I WOKE AT DAWN, AS IF MY INTERNAL ALARM CLOCK hadn’t come dislodged in spite of everything that had happened. It seemed impossible that either of us had managed to get back to sleep after a dream like that—a dream that we’d somehow shared, something we’d never done before—but Malina was still resolutely asleep, curled tightly like a mollusk with a little frown creased into her brow, her lips pursed and rosy as a baby’s.
I didn’t want to wake her so early, but I needed to be outside. I needed the world firm and real beneath my feet, to breathe warm morning air until I could calibrate to this new normal.
Throwing a heather-gray cashmere wrap over my nightgowned shoulders, I eased the bedroom window open and dropped lightly onto the smooth stones of the courtyard. Čiča Jovan lived in a pied-à-terre in one of the renovated stone buildings near the Northern River Gate, the Old Town’s back entrance. It was right across from our favorite pizzeria, the Bastion, named after the fortifications that led out of the Old Town along the clear, green water of the Škurda. The air was always cooler here, like spray to the face, and it already smelled like baking calzones: the insides a molten mass of cheese, prosciutto, and mushrooms spiced with oregano, and a rich dollop of sour cream on the top.
Whatever eagle eyes the police had posted to watch over our house had apparently called it a night long before dawn. I could see one drooping at his post, snoring in his chair in Jovan’s wild little garden. Other than him and the bakers inside the pizzeria, the small square was deserted beneath the blazing pink and orange of a sky shot through with veins of molten gold.
There shouldn’t have been anyone around watching me. But there was.
I could feel it, a tingle over the crown of my head that spread down the back of my neck like a flurry of pins and needles. People had stared at me plenty over the years, at me and Malina both, and I was intimately familiar with how the weight of eyes usually felt. But this was different, so intent I almost felt as if I was being touched, caressed by fingernails running lightly through my hair and down my nape.
It felt so weirdly delicious yet uncomfortable that I froze, scanning the square. Nothing stirred against the gray of the stone blocks, other than the whisper of lacy curtains behind open white shutters across the way, and a scattering of wildflowers nodding in Jovan’s garden. They pinwheeled into an unruly whorl as soon as my gaze landed on them, and I looked hastily away.
Then a flicker of movement drew my gaze up to the bastion itself, the rounded stone fortification with its crenelated edges. I’d never seen anyone up there before, but now a woman leaned on the edge right above the river gate, hair even blacker than my own spilling over like an inkfall.
I walked across the small square like a sleepwalker until I stood in front of the gate, my neck craned so I could look up at her with parted lips and squinted eyes. To her right the craggy mountains reared, patches of green against the sheer stone screes, and her silhouetted form was draped in dusky blue and silver, a loose Grecian dress pinned around her neck. From where I stood below her, the angle threw the architecture of her bones into stark relief, and I realized I knew her. I knew that powerful jaw, the full mouth and regal flare of the nostrils, the unyielding cheekbone sweep and thick black brows above pale eyes.
Then somehow her perfume reached me, as if it could seek me out despite the direction of the wind. With déjà vu rolling over me like a lurching tide, I didn’t just know but I remembered.
FOUR YEARS AGO Lina and I had sat in the Arms Square on my threadbare blanket, hawking my glass flowers while Lina sang wanting songs at passing strangers. We’d already had a good day of it—three fractal poppies sold, scarlet with jet-black centers like singularities, and two lady’s slipper orchids I’d sweated over for weeks—when they came.
Counting our coins and dinar bills, neither of us noticed until their shadows fell over us, and that sweet scent tightened around us like a grasping hand. It smelled like sandalwood and honey and bergamot, bright honeysuckle above and the tang of blood oranges below. It smelled so good it nearly hurt, and I could feel my lungs expanding painfully with the effort to draw it in, my bronchioles unfurling like cherry-blossom buds.
The black-haired woman had worn a gown then too, so extravagant it should have been silly in the milling crowd of T-shirted tourists, but it wasn’t. Its full skirt was lined with stripes of shining peacock feathers alternating with raven black, as if she were heading to a masquerade. Her arms were swathed to the elbow with fingerless gloves, black leather and lace fine and dense as filigree. Deep copper shoulders glowed smooth above a satin hem.
