“How exactly will ‘all this’ be over?” I asked her. “How did it even begin?”
“With one of you fair ladies falling in love, I believe,” she replied as she shifted the van into gear. The engine sputtered alarmingly, but turned over. “That was when you first drew his notice. Like I said, Jasmina and I had sworn an oath to each other: the one chosen would love Death so fiercely he wouldn’t want another, and the other would run and hide from the coven, live freely and never have children. So I told him I’d be the last, and he believed me—you two were the first to ever grow up outside of coven, disconnected from Mara. He couldn’t feel you through his connection with her, didn’t even know that you existed. And he was so happy with me, content enough he even claimed he wanted me to be the last. Because after me no other would compare.”
I looked over at Lina, whose hand was at her mouth. “Mama told us never to fall in love,” she said faintly. “Is that why?”
“That’s why,” Dunja confirmed. I watched her in the rearview mirror, her lips twisting with sadness. “When he felt one of you fall, he just couldn’t help himself. He had to see you, to go look for himself. He’s like a spoiled child that way, drawn by each new thing. No matter how much he claims to love the one he has.”
A lightning shudder of chills flashed through me, a tingle of familiarity. A spoiled child, drawn by each new thing. I knew a bit about what that looked like. In fact, I knew exactly what it looked like. “So Death really is a person?”
The car lurched as she turned onto a rutted semblance of a road. Some little forest animal dashed across the path in front of us, its brushy tail disappearing last as it plunged into a thicket of fern and wild strawberry.
Dunja tilted her head back and forth sinuously, considering. Even that simple gesture was hypnotic to watch. “He certainly seemed so to me, though I don’t believe that’s entirely true. Mara’s spell forces a communion, a bond between the embodied essence of an immaterial force and the soul of a material creature. He only agreed to it because she beseeched the old gods to lend him flesh and then made him love her enough to be willing to grant immortality, in return for such prizes as her daughters are. It’s all beyond true comprehension. But it felt like . . .”
She gave a wisp of a sigh, and the softness of it was unmistakably wistful. “It was like the most vivid fever dream, yet the truest dream I ever had. Truer than the small, faint flicker of a life I lived before it. It’s almost hard to hate her, for all she stole from me—from all of us—when being with him was the singular glory that it was. It might be a terrible wrong, a craven evil to breed daughters for such a selfish purpose. But I won’t lie and say it wasn’t the happiest I’ve ever been.”
She missed him, badly. There was a terrible longing beneath the bright surface, like the hottest heart inside a star.
“What did he look like?” I asked her, my heart still pounding.
“He appeared to me like a boy I’d once admired—a form that was particularly pleasing to me. I couldn’t tell you if that’s how it always works, but I suspect it might be. We’re as much a part of the pairing as he is; his flesh echoes whatever we desire, whatever is best to incite and seal in the love.”
My stomach churned with bile. Fjolar had always seemed so familiar to me, almost remembered, and now that original, underlying memory struck like a spearhead. I’d watched a boy once, many years ago, walking along the Riva. A Scandinavian tourist, the most handsome boy I’d ever seen, jostling along with friends who’d never be brighter than they were in his shadow. He’d looked at me and smiled admiringly, the smile spreading wide across his broad and bony face, lighting his gas-flame eyes.
He’d seen me, liked me, enough that I never forgot. And everything else Fjolar had been—the eyeliner, the bracelets, those jagged, lovely tattoos; even the story about a younger brother, a cruel mother, the similarities in our names—had all been designed to appeal to me.
Malina may have been the one who fell in love, but I’d been the one he’d sought out, and wanted for himself. Did that mean I could have saved Lina, no matter what? Did it mean I might even have enjoyed it? And at bottom, what did that make me, that I’d been so ready to dive into him at the expense of anything else?
“How did you leave at all?” Malina asked Dunja. “It doesn’t sound like that’s a choice the ‘offering’ would have.”
“Once he was gone, his kingdom couldn’t hold me any longer,” she said simply. “It’s like a trapped bubble, a pocket between our world and the next, dependent on its occupants. A space he and Mara made together—a bit like you blowing your glass, Iris, forming new space with your breath and solidifying it—as a haven for him and each companion. Without him in it, it means nothing, and so I woke—to find him, and to bring him back.”
“And how do you plan to do it?”
“By stealing Mara’s spell from her and shifting it to me. Though the spell flows through her, it needs the pinions of her other daughters, the ones who also become undying after they offer up their own. Like an electrical grid. I want to close the loop with just him and me inside it. No more succession; no more immortality. Just he and I forever in his kingdom—and freedom for the two of you.”
WE DROVE DEEP inside the forest before we stopped, tucked high up in the mountains for Dunja’s comfort. I was swimming with fatigue by then, and beside me Lina was swaying on her feet. Though Dunja seemed impermeable to the night chill, both of us were nearly chattering with cold. We’d traded in our flimsy outfits for some plain T-shirts and shorts we’d found in the back, and sneakers too big for both of us, but it still wasn’t enough to shield from a mountain night.
“You’re cold,” she said, almost a question. “And near dead on your feet. Of course. I remember about that. There’s sleeping bags in the back, why don’t we put those out for you?”
“What about you?” I asked as we unrolled them, the puffy blue material ballooning. “Do you get tired? Do you even sleep?”
“I haven’t tired since I returned, so I’m not sure—perhaps it will come, in time? Everything looks different than I remember, and I can feel—I can smell and hear and taste too much. The air itself has cloying flavor when I breathe, at times so I can barely stand it on my tongue. You’ve seen the things I can do, the way I’m strong. Whatever I am now, it’s far from human anymore.”