by Lana Popovic
“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 par
ticular 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.”
Seventeen
Iris
TOGETHER, FJOLAR AND I SLOGGED THROUGH THE KINGDOM, delving into each piece for whatever shape a caged demon soul might take.
The Quiet had stopped being such a torment. Now I instinctively wound my wisteria nest around me whenever we hopped a seam, to seal myself safe, and I’d discovered that being in that nowhere-place even made it a little easier to fractal myself toward Lina and search for any sign of a traitor in her midst. Maybe it was the nature of the fabric, its purpose as both a boundary and connective tissue. When I was in it, I swam that much closer to the shores of my own world.
Every time I tried it, I caught brief glimpses of my sister by extending myself through the buds and branches of my own bloom. I saw Lina wandering the chalet grounds, sitting in a stone cottage with Luka and Niko, singing to a Great Hall filled with coven daughters wielding their gleams. But I was so faint, barely there and then gone like a breath. My presence was too wan without the catalyst of a great, propulsive need. She didn’t see me, and I only ever stayed enough to catch sight of her beloved face.
And feel the roiling darkness lapping toward her, trembling with eagerness to close in.
Because I never saw her without whiplashing to wherever Herron was. Sitting cross-legged with a limp kitten in his lap, exhaling darkness down some poor boy’s throat, and once, stalking through the West Gate in Old Town Cattaro, his handsome, savage face tilted to the sky.
A stone’s throw from where Čiča Jovan lived.
He was trespassing on my turf, and there was nothing I could do about it—no way to help Lina, Jovan, anyone—until I found that goddamned soul. Knowing that I was working on a different timeline than they were did nothing to still the underlying clamor of panic and rage, the dragging sense that somehow I was still being much too slow. I couldn’t find the soul; I couldn’t find any spies.
And I couldn’t shed the creeping, nasty feeling that every time I saw Herron, he somehow saw me back.
It all took its toll on my body; even holding Fjolar’s hand, I often went woozy and watery in the knees. It didn’t help that I wasn’t eating enough. We found most of my food in the kingdom’s wooded regions, nuts, fruit, and edible flowers that Fjolar foraged for me—all of them beautiful, luckily, or else they wouldn’t have been there for the picking.
And in one of these, the crooked wood, I first saw the owl.
The crooked wood was a pine forest swathed in deep summer, with all its trees growing uncannily twisted, swooping ninety degrees from the ground at their base before sweeping up into a smooth, curved silhouette like half a cello. Cottages sat tucked between them, painted candy colors and decorated with flowers like exquisite Easter-egg decals.
“It’s a little bit of Poland, for my mistress’s pleasure,” Fjolar told me when I asked, sweeping into a courtier’s bow to make me laugh, his pale hair dappled with leaf shadows. He’d been trying so hard to keep me from getting bogged down in despair, but there was only so much he could do for me. Still, I found the effort sweet, heartening when I needed it.
It was becoming hard to remember what it had even been like, not spending all my time by his side.
“The parts of it I thought you’d like,” he added. “The trees are from the Crooked Forest in West Pomerania, and the houses from the village of Zalipie. They like their flowers there, almost as much as you do.”
I thought of my bedroom ceiling at home in Cattaro, its hanging parasols painted with a wisteria tunnel, and knew exactly where he had gleaned this from.
“I know all about wagers with you,” I tossed back feebly, too worn out for real banter. “Can we look inside the cottages? The soul might be in one.”
We searched each from root cellar to attic. And though all their inside walls were also charmingly painted with flowers, I found with a plummeting heart that not a single one held anything like what we were looking for.
But outside, a flash of sunlight on wings, caught from the corner of my eye, momentarily startled me out of despondency. I whipped around, shading my eyes, trying to see where it had gone. “Fjolar!” I called out breathlessly. “There’s a bird here!”
He froze. “A bird? I don’t think so, flower. There aren’t any animals here, and I would know. The things that mimic life here are for decoration only.”
“But I saw—” Another tawny flicker, and this time I turned quickly enough to follow it. A neat brown owl, small for its kind, took flight from a cottage roof to the nearest branch of a crooked tree. There it settled, staring straight at me with impassive, dark-rimmed jade-and-golden eyes.
I crept up to the tree, holding my breath, afraid any sudden movement would chase her off. Hand still laced with mine, Fjolar trailed me reluctantly. “Hello,” I whispered, so happy to see a living thing besides the two of us—if Fjolar even counted as a living thing—that I almost wanted to cry. “How did you get here?”
“Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think she’s going to answer you, flower,” Fjolar said dryly. The owl turned her round gaze on him and issued a very deliberate screech in his direction.
“I don’t think she li
kes you.” I bit back laughter, standing on tiptoes and reaching a hand high up, thinking she wouldn’t let me touch her. She did; awed, I stroked her feathers, velveteen with a waxen finish, with my fingertip. “But she and I are clearly meant to be friends.”
“Once you’re done petting, we should go,” Fjolar said, and I drew back to look at him, startled by the brusque tone of his voice. Ever since the frosty savanna, he’d been so much gentler with me, solicitous and careful with my brittleness. But now his blue eyes were narrowed in a feline, predatory way—unnervingly familiar from all the times he’d leveled that challenging gaze at me. “I don’t know how this uninvited guest snuck in here, but there are many, many other places left for us to search. Do you really want to linger?”
“You’re right,” I murmured, lowering my hand. “Let’s keep moving.”
But I was inordinately sorry to leave her behind as Fjolar led us to a threshold—a natural arch formed by the overhang of the branches above—and we stepped into the void of the Quiet together, and on to the next piece.
PLACE AFTER PLACE after place. All blurring together like an artist’s muddied palette. Each was shatteringly beautiful in its own way, but I was getting so tired of being wonderstruck without a purpose.
In a tiny boat, Fjolar poled me like a gondolier through a series of linked caverns lit by dangling glowworms, like a stone sky studded with twinkling, pale-blue constellations. We visited rivers with submerged balls of flame that catapulted out of them like falling stars in reverse, and a field that flickered with an endless, electric symphony of lightning. He led me through a Spanish castle like an Aztec temple, half submerged in its own overflowing pool and fountains, the building itself drowning in creeping moss and foliage. It looked exactly like a mausoleum for a demon’s soul, but its musty, dank rooms were empty and reeked of stagnant water.
And everywhere we went, I caught flashes of owl. Sometimes just the slant of her shadow, and other times an actual glimpse of talon, tail, or feathers from the corner of my eye. It wasn’t always brown, as far as I could tell. Occasionally I saw streaks of gray or russet or even snowy white at the very edges of my vision, vanishing with the next blink. But the oddest thing was that the feel of her stayed the same.