WE BOUNDED THROUGH THE DARKENED FOREST, BETWEEN tree trunks and past fallen, moss-furred pines. Moonlight poured between the trees, bright as headlight beams. On the lower levels, where the sun couldn’t reach during the day, the branches grew bare of needles, instead curved and sharp like thorns. Forest mulch, a mix of fern, pine needles, and bursting mushrooms, squelched beneath our bare, pounding feet.
Far ahead of us Dunja flashed between the pines with white hair whipping behind her, following no route that I could see, fleet-footed and agile as a deer. My own breath had already grown ragged and Malina kept tripping beside me over the hem of her ridiculous metal-feathered dress. Dunja had paused in our headlong tumble only for long enough to unweave the ribbons from our hair, her fingers flying inhumanly fast before she plucked them all out and dropped them on the floor, grinding them viciously underfoot. After that, it had been running and running, until my knees felt like aspic.
“Could you possibly move an iota faster, pretties?” Dunja tossed over her shoulder. “She’ll cut herself free soon with those sharp old claws, and once she does, she’ll rouse the others.”
“Would you like to carry us on your back, auntie?” I called back between pants. “Because we don’t get any faster than this.”
We finally burst into a little clearing, choked with mud and massive, weathered logs. A battered white van was parked there, backed against the logs. Dunja unlocked the doors and we piled into the crowded insides, scrambling over stuffed animals and threadbare pillows. There was a collection of pots and pans in the farthest back, along with a carton of provisions, dried meats and fruits, juice boxes, and canned vegetables. It smelled like baby powder, chili pepper, and soap.
“Where did this come from?” Malina asked her. “This looks like someone’s home.”
“I bought it from some American tourists after I left Perast,” Dunja replied. “A traveling family, I think. With children.”
“And they just gave it to you? Along with all their things?”
“I may have stolen it a bit,” she admitted vaguely. “But I left money in its place, I think. Learning to drive it properly was the larger problem, though everyone emerged from that relatively unscathed.”
Malina and I exchanged uneasy glances as to what that meant as I tucked a matted-haired Barbie into the seat pocket to make more room for us.
“We’ll be staying in the woods for a while,” she continued as she fired up the ignition. “Now that your ribbons are gone, Mara won’t be able to track you through them any longer. But Žabljak is too small for us to hide there properly until all this is over, however it all ends. The coven is known there, the chalet a ‘retreat’ for rich eccentrics. Someone might tattle on us for the right price.”
“How exactly will ‘all this’ be over?” I asked her. “How did it even begin?”
“With one of you fair ladies falling in love, I believe,” she replied as she shifted the van into gear. The engine sputtered alarmingly, but turned over. “That was when you first drew his notice. Like I said, Jasmina and I had sworn an oath to each other: the one chosen would love Death so fiercely he wouldn’t want another, and the other would run and hide from the coven, live freely and never have children. So I told him I’d be the last, and he believed me—you two were the first to ever grow up outside of coven, disconnected from Mara. He couldn’t feel you through his connection with her, didn’t even know that you existed. And he was so happy with me, content enough he even claimed he wanted me to be the last. Because after me no other would compare.”
I looked over at Lina, whose hand was at her mouth. “Mama told us never to fall in love,” she said faintly. “Is that why?”
“That’s why,” Dunja confirmed. I watched her in the rearview mirror, her lips twisting with sadness. “When he felt one of you fall, he just couldn’t help himself. He had to see you, to go look for himself. He’s like a spoiled child that way, drawn by each new thing. No matter how much he claims to love the one he has.”
A lightning shudder of chills flashed through me, a tingle of familiarity. A spoiled child, drawn by each new thing. I knew a bit about what that looked like. In fact, I knew exactly what it looked like. “So Death really is a person?”
The car lurched as she turned onto a rutted semblance of a road. Some little forest animal dashed across the path in front of us, its brushy tail disappearing last as it plunged into a thicket of fern and wild strawberry.
Dunja tilted her head back and forth sinuously, considering. Even that simple gesture was hypnotic to watch. “He certainly seemed so to me, though I don’t believe that’s entirely true. Mara’s spell forces a communion, a bond between the embodied essence of an immaterial force and the soul of a material creature. He only agreed to it because she beseeched the old gods to lend him flesh and then made him love her enough to be willing to grant immortality, in return for such prizes as her daughters are. It’s all beyond true comprehension. But it felt like . . .”
She gave a wisp of a sigh, and the softness of it was unmistakably wistful. “It was like the most vivid fever dream, yet the truest dream I ever had. Truer than the small, faint flicker of a life I lived before it. It’s almost hard to hate her, for all she stole from me—from all of us—when being with him was the singular glory that it was. It might be a terrible wrong, a craven evil to breed daughters for such a selfish purpose. But I won’t lie and say it wasn’t the happiest I’ve ever been.”
She missed him, badly. There was a terrible longing beneath the bright surface, like the hottest heart inside a star.
“What did he look like?” I asked her, my heart still pounding.
“He appeared to me like a boy I’d once admired—a form that was particularly pleasing to me. I couldn’t tell you if that’s how it always works, but I suspect it might be. We’re as much a part of the pairing as he is; his flesh echoes whatever we desire, whatever is best to incite and seal in the love.”
My stomach churned with bile. Fjolar had always seemed so familiar to me, almost remembered, and now that original, underlying memory struck like a spearhead. I’d watched a boy once, many years ago, walking along the Riva. A Scandinavian tourist, the most handsome boy I’d ever seen, jostling along with friends who’d never be brighter than they were in his shadow. He’d looked at me and smiled admiringly, the smile spreading wide across his broad and bony face, lighting his gas-flame eyes.
He’d seen me, liked me, enough that I never forgot. And everything else Fjolar had been—the eyeliner, the bracelets, those jagged, lovely tattoos; even the story about a younger brother, a cruel mother, the similarities in our names—had all been designed to appeal to me.
Malina may have been the one who fell in love, but I’d been the one he’d sought out, and wanted for himself. Did that mean I could have saved Lina, no matter what? Did it mean I might even have enjoyed it? And at bottom, what did that make me, that I’d been so ready to dive into him at the expense of anything else?
“How did you leave at all?” Malina asked Dunja. “It doesn’t sound like that’s a choice the ‘offering’ would have.”
“Once he was gone, his kingdom couldn’t hold me any longer,” she said simply. “It’s like a trapped bubble, a pocket between our world and the next, dependent on its occupants. A space he and Mara made together—a bit like you blowing your glass, Iris, forming new space with your breath and solidifying it—as a haven for him and each companion. Without him in it, it means nothing, and so I woke—to find him, and to bring him back.”
“And how do you plan to do it?”
“By stealing Mara’s spell from her and shifting it to me. Though the spell flows through her, it needs the pinions of her other daughters, the ones who also become undying after they offer up their own. Like an electrical grid. I want to close the loop with just him and me inside it. No more succession; no more immortality. Just he and I forever in his kingdom—and freedom for the two of you.”
WE DROVE DEEP inside the forest before we stopped, tucked high up in the mountains for Dunja’s comfort. I was swimming with fatigue by then, and beside me Lina was swaying on her feet. Though Dunja seemed impermeable to the night chill, both of us were nearly chattering with cold. We’d traded in our flimsy outfits for some plain T-shirts and shorts we’d found in the back, and sneakers too big for both of us, but it still wasn’t enough to shield from a mountain night.
“You’re cold,” she said, almost a question. “And near dead on your feet. Of course. I remember about that. There’s sleeping bags in the back, why don’t we put those out for you?”
“What about you?” I asked as we unrolled them, the puffy blue material ballooning. “Do you get tired? Do you even sleep?”
“I haven’t tired since I returned, so I’m not sure—perhaps it will come, in time? Everything looks different than I remember, and I can feel—I can smell and hear and taste too much. The air itself has cloying flavor when I breathe, at times so I can barely stand it on my tongue. You’ve seen the things I can do, the way I’m strong. Whatever I am now, it’s far from human anymore.”
She made a faint sound, barely above a whisper, but I felt the pain of it like a knitting needle down to the soul. “It’s as though I spent so much of myself on him, that what’s left is this body forged of strength, run by the barest paucity of spirit. And when I try to sleep, all I see is him. It’s less torment to keep my eyes open, though I’ll lie down with you.”
We set up the sleeping bags into a Y, our heads together at the center. Above us the pine branches crossed each other, carving up the night sky into a puzzle of star-pricked pieces with wind whistling through them.
“Strange,” Dunja mused, staring at the sky, “that they should call fighting death ‘raging against the dying of the light.’ As if so much of light itself weren’t already dead, shed by corpse stars long since passed. And as if he himself weren’t so bright. Incandescent.”
