“I’M FINE, I’LL BE FINE, IT’S NOT AS THOUGH I’VE NEVER taken a tumble before during practice,” Oriell murmured to the two who rushed to her side as soon as she hit the floor. Rubbing her ankle, she looked up at me with stricken eyes. “I’m so sorry, Malina. I had it, I really had it while you were singing. All I could think of was that I would reach the sky. It was just when you stopped . . .”
“It’s not your fault,” I gasped out between big gulps of breath. I hadn’t realized how hard I’d been working to channel all that feeling, inscribe it onto Oriell with the quill of the song. It wasn’t what I usually did. My songs were invitations to feel the spectrum of emotions, or an echoed depiction of what someone else felt. They weren’t meant to be such a forceful command. “I shouldn’t have just cut off like that.”
“You would have had to stop soon, anyway, pie,” Niko said. She had appeared by my side, snaking a slim, strong arm around my waist. I leaned gratefully into her, resting my cheek against the top of her head. Over the years I’d learned that she could more than take my weight. “You were turning a really unfortunate kind of green. Like a little purply? I didn’t know faces went that way.”
Mara watched me with grave eyes, and for once she couldn’t quite keep her face impassive. I could both see and hear the roiling distress beneath the smooth facade.
“Nikoleta is correct, I think,” she murmured. “We will try again tomorrow.”
We did try again the next day. And the day after that.
But no matter how I struggled, I couldn’t make it last.
To make matters worse, it didn’t even work on all of them. We found that out when I tried singing to a few of the others, thinking the problem might have been with Oriell. But no matter how much of my gleam I forced into the song, some of them couldn’t even do what she had done. The leap from beauty into strength was too much for them.
Mara had molded them into courtesans so well that in some cases it couldn’t be undone.
And the effects only lasted as long as my voice. If something hit me on the battlefield—or if I woke up with a sore throat—they wouldn’t be able to stir themselves into action. The song didn’t linger once my voice died, had no staying power.
Worst of all, I just couldn’t sustain a prolonged gleam without Mara boosting it for me with her own song. If I tried to push through without her, I promptly passed out no matter how much strength I funneled into the effort.
Three days later, we weren’t any closer to an army, and we’d lost half the remaining winter in our eyes. The looming dread obstructed my own gleam, made me that much less able to inspire others with what song I could muster.
After breakfast that morning, overwhelmed with frustration, I went to find Mara in her chambers, Niko by my side. “Is there anyone else who could help teach me?” I asked her. “I need to get stronger, and I just . . . I don’t know how. Not by myself. You won’t be able to help me when the time comes, and I need someone.”
Or else we’re lost, I added silently.
I didn’t have to say it out loud. She knew it as well as I did.
Her face turned pensive, then taut. “There is someone,” she said. “I had hoped to avoid entangling her in my own mare’s nest. But now . . .”
We all knew what she meant. If he blew through us, Herron would be everyone’s menace soon.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“An old family friend, I suppose you could call her.”
“Though I wouldn’t,” Izkara interjected from the corner where she lurked, watching over Mara. She mock-shuddered, then cast me what passed for a sympathetic look from her, which meant she looked like she only half wanted to slap me.
“Still, there is the matter of the favor to collect,” Mara mused. “Unpleasant though the asking will surely be. Jasna will want to keep you for a spell, fledgling, if she agrees to help. And we have a few days to spare for it—he would not dare strike out while any of my winter still holds him in its grip and renders him weak. I can feel how far away from us he is, still; he has barely moved inland since he dragged himself ashore.” She still avoided saying his name, I’d noticed, whenever she could. As if she was still loath to lend him power by calling him out. “He would not gamble and risk losing to me again, not after these many years.”
She turned her ponderous gaze to me. “Go and prepare some things to bring with you, fledgling. And you, too, Nikoleta, if you wish to chaperone your lover.”
