LINA WAS STILL AWAKE WHEN I CREPT BACK THROUGH THE window—I was really getting to be an expert at avoiding doors—my tunic clinging to my damp bra and panties. She’d turned a lamp on, one of Čiča Jovan’s whimsies, its base a bottle with a schooner trapped inside it and the shade in the shape of a mast and sails.
In its faint light, her cheek was striped with dried tears, and with her lips still trembling she looked like a lost and desperate little girl. I found that I just couldn’t be angry with her anymore, as if it had become physically impossible to summon that much spleen. Fjolar had bled it out of me with tenderness. Instead I felt a smooth, vast sense of peace, like a windless desert at twilight—anything unruly had burrowed deep underground, an expanse unruffled by living things.
Her eyes narrowed as I sat down on her side of the bed, her thick lashes nearly meshing. “I think you’re not mad at me anymore,” she said, each word blunt and careful, like a child picking out marbles.
“No,” I agreed. “I’m done with that, for now.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Why?”
“Does it matter why? We could just agree to be okay.”
“But you never just stop this way, Riss. Not without hashing things out, not without a fight. It’s not like you.”
The digging should have irritated me, but I couldn’t find any residual embers to fan, nothing that even threatened to grow into a flame. “I’m just feeling peaceful, is all. Can you let me have that, after everything we’ve been through for the past few days? It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you and Niko. I just don’t have it in me to care at this very moment.”
“That’s what I mean.” She scraped at her lower lip with her teeth. “I wanted to tell you that you were right, before. I shouldn’t have told her—especially not without asking you first. She’s my best friend. But you’re my sister. I should have been protecting you. I’m selfish like that sometimes, you’re right. Being sorry doesn’t always fix everything, and I know that I—that sometimes I use it like a patch.”
I stood and peeled the tunic and underwear off, shivering a little as the air hit my still-damp skin. “So, we’re good then.”
She was still frowning as I slipped back into bed, the heavier cotton of my borrowed nightgown wicking the last of the wet from my skin. “I just . . .” Her voice sharpened. “Did you go see that boy, Riss? Is that where you went?”
She wouldn’t like it, but I couldn’t be bothered with a lie. “Yes,” I said simply. “I smoked with him out on the beach. Then I made the water bloom for him, and then I kissed him on the pier stairs, and then I slept with him. See that? That’s honesty, right there. You could take notes.”
“But you only just met him!”
“So what? I wanted to. And we were safe.”
“Fine, okay, you always do what you want. Everybody knows that. But you made the water bloom, and he could see it? You don’t think that’s something to talk about?”
“Not at this moment, no.”
Her mouth went slack with incredulity. “He shows up out of nowhere right before Mama’s attacked, right before she goes missing, and you don’t even think twice about him? How do you know he doesn’t have something to do with this?”
“Why would he have anything to do with Mama? He’s just visiting from Iceland. His mother was from here. It’s the start of the season, there’s probably hundreds of tourists who showed up in the last few days.”
“Not ones who can’t get enough of you all of a sudden, who think about you like you’re made for dessert.”
I felt a distant bolt of fury, like a glimpse of lightning two mountain ranges over. “Because that’s such a crazy thing to consider, that a boy I met might want me?”
She dug both hands into her hair. “That’s not what I meant! I’m just saying—”
I reached over her to flick off the lamp, feeling her flinch as my wrung-out hair dripped salt water onto her face. “I want to go to bed. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
I WOKE BLEARILY, squinting against the glare of late-morning sunlight. My muscles felt dull and sluggish, a hungover ache more intense than I would have expected from the wine and single cigarette I’d had the night before. All the stress and exhaustion of the past few days finally crashing over me, most likely.
Lina was already up and about, for a wonder, wearing a peach maxi dress with a tiered skirt, patterned with tiny wild strawberries, ferns, and sleeping mice with curled forepaws. A corded bracelet of braided leather and silver thread had been wound around one wrist, and I could see the peep of her silver espadrilles beneath the dress’s hem. Čiča Jovan must have brought over some of our things yesterday, while we were still out.
