Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(37)



Luke gave me a little tug and I hopped off, trailing after him reluctantly. “Hail the Queen / Of the Boka sea.” He read the inscription off the bronze door as we walked across the threshold. “You are the red dawn / The shield of our faith.”

“What is that?” I whispered to him. There was none of that cold density in here that some churches exerted, a silent demand for continued silence. But somehow even this cool, sweeter hush felt cloying to me, itchy on my skin.

“A hymn for Our Lady, looks like.”

He wandered off toward the altar, but I stayed in the nave, turning in a little circle over the blue and gray diamond-tiled floor. The ceiling was painted elaborately with celestial motifs, each scene cordoned off by braided gilt. The walls were lavished with framed paintings, the bottom row above the choir benches featuring images I recognized from the Old Testament, of both male and female prophets. The topmost row held four massive paintings, two on each side of the nave, a gleaming silver frieze in between them.

The entire inside of the church was rife with repeating patterns, and again I could feel the beginnings of the gleam swelling in my sight. I wanted to wallow in it, to be delighted in this sudden resurgence—I’d missed it so badly, for so many years—but this felt almost hostile in a way I didn’t remember from before. As if it wanted to multiply this church’s insides into endless fractals and then shatter them, like a mallet brought down on a block of ice.

“Missy?” Luka said, hand on the small of my back. “You okay?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m fine. I just need a minute.”

Trying to narrow my focus, I drew closer to one of the silver plates, an exquisite rendering of a storm-wracked ship with one splintered mast, a cloud-borne Madonna hovering above it in blessing. The metalwork was so finely done that the waves beneath the ship’s prow churned in a fine, almost lacy froth.

“They’re votive plates,” a tentative voice said over my shoulder. “Perast has always been home to sailors. Whenever they survived some tragedy at sea, they would make a solemn oath.”

I turned from the plate. A gangly, green-eyed boy about my age stood behind me, his freckled cheeks flushing adorably when I met his gaze. I smiled at him. “What kind of oath?”

“The sailor would pledge that, if he survived and returned to port, he’d leave some mark on something lasting like silver—usually a picture of whatever kind of ship he’d sailed on, and an inscription naming the vessel and its captain. Local goldsmiths made these plates, here in Perast and in Cattaro.”

“What about these?” I asked, pointing to a silver heart, nestled into the crook of a miniature arm. “What are they for?”

“Same thing. Sometimes the sailors thought they were sure to lose an arm or a leg, falling overboard or getting tangled in the rigging, and that it would have happened if Our Lady’s love hadn’t protected them. This isn’t nearly as many as we once had. Our Lady was looted twice.” His eyes dimmed. “People always want to take what isn’t theirs. Even today.”

He tