It was far from the kind of cliffside-clinging village I’d always imagined from Mama’s story. But it felt, at least, like another version of the truth. As if everything she’d ever told us had been like a matryoshka nesting doll, and we had to crack open shell after shell to find the kernel of pure truth at the heart.
Luka and Niko had raged in every way they could think of, but Lina and I had found our way back to each other and clasped tight. No amount of their battering against our seamless united front would budge us. We’d left Niko in raging tears, pounding her tiny clenched fist against the Prince’s bar top.
“Why won’t you let us come?” Luka had asked me after she turned away from us to pour herself a shot of tequila, slamming both glass and bottle with abandon, refusing to talk or to accept a good-bye hug. “Or just me. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You’ll need help.”
“And that’s exactly why we have to do it alone,” I’d whispered back. It hurt so much to meet his eyes and see what I was doing to him, but I refused to spare myself by looking away. “We have no idea what we’re going to find and I—I can’t risk you like that. Or Niko. Whatever’s in those mountains, I can’t let it have you. You would do the same, if it were you and Niko instead of us, all tangled up in something this terrifying and invisible. You’d never let us come with you. You know it.”
He kept his teeth clamped tight against everything he wanted to fling at me, his fists clenched on the bar top. “Okay, then,” he said finally. “Fine. But is there anything I can do for you? I need—just something to do, Iris. Anything.”
“Could you tell Jovan that we had to go, please? If we say good-bye, he’ll never let us go, he’ll have the police hold us if he has to. Maybe if you could tell him that we found something to do with Jasmina, with the people who made her—he’ll know what that means—and that we had to follow it all the way to the end. Maybe it’ll give him some comfort.”
“Of course it won’t. But I’ll do it, and we’ll see him through this. I promise.”
He nodded one last time, then caught me in a fierce hug. I could feel the hammering of his heart against my cheek. It would take me a long while to forget the carefully curated devastation in his eyes, especially because of how completely I deserved it. I’d let him down and broken his trust in every form, and now I wouldn’t even let him do the only thing he’d ever wanted—just to help me.
Still, whatever was waiting for us in the mountains had to be cordoned off from everyone we loved, no matter how much those left behind us hurt.
ABOUT AN HOUR and a half in, it was the ribbons that woke me fully.
I peeled my face from the glass, squinting into the glare. My cheek was both numb and hot, and I’d left a charming snail-smear of drool on the window. Beyond it, the day was crystalline, a pennant of clear sky above even greener mountains on either side of us.
We’d worried about what we’d even do once we got to ?abljak, but as we looped around the hairpin turns that seemed impossibly narrow for the unwieldy lumber of the bus, I could feel the ribbons surging against my scalp, glowing with a sweet, lovely warmth nothing like the spitting-cobra tingle I’d felt at the churches.
It must have been a slow burn, like the gradual turning of a dial, because neither of us could tell when it had begun. But now it felt purely wonderful, like the pull of home after such a long, long time away. Like the idea of crawling into your own bed after the hardest day.
We didn’t talk about it. Lina could hear that I felt what she felt, a madcap thrill strong enough to revive me from my stupor. As the bus groaned into its ?abljak stop, we were the first to pile out and rush into the station. A leathery woman with windburned cheeks and wiry hair signed a yellow Fiat into our custody without even bothering to check my license, though her eyes narrowed as she scanned our faces.
Outside, a single shared glance confirmed that Lina would drive. I’d gotten the most practice with Luka, but there was no way I could have managed it, not with my limbs still feeling like kindling. As she pulled carefully out of the lot, easing back into the motions of driving stick, it didn’t seem to matter that all we had was a tourist guidebook and map the woman at the station had given us. The ribbons didn’t just warm and soothe; they tugged in a gentle, possessive way, like fingers wound lovingly into our hair, massaging away the qualms. Straining like a compass needle. We were going home. And maybe there, we’d finally find our mother again—or at least understand enough about what had happened to her to learn how to let her go.
We drove past the ?abljak township, bare of people in its off season. We passed empty streets lined with domed streetlamps, wooden chalets with long, slanted eaves that shed snow during the heavy winters, and ski hotels shaped like wedges for the same reason. For a while, a sheepdog puppy trailed the car, barking like a beast, his coat shaggy and his eyes a startling, milky blue. We reached a glacier lake ringed with soaring pines—Zmijsko Jezero, I found on the map, the Lake of Serpents—and still we climbed higher into the dense, evergreen woods.
“This is the way, isn’t it?” I asked her. “You feel it, too?”
“Oh, yes.” She jiggled her shoulders with pleasure. “It’s definitely the way.”
Checking the guidebook, I pointed out the mountain summits silhouetted above us as we drove deeper and higher into the forest. The humped outline of Veliki Medjed, named “Big Bear” for its bear-snout shape, roared into the sky next to the crisp, near-perfect triangle of Savin Kuk.
When the forest finally widened into a clearing that held a dark, massive chalet the size of a hotel, the ribbons pealed like soundless bells, all homecoming and jubilance. As Lina pulled us into the gravel driveway, neither of us had any doubt that we’d arrived.
We stepped out into the clearing together, the chalet looming in front of us, hewn from deep mahogany logs. It was at least five stories tall, its eaves nearly brushing the ground, wide glass windows opening into what looked like a ballroom. The clearing itself looked like something out of a fairy tale, the kind that Malina and I had read to each other once Mama could no longer be bothered. Clouds of midges whirled like snowflakes in the golden shafts of afternoon sunlight, and silken spiderwebs glinted, strung between the pines. Some even floated through the air in glimmering strands, untethered, clipped from their moorings by the briskness of the breeze.
“It’s so pretty here,” Malina murmured, echoing my thoughts.
I was still nodding when the giant door swung open on silent hinges. A woman stepped out, and for a moment the world shifted sideways.