MIRKO DROVE US BACK TO THE OLD TOWN, AND ČIČA JOVAN insisted we spend the night with him; neither of us could face going back to our empty house with the pall of Mama’s absence, her death or undeath or whatever it was, hanging over it. And there was the horrible possibility that whoever had hurt our mother might be lurking somewhere near, waiting for the chance to strike at us too. It seemed ridiculous that anyone would want to hurt us, here where we knew everyone, but nothing was certain anymore.
Still reeling, I’d told the detective about Dunja, and my missing bougainvillea sculpture—he’d asked for anything we could think of that might help in the investigation, which he meant to begin no matter what was happening to Mama—and then assured us that officers were posted around the house to keep watch.
None of us knew what to do with ourselves after that. My insides felt clammy and numb, as if I’d been floating in icy water from the inside out. Jovan made sure we were comfortable in his guest room, but after we were settled I could hear him pacing the living room beyond our cracked-open door, murmuring “God, Jasmina, God, kuku lele” to himself, followed by a quiet rasping so low and terrible I didn’t immediately recognize it as tears. I closed the door with a soft click, pressing my cheek against the warped surface.
Malina showered first, so she was already tucked up beneath the quilts in the guest-room bed by the time I padded out of the bathroom. I slid in next to her, folding myself around her curled body, and she tucked her feet against my calves. We lay together in silence for a long moment, listening to the rise and dip of each other’s breathing until we finally matched up.
“What do you think is happening, Riss?” she whispered. “It has to be something like the gleam. Not exactly like it—nothing we do has ever been anything as terrible as that—but the same sort of thing. Some kind of magic. I mean, what else could it be?”
We’d hardly ever called it that before. “Magic” sounded like something out of one of my books, vast and impossible to reconcile with our world, gods and demons and creatures made from daylight or darkness but decidedly inhuman. The gleam felt more like a talent, a skill we’d been born with, if crafting beauty could be a genetic trait like the color of our eyes.
But it was magic. Mama had called us witches since we were little, to make sure we understood the danger and the secrecy we practiced, and witches worked with magic—that was their material, the fabric of their loom. And I remembered the sheer intensity of my fractals when I’d been at the height of my gleam. That girl hadn’t just been beautiful; she had been so strong. And Malina still was, no matter how she tried to spare me by hiding the fullness of her gleam.
“It must be,” I agreed. “But being alive when she should be dead . . . that’s an infinity apart from eating the moon.”
“And you think that woman you saw fighting with Mama has something to do with it?”
“Mama said her name right before she . . . stopped. She said, ‘Dunja.’ And then, ‘don’t.’ And that woman was so strange when I talked to her. The way she spoke, the things she chose to say. Why would Mama have said her name if she hadn’t been the one to do it?”
Malina let out a quavering sigh. “It’s all so impossible, you know? My brain just doesn’t want it. And either way—I don’t think we’re getting her back, Riss, not from whatever or wherever she is now. I guess it’s really just you and me. Like you always said.”
“But if it is magic, maybe it isn’t permanent,” I argued. “Maybe there’s some way to undo it, if we can find Dunja.”
“Maybe.” I could hear the anguished doubt in her voice. We’d both seen Mama; I couldn’t really imagine a magic that would bring her back from that, either, even if one existed that wouldn’t let her go.
“I just keep thinking . . . ,” I started.
“What?”
“I keep thinking, if she’s well and truly gone, now I’ll never get to ask her why. Why she was so hard on us, or on me, at least. No, don’t deny it, I know she wasn’t all cherry preserves and sugar water for you, either. But you know it was always so much worse for me.”
“I do,” she said softly. “I know. I think it might be because you kept stepping between us? Even when she wanted to take it out on me, you wouldn’t let her.”
“But still, it was always different with you. It never felt like she was sharpening herself on you just for the hell of it, like you were her whetstone.” The memory of last night, the almost playful banter between them, drilled deeper inside me. “It’s almost easier to think she never loved me at all, but then I have these memories of her taking us to the beach at Prčanj when we were little. We had swimsuits that matched hers, white with strawberries on them, and she’d tow us around in our floaties and pretend to nip our cheeks like snacks. Do you remember that?”
She nodded, her hair tickling my nose. I buried my face in her curls, inhaling her complicated scent—the sweet and oddly biting perfume of the ribbons, above the white musk, cedar, and patchouli from the little tinctures she and Niko blended together.
“I used to think it was because having us kept her from things she wanted for herself. She could have been a famous chef anywhere she wanted, instead of raising us with no one but Čiča Jovan to help.” It was so hard to say this, even to her. “But then I wonder if that wasn’t it at all. If it was maybe just raising me that did it.”
She stiffened against me. “What do you mean?”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, enough iron that I was sure my voice wouldn’t break. “I know I’m not easy to love, sometimes. I hated her so much for taking the gleam away from me—I threw it in her face so many times—and I know I’m not very much without it.”
Not like you, I didn’t add. You who’d still be so sweet and perfect even if you couldn’t sing.
