NEV REFUSED TO TELL US THE BRIBERY AND STRING-PULLING that had been necessary to grant us permission for an Ostrog pilgrimage; I got the sense that whatever sacrifice she’d made had been big enough that even if it was for Jasmina’s sake, she still resented us a little for it. But three hours later we had it—two of us would be allowed to go, but only two.
Luka wouldn’t hear of Lina and me striking out on our own; protecting us trumped everything, like it always did with him.
“Missy, Ostrog is a cliff monastery, and those roads are hell even for seasoned drivers. I’m not trying to be some ‘girls can’t drive’ asshole, don’t give me that look, Niko. I’m just saying they haven’t had much of a chance to practice. And if this woman is still out there, and is the one who attacked Jasmina, she could be waiting for you in those mountains. If only two can go, it should be me and one of you.”
“Iris,” Niko jumped in. “Take Iris.”
“Hey!” Lina bridled. “I don’t even get a say in this?”
“You couldn’t even climb that runt tree in the schoolyard without wanting to pass out, pie,” Niko pointed out. “You couldn’t handle the jungle gym. Do you really want to be trapped in a moving metal prison thousands of feet up, nothing between you and the plummet, just all that empty air and—”
“Okay, would you please stop?” The skin beneath Lina’s eyes had turned green, translucent like dragonfly wings. “You’re right. That doesn’t sound . . . ideal for me.”
“Exactly.” Niko crossed her slim arms over her chest, satisfied. “You can stay with me, and we’ll see if there’s anything else helpful in Mama’s book. There’s so much in there, and I haven’t had a chance to fully delve into it. Maybe we’ll find something more.”
Lina nodded, chewing on her lip, her eyes clouded with uncertainty. She reached for me, and I pulled her into a quick, fierce hug. “Don’t worry, bunny,” I whispered into her ear. “Let me handle this one. Luka will keep me safe, promise. And about last night, I’m . . .”
“It’s okay,” she murmured back. “You don’t have to say it, I know you are. Just come back to me soon, please?”
“GODDAMN IT, LUKA, how do I get this off?” I demanded, twisting around in the front seat as the seat belt threatened to throttle me.
He shrugged, eyes on the road. “You don’t. Not safe to ride with your feet all tucked up under you like that. Very fetching, but not safe.”
Huffing with frustration, I levered my chair back and jackknifed my knees up to my chest in protest, resting my heels on the dashboard with my soles pressed against the glass.
“Wow, princess,” Luka commented with a sidelong glance. “By all means, smear my windshield with your improbably tiny feet. I wouldn’t want you to feel like you’re not traveling first class.”
“My feet are not tiny.”
“They are so, look at them. I don’t understand how you walk around with those. Probably you could be in a circus, they’re so small. It’s very cute.”
“What about if I take one and put it in your face?” I suggested. “How cute would that be?”
“If you’re looking to drive us into a ravine, you should try it out.”
We’d only been driving for forty-five minutes, but aside from the coast, most of Montenegro was at least three thousand feet above sea level—a whole kingdom of untamed mountains with gentler, fertile plateaus and valleys dipping between them. I thought of ?i?a Jovan as the road wound us up the mountainside, through the fir, spruce, and towering black pines that had given Montenegro its name, their gangly trunks bare of branch and needle until they burst into life high above the rest of the trees. When I’d told Jovan once that I’d like to see skyscraper buildings in person, he’d laughed his hoarse smoker’s laugh and said, “Trust me, sweetheart, people in cities have no idea what truly scrapes the sky.”
I could see now what he meant. Even as we gained altitude, the mountains loomed above us like monoliths, so thickly forested in places that they rolled with greenery as if furred with moss, in others stark and scraped down to the limestone beneath. Some of the exposed stone was creamy as a layered dessert, swirled with butterscotch and russet—I couldn’t look at those too long without the striations beginning to waver, trembling in my vision as the gleam threatened to seize and multiply them into whorling fractals.
Lina would have hated it. Even with my general indifference to heights, I still couldn’t glance past the low guardrail without my stomach pinching a little at the drop.
“How do you think the hajduci ever lived in these mountains?” I asked Luka. The hajduci had been outlaws in the seventeenth century, fighting the Ottoman Empire as guerrilla warriors. “Look at how steep it is out there.”
“Ah, those were rugged highland folk,” he drawled, lengthening our already slow vowels until I smiled despite myself, watching his knuckles shift beneath tanned skin as he rearranged his grip on the wheel. “Montenegrin manhood at its finest. Finer, even, than your chauffeur, if you can conceive of a thing like that.”
“Forsooth, I cannot.”
“I know, the mind boggles. Plus, they were busy hiding from the Ottomans and also chopping them up whenever the opportunity presented itself. So I assume that was pretty motivational. Lots of adrenaline.”
As we wound up and up, I could see a linked series of glacier lakes in the distance, gleaming beneath the morning sun like pools of sky and gold. The more distant sets of mountains looked like they were rising from an ancient sea, bucking out of the water like the coils of some leviathan.
“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” Luka said softly, taking his eyes off the road to glance at the lakes through my window. “Almost primordial.”
“It does make all this a little easier to accept somehow, doesn’t it? A world that looks like this, I mean. Speaking of which, how are you taking all this so well?” I’d told him about what Niko had found for us as he drove, Marzanna’s story and its echo in our dreams. “Being friends with a pair of witches, whose mother happens to be not only undead but also kidnapped. Magic suddenly real. A white-haired woman running all over creation, stealing from us and from churches. I’d have thought the epic shifting of your paradigm would be triggering countrywide earthquakes.”
“I don’t really know, Riss. This does all seem too surreal, way too out of hand, but . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know exactly how to formulate this, and could you try to not be offended?”
“Oh, definitely I won’t, since you started it that way.”
He hissed out a sigh. “What I mean to say is, as completely bizarre as this all is—as far out of any normal, real-world depths that I can navigate—it doesn’t feel nearly as strange as it should. And that’s because of the three of you, I think.”
I stiffened until my back felt like a staff against the pleather seat. “What do you mean by that?”
“Have you ever heard of the uncanny valley hypothesis?”
“Do you think I’ve heard of the uncanny valley hypothesis, Luka?”