She turned to me cautiously, hands stilling on the shirt she’d been folding to put in the dresser. Her hair was in a loose braid, its curling ends and ribbons trailing over her chest, and with it drawn back she looked even more like a watercolor version of our mother.
I could see the moment she felt my stab of pain; her face softened with sympathy. “There you are,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
I dug a knuckle into one crusty eye. “Pretty far from phenomenal, actually. Not sure what’s wrong with me. I never sleep this late.”
Malina had always been the one able to plunge into sleep like an Olympic diver, willing herself into oblivion whenever the world around her grew too intense. But this morning I still felt half asleep even with my eyes open, the waking world around me tilting swimmy and unreal.
I stretched my arms gingerly over my head, wincing. “And I feel like I spent last night in a mosh pit instead of . . .” Gleaming for Fjolar, I didn’t say. Just thinking of him revived a surge of lust, and I dug my nails into my palm, trying to quell it before Lina caught its sound. I didn’t want to disrupt this fragile peace between us.
It was futile as usual, and I could see Lina’s nostrils flare in response before she chose to let it go. “Well, if you’re feeling up to it, Niko said she’d meet us at the Prince. She’s bringing her mother’s book with her. Do you want to come with me? You don’t have to, I could go alone while you keep resting—”
“No, I want to come. If you don’t mind. If she’s found anything, I’d like to see it for myself.”
“Sure. I put up your clothes, too—I hope that’s okay? They’re all in these two drawers, next to mine.”
I dredged up a smile for her. “Thank you for that. You didn’t have to do that.”
She flicked one shoulder in a tentative shrug. “I was up anyway. I think Jovan’s made breakfast for us, if you want to eat together?”
“I do. Let me just take a quick shower first.”
I dragged myself to the bathroom, feeling like a prizefighter who’d lost a particularly vicious bout. Despite all the sleep, my eyes were heavy with plummy bags, and my temples felt tender. In the shower, I let near-scalding water pound over me until my skin turned red. By the time I’d wriggled into shorts with radioactive symbols stamped onto the pockets and a black tank with a mesh racerback, my head had cleared a little.
Outside, Čiča Jovan had laid out a breakfast banquet for us, as if we were actually starving orphans. He’d been cooking lavishly for himself for years, since his wife, Anita, had died so young, and even when I worked with him in the studio he was forever interrupting to spoon-feed me bites of whatever he had simmering. We ate with him at the wrought-iron table in his garden, between patches of neatly tended vegetables and wildflowers trailing tendrils everywhere. He watched us like an anxious mother hen, offering us feta cheese omelets, spooning extra sour-cherry preserves onto our plates. Lina had loaded her plate with a chocolate Eurokrem crepe, and was carefully dotting mayonnaise onto her toast, which she’d smeared with Carnex vegetable pâté.
“What?” she said through a mouthful, catching my look. “Why are you looking at me like I’m eating roadkill or something?”
“I think Carnex pâté might be worse than that. Roadkill is too close to organic.”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s delicious. Better than your crepe of the Spartans there, for sure.”
“I know not of what you speak. Cocoa and sugar is a classic.”
Čiča Jovan frowned at me over a steaming sip of black coffee. “You’re barely pecking at that, Iris. Have some of the omelet, my girl, you’re beginning to look like a whalebone corset. Or I can cut you some gibanica from yesterday if you want.”
My insides turned over at the thought of the cheese pie leaking grease. “No, thank you. I’ll eat more at the Prince, I promise.” I looked up at him, gauging his reaction. “Lina and I were thinking of spending the day there. It helps to be around Niko and Luka, and they’re both working today.”
It was painfully easy to lie to him, when he was so clearly unmoored when it came to us—how to keep us both safe and happy, now that we were in his care. “I would rather you stayed with me today, at least until we hear something from the police or the hospital. I know you want to be with your friends—”
“Jovan, please?” Malina broke in softly, reaching across the table for his knobby-knuckled hand. “We’ll be with Niko and Luka, and their father will be there too. It’s such a public place, who’d come after us there? It might even be safer for us there, maybe?”
