of pain that had led her here thinned and vanished. She felt herself again. Right.
Nothing gasped as she realized it was all true: she was not quite human, and Kirin had bound her to him years ago.
His eyes snapped open, clear and brown as crystalized honey.
She crouched before the stone bars.
“Nothing,” he whispered. “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” she said dully.
With a wince and a groan, Kirin pushed off the wall, struggling to his knees. He crawled to her and leaned his shoulder against the bars. “Nothing,” he said again. And he reached for her.
She gave him her hand. She couldn’t help it.
His fingers were dry, the nails cracked, and she threaded hers with his, pressing until their palms were flat together.
“I knew you would come,” he said.
“I’m sure you did.”
Kirin frowned at her tone but held her gaze. “Is Sky here? Is he well?”
Nothing lowered their hands. “He was injured when he challenged the Selegan River dragon, but he is here, and alive. She says he’s healing.”
“The sorceress.”
“Yes.”
“Can you get me out of here?” Kirin tugged at her hand.
She shuffled closer to the bars. “Maybe.”
“Maybe? Have you bargained with her? Or did you find your way here alone?”
Nothing remained quiet, studying him, sure it was him and hating how absolutely certain she was. It was all true.
“Kirin,” she whispered, yearning for him to tell her there’d been a mistake.
He nodded.
“I slit the throat of the imposter she sent.” Nothing paused at his hiss of surprise. “Then tonight I met another imposter, and I knew that wasn’t you either.”
He nodded again.
The pain was back, hot as a swallowed ember. “What am I?”
Kirin started to say, Nothing. She could see it in the shape of his mouth, in the pull of breath.
But he paused, and instead answered, “Mine.”