THE GRIEF DESCENDED WITH THE ASHES.
It took days to fully douse Jasna’s burned wreckage of a vineyard, trampled by Herron’s demons and seared by Amaya’s flames. The villagers turned up to help, and though they whispered to each other behind their work-worn hands and looked at us with fleeting, fearful eyes, they didn’t ask any probing questions.
They’d felt the ground rocking with the battle from miles away, seen the lapping of the fire against the sky—but an earthquake and a careless bonfire that had blazed out of control were answer enough for them. They didn’t need to consider monsters darker than the night, glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
I wished I could do the same myself. Sometimes ignorance was the wiser choice, and easier on the heart and mind.
Malina and I helped where we could, but neither of us had much to give. Not to the effort, nor to each other. We’d lost so much that the world felt both new and somehow tainted, raw and rotten like a fresh-peeled fruit plucked too late. It should have been some comfort to bear it together, but for once, it wasn’t. We had an overlap of anguish—Mama, Nev, Jovan—but Lina had also lost family that she’d come to know, coven daughters who were strangers to me. Women she’d trained and learned to respect, who meant something more to her than they ever would to me except a list of lovely names.
Niko understood the loss better than I could; she’d been there for it. I rarely saw her drift far from Lina’s side. She was always there, petting, gentling, watching over her “pie”—and Lina took care of her in kind. They spent most of their time in Jasna’s herb garden, tending to it and cutting plants for healing tinctures and tonics that I refused to drink.
That garden wasn’t my place, not the way it was theirs. And even if it had been, I no longer belonged with them.
They hadn’t lost Fjolar like I had. They hadn’t almost-loved and then killed Death.
I couldn’t blame them for their distance like I would have once. I was too tired for blame, and I was different, too. Alien, disjointed, out of step with the whole world around me. The passing of time bothered me, the heartache of losing day to night over and over, instead of seeing a steadfast sky above. The kingdom had marked me like a brand, in some indelible way.
The only one who could have understood my newness, and my shameful longing for Fjolar—the only one who would have helped me through both without judgment—was Dunja.
Our aunt turned goddess, and then lost to light.
I didn’t even have her to turn to, now that my own mother was truly gone.
And then there was Luka.
He haunted me, a ghost hovering around my edges. Gazing at me with those watchful hazel eyes, muscles always tensed under his fine-cut face. Uncertain around me in a way he’d never been before. He’d held me through that first rending, weeping night of loss after Dunja destroyed Herron, but that had been comfort lent in catastrophe. Now, in the absence of tragedy, we couldn’t seem to find each other.
I couldn’t find my own best friend.
Maybe it was me who was the ghost again. Like I’d been to Lina every time she saw me fractaled.
Maybe I’d never be anything but a stranger again, the prodigal daughter who should never have come home.
THE THIRD NIGHT, I couldn’t sleep. I was still so tired, bogged down as if my veins ran with silt instead of blood, and all I wanted was the comfort of oblivion. Which, of course, wouldn’t come.
Even sleep wouldn’t indulge me here reliably, not anymore.
As far as I could tell, none of the surviving coven daughters were similarly troubled. The cottage was filled with a soft symphony of sleeping breath, the thirty gathered women drowsing away the gathered exhaustion of difficult days. Niko and Lina actually had one of the spare bedrooms to themselves, as if they were Jasna’s designated royalty.
At least I wouldn’t have to see them curled together in the kind of peace I couldn’t seem to find.
I stepped between pallets and bedrolls, picking my way carefully through them until I made it to the kitchen, where I found a storm lantern to light my way. Then I wrapped myself in one of Jasna’s hand-knit sweaters to ward off the mountain chill, my nose wrinkling at the fabric’s scent; everything she owned was fragrant with wild onion, beeswax, and herbs. I should have loved the earthiness of it, the homespun warmth. But I didn’t. Some part of me had delighted in the allure of Mara’s exotic haven—the same part that had thrilled to Fjolar’s kingdom in all its overwrought glory.
I just didn’t like it here. It felt like the essence of Cattaro, or Montenegro itself distilled down to an absolute.
And it was still the opposite of what I wanted.
Outside, I sat on Jasna’s porch swing, setting myself to swinging with a push of bare toes against the cool cement. The night was pure, with enough of a pine breeze to slice through the lingering reek of char. I could smell honey and night-blooming flowers, even cold running water somewhere far from here.
That was another artifact of the kingdom: my senses had never waned to what they’d been before. Scents were stronger, noises louder. Everything was somehow more. Sometimes I even thought in cadence, in rhyming stanzas, as if I’d never stepped out of that magical, performative groove.
The chair sank beside me, groaning, and I startled. I’d been so caught up in considering my own heightened senses that I hadn’t heard Luka step outside. The irony of it made me laugh a little, lightly.
Luka turned to look at me, draping an arm over the back of the chair. So careful where he placed it, not quite close enough that I could feel it behind my neck. Moonlight limned his cleverly chiseled features, ran silvery fingers through his shock of hair.
“Something funny, Missy?” He smiled a little, an echo of the half-dimpled smile he used to give me. “Whatever it is, don’t let me ruin it. It’s nice to hear you laugh.”
I opened my mouth to reply, and just as quickly realized I had nothing to say.
Silence collected around us like sediment, and he looked away.
“Do you still love me?” he asked eventually, blunt and quiet. I could hear the trepidation in his voice.
I let the pause settle in like an exhale between us, thinking.
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. “I think I do, under everything else. But it feels far away right now. Or very deep down, maybe. Like bedrock. I know it’s there, because it’s always there. But I can’t exactly feel it.” I glanced over at him, steeling myself for his pain, grateful that I didn’t have Malina’s ability to hear it. “I’m sorry, Luka. Do you . . . do you still love me?”
A muscle ticked beneath his jaw, but his face stayed placid in profile. He didn’t look at me again. “Of course I do, Missy. I always do. But at the same time, I don’t know, either. It’s—things happened, while you were gone. I missed you, badly. Terribly. There was someone . . .” He trailed off, swallowing.
“It’s all right,” I murmured, feeling a faint, grazing pain. Like the scrape of a cat’s tongue, but not unpleasant. Jealousy too far removed to wound. “You were alone, and whatever you did, it was what you needed to do. Believe me, I understand. I understand so much.”
And I did. For all the lies and endless manipulation, I still missed Fjolar like a phantom limb. His smell, the sardonic lilt of his voice, the roughness and tenderness of each caress. His demands, his wonder at the sight of me, the clench and twist of his many betrayals.
It was so near the surface, eclipsing everything else beneath it. I couldn’t see past its mass, or through its remembered, distorted light.
It would pass, I knew. I would heal, and become something else, again.
Because everything changed. That was the true beauty of this living world, even if I wasn’t quite ready to appreciate it yet.
“Do you think . . . ?” Luka began. “Do you think, someday . . . ?”
I reached for his hand. It was warm and large, but not like Fjolar’s. His palm was less coarse, his fingers longer and slimmer, laced differently with mine. He wrapped his other hand around my wrist and squeezed, hard enough that I nearly gasped. He did remember, then.
So did I.
“Yes,” I said, soft as a breath. “I do think, someday. But not now.”
He sat with me for a while longer, watching the wheeling of the stars across the sky. They twinkled in the shimmering way they always did in this world; the astronomical term for it was “seeing,” I remembered. A strange way to put it, but nice.
As if even while we watched them, the stars saw us back.
I STAYED OUTSIDE for hours, long after Luka left. He squeezed my hand in parting, but didn’t try to kiss me or speak. We weren’t each other’s to kiss—not now, though maybe someday.
And there was nothing left to say.
I was still there when Mara slipped outside, all in black, a satchel slung over her shoulder. She startled when she saw me, exactly like a normal, mortal woman, clapping a hand over her heart.
“Lisarah,” she began, then caught herself. “Iris. I did not think to find you out here. You, or anyone.”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Inside didn’t seem like the place to be. Not that anywhere seems the place to be, at least for me. And you, sorai? Leaving us like a thief in the night?”
The phrase brought back the memory of all the times Mama had said it, nocked it at me like an arrow for sneaking outside. The thought of her prodded pain back to life, the blister of her loss that lived inside me.
Mara wavered for a moment, as if caught between the desire to leave without explaining herself—the woman she’d been before hadn’t owed explanations to anyone—and the urge to shrug on the skin of someone new.
Finally she moved to sit beside me. And even now, stripped of her tripled tones, she smelled like love, largesse, and light. I breathed it in, sweet fruit and frankincense, and when she drew me close to her, I didn’t resist. My head dropped onto her shoulder of its own accord, my eyes half closing as she stroked my hair with her ember’s touch.
“I am leaving,” she admitted, resting her cheek on my crown. “You love me still, my far-daughter—even you, who once nearly tore me apart, because you cannot help but love me. And while you all ring yourselves around me, none of you will live so freely as you now can and should. And I . . .” She heaved a long, heavy sigh. “I no longer wish to be this family’s sun. There are things I would do, and people I would find. It will be good, for everyone, to make a life without me at its eye.”
“I understand,” I said simply, marveling at how much change had already befallen us. I’d hated her once, tried to burn her with all the forceful loathing of my heart.
And now I was so close to her I could feel her silken throat clench with held-back tears.
She didn’t want to leave us, not really. Because she loved us more than anything, as was her nature to do. But she’d do it, because we needed it, and to give what was needed was in her nature too.
“You do?” she whispered into my hair, and for a moment I heard an echo of Mama in her rich, husky human voice.
“I do.” I bit my lip and let myself cry. Just a single tear for now, hot and smarting down my cheek, but there would be more. “Because I’m leaving too.”