His eyebrows drew together at the thought that he might not be able to protect us on his own. He’d always been a fiercely proud man, and even though I’d only ever known him old, I’d seen how it frustrated him that age had stolen so much of his skill and strength—his once-steady fingers trembling and a stoop hunching his tall frame. But he’d never let the prickling of his pride get in the way of keeping us safe.
“All right, then,” he said stoutly. “But I’ll walk you there, and take my battle cane. Let someone try to cross either of my girls’ paths with me standing in their way.”
THE PRINCE WAS a little busier than usual, for so early in the day, but it was Friday; the flood of tourists would be swelling over the summer weekends, regular as the tide. There was already a group of giggly Dutch girls in one of the nooks, nibbling on biscuits and coffee as they puffed on a peach-mint nargileh.
Otherwise it was just us, Luka tending the bar and serving while Niko knelt on the tasseled cushions with us, striking in a scarlet wrap dress and a choker of tambourine zils strung on black cord; it had the look of Koštana’s handiwork, and I wondered if she had made it for Niko, if Niko was wearing it in her mother’s memory.
Niko’s collection of her mother’s writings sat on the floor between us. I had been expecting something more mystical, somehow, maybe a leather-bound grimoire with tarnished clasps. But I’d forgotten that Niko had been barely thirteen when she made it, out of a simple black binder that she’d plastered with a collage of Koštana’s photos. Koštana was smiling in all of them, so widely you could see her one gold molar glinting—Luka had once told me how much it mortified him that she adamantly refused to swap it out for a regular white cap—and her children’s faces pressed next to hers like a gradient of color. Luka’s tan skin, Niko’s olive, and their mother’s even deeper brown. Her right ear was cuffed with piercings, from the shell down to the lobe, just like Niko’s was.
There were even gummy bits of glue where a younger Niko had bejeweled the binder with little plastic gems that had dried and fallen off, though a few clung to the edges. At the very top, she’d written in sparkly, looping cursive, “My Mother Koštana’s Book of Everything.” And beneath it, the saying, “Jedna je majka.”
There is only one mother.
It broke my heart to look at it, to know what she must have been feeling, both now and when Koštana died. Niko’s face was painstakingly placid as she flipped it open, but Lina’s eyes swam with held-back tears.
“Thank you for showing this to us,” she said. “Really. I know how precious this is to you.”
Niko leaned her temple against Lina’s shoulder. “It doesn’t do anyone any good moldering in the dark, does it? She would have wanted it to be useful. Especially to you two.”
“Even still,” I said. “Thank you. Lina said you’d already looked through it, that you found something?”
“I was right—it was in one of her songs.” Niko flicked deftly through the pages with her slim fingers. “That name you mentioned, of the woman in your dream. Marzanna. The song is Romany, but I translated it for you this morning, set it to rhyme as best I could. She only sang it for me once; I remember because I was asking her about magic, the little things she sometimes did for the changing of the seasons. I asked her why, what it was for. And she sang me this.”
She ran her finger down each line. “It’s called ‘Kill Her in Winter, So She Can Birth Spring.’”
My stomach felt like a nest of baby snakes had hatched in it all at once. I clutched a fist against it, and looked over to Lina, whose face had gone bloodless.
Niko began:
Her bones are of nightmares, her face cut from dreams,
Her eyes are twinned ice chips, cold glimmering things,
Her hair is the scent that will drive you to death,
Her lips are the kiss that will steal your last breath.
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
Strip her arms bare of glitter or silver,
Choke her and flay her, force her to deliver,
Drown her in lakebeds, or quick-running streams,
Dunk her in pond scum to smother her screams,
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
To chase out the winter, build her to burn her,
Make her a body, the better to spurn her,
Build her of twigs, and of scraps, and of sticks,
Then build up the fire, and sing loud as it licks,
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
Niko stopped, laying her hand flat on the page as if she could blot out the words. Lina’s eyes were so wide I could see the whites all around them, and I wondered if I looked like that too, like a cornered animal.
