But Eva didn’t have time to answer. Because from the wall on the right came the sounds of a chair scraping back. The next second, she saw a plume of smoke. Someone stepped into the shadows of a statue. Instantly, the pillars lurched to life, the broken faces of nine statues swiveling toward them.
An old, smoke-rasped voice declared:
“You shall not take another.”
20
LAILA
When Laila was a child, her mother made her a doll.
It was the first—and last—toy she ever owned.
The doll was made from the husks of banana leaves, stitched together with the ends of the gold thread that had once fringed her mother’s weddingsari. It had burnt eyes of charcoal, and long black hair fashioned from the mane of her father’s favorite water buffalo.
Every night, Laila’s mother rubbed sweet almond oil into the scar on her back, and every night Laila held still, terror gripping her heart. She feared that if her mother pressed too hard, she would split down the middle. And so she held her doll tight, but not too tight. After all, the doll was like her: a fragile thing.
“Do you know what you and this doll have in common, my love?” her mother had asked. “Both of you were made to be loved.”
To Laila, the doll was a promise.
If she could love its stitched-together form, then she too could be loved.
When her mother died, she took the doll everywhere. She took it to dance practice, so it could learn the same movements she did and remember her mother with each sharp stamp of her heel and flick of her wrist. She took it to the kitchens, so it could learn the harmony of spice and salt, and the relief that this place was a sanctum. Every night, when Laila held the doll close, she felt her own emotion and her own memory replaying behind her eyes like a dream that would not end, and though she had grief, she did not have nightmares.
One morning, she awoke to find it gone. She rushed into the hall… but it was too late. Her father stood by the hearth, watching as scarlet flames fed upon the doll, charring out its eyes, gulping down the single braid of its hair that Laila had so carefully arranged to match her own. The room smelled of singed parts. All the while, her father did not look at her.
“It would’ve fallen apart sooner or later,” he said, crossing his arms. “No use keeping it around. Besides, you’re far too old for such childish things.”
Afterwards, he left her to kneel before the flames. Laila watched until the doll was nothing more than soft ash and the muted glimmer of golden thread. Her mother was wrong. They were not made to be loved, but to be broken.
After the fire, Laila stopped playing with dolls. But despite her father’s efforts, she had not stopped carrying around her own death. Even now, all she had to do was look down at her hand and the bright garnet ring waited to taunt her.
Laila stood in the icy makeshift morgue, the only living girl in the room. For today, she wore a funereal-black dress. On a smalltable beside her lay pen and parchment, and the diamond necklace Séverin forced her to wear. It hadn’t felt right to lean over these girls with such extravagance on her skin, even if it was only a fancy means of summoning her.
Spread out on nine ice slabs were the dead girls taken down from the walls of the ice grotto. In the dim light of the Forged lanterns, the girls looked as if they were made of porcelain. As if they were simply playthings that had been loved too hard, and that was why their pearl-pale legs were mottled, why the thin shifts they wore clung to them in tatters, why the crowns placed on their heads had been knocked askew and tangled into the frigid clumps of their hair. At least, it seemed that way until one looked at their hands. Or, rather, the lack of them.
Laila fought back a wave of nausea.
It had taken all the attendants of House Dazbog, House Kore, and House Nyx combined to remove them from the walls. Forging artists brought in from Irkutsk had created a morgue, and House Kore’s artist gardeners had crafted ice blossoms that gave off heat without melting. A physician, a priest, and a member of the Irkutsk police force had been summoned to administer final rites and identify the bodies, but they would not be here for a couple of hours, which left Laila some time alone with them. The others thought she was there to document what she saw, but the real reason lay in her veins. Her blood let her do what no one else could for these girls—know them.
“My name is not Laila,” whispered Laila to the dead girls. “I gave that name to myself when I left home. I have not said my true name in years, but since I don’t know if we’ll ever discover who you were… I hope you find peace in this secret.”
One by one, she walked among them and told them her real name… the name her mother had given her.
When she finished, she turned to the girl closest to her. Like the others, her hands been removed. There was a crown around her head, and in some places frosted petals still clung to the wire. Laila withdrew a piece of cloth from a basket at her feet. For what she had to do, she could not bear to look at the girl. What was left of the girl’s face reminded her too much of a young Zofia… the suggestion of a pointed chin and a delicate nose, the slightest lift of her cheekbones and the fey-like sharpness of her ears. This was a girl who was too young to be beautiful, but might have become so had she lived long enough.
Laila covered the girl’s face, her eyes stinging with tears.
And then, she read her.
Laila started with the crown of wire, the cold metal burning her hand. Her abilities had always been temperamental. The memories—sights, sounds, emotional impressions—of an object lingered close to its surface for a month before vanishing. After that, what remained was residue, an impression of the object’s defining moment or emotion. Usually, they were textures to Laila—the spiked-rind of panic; the silk-melt of love; the thorns of envy; the cold solidity of grief. But sometimes… sometimes when it was strong, it was like livingthroughthe memory, and her whole body would feel strung out from the weight of it. That’s how it had felt with Enrique’s rosary, like witnessing a scene.
Hesitantly, Laila closed her eyes and touched the crown. In her head flowed a piercing tune. Haunting and vast, like what a sailor might grasp of a siren’s song seconds before drowning. Laila drew back her hand, her eyes opening. The wire had been taken from an instrument, like a cello or harp.
Next, her fingers coasted over the cloth covering the girl’s mauled face and the strange symbols cut into it. Laila’s soul recoiled at the thought… whoever had done this to them hadn’t even seen them as people, but something to be writ upon like so much parchment.
She didn’t want to look, but she had to.