“So I wonder if maybe she loved me at first, but then . . . couldn’t anymore. Because I’m all harsh and sort of scabby, and I can be terribly mean. And I know how much she values—valued—beauty, and I’m not beautiful like you—”
“How dare you say that?” The outrage in her voice took me aback. “You think you made her stop loving you, like you weren’t good enough for her to love? I’m not going to lie—I’ve seen you taunt her even when you didn’t have to, and so maybe there was a circle you both fell into and then there was no way out. You haven’t called her ‘Mama’ in years and years; you did that on purpose just to bait her, you know she hated that. And the way you always talk about Japan . . .”
My shoulders tensed like a stitch drawn tight. “What do you mean?”
“Japanese flowers, Japanese food. Trying to learn to write kanji. Like you’re so desperate to get away from here—from me and Mama—that you’d latch onto anything and ride it as far away as it could take you.”
“That’s not fair.” Except, it was, at least in part. “Or true.” That, too. “Those things belong to us. And you’re the one who found the patterns for the kimono online, remember? You’re the one who bought fabric and snuck her sewing machine to Jovan’s studio to sew them for us.”
I could hear her swallow. “But I don’t call relatives we might have in Japan—if they even exist—real family, like you do. As if Mama and I are fake to you.”
“That’s not how I mean that,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. Or you. I just meant, maybe there I would be someone. Someone real, not just a poor-man’s version of the two of you.”
Lina brought her thumb to her mouth and chewed furiously at it. “Please, please never say that to me again. There’s no world in which I’m whatever it is you think I am. Prettier, easier to love, somehow better than you. I can’t stand knowing that you think that. That’s—that’s such bullshit, Riss.”
She spat the word out like it hurt, like she’d been holding tacks on her tongue. I knew how much she hated swearing, and somehow that one word in the whole un-Malina-like tirade comforted me more than anything else she’d said. I stayed silent but I tightened my arm around her waist. In turn, she curled her fingers around my wrist, her ragged cuticles scratchy against my skin. Then she snapped my hair band for me once, as if she knew I needed it. A warm breeze stole over both of us through the cracked-open window, bringing with it the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sea.
“Are you going to say something?” she whispered.
“It’s just, I can’t feel anything properly. Other than that one feeling. I haven’t even cried since we got here.”
“That’s not all you feel,” Lina murmured. “That’s just the top.” She shifted against me, reaching up to knot my fingers with hers. “Do you want me to sing it for you? It would be better with the violin, but I can do it if I use all three.”
I hesitated. Malina’s polyphonic songs could be overwhelming when she didn’t hold back, not just echoing emotions but stealing inside you through the cracks—and whatever lurked below my frozen surface, the trapped minnows and monsters underneath, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to meet it face-to-face.
But the mother who had nibbled on our cheeks—the mother who’d looked at me like Queen Jevrosima at her beloved son—she deserved my tears.
“Go ahead,” I said.
She sang softly, just loud enough for me to hear, the hum of the fundamental joined by one overtone and then the other. At first the song was peaceful, gentle dips and falls like seawater rippling under a night sky scattered with dim stars, but then I caught the refrain, and it was us—two girls adrift on a raft big enough for three, an endless sea lapping against the edges. We were together, but so alone, far from any welcoming shore. And the space between us, mother-shaped, ached with every note that formed its contours.
We’d had a mother, wrapped in barbed wire more often than not, but still alive and ours.
And now we didn’t. Whatever was happening to her, she was gone. We had only each other, and it wasn’t nearly enough.
I felt my tears before I even knew I was crying, sliding silent but scalding down my cheeks. I wept into Malina’s hair until my body quaked, my ribs aching with the sobs I swallowed. I’d thought nothing could be worse than when Mama’s eyes chilled, or when she flamed into sudden rage like a phoenix, but I’d been wrong. This was worse, so much worse—especially when I remembered imagining her dead a thousand times over, after she slapped me, ignored me, or gutted me with a single word.
And worse yet when I acknowledged the faintest tinge of relief beneath it all.
“I saw it happen, Lina,” I whispered through the tears. “I saw it—I saw her dying. I can’t . . . it keeps playing in my head, on loop. I can’t think about anything else.” I could hear her shuddering breath jostle between the notes of the melody. “And sometimes . . . sometimes I wanted her to die. Do you think . . . ?”
“No,” she said firmly, breaking off the song. “Of course you thought about it, sometimes. So did I. So do kids whose mothers don’t ignore them for two weeks because they accidentally put salt instead of sugar in the meringue. It doesn’t mean we wished her dead, you know?”
WE BOTH GREW quiet after that. I turned away from Malina, my spine notching into hers like clockwork gears. Drained of everything, I fell asleep in a lurching, heavy drop, as if I’d been heaved into water with stones tied to my feet.
And then the bed was gone and I was cold, colder than I’d ever been inside a dream. The night sky above me was both black and bright, feathered with a vast, milky tapestry of stars and a sickle moon. I stood on a sweeping mountain plateau, circled by peaks looming darker than the night above. Frosted pines surrounded the clearing, and at its very center, a naked woman knelt with her face turned up to the sky.