“I’m sorry you lost him,” Lina said, her voice faint. “It was me, you know. I’m the one who fell in love. If it hadn’t happened, would everything have gone the way you and Mama wanted?”
“No, sweetness. Perhaps it could have, if Jasmina had managed not to have you at all, but as it was, as soon as Mara found her again and discovered the two of you, there was no question what would happen. You merely sped things up a bit. Otherwise, once I burned out—and I would have in another year or two, he couldn’t spare me from that; I would have stopped being able to dance for him, disappeared from his world just in time to die back in my own body in the cave—Mara would simply have claimed you one way or the other.”
“Why didn’t she just take us to begin with?” I wondered. “She knew where we were for years. Why did she let Mama keep us at all?”
“I imagine it’s because the sacrifice must have a willing component in order to function—the mother’s sacrifice of one of her daughters is the fuel for the spell itself. Mara would have hoped that Jasmina would come around once she tired of the constant battle it was to have you and to hide you; that would have been easiest for her. And if Jasmina refused to the bitter end, well, Mara would simply have woven a different web of lies to entice you to sacrifice, for each other and for your mother. That’s why she let you come to her. So that every step you took was a testament to your free will.”
Like a snake charmer, singing the song that wound our inevitable way to her.
“How do you think she found Mama in the first place?” Malina asked.
She flicked one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “I’m not sure. Jasmina would have known to shed her ribbons and not take her scent with her.”
So that was why she’d had Koštana craft her the Scent of Home as a substitute, I realized in a flash. To evoke the feel and scent of coven when she missed it most, to indulge as safely as she could.
“But perhaps she still had some dab of it on her somewhere,” Dunja continued, “we all wore it every day. And she had to run quick, while they were distracted with offering me, so she might not have been as thorough as she needed about washing it off. Even the slightest bit of Mara’s blood still on her skin might have been beacon enough.”
“What awful bullshit this all is,” I said, clenching my fists against my thighs. “Mara said the sacrifice was mutual, agreed on between the mother and daughters. We were only going to compete against each other because we couldn’t agree.”
Dunja snorted. “Hardly. She knew you couldn’t possibly agree, the way she set it up for you. There’s always a contest between daughters—it’s part of the appeal the bargain holds for him, the thing that strikes his fancy. Two beauties vying so mightily for his hand. Then once he chooses between them, Mara sparks that daughter’s love to seal the bond.”
“He sounds kind of like a raging bastard,” Malina noted. “No offense to you.”
“Oh, he is, no mistake,” Dunja agreed mildly. “But also devastating, charming as the summer day is long.”
We went silent for a moment, listening to the life stirring in the ferns and foliage around us. Something snuffled curiously before rushing off with a high-pitched call. I wasn’t afraid; there was nothing here we couldn’t fend off, between the three of us.
“I’m sorry if I’ve got this wrong,” I began. “But you seem to miss him, and it sounds like you were happiest when you were serving. And then Mama would have lived forever, if she’d stayed in coven and given up one of us. So why is it all so terrible? The chalet is gorgeous, and Shimora said there were others all over the world. It seems like it could be a lovely life.”
“Because there’s no choice about it,” Dunja said, flat. “No consent in anything. We’re taught how to walk, to talk, to move, to think. Only to be beautiful, and amusing. Mara doesn’t strip us of love for each other, of course; I’m not sure even she could go so far. So there is that. But so much forced molding empties out the gleam, makes it hollow. Like anything else, magic takes freedom to thrive. That’s why you two are so different, I think. Because you grew up free.”
“What do you mean?”
She shifted in her sleeping bag, rustling, stretching out her arms until her hands tangled in my hair. She ran it idly through her fingers, stroking each long strand just like Mama had done when I was little. Maybe the two of them had done that for each other. I wondered if she was still in that room, trapped by roses, on the precipice of death. Or if Mara had already let her die now that the charade was over. It strained my heart to think that nothing we could do would save her, but at least if we managed to break free, we would be doing the one thing she had fought so hard and miserably to do herself. We’d be forging a new kind of legacy for her.
“Mara’s line were all true witches once,” Dunja said. “The first nine tiers still are, with a weakening in every generation. The gleam is meant to be a vehicle for the bearer’s will, in whatever form it takes. Instead, all our training turns it into no more than a parlor trick, empty flash and glitter with no true strength behind it. Women like us were leaders, once, healers and warriors and priestesses. Before Mara turned us into living dolls.”