But none of it compared to the sheer force of her face, a kind of bold that seemed almost wild: cheekbones flat and broad as steppes, a wide-bridged nose with a small bump between her eyes, a lush and perfect mouth. And those pale, pale eyes, black-rimmed and water gray. Exactly the color of my mother’s, or Malina’s, or my own.
And there was that hearthstone smell, like warmth and trust and mother-love. I wanted to be even closer to it, I realized. I wanted the black-haired woman to sit down with us, to somehow pull both me and Malina onto her lap as if we were still little girls who could fit.
“Look at them, Naisha,” she whispered to the other in a rough-edged purr layered with more tones at once than I could count. It was a bit how Malina sounded when she sang, but I didn’t think she could talk this way, and she wasn’t anywhere near so multiple. “Look at how faint and little they are, that all these shamblers barely even see them. They should be so much lovelier by now.”
“It’s not their fault, Sorai,” Naisha murmured back. She was lovely too, a blonde carved out of ivory, platinum, and silver. She had the same wolf-gray eyes, but her narrow features were both delicate and sharp, as if a sculptor had whittled her face using only a very pretty knife. She wore a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breastbone and rolled up to her elbows, and in her worn-down, shapeless jeans she still looked like someone’s queen. “She isn’t teaching them, like I told you.”
There was something familiar about her voice, sweet and stripped of the other’s inhuman resonance, but the honeyed prison of perfume wouldn’t let me think enough to place it.
“But they do look at us,” I said, as if the blonde hadn’t even spoken. My voice sounded strange and echoing, as if the three of us were underneath a dome, an upended goldfish bowl. It made the air feel like cotton stuffed in my ears. “They stare at us all the time.”
“Of course they do, little one,” the brunette—Sorai—said, and the slight smile she gave me warmed me to my core. Looking at her felt like staring at a darkened sun, watching an eclipse until it turned your eyes to cinders. “You were born to draw the gaze, to snare it like a butterfly in a net. But you are not nearly what you should be. Show them, Naisha. Show them what beauty should be like. Show them all they are missing.”
Naisha’s face stayed impassive, and I would never have noticed the struggle beneath if I hadn’t seen Malina’s eyes on her and heard my sister’s dissonant little trill: Don’t tell me what to do. It seemed strange, that childish note of defiance. Especially since they both looked around the same age to me, not much older or younger than Mama.
Moving so slowly, Naisha unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall, tossing her head so the gleaming corn-silk rope of her hair slid over one shoulder. Her bare torso shone long and lithe, small teardrop breasts tipped in pink. Every gesture was beyond deliberate, the bending of each wrist and crooking of her fingers like the precise steps of the most minute dance. I noticed she had an odd piercing, a tiny diamond embedded into her left wrist, sparking between the forking green threads of her veins. My heart pounded wildly in my chest; I’d seen women topless on the beach sometimes, but they’d never looked anything like this, a perfection vast and heartbreaking as a sunrise.
Beside me, I heard Malina catch a shuddering breath, but still no one else in the square even looked our way.
Patterns began to flicker across the pristine canvas of Naisha’s skin, chasing one another. Tiger stripes of orange and black wound around her waist, then a silver spate of fish scales scattered across her ribs. Long, pale swan feathers fanned out over her chest, then bright-green and glossy black ones swept up her neck. Cheetah spots raced in trails down both her arms, and finally the skin around her eyes turned a stippled, tawny brown and beige, as if she had become part diamondback snake.
As she flicked through the patterns, her eyes and hair changed color to match, flowing from a brilliant, inhuman orange to a flaring peacock green, and even her features seemed to shift, sharpening or flattening out to mimic the animal she was showing for us. Yet it never went all the way; her face stayed beautiful in each incarnation, a gorgeous were-woman hybrid like a creature from one of my storybooks. A shape-shifter prettier than any succubus I’d ever read about.
I realized my jaw was hanging open, and closed it with a click as Naisha dipped to pluck her shirt from the ground, shaking her hair loose as she buttoned it briskly back up. Even that was gracefully done, nimble and quick like fingers flying over piano keys. My mouth had gone dry, and everything inside my head swam giddy. I should have been shocked to see something so dazzlingly strange, but the shock felt very far and faint, eclipsed by envy and wonder.
“Do you see?” Sorai said softly, reaching out to graze the crown of my head with her nails, Malina’s with her other hand. A tingling current ran through me, and I nearly arched my back like a cat at her touch. “This is how you should be. So beautiful that you can wound with it. Your beauty is a force, you know, a power all its own. It can be both sword and shield for you, and win you anything you want.”
“But I—I don’t know how,” I said hoarsely. Malina made an uncertain hmm beside me, as if she somehow almost knew what that meant, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Sorai enough to question her. “Will you show us?” I yearned for them to stay so badly, to remind me how to gleam.
“Oh, you will learn again when you need to,” she replied, still stroking my head. “It hasn’t died inside you. I see it merely asleep, like a fox kit curled up in her den. And even what is deeply sleeping nearly always wakes again. But remember that it burns inside you, a fox fire in your chest. Even if it might be simpler, never let yourself forget.”
“What about me,” Malina asked thickly. “Why aren’t you telling me not to forget?”
Sorai gave a bright, stirring laugh, a cluster of nested bells rung together. “Because you are my cuckoo, are you not, baby songbird? All that false meekness in your mother’s nest.”
“Are you going to . . .” Naisha hesitated, then cleared her throat. Sorai turned to her with a languid, too-slow swivel of her head, fine crow’s-feet crinkling as her eyes narrowed. “Do you wish to take them, then?” she finished.
“No, let her keep them still. She’ll serve as she needs to, when it’s time. She will, and they will.”
She turned back to me, dropping quick yet weightless to her knees, as if she were at once made of feathers and lead. The feathered gown pooled around her, and she tipped my chin up with a warm, curled finger—I could feel the sharp edge of her nail sink almost painfully into my skin—before leaning forward, her hair sliding like a curtain around both our faces. Her eyes were so bright I could barely stand to look at her, and my own slid closed as her lips covered mine in a smooth, chaste kiss, a long exhale of that dizzying perfume. It had deepened and darkened, too, turning closer to the earth; patchouli, frankincense, and even tobacco.
Everything seemed to slide away—the ground beneath me, the grit of the stone block against my back, the warm brush of Lina’s arm by mine—and I funneled into a thick and fragrant black.
AS I BLINKED against the darkened, frayed edge of the memory, I looked up to see the woman on the bastion gather her skirts in one hand and leap nimbly over the other side, beyond the Northern Gate—into the Škurda River. I raced headlong through the gate, but there was nothing, no one, just the lacy green-and-white churn of the water rippling around rocks beneath the bridge.
I stood for a moment with the back of my hand to my forehead, reeling; the way she moved had been so fluid it was nearly inhuman. And now that I remembered her—remembered them both—I couldn’t believe that I had ever forgotten. I could recall the rest of that afternoon perfectly, almost too well, as if the excision of that memory had crystallized the remainder of the day. Lina and I had gone on as if nothing had happened, used some of the glasswork money to split a hazelnut and strawberry gelato before we headed to the beach with Luka and Niko. And there’d never been a single mention between us of a woman wrapped in feathers and scent, or another that could draw animal prints using nothing but her own skin.
It was the perfume that had done it: a perfume that made us feel things and then forget them, just like Mama had said our grandmother’s gleam had done before she died.
And both of those women had our eyes.
Those women were family, somehow, they had to be. And if they were, then everything Mama had told us—the three of us, all alone in the world—was a lie. And from what Sorai had said, the gleam she saw inside us was something not to be tamped down, but to be coaxed into full flame just like I’d always wanted.
But who were they to us? Why had Sorai given me back a memory she had stolen from me years ago, just like she had considered stealing both me and Malina from our mother? Why had they even wanted to take us—and why had they left us with Mama anyway when they could have spirited us away so easily, luring us with that perfume like some scented pied piper?
The only thing I could latch onto was that one of these three women, Dunja, Sorai, or Naisha, had hurt our mother, then somehow suspended her just short of death. It was Dunja’s name that Mama had spoken last, but then again, that “don’t” . . . now I wondered if she was truly our only suspect. Everything felt like twist-tied nonsense, without end and beginning, like the world had spun itself into a Möbius strip. I yearned suddenly for Luka, who’d taught me about Möbius strips and then indulged me endlessly when I caught a fascination with them, wondering how they could be worked into my glass fractals. If he were here, what would he tell me to do? How would he cut to the root of this tangle?
The root. That was it. Mama was the root of this, and even if I couldn’t go to her directly, I still had all her things.