by Lana Popovic
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?”
TWENTY-NINE
NIKO AND LUKA WERE THERE BY MORNING; THEY MUST have driven all night, set out as soon as we called them. Dunja had picked them up in town with the trundling van so we wouldn’t have two cars to conceal; as they piled out nearly on top of each other, I clasped my hands behind my back so they wouldn’t shake.
Niko flung herself at Lina like something propelled from a slingshot, the chestnut pennant of her hair flying in her rush. I nearly thought she’d knock Lina over, but my sister swept her up easily as if this was something they’d done many times before, spinning her in a little circle before setting her down and tucking her close, her cheek resting on the shining crown of Niko’s head.
“You fucking asshole, Lina,” I could hear her rasp against my sister’s chest. “You do not ever, ever do this to me again. Hear me?”
“Hear you, princess,” Lina whispered, drawing back so she could tip up Niko’s chin. “Do you think you’re going to punch me this time, too, or can we maybe get on with it?”
Niko glowered for a moment, then melted into a smile like sunrise, reaching up with both hands to pull my sister’s face down to hers. Blushing a little, I turned away from the private fervor of their kiss.
In the meantime, Luka waited for me by the van, his eyes hooded. His face was pale beneath its olive tint, his hair tousled from lack of sleep, jaw tight the way it was when he hoarded words like a living vault. I approached him slowly, penitent, wondering if he would keep me locked out—but as soon as I lifted a hand to touch his shoulder, he circled my wrist with his long fingers and pulled me to him, crushing me against him so tight he lifted me off the ground. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing, dangling in his arms with my toes just barely brushing the grass, but I’d have let him hold me like that until I died.
“Thank you for coming,” I whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“I’ll always come for you, Missy.” I felt his heart beating steady against my chest. “Always, anytime, anywhere. Though I’d rather just be there to begin with. You should really know at least that much by now.”
I’M NOT SURE what I’d expected from this spell. A cauldron, maybe, bubbling over a low flame. Pickled nightmare nuggets bobbing in glass jars. Fingernails, teeth, black candles, and bloody runes. And nighttime, at the very least.
What I hadn’t expected was to be standing at a lapping lakeshore in broad daylight, staring at the glint of my glasswork bougainvillea, which perched like a diadem on top of the unlikely pile of things we were about to burn.
“So how, exactly, are these bits and bobs supposed to work?” I asked Niko, sweeping my hand at the pile.
“We know Mara bound Death to her through a love ritual, though we can’t know exactly how it worked, and we aren’t her, anyway,” Niko said.
We’d spent over an hour explaining everything to her and Luka. I’d expected more pushback, more incredulity. But then there was Dunja beside us, gazing narrowly at the pile. She should have looked absurd, barefoot in the forest with her snow-fox hair and harem pants, sunlight sparking off the sequined band that covered her breasts above the bare expanse of navel. But she didn’t. Instead, she looked like something precious from another world, too queer and beautiful to be human. Like something that had been born in a realm a sideways step from our own.
“This gathering should act as a reversal,” Niko continued, ticking them off on her fine fingers. “The tapestry from Our Lady of the Rocks is a symbol of boundless love, the willing sacrifice Jacinta made for her husband—her labor and eyesight, in exchange for the hope that she might bring him home. The opposite of Mara’s forced-labor love.”
“Not only that,” Dunja broke in. “That island was meant to be consecrated to Mara, a gift in her name. The brothers who discovered her figurine on that first stone kept it; and Jacinta sought it out, ground it to bits, wove the fragments into the tapestry. Her will—a mortal’s will, but still, not to be dismissed—was that Mara’s power of love help save her husband, the chosen of her heart. It therefore
connects directly to our witch mother, but with a purpose equal and opposite to the spell that she wrought. Subverted by one woman’s choice.”
“And Malina’s violin and Iris’s sculpture,” Niko continued. “They represent you, the gifts you inherited as Mara’s daughters so you could be fun and pretty for Death like the spell demands. And Mara’s hair, and Dunja’s, link this ritual to them, specifically.”
“They used to call her Black Mara when she was truly young,” Dunja said, her eyes distant. “She was always proud of her hair. That was how they caught me in the first place; I had to risk getting close enough to her to steal some for this, and they swarmed me, trapped me before I could take it.”
“What about the bones?” Malina asked, choking a little over the last word.
We knew now what Dunja had taken: the remnants of the saint’s right hand, wrapped in a torn-off bit of the velvet raiment. She’d called it his “righteous hand,” and I hadn’t been able to tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. I wondered with a shudder if there’d still been scraps of tendon attached to it, if it had come loose at the lightest tug, or if she’d had to snap it free like chicken bone.
“From what you’ve said, the Christian canon doesn’t agree with Mara, not if she’s bound to much older gods,” Niko said. “Christianity doesn’t exactly play well with others, particularly witches. That’s probably why you had that reaction at the Ostrog monastery, Iris. Those bones are holy, and they rebel against Mara and her blood. Their burning should release that aversion, and that’ll be our fuel.”
Luka spoke up for the first time. He sat with his back against a pine trunk, the color finally returned to his face now that he was sure I wasn’t going to vanish on him again. “So, basically, you’re just doing what the legends in Mama’s book say. You’re trying to burn her—and then drown her, I assume, since we’re by the water.”