It sounded exactly like her, like the woman in the clearing. And like Sorai, too.
“Is that it?” I whispered. “Is there anything else?”
“Mama told me a story to go with it,” Niko said. “Because it scared me so much, and also made me sorry for Marzanna. It’s a mishmash of things, a patchwork tale. A lot of these legends crossed the country borders, carried by the Romany. Mama said she was a Polish witch-goddess who ruled over winter, nightmares, and love. They say even Death was so fascinated by her that she never died.”
“So, Mara and Death, biffles, understood,” I said. “But what about all those other names?”
Malina looked up from her phone. “They’re all the same person. Deity, whatever. I just checked. They’re what they call her in different places. Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak. Everyone has a name for her, all the Slavs and Baltic people.”
“But Mara,” I said softly. “Mara is her first name. Is there anything else, Lina?”
“It says that in Poland, they kill her every spring equinox. First they make an effigy of rags and clothing, and they decorate her with ribbons and baubles before they burn her. And then whatever’s left, they dunk into every body of water along the way of the parade, drowning her in every lake, pond, and puddle. They sing witch-burning songs the entire time. The one Niko has must be a Romany version of those. Oh, and . . . wow.”
“What?”
Lina chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. “It even mentions Our Lady of the Rocks. Apparently there’s a side story—sort of like an urban legend, I guess, but religious—that the Mortesić brothers who found that icon actually found something much older there, an ancient figurine of Marzanna. And that they intended to dedicate the island to her name, but were too afraid of being labeled heretic pagans. So they pretended they’d found the Virgin Mary icon instead.”
“But why?” I whispered, tugging at the ribbons in my own hair. “Why is she so terrible that she needs to be both burned and drowned?”
“That was the part Mama told me,” Niko said. “To make her sound less like she might eat me in the night. I wrote it down along with the song. The story goes that she was a human woman long ago, back when migrants crossed all the way from India, before they settled here and split into the Indo-European tribes who became us. And even though she’s been deathless since she befriended Death, she isn’t evil.”
“Yeah,” Lina added. “That’s what this says, too. That there has to be a sacrifice to keep things orderly. For winter to end, Mara has to die and birth Jarilo, god of spring—though really, he’s just another form of her, because she never truly dies.” She shuddered. “I don’t know. It still sounds awful to me. Maybe you just have a higher tolerance for the hideous. You did make me watch Paranormal Activity three times.”
“Only twice, the third time was the sequel. The good one.”
Lina rolled her eyes. “It’s always the fine print with you.”
I thought of the woman in the frozen, snowy clearing, her intensity and wildness, the bloody powders pounded from murdered things smeared all over her face. The fractaled sigils and dried flowers around her, the sharpened stones for cutting, and that glittering pile gathered up in front of her. Whoever that woman was—whatever she was, witch or god or both—the things she had done had been intentional. There was no mistaking the willfulness that blazed in her. Whatever she had done, maybe she’d earned herself this endless burning and drowning.
“But what does this have to do with us, or Mama?” Lina was saying. “Why are we dreaming about her?”
“And why do we have ribbons in our hair?” I mused. “That seems related, if it’s important enough that even a story about her would mention them.”
We all fell silent, frowning at our hands, until the tinkle of the bell above the door and Nev’s brassy voice broke our quiet.
“Riss! Lina!” She rushed at us in her gangly way, dropping a massive plastic bag beside her as she knelt and flung her arms around me. “Oh, dollface, I’m so fucking glad to see you. And you, Lina, my condolences, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry about Jasmina. I still—I just still can’t believe it’s true. I can’t imagine how this is for you.”
