Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(36)
“Yes, yes, thank you,” she broke in, grabbing his hand and giving it a sound kiss. I watched the two of them uncertainly, not sure what had shifted the tide, but I put the thought aside as anticipation surged through me. We were going. We were doing something.
HALF AN HOUR later, all four of us had somehow jammed ourselves into Luka’s ancient cherry-red Mazda. As we set off north along the Adriatic Highway I still felt a little giddy, a helium sort of high that buoyed me up even though I knew it would leave me dizzy and deflated once it faded. Luka glanced at me a few times, as if he wanted to say something, but each time he bit back whatever it was.
Outside, the narrow highway wound along the contours of the bay, overhung with the cliffs above us. The surface of the water had swallowed both the mountains and sky, reflecting slick, blurred replicas of blinding blue, gray stone, and even the whites of the clouds that had settled midway down the cliffs like curls of exhaled breath. Beside us, neat ranks and files of buoys bobbed in the water, hosting acres of mussel plantations.
Barely twenty minutes later, the highway dipped west and the first stone houses of Perast came into view. The little fishermen’s town nestled at the gently sloping base of Mount Saint Elias, sheltered from the northern winds during winter, and angled toward the cool breezes that funneled through the Verige Strait in high summer.
“Look,” Luka said, and I followed his gaze. Across from Perast, stranded in the middle of the bay and dwarfed by the granite loom of the mountains all around, two islets stood guard like tiny, twinned versions of lost Avalon. “You can see them from here. Saint George, and Our Lady of the Rocks.”
Malina stirred in the backseat, propping herself up in the space between us. “Saint George is abandoned, right? Just the old Benedictine abbey.”
Luka shook his head. “The abbey’s from the twelfth century, but the Saint George church is from the seventeenth. There’s a cemetery there, too, for old nobles from Perast.”
“How do you know?”
“Mama wanted to be buried there,” he said simply. “When nothing was working anymore, she wanted us to take her on a tour of the monasteries and churches, the nicest ones. Remember, Niko? We thought it was a last-resort thing, hedging her bets with all the saints. But really, she just thought they were beautiful. She wanted to say good-bye, and find the right one.”
I snuck a look at Luka, my throat clenching. I hadn’t known that about his mother. Ko?tana had died three years ago from leukemia, and Luka had been wrecked for years after. It was part of the reason I’d never fully believed he’d go to college in Belgrade until he was gone; I couldn’t imagine him leaving his father and Niko after she died. But he had. Life went on.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, catching Niko’s glistening dark eyes in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t know.”
She pressed her lips into a wavering half smile. “It’s okay. They don’t bury anyone out there anymore, anyway. She’s back in Cattaro. But she’d have liked that we stopped by here, don’t you think, Luka? And that it made us think of her.”
I glanced back out at the islet, the ancient, blocky silhouettes of the church and the abandoned abbey, overgrown with dense vegetation and slender cypress trees. There was a deep and sacred sort of beauty to it, as if it stood still even as the currents of time parted and flowed neatly around it, leaving it untouched. It looked like the kind of place that could keep a soul safe.
“Why aren’t there any trees on Our Lady of the Rocks?” I asked, tracing the outlines of the other islet on the window. The church of the Blessed Mary was stone, too, but more elaborate, with a domed apse, a round bell tower, and what looked like a guardian’s house attached. The rest of the isle was flat and bare, empty of anything green.
“Because it’s man-made, not like Saint George.” He cast me a skeptical look. “Have you really never heard any of this?”
I shrugged. “Mama was never much for churches.”
He craned his neck as he eased us into a parking spot, next to a restaurant tucked behind a grapevine trellis. “I’ll tell you all about it on the ferry. It’s an unusual story, not the kind of thing you forget.”
There were two ferries tagging each other back and forth to the island, and we caught one, ducking our heads beneath the canopy that protected the simple boat on rainy days.
Once settled on the wooden bench that ran down the center, slick with waterproof white paint, Luka continued. “Our Lady isn’t just a Roman Catholic church—it’s a sailors’ votive shrine. They say that in 1452, the Mortesi? brothers, who were recovering from some seafarers’ disease—scurvy, probably—found an icon on a rock in the middle of the bay, a painting of the Madonna and the baby Jesus. Right afterward they made a miraculous recovery. Due to the painting, of course, or possibly the sudden availability of oranges and sauerkraut.”
I nudged him with an elbow to the ribs. “Spoken like a true believer, Damjanac.”
“Just laying out the facts. Anyway, the townspeople took this as a sign that this spot was marked as holy, and began sinking boats heaped with stones around that original rock. They layered a foundation so that the main altar of the shrine would perch on the reef where the painting was found.”
The hull scraped along the islet’s wooden dock, and Luka swung off first once the captain had secured the ropes. Malina and then Niko caught his outstretched hand and hopped off the makeshift steps that had been propped along the boat’s side, heading toward the bronze door of the church’s main portal. I laid my hand on Luka’s palm and lingered on the boat for a moment longer, feeling the lurching bob beneath my feet. The roots of my hair prickled oddly, and I felt suddenly hesitant to step onto the dock.