Niko scrambled toward the door in a flash of fine sleek hair and tan limbs. “I’ll go get Luka,” she tossed over her shoulder to me. “He won’t want to miss an excuse to ditch this place.”
“SO YOU’VE BROUGHT a war of the worlds to my doorstep, have you?” Jasna said dryly, dropping a rough-turned clay mug of lemonade into Mara’s waiting hands. Dunja, Izkara, Niko, Luka, and I already had ours—Dunja had insisted on coming too, to watch over me. Jasna had very deliberately served Mara last. “Blown it in like an ill wind. What a fine guest-gift to offer me, after all these years. Though I would have been happy with something more modest. Just so you know, so as not to overspend for next time.”
Jasna’s home was in one of the little villages clustered in the Zeta Valley, in a cradle of emerald mountains. A vineyard bursting with ripening grapes surrounded her sprawling stone cottage, and an evergreen forest marched up the mountain slope at its back. It all looked like it had been transported here from centuries ago.
We all sat barefoot around her stone hearth, a brushy handmade broom laid out along the mantel. From the inside, the cottage seemed much more spacious than it should have been. All rough stone and exposed, worn wooden rafters, as if it had been built around a gallows. Little wicker men and dried wheat dollies hung above every window. Everything smelled like herbs, sliced lemons, and the savor of roasting sausages.
“I would not be here if I could avoid it, baba,” Mara said through tight lips. “And you know it. But by your honor and your family’s word, you owe me and mine what I am come to claim.”
“I doubt my great-grandmother foresaw a repayment like this, when she asked your help with the paltry thing she needed,” Jasna retorted. “But you’re right that I’m honor-bound by her word, and the favor owed. And fortunately for you, I don’t take kindly to the notion of demons defiling my lady’s soil.”
Sipping the tart, herbed lemonade—Niko would know what was in it, but now wasn’t the time to ask—my gaze drifted as they spoke. Black cast-iron chandeliers hung from the eaves, burning with beeswax candles that dripped searing blobs. In the open corner of the kitchen, cut lilies floated in water in an age-clouded copper sink. The splintered wooden boards that served as shelves groaned under jars of powders and herbs, and accumulated oddities lay strewn everywhere. Hand-sculpted vases, an antique charcoal iron, incense holders in descending order like nesting dolls. A dried puffer fish with a pooched mouth that I just knew Niko would try to kiss when no one was looking.
Jasna herself looked heartily ordinary. Freckled, sweet-faced, and barefoot, with a gray-threaded brown braid slung over her homespun yellow sweater and torn jeans. She seemed too young to me to be a grandmother unless she’d had children early, but when Mara called her baba, she didn’t object. As if it was a term of respect.
“So, what can I do for you, Black Mara?” she asked, lowering herself into a rocking chair so close to the ground it must have been carved a century ago. “I can offer you my own coven’s help, along with the favor of the gods who claim us and this land.”
“I come seeking your particular aid. Not that of your . . . coven, or your gods.” I gritted my teeth at the barely restrained disdain in Mara’s voice, especially when Jasna’s face darkened in response.
“I see you still think of us as kitchen witches, compared to you. Peasants digging in this world’s dirt,” she said, low and echoing. As if something much older and bigger stood behind her shoulder, speaking with her voice. “But our roots run deep, and our gods attend us when we call. And where are yours, in your hour of need? So have a care how you speak to me, you upstart girl. And a girl you are in the Great Lady’s eyes, no matter how old.”
Izkara sprang from her seat and lowered into a ready crouch. “Show sorai respect,” she grated in her gravelly half-animal voice. “Or I will make you.”
Jasna’s gaze shifted to her, and her eyes also seemed like a screen hiding something larger behind them. I could almost hear it, like the beating of tremendous wings. For a moment, I thought I saw a stir of something in the rafters. A cloud of feathers drifting above Jasna like a distant, diffuse halo. “Heel, you rude mongrel of a watchdog,” she rumbled. “You’re in my house now. Sit down before I make you sorry.”