The wind picked up her hair, and it drifted above us like moonlit spider silk. “That’s why the two of you are still so strong, reared to all that freedom. And you, Iris, have something none of the rest of us have had: the infinite bloom, the ultimate culmination of the gleam. Though the first nine can all impose their will upon this world through the gleam, only the infinite bloom lets you grasp hold of space and time, fling your will so far and wide that you can even call upon the gods. Only she has ever been able to do that.”
I remembered Ylessia’s churning jealousy, the envy in Shimora’s voice when she talked about elders with more strength. “It gets worse as the years go on, doesn’t it?”
“It does. When we’re little, we don’t know any better, and the ribbons make us pliant, eager to please her. But once we’re older, after we’ve lost both a sister and a daughter, and she no longer needs to hold us back from the outside world—it becomes impossible not to see all that we gave up and all that we’re missing. All the things that we could be, out there. Especially now, in this new age with wonders so accessible, it’s becoming harder for her. I think that was what happened with your mother and myself—by the time we were born, the coven had reached some critical mass.”
“What do you mean? What changed?”
“There were simply too many of us, maybe, for her to maintain a proper hold. Salia, who taught me to dance when it came clear that movement showcased my gleam best, let me watch videos of the Bolshoi Ballet. And I thought—I could be that, go out there, dance for anyone I wanted. Or even just for myself.”
I remembered the alias she’d chosen for herself, for her brief stay in the Hotel Cattaro. Nina Ananiashvili. The woman my aunt had wanted to be when she grew up.
“Salia encouraged me a little when I shared the thoughts with her, very quietly, even started taking my ribbons out bit by tiny bit.”
“Until you and Mama swore that it would end with you,” Malina said.
“Oh, Jasmina hated it even more than I did. She railed to me against it all, the naming and the scenting, that nothing could be chosen by or belong to us alone. She was the one who named us in secret when we were still little, so that we would have something of our own. Jasmina and Dunja—dunja, for sweet-smelling quince. A sister flower, and a sister fruit.”
“But then she fucked it up a bit,” I added.
Dunja hummed a chastising little note. “She was so racked with guilt over everything, when she came to see me. She barely remembered how it even came about; a year after she’d made her escape, she simply met your father and wanted him, with disregard for consequence or any promise she had made. Like a fugue state of the will. And once she was pregnant, she couldn’t bear not to have you—it matters little if that was a result of the spell or her own loneliness, the ache for coven. It was all such slow torture for her, from then on. Tamping down your gleam so Mara would never hear of you or find you. Forbidding you from loving so that Death would never look your way. Rendering you unlovable so you wouldn’t even be tempted.”
“How fucking terrible,” I whispered, thinking of the many years of battling her, how it must have ground up her insides even as it ground mine. The pain twisted like something alive trapped inside me. The ache might have been less, if I couldn’t still see the look in Mama’s eyes that last night when I’d slept in her bed. “Why didn’t she just tell us all of it? We could have listened, hidden together. She didn’t have to fight completely alone.”
“She was afraid you might prefer the coven life to life with her, no matter the cost of the sacrifice,” Dunja said softly. “Immortality is a powerful lure, not to mention wealth. And if she gave you that choice and you chose Mara over her, then she would have failed me twice.”
“Or she could have trusted us,” Lina said bitterly. “Given us a choice, like no one ever gave her.”
“She was trying to make it right,” Dunja chided. “When she came to me, she was the one who suggested a mortal’s spell—a friend of hers had been a magic worker, and taught her a little of a different way. She told me to begin gathering those artifacts; that was why I met her at the café the morning Mara descended on us, to see how we would carry on. Neither of us knew that she’d already come to stalk us by then.”
“So what do we do now? How do we cast it?”
“I wish I had the first notion, sweetness.” The admission took all the breath out of me. “I know nothing about this brand of magic, or why it should even work at all. We’ll have to find someone who does, as quickly as we can, with Mara on our heels. My thought was that this practitioner, Jasmina’s friend, could help.”
Malina and I sat bolt upright as one. “She’s dead,” I said, my heart pounding, part dread and part sheer, swelling joy. “But there is someone. We do know someone who could help. Could you get one of us to a phone, in town?”