She smelled so wonderfully familiar, the vanilla extract that reminded me of all the hours I’d spent working beside her in the café as she baked with Mama. I fought back tears even as I pulled away from the hug like a kitten squirming out of fond arms; it was too much to feel her sympathy. It made the strangeness of the truth feel worse somehow, a confinement Lina and I could share only with Luka and Niko.
She let me go, with a wordless look of understanding at my discomfort. “I baked some baklava for you,” she said tearfully. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought Luka or Niko could bring it over for you, but this is much better.” She cupped my cheek for just a moment before pulling back, and I thought for the thousandth time how nice it would have been to have her as an older sister.
She dove headlong into the bag and lifted out pan after pan of the sticky, glossy dessert, liberally sprinkled with nuts, enough for a battalion. Even Niko began looking a little fazed as stacked pans teetered on top of each other on the table between us.
“Go on, have a little,” Nev said, flapping a hand in the general direction of the baklava. Her ivory sailor dress was smudged with syrup on the bodice; I wondered how long she had been toiling away at this, if this was the shape of her grief. “I made it with hazelnuts instead of walnuts, I know you both like those better.”
At her urging, we all dug into the pan with our fingers, cupping our palms beneath the sweet, flaky squares to catch falling crumbs. I’d always loved baklava, the crisp layers of phyllo as they melted in your mouth, the almost cloying sweetness of the honey, syrup, and chopped nuts cut by the acid nip of lemon. We’d made variations of it at the café so often that it tasted exactly like home to me. It made me hungry in a way I hadn’t really been in days.
“When is . . .” Nev cleared her throat. “When is the funeral? I hadn’t heard anything, and I didn’t want to be a bother by asking, but I was so afraid I’d miss it.”
“We don’t know yet,” I said when Malina hesitated, shooting me a beseeching look. “Because it’s a—because it’s a murder, the police protocol is stricter. They might need to keep her for longer before they give her back to us.”
Nev looked so stricken I wanted to slap myself for the lie, but there was nothing better to tell her. “I’m so sorry to hear that. What utter bullshit. I mean, I’m sure it’s necessary and all that, but it probably doesn’t help that they’re morons and probably running all amok what with everything else that happened yesterday.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shit, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear that, either, what is the matter with me.”
The nape of my neck began to prickle. “What do you mean? Nev, what’s happened?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, really, I shouldn’t have even brought it up, it’s just that Tata hasn’t been able to shut up about it and—”
Nev’s father, Uroš Stefanović, the councilman. My pulse sped up, and I grabbed her arm, squeezing so hard her eyes widened. “Nev, what happened?”
“It looks like someone’s stealing relics from our churches, and it’s—Iris, that fucking hurts, let go!” She rubbed her arm, eyes wide. “First it was Our Lady of the Rocks, but that was just a votive gift. Then it was the monastery of Ostrog, and Tata’s being very tight-lipped, but it sounds like someone’s tampered with Saint Basil’s remains. Everyone’s clutching their prayer beads over it, pun totally intended.”
“Do they know who it was?” Malina broke in.
“No, but apparently it was a woman. Which is driving everyone nuts, all hail the misogyny, as if women can’t be good at stealing and sacrilege—”
“But we have to go,” I interrupted. “We have to go to Ostrog.”
Nev stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Why in the shit would you need to go there? And you can’t anyway, the monastery is on lockdown to visitors. They’re not letting anyone in.”
“Can you ask your father? Please? It’s—” I geared up for another heinous lie. “We promised Mama we would go, when we found her. It was the last thing she said to us before she passed. Malina, tell her.”
“Right,” Malina said, warming to the story. “She could barely talk, you know? But she managed that. It’s something she always wanted, and you know she wasn’t even very religious, Nev. But it was like—like her deathbed wish that we go there in her place. And since we don’t even know when we can bury her properly . . . please, could you just ask for us?”
Nev looked narrowly between the two of us, as if she sniffed something off, but the desperation must have been scrawled over our faces. “Jesus, what a thing. All right, then. I’ll see what I can do for you.”