“So how, exactly, are these bits and bobs supposed to work?” I asked Niko, sweeping my hand at the pile.
“We know Mara bound Death to her through a love ritual, though we can’t know exactly how it worked, and we aren’t her, anyway,” Niko said.
We’d spent over an hour explaining everything to her and Luka. I’d expected more pushback, more incredulity. But then there was Dunja beside us, gazing narrowly at the pile. She should have looked absurd, barefoot in the forest with her snow-fox hair and harem pants, sunlight sparking off the sequined band that covered her breasts above the bare expanse of navel. But she didn’t. Instead, she looked like something precious from another world, too queer and beautiful to be human. Like something that had been born in a realm a sideways step from our own.
“This gathering should act as a reversal,” Niko continued, ticking them off on her fine fingers. “The tapestry from Our Lady of the Rocks is a symbol of boundless love, the willing sacrifice Jacinta made for her husband—her labor and eyesight, in exchange for the hope that she might bring him home. The opposite of Mara’s forced-labor love.”
“Not only that,” Dunja broke in. “That island was meant to be consecrated to Mara, a gift in her name. The brothers who discovered her figurine on that first stone kept it; and Jacinta sought it out, ground it to bits, wove the fragments into the tapestry. Her will—a mortal’s will, but still, not to be dismissed—was that Mara’s power of love help save her husband, the chosen of her heart. It therefore connects directly to our witch mother, but with a purpose equal and opposite to the spell that she wrought. Subverted by one woman’s choice.”
“And Malina’s violin and Iris’s sculpture,” Niko continued. “They represent you, the gifts you inherited as Mara’s daughters so you could be fun and pretty for Death like the spell demands. And Mara’s hair, and Dunja’s, link this ritual to them, specifically.”
“They used to call her Black Mara when she was truly young,” Dunja said, her eyes distant. “She was always proud of her hair. That was how they caught me in the first place; I had to risk getting close enough to her to steal some for this, and they swarmed me, trapped me before I could take it.”
“What about the bones?” Malina asked, choking a little over the last word.
We knew now what Dunja had taken: the remnants of the saint’s right hand, wrapped in a torn-off bit of the velvet raiment. She’d called it his “righteous hand,” and I hadn’t been able to tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. I wondered with a shudder if there’d still been scraps of tendon attached to it, if it had come loose at the lightest tug, or if she’d had to snap it free like chicken bone.
“From what you’ve said, the Christian canon doesn’t agree with Mara, not if she’s bound to much older gods,” Niko said. “Christianity doesn’t exactly play well with others, particularly witches. That’s probably why you had that reaction at the Ostrog monastery, Iris. Those bones are holy, and they rebel against Mara and her blood. Their burning should release that aversion, and that’ll be our fuel.”
Luka spoke up for the first time. He sat with his back against a pine trunk, the color finally returned to his face now that he was sure I wasn’t going to vanish on him again. “So, basically, you’re just doing what the legends in Mama’s book say. You’re trying to burn her—and then drown her, I assume, since we’re by the water.”
Niko raised her eyebrows at him. “That’s right. Do you object?”
“I don’t object, gnat,” he tossed back. “I’m just not sure we’re going about this the right way.”
“And why not?”
“Because you’re acting as though it’s an algorithm, and all you have to do is plug in the proper values for it to spit out the result you want. That’s not how spellwork goes. A collection of symbols isn’t enough by itself. There has to be something—something more. Active intention, maybe. Even I know that much from Mama’s stories.”
“How would you know? You hated her stories.”
“I didn’t hate them,” he forced out. “And I always listened. And I’m just . . . I think something here doesn’t add up properly.”
Dunja moved so quickly I barely had time to gasp. One moment she’d been facing the lake, and in the next she’d streaked over to Luka, where she crouched balanced on the balls of her feet, violence radiating off her like a wildcat with a swishing tail.
“Maybe that’s true,” she said through gritted teeth, “and maybe it’s not. Either way, I don’t remember asking for a critical analysis from doubting Thomas. And unless you can present us with another solution, why don’t you consider not undermining your sister before she even begins?”
He met her gaze, his hazel eyes even. All of us held our breath as she considered him for a moment longer, eyes dangerously narrowed, then sprang up and spun on her heel.
“Um . . .” Niko turned to Dunja, warily. “It has to be you who does it, actually. You’re the one trying to move the spell, right, shift it from Mara and onto you? So the intention behind it has to be yours. You should be the one who sings, too.”
Silence settled over the four of us as Dunja stalked off to fetch the jug of gasoline that had been bumping in the back of the van beside the pots and pans. She doused it over the objects and the bristle of kindling that surrounded them. I felt a piercing pang for what would be lost. That singular tapestry; the bougainvillea, the gift I’d given my mother made with my own breath; the violin that my sister had used to play me everything I’d ever felt but couldn’t say, since she was barely old enough to hold it properly. Even the idea of burning the saint’s hand felt like sacrilege.
Still, there was a quivering sense of expectation in the warm, early-summer air, the sunlight dense as amber as it fell over us and broke itself into the ripples of the lake. The world beyond us and the lake seemed to have receded entirely. The van was tucked into a secluded campsite about a mile away, far from where tourists usually gathered, and it was still too early in the season for hikers and wildlife enthusiasts to be making their pilgrimages to the Black Lake.
I wondered if the name was why Dunja had chosen this place—yet another connection to Mara, besides its obvious and staggering beauty. A perfect ring of pines surrounded the water, reflected in its sky-blue surface; one of the pines had died, and stood white and bare next to its green neighbors like a lingering ghost.
Dunja stood still in front of the assemblage, gathering herself. She splayed and flexed her fingers a few times, the only sign of nervousness I’d seen her show so far. When she began singing, her voice was clear and lovely as a lyre. Probably all of them were taught to sing, along with everything else. Just in case that was something that he liked.
Her bones are of nightmares, her face cut from dreams,
Her eyes are twinned ice chips, cold glimmering things,
Her hair is the scent that will drive you to death,