Mara bowed her head, running her tongue along the inside of her full lower lip. Humility didn’t come easily to her, but it did come. She flicked a warning gaze toward Izkara, who thumped back down and twined her fingers into a single tight fist in her lap, huffing short breaths through her nose.
“Forgive me, baba,” Mara said stiffly. “We will accept whatever you have to share, gladly and with thanks.”
The precarious moment of crackling ozone passed. Jasna settled back into her chair, that secondary presence subsiding. The molt of feathers above her, if they’d even been there, dissolved back to air. I let my shoulders drop from where they’d hunched up to my ears.
“As to what we need, we seek your mortal wisdom. My far-daughter”—she paused, glanced at me—“Malina’s will requires strengthening for what lies ahead.”
“Hmm.” Jasna leaned back pensively, rocking herself with her right foot. Her eyes grazed over me, and I froze under the weight of even their peremptory regard. They were an ephemeral blue, like the sea under a clouded sky. Clear and arresting. “Why even bother with plain, old mortal will? When has all your fabled gleam not been enough for you?”
“I’m sorry,” I broke in, speaking for the first time. “But what’s the difference, exactly?”
“The little bird speaks!” She clapped her hands together. “And here I thought your old mother might have your tongue tied up in a hex bag.” A sly, needling glance at Mara. “Not that she would, of course. She’s above doing harm just because she can. As am I, for that matter, and in that we find our common ground. As for will . . .”
She looked at me directly now, unblinking as an owl, her sun-browned, blunt-nailed hands folded in her lap. “While your gleam is part of you—a magic you were born with, running through your blood—your will is you. The force of everything you are, brought to bear on bending the world into whatever it is you want. Unlike your sequins and sparkles, with enough work, anyone can learn to wield their will. Though, as with anything, some of us are stronger than others.”
She shifted her gaze to Mara. “But I ask again, Black Mara. Why come to my door with this? Has all that lofty beauty truly failed you?”
A muscle twitched in Mara’s jaw. “It is not enough. Not anymore. The gleam is not what it once was—not even in my far-daughter, and she is much stronger than many of the others.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet to hear!” Jasna gave a charming, hooting laugh. Her smile was gap-toothed, sunshine through clouds, and it brought her close to beautiful. Even for all her taunting, I heard no actual malice in her. Just a pleasant, rhythmic rushing like waves rolling home to a placid beach. A vast yet simple peace that even news of advancing demons somehow hadn’t disturbed. “Baba Emilija would’ve been beside herself with glee if she were here. A strong believer in ‘pretty is as pretty does,’ she was.”
“Yes, she was,” Mara agreed mildly. “Yet also in my debt. So will you help?”
“Of course. I live by my word, as a true witch should. How much time do I have with your girl?” Those steady eyes landed on me again, assessing. “And what does she do, in your glitzy way?”
“She sings what she hears,” Mara replied shortly, steepling her long fingers and then lacing them beneath her chin. “And you have two days with her, perhaps three on the outside.”
Or until the gray in my dark eye ebbed down to a quarter at the most, to leave us with a buffer. More than enough time for me to head back to Mara’s stronghold if she sensed Herron coming.
A sudden flicker caught my eye, on the widow’s walk above. Like a pixelation, a wavering in the shadows beneath the eaves. I thought I saw something, like I’d almost seen on the chalet’s balcony. Almost heard the rush of rain.
Bubbling hope rose up my throat. Riss. What if it was somehow Riss?
But then it vanished, and I deflated. There was nothing there but the swaying strings of wrinkled peppers and garlic dangling from the decorative railing.
I turned back to Jasna, who was scoffing from deep in her throat. “Two days? Do you care to set any other impossible tasks for me, like from the old tales? Maybe you want a dress sewn from the fabric of the dawn? Or snowdrops to fill ten baskets? I’m no storybook witch, girl, no more than you are. Working with will properly is like using any other tool. Learning to touch it, know it, wield its heft—it all takes time.”