I followed the spill of moonlight on her dark hair, so long it swept over her shoulders and covered her breasts, its ends brushing the thick, curved muscle of her thighs. I could see the wisps of breath pluming from her flared nostrils; she was so much warmer than the air that the snow had melted beneath her folded legs, all the way down to the brittle, dead grass and earth beneath. Even from where I stood, I thought I could smell her, something sweet and stirring that pierced me to my core.
It was too dark and she was too far for me to make out the features of her face, but I could see the liquid glitter of her eyes. And when she met mine, there was nothing else. Only her and me, two fixed points in a universe that wheeled furiously around us.
I loved this woman, I realized. I adored her. I wanted her to hold me, to own me, to chain me to her side with a collar made of silver links. Because nothing more was needed—I would never run from her.
There were things scattered in a circle around her, too, wickedly sharpened stones, little sigils shaped from sprinkled powders, and flowers so perfectly dried they looked like sketches against the snow. They burst into fractals when I looked at them, multiplying into a spiraling infinity around her. Together with the powder sigils, they made a complex design that shifted and blurred every time I looked at it head on—a geometric ring around her like the rapid spread of ice crystals under a microscope.
The powder was made of ground and colored bone, I knew somehow, from the skeletons of things she had killed with her own hands. Little things, rodents and hatchlings and baby snakes; bigger things, foxes and wolves and sinuous ermines; and biggest things, that she’d had to strike with spears and slash with knives, peeling back glistening hanks of muscle to reveal the bleach of bone beneath.
Even the dye was made from murdered life, the shells of glossy insects she’d smashed with her own fists, flower petals bled of color in her grip.
There was also a brilliant little heap right in front of her knees, as if she’d shaped it into a pyramid with her hands, and though I wasn’t close enough to tell what it was, I could see it glittering madly beneath the moonlight.
One of the sigils kept catching my eye, because I knew—I felt—this one had been made of something small, something fuzzy-haired and squalling as it swung little fists in search of a missing mother. Because that was what it would have taken, to summon the attention and favor of the old gods who would let her do what must be done. To give body to that which had none.
And yet as soon as I thought it—she killed a child for this—the certainty was gone.
She watched me, humming a tune that dipped low before soaring high, the warmth of her rising off her silhouette in an icy halo. This dark flower of a woman, this sacred lady, would never have done a thing like that. I couldn’t have loved her if she had, and love for her was the only thing I knew.
Without breaking the lock of our gaze, she reached out and delicately plucked up one of the stone blades, her fingers fine and dark against the snow. Slowly, she drew it along the inside of her arm, and I winced as I saw it bite into skin, the well and sluice of her blood down to her palms. She let it drip over the flowers and patterned powders, then gathered them all up and crushed them between her hands. With splayed fingers, she smeared the paste over her face, and throat, and chest, until her eyes blazed between the whorls and streaks, her hair like water dappled with moonlight.
The song she hummed grew louder, and I loved her so much I wanted to die. If she would let me be her daughter—if she would deign to be my mother—I would fling myself off mountains, let river water fill my lungs until they burst. But only if my death was what she wanted.
Then she rose up in a fluid movement, rocking back onto her heels. The love inside me eddied like whirlpools, tinged with a dash of panic, a hint of terror. She made her way to me with slow, deliberate steps, each fine-boned foot searing an imprint into the snow below her soles. A light, feathery snow began to fall, and it gathered in my lashes even as it barely glanced her skin before melting.
Her fingers were so hot when she trailed them over my face that I would have flinched away from her, if her humming hadn’t held me fast.
“Mara,” she whispered, the sound of it so alien I wondered if it was a word in some other tongue. She bared her teeth in a smile, and they flashed white in the dark.
“Mara,” she said again, her tongue flicking behind her teeth. She ran her fingers through my hair. The snow had turned to flurries that whipped around us, and still she stroked my hair, from its roots to its ends, until I nearly swooned at her touch. Even in the dream, ribbons were threaded through its length. “Marzanna. More. Moréna.”
It wasn’t a word, I realized. It was her. It was her name, and she had many.
“Maržena,” she continued through gritted teeth. A flood of pure terror flushed through me, until she gripped my face in one strong, bloodied hand and I went slack, gasping with fear and adoration. I could smell her fully now, the iron reek of blood, the dry salt of bone, and an overwhelming wave of sandalwood. “Morana, Mora, MARMORA!”
The last she shrieked into my face, her voice blending with the gale, and I tore myself awake like a bandage off a wound. I was still screaming her names as I sat up in bed, my entire body shuddering. Beside me, Malina sat stone-faced, her jaw clenched so hard I could see the tendons in her throat twitching.
I folded over until my head lay in her lap, pressing my fists against my face.
“Did you see her?” she whispered, in a cold, uncanny dual voice that sounded nothing like her. I’d never heard her just speak in polyphony before. “Did you?”
“Yes.” I bit back a whimper. “I saw her.”
It felt like a long time until she laid her hand on my head.