There was also a brilliant little heap right in front of her knees, as if she’d shaped it into a pyramid with her hands, and though I wasn’t close enough to tell what it was, I could see it glittering madly beneath the moonlight.
One of the sigils kept catching my eye, because I knew—I felt—this one had been made of something small, something fuzzy-haired and squalling as it swung little fists in search of a missing mother. Because that was what it would have taken, to summon the attention and favor of the old gods who would let her do what must be done. To give body to that which had none.
And yet as soon as I thought it—she killed a child for this—the certainty was gone.
She watched me, humming a tune that dipped low before soaring high, the warmth of her rising off her silhouette in an icy halo. This dark flower of a woman, this sacred lady, would never have done a thing like that. I couldn’t have loved her if she had, and love for her was the only thing I knew.
Without breaking the lock of our gaze, she reached out and delicately plucked up one of the stone blades, her fingers fine and dark against the snow. Slowly, she drew it along the inside of her arm, and I winced as I saw it bite into skin, the well and sluice of her blood down to her palms. She let it drip over the flowers and patterned powders, then gathered them all up and crushed them between her hands. With splayed fingers, she smeared the paste over her face, and throat, and chest, until her eyes blazed between the whorls and streaks, her hair like water dappled with moonlight.
The song she hummed grew louder, and I loved her so much I wanted to die. If she would let me be her daughter—if she would deign to be my mother—I would fling myself off mountains, let river water fill my lungs until they burst. But only if my death was what she wanted.
Then she rose up in a fluid movement, rocking back onto her heels. The love inside me eddied like whirlpools, tinged with a dash of panic, a hint of terror. She made her way to me with slow, deliberate steps, each fine-boned foot searing an imprint into the snow below her soles. A light, feathery snow began to fall, and it gathered in my lashes even as it barely glanced her skin before melting.
Her fingers were so hot when she trailed them over my face that I would have flinched away from her, if her humming hadn’t held me fast.
“Mara,” she whispered, the sound of it so alien I wondered if it was a word in some other tongue. She bared her teeth in a smile, and they flashed white in the dark.
“Mara,” she said again, her tongue flicking behind her teeth. She ran her fingers through my hair. The snow had turned to flurries that whipped around us, and still she stroked my hair, from its roots to its ends, until I nearly swooned at her touch. Even in the dream, ribbons were threaded through its length. “Marzanna. More. Moréna.”
It wasn’t a word, I realized. It was her. It was her name, and she had many.
“Mar?ena,” she continued through gritted teeth. A flood of pure terror flushed through me, until she gripped my face in one strong, bloodied hand and I went slack, gasping with fear and adoration. I could smell her fully now, the iron reek of blood, the dry salt of bone, and an overwhelming wave of sandalwood. “Morana, Mora, MARMORA!”
The last she shrieked into my face, her voice blending with the gale, and I tore myself awake like a bandage off a wound. I was still screaming her names as I sat up in bed, my entire body shuddering. Beside me, Malina sat stone-faced, her jaw clenched so hard I could see the tendons in her throat twitching.
I folded over until my head lay in her lap, pressing my fists against my face.
“Did you see her?” she whispered, in a cold, uncanny dual voice that sounded nothing like her. I’d never heard her just speak in polyphony before. “Did you?”
“Yes.” I bit back a whimper. “I saw her.”
It felt like a long time until she laid her hand on my head.
NINE
I WOKE AT DAWN, AS IF MY INTERNAL ALARM CLOCK hadn’t come dislodged in spite of everything that had happened. It seemed impossible that either of us had managed to get back to sleep after a dream like that—a dream that we’d somehow shared, something we’d never done before—but Malina was still resolutely asleep, curled tightly like a mollusk with a little frown creased into her brow, her lips pursed and rosy as a baby’s.
I didn’t want to wake her so early, but I needed to be outside. I needed the world firm and real beneath my feet, to breathe warm morning air until I could calibrate to this new normal.
Throwing a heather-gray cashmere wrap over my nightgowned shoulders, I eased the bedroom window open and dropped lightly onto the smooth stones of the courtyard. ?i?a Jovan lived in a pied-à-terre in one of the renovated stone buildings near the Northern River Gate, the Old Town’s back entrance. It was right across from our favorite pizzeria, the Bastion, named after the fortifications that led out of the Old Town along the clear, green water of the ?kurda. The air was always cooler here, like spray to the face, and it already smelled like baking calzones: the insides a molten mass of cheese, prosciutto, and mushrooms spiced with oregano, and a rich dollop of sour cream on the top.
Whatever eagle eyes the police had posted to watch over our house had apparently called it a night long before dawn. I could see one drooping at his post, snoring in his chair in Jovan’s wild little garden. Other than him and the bakers inside the pizzeria, the small square was deserted beneath the blazing pink and orange of a sky shot through with veins of molten gold.
There shouldn’t have been anyone around watching me. But there was.
I could feel it, a tingle over the crown of my head that spread down the back of my neck like a flurry of pins and needles. People had stared at me plenty over the years, at me and Malina both, and I was intimately familiar with how the weight of eyes usually felt. But this was different, so intent I almost felt as if I was being touched, caressed by fingernails running lightly through my hair and down my nape.
It felt so weirdly delicious yet uncomfortable that I froze, scanning the square. Nothing stirred against the gray of the stone blocks, other than the whisper of lacy curtains behind open white shutters across the way, and a scattering of wildflowers nodding in Jovan’s garden. They pinwheeled into an unruly whorl as soon as my gaze landed on them, and I looked hastily away.