Mara lifted her slim shoulders once and spread her hands. “Then teach her what you can, baba, in the time we have. This world will thank you for it.”
“‘This world,’” Jasna echoed mockingly. “Arrogant as ever. What do you know of this world?”
“More than I once did. Or I would not have come to you.”
“And what do you say, little bird?” She quirked her head at me. “I’ll teach you what I can. But only if it’s what you want.”
“I do,” I said, so firmly the conviction felt almost uncomfortable in my mouth. “I was the one who asked for this.”
“Then perhaps you’re not a lost cause after all.” Her gaze slid to Niko, then to Luka. “And you two? No tourists allowed. If you stay too, you’ll help. You certainly have the raw materials; I can smell it.” She sniffed playfully at the air. “The potential on you both.”
Niko lit like a paper lantern at the prospect of being involved, and even Luka’s somber look slipped a little with his nod.
Jasna beamed, and rubbed her hands briskly together. “Good enough for me! Now let’s see what mischief Granny Witch can teach you.”
AFTER MARA AND Izkara left, leaving Dunja outside to keep guard, we ate at Jasna’s long trestle table. She fed us beefsteak tomatoes and diced cucumbers from her garden, and fresh-baked rolls spread with young, mild cheese and filled with spicy sausage. The lemonade had been replaced with sweet red wine from Jasna’s own vineyard, differently herbed.
I’d gotten so used to fancy coven food, everything sliced into transparent curls or annoyingly deconstructed, that I thought I’d die of these simple joys. Luka apparently felt the same, barely surfacing from his plate.
Jasna watched us in consternation. “Did they not feed you children at that ridiculous palace of a house?”
“I prefer food I can’t see through,” Luka mumbled through a wolfish bite. It was so close to what I’d been thinking that I nearly laughed through my own full mouth. “And the wine . . . is that woodruff, and meadowsweet? What were you going for with those? Gentle victory? Triumphant peace? Kind of optimistic for our circumstances.”
“Something like that, yes,” Jasna replied in a faintly surprised, approving tone. “I thought they’d do you good, all the same. The three of you could do with a glass half full. Who taught you herbs, boy? They did a fine job of it.”
Luka chewed once more, then swallowed hard. “My mother. She used them like you do.”
“I didn’t think you remembered any of that, beast,” Niko said, soft.
“Of course I remember, gnat,” he said, just as tender. “I always told you I wouldn’t forget.”
I glanced over at Niko, watched her bite her lip with well-worn sadness. Even after three years, they both still missed Koštana badly, I knew. I still missed her, and she hadn’t even been my mother.
But the melancholy didn’t last. There was a lightness here, I realized, an undercurrent of deep-rooted joy that I’d never heard at the chalet. The entire cottage felt like Jasna, just like Mara’s stronghold felt like her. But unlike in my own kin’s home, there was nothing baleful here, no oppressive taint. No rancid guilt, no ancient curse. No Mama breathing her doleful cold down my neck.
Just books, gardening and sewing tools, and the grassy, meadow scent of fresh and drying herbs. Pragmatic magic, and common contentment.
It made me feel so safe. It reminded me of hope, and the magic Riss and I had once weaved with Mama in our garden just for the sake of happiness.
Once we were done eating, Jasna took all three of us over to the sink filled with leaves and lilies. She sprinkled coarse salt into it, then picked up a double-sided blade with a gleaming ebony hilt. I didn’t recognize any of the intricate little sigils engraved into it. Murmuring under her breath, she dipped the point into the water, breathing slow and steady through her nose.
“What are you doing?” I asked, just above a whisper.
She gave me a half smile, her eyes still closed. “Cleansing. Consecrating the water by my own hand, and in the Lady’s name.”
I remembered she’d called on this lady before. “Who is she? Your lady, I mean.”
“The maiden and the mother, and also the wizened crone,” Jasna replied, pitched low with reverence. “The lady of the moon, the stars, and especially of the earth. Devoted steward of all that walks and crawls and flies over her beloved face. She’s our cradle and grave, our home and hearth. The wellspring of our rebirth.”
