“Look at that!” he whispered, delighted as a child. “My eyes! Look what you made for me, you wondrous thing.”
“Thank you, I . . .” My mouth was so dry. It was hard to talk. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I don’t like it,” he said, low, eyes narrowing. “I fucking love it, flower girl.”
He began kissing me then, like hot summer rain, a shower down my neck and chest.
I tried to raise my head, only to find my neck wouldn’t hold it before it thumped back down. “Fjolar, I think I need—I need to sleep.”
He hummed a disapproving sound against my skin. “But it’s still early. Play a little more, hmm?”
Biting my lip, I stared up at the sky, which was already bleeding into dawn. His mouth was searing on my stomach; I could hear and feel his quickened breath, and I strained up toward it despite myself as he traced his lips around each hip bone. The faintest stop stop stop echoed in my mind before I gave up, and I fell asleep with him still kissing me lightly, that hollow echo plaintive, like a stranded girl calling from a distant mountaintop.
I DREAMED OF honey.
There was a meadow first, alive with rippling waves of grass, a green sea bobbing with a regatta of wildflowers. Bees flitted between them, too fat, gold, and friendly for waking life; I could see the tiny dangle of their legs spotted with bright yellow pollen. Pines circled the clearing like guardian soldiers, tall and so densely needled they were nearly black, and behind them in the distance there were craggy mountains everywhere, sere and snowcapped and rolling with these same proud pines.
It felt like a place I knew. And it smelled like the place I was born. Sunlit air and a cool breeze that still held a breath of the mountaintop snow it had swept over, the invisible ice crystals it had stolen in its wake. Sharp grass and wildflowers, too, and piercing evergreen.
Somehow I watched it all from the Ostrog monastery ledge with Luka, a spoonful of honeyed apples sticky in my mouth.
Even a batch from the same hive can taste completely different two weeks later. People who really know honey can tell exactly where each batch is from, and when.
And then instead of honey, the skyr cake was back on my tongue, milk cultures and crushed biscuits melting.
It tastes like home to me, more than anything else. The happiest of my home.
Taste and smell together, like a time machine.
I burst awake like a surfacing diver, gasping. Lina’s face was directly above mine, gorgeous with pallor in the unearthly bright early-morning light, her eyes nearly silver above plum shadows. Her cold hands were wrapped around my face.
“Are you okay?” she whispered fiercely. “I knew you’d have come back here to see him. Did he do something to you? I’ll kill him if he did, I’ll—”
“No,” I mumbled, trying to pry my tongue loose from the roof of my mouth. I was thirsty and starving and nauseous, all at once. I ran my shaking hands over my body, searching, a far-off panic beating inside me like a distant drum. But everything was where it should be, my shorts and tank top snugly on, bra straps digging comfortingly into my skin. In the simplest physical sense, my body felt undisturbed. “I don’t think so. I’m fine.”
But even if he hadn’t touched me after I passed out, I was nowhere near fine. I’d seen Mama debone a whole duck once, and that was how I felt. Like a limp sack of muscles, a tangle of flaccid veins and tendons with no chassis to support them. Sitting up made me groan with pain, even with Lina’s arm behind my back.
“Where’re Luka and Niko?” I forced out.
“You were still gone when I woke up, and I didn’t want to wait for them.” Her nostrils flared with fury, exactly like Mama’s in high temper. “What’s wrong, Riss? What did that bastard do to you?”
“He didn’t do anything, really, it wasn’t his fault. . . .”
But he’d known I was tired; I’d told him over and over. And even then he’d wanted me to show him, to bloom fractals for him until I drained myself into exhaustion.
I felt on the cusp of a very great rage, but I was still too tired to take the step. And there was something else we had to do, besides.
I met Lina’s furious eyes, so grateful for her. She could do it for me while I rallied. She could cup my fury in her hands and blow on the embers when they guttered. “No, you’re right. He did do something to me. But that’s not the important thing right now, not the most important, anyway. I know what it means, Lina. I know why Mama’s perfume was called the Scent of Home. There was honey in it; we have to find out exactly where it came from.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE BUS JUDDERED BENEATH US, STRAINING ALONG THE narrow mountain roads. I sat next to the window so Lina wouldn’t have to look at the plunging depths beyond the mountainside, but both of us were too exhausted to care much either way. She held my hand in her lap, cradled in both of hers; my head was tucked into her neck. The pilled seats were so saggy I kept feeling like I was going to collapse right through mine, like falling down a rabbit hole, and the air was stale and warm from the feeble AC.
Even worse, that quivery, unstable feeling of emptiness refused to recede, as if Fjolar had sucked the marrow from my bones. I’d gone limp as a jellyfish washed out onto a beach. Even deadened with fatigue, it scared me badly how empty I felt.
Still, I passed out almost as soon as we’d boarded and settled in, right after wolfing down two smoked-ham and cheese sandwiches that Lina pressed on me, washed down with a liter bottle of orange Fanta. I dreamed about him in jolts and flashes as I drowsed on Lina’s shoulder. Every time I woke up enough to be aware of her, I could hear her grinding her teeth in silent fury, jaw clicking.
“You were right about him,” I whispered up to her, and even defenseless as I was, the words stuck like burrs in my mouth. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s not your fault, Riss.”
“But you warned me—”
“It doesn’t matter. I can hear you hurting and tired, and still I can’t even tell what happened. So whatever it is, you couldn’t have been ready for it, okay? Whatever it is, it was his fault.”
I grasped her hand tight, hoping she could hear my unspoken thanks.
As I slipped in and out of sleep, my temple tilted against the window after Lina curled up away from me, my mind batted vaguely at the happenings of the morning. Niko had checked her mother’s book for us and confirmed that the honey in Mama’s perfume had been very specific—a batch harvested in ?abljak, in early spring. ?abljak was the highest-altitude town in all the Balkans, perched on the imposing Durmitor range; Lina and I had both known that much from school.