<Aww. Okay, but I hope you trust them soon.>
Out loud, I say, “Thank you,” and then mutter a binding in Old Irish to keep all my hairs on my head, a precaution that Atticus recommends when dealing with them. I move to take a spot on a blanket to the coven leader’s left but with a basket between us. The nearby witches make minute adjustments so that they can see me better, while the ones on the opposite side of the trunk move so that they have a clear view. They’re not dressed alike, to suggest that they’re anything but friends, or in any fashion that might suggest they’re into the occult. They’re wearing clothing appropriate for a sunny but chilly late autumn day. Some wear jeans, others leggings under skirts with their feet shoved into boots and purple scarves around their necks. Light jackets of varying materials and colors, and a couple of cute knit hats on their heads. Besides Malina, whose long straight blond hair instantly identifies her, I think I recognize four other original members by Atticus’s shorthand descriptions: Owl-Eyed Roksana, Bedhead Klaudia, Kazimiera Who’s Damn Tall, and Cherubic Berta.
“Would you like a cucumber sandwich or something to drink?” Berta asks. She has rosy cheeks and I suspect she might be a bit sloshed, judging by the besotted grin on her face and the nearly empty glass of wine in her hand with an even emptier bottle nearby.
“No, thank you,” I say. “I ate recently and I’m not hungry.”
“I’d introduce you to everyone, but I expect you’re here for business rather than pleasure,” Malina says. When I nod and grimace by way of apology, she smiles in understanding. “We appreciate you being direct and forthright with us. What did you wish to talk about, then?”
“Your predecessor placed a cloak around Atticus’s sword that shielded it from divination. I wonder if you can do the same thing to me?”
“Yes. We can provide you with a divination cloak. But it’s not the sort of thing for which we accept coin.”
“That’s good, because I don’t have a single, uh … I was going to say penny, but you probably don’t use those in Poland.”
“No, we use the grosz for small coins,” one of the witches says—since her legs appear longer than some people are tall, I think she is Kazimiera.
“Don’t have a single grosz on me either.”
“Then you can earn your cloak,” Malina says, “by helping us find the white horse of ?wi?towit.”
“I beg your pardon?” She’s moving quite fast—she probably already knew what I was going to ask and what she would ask in return.
“?wi?towit is an old Slavic god of war and divination. There are slightly different spellings and pronunciations of his name depending on which Slavic country you’re in, but he was—or is—important to Polish pagans like ourselves.”
“And he had a white horse. Did he lose it or did somebody steal it?”
“We’re not sure.”
“Why is the horse important? Why isn’t ?wi?towit looking for him?”
“We are not sure ?wi?towit is still alive, actually. But we believe that the horse is.”
It appears that there are no quick answers to my questions, since I’m missing context. “You’d better start at the beginning.”
Malina turns to one of her coven with overlarge glasses and a thicket of frizzy, dirty blond hair tamed into a thick ponytail. “Roksana, you’re better at this sort of thing. Will you give her the condensed version?”
“With pleasure.” She smiles primly and swings her giant peepers in my direction. “To the northwest, off the coast of Germany in the Baltic Sea, there is an island called Rügen.”
“Really? Named after Count Rugen, the six-fingered man?”
“What? No. Named after the Rujani people, a Slavic tribe that occupied it from the ninth to twelfth centuries. The current name is a German corruption.”
“Oh.”
“On the northeastern tip of the island, at Cape Arkona, there was a fortified cult site called Jaromarsburg. They had a temple there to the god ?wi?towit. It was the last outpost of Slavic paganism before the Danish king laid siege to it in 1168 and defeated the Rujani. The Danes burned down the temple and the carved idol of ?wi?towit and forced everyone into Christianity afterward. The Rujani were eventually assimilated into the Germanic tribes nearby, and their language died out in a couple of centuries. But what happened to ?wi?towit and his horse is what we wish to find out. They disappeared.”
“You mean they were physically present at Jaromarsburg?”
“Perhaps not ?wi?towit himself. But his horse was, until—we are guessing—immediately before the Danish invasion.”
“And how do you know this if it was almost a thousand years ago?”