This lady sounded beautiful, I thought, somehow familiar. And Jasna loved her, I could hear its clarion pitch. Exalted, freely given adoration. “Does she have a name?”
“Oh yes, many, many names. She’s simply the Lady to those unsworn to her. And though she’s everywhere, around these parts we call her Zorica, sometimes. Dawn Star, mother of the sun.”
One by one, she dipped our hands into the water before dabbing it with her roughened fingers onto our ankles, throats, and foreheads. “Have a little of this, too,” she murmured, offering oil that smelled like eucalyptus, mint, and cinnamon. “In the same places the cleansed water touched. And anywhere else you’d like to smell nice.”
I dabbed it everywhere, like perfume. It made me feel an earthy, refreshed kind of clean, like I’d waded naked through a mountain spring. I lingered with her at the sink once Luka and Niko moved back to the table, breathing in the smell of water and the lilies.
Jasna watched my pleasure, smiling. When I caught her eye, she tipped me a wink. “You’re one of hers too, just so you know. You might be born to Mara’s line, but you belong to the grove no less than I do, as one of the Lady’s hidden children. You can feel it, can’t you, the pull when you’re near me? That’s why you’ve fallen in with these two.” She inclined her head toward Niko and Luka in turn. “They’re hers too, especially the girl.”
I thought of how Niko sounded like wings, like flight—like the feathers that had seemed to rain down over Jasna. Maybe that was somehow part of this goddess’s mark. Maybe just a few months ago I would have questioned if I even believed in goddesses or gods. But there wasn’t much room left in me for that kind of doubt, not anymore. I’d left that simple, easy world behind.
“Through their mother, I’d guess,” she went on. “Dedication to the Lady often runs down maternal lines. Though yours likely wouldn’t have.”
I turned the idea over gingerly in my head, the thought of belonging to something other than a legacy of forced beauty and servitude. Such a precious, unexpected gift—maybe even one from our faceless father.
I caught her arm grazingly as she turned away. “Why do you hate her? Mara, I mean? She can’t help what she is.”
Her eyes went soft as morning mist. “Oh, I don’t hate her, bird, don’t think that of me. I hate very few things. It’s a wasteful, violent way to spend one’s will. But I don’t like her, you’re right. She’s not fully of this place—you know that much—and of course that’s not her fault. But she chooses to act like a queen, nose upturned, with scant regard for our world’s sacred things. It isn’t right.”
I remembered Mara’s story, the casual way she had dismissed her own tribe’s gods. Her snarling, spitting hatred for the icons of Christianity. “Stars and gods,” she always said, but even that was more of a curse than an oath. I’d thought it was all the sacrifice that had made her that way, but maybe it was how she’d started out.
“Always so haughty,” Jasna continued dourly, gaining steam. “It rubs me all wrong. As if being the by-blow of some shiny, wayward godling passing by from elsewhere—or whatever it was that made her—exempts her from owing respect to the gods that hail from here. I’d wager changing that outlook would have saved her some trouble in the past.”
“But she did do your great-grandmother a favor, didn’t she?” I pointed out.
“Yes, that.” Jasna rolled her eyes. “My great-grandmother had too many overeager suitors, and no interest in being some village lumpkin’s put-upon wife. Most of them she got rid of herself, but one just wouldn’t take the boot. So she asked Mara and her sirens for her help in ‘stealing’ him from her, in exchange for a future favor. Don’t know what happened to that oaf. Do know he never bothered her again.”
I nearly burst out laughing at that. The first fiction Mara had told us, about our family’s curse, was that it had been cast by a jealous witch whose lover had been stolen by one of Mara’s tribe. She’d clearly used Jasna’s great-grandmother for inspiration. And I couldn’t imagine anyone more unlikely than Jasna to curse someone over a man.
Something else occurred to me. “I saw a church, in the village,” I said carefully. “What do . . .” I trailed off, unsure how to finish the thought without offending her.
She raised a merry, unruly eyebrow. “What do the priests think of me? My family’s been here since before this thought to be a village, patching wounds and catching babies. The priests and I know enough to leave each other well alone. Now, come.”
She led me back to the cleared table, her arms full of jars and vials she’d gathered from the shelves. “Let’s see, let’s see,” she muttered to herself. “Something traditional, I think, but with a twist.” She dropped pinches of herbs and resins from the jars into a simple granite mortar, before grinding it all together briskly with the pestle, her cheeks turning ruddy with the effort. There was nothing studied about the efficient motions of her hands and the strength she put into the grind, nothing pretty, but I could still feel the buzz of magic building. “Can one of you clever kits tell me what all went in here?”
“Frankincense, obviously,” Niko said, sounding like such a know-it-all I smirked beside her. “And myrrh and benzoin. Mmm, and sandalwood. Gum acacia, too, I think. Would a little sage help too?”
“And sweet orange oil, maybe,” Luka added. “Mama always liked to add a dash. She said it made things friendly. Not an exact science to it, but it somehow sounded right.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Even to me.”
“Good on you both,” Jasna said, nodding. She’d brought a little electric pot to the table, half filled with water, and set it to bubbling. “There’s a lot of fire and air in this particular mix. Lovely for sparking the will, but maybe a little bright and flighty—and our little bird brings much of her own light already, doesn’t she? Some sage could ground her, lend a little earth.” She smiled at Luka. “You’re right, as well. A little orange oil won’t hurt.”
Niko wrinkled her nose. “Is that . . . a fondue pot?”
“It is, and why shouldn’t it be?” Jasna retorted. “Do you demand a cauldron for authenticity?” She scraped the mixture deftly into the burbling water, sliding a lid over it to capture the fragrant steam. “Now lean close and breathe the goodness in.”
I closed my eyes and parted my lips, feeling the heat of steam against their soft inner flesh. It smelled sharp, sweet, and dizzying, herbal yet old as sacrament. With it I could feel the balance shift from levity to sanctity.
“Go on, breathe deep,” Jasna instructed, her voice even and smooth, a steady meter. “Fill your lungs with all the latent power in these herbs. The smell of magic born of this earth, and worked since time itself was barely weaned. Burned in cauldrons and censers and”—amusement touched her voice—“fondue pots, for love and strength and healing, banishment and summoning, reverence and wrath.”
I could feel the gleam straining inside me, responding to the scent and the rhythm of her words as my mind unfurled. I nearly started humming out of habit.
“No, bird,” Jasna cautioned gently, as if she could feel it. “That’s the easy path. You were born knowing how to walk it; to you, it’s like breath. Dive deeper now, look harder. The Lady brooks no shortcuts, no crutches, no laziness. Find the other strength.”
I frowned, my eyes still shut. I didn’t know what she meant.
“Oh yes you do, bird,” she chided. “Don’t pull that ornery face with me. You know where to go already; I’ve even seen you do it. Think of what you search for when you make your shield. That pretty birdcage you build for yourself, to keep things out when they get too loud.”
I drew a sharp breath. “How do you—you can see the bubble?”
“Of course I can see it,” she said, a smile coloring her voice. “What do you take me for, a witchling wet behind the ears? And it’s not a ‘bubble’ like a child blows through a loop, but a witch’s shield. If you can shape your will into a shield, you can shape it into anything. Just look for the place in you that echoes with intent. The certainty that you can mold the world—that if you lead steadily and well, reality will leap to follow. Do you know it yet, little bird? Can you feel it’s true?”
My hands had heated with the sound of her voice, and my whole spine seemed to glow. I felt so whole, connected to the earth where I touched the floor with my bare soles. Grounded like a wire.
There was a place inside me, like a cavern. Sparkling with stalactites of potential.
“Yes,” I said slowly, edged with wonder. “I think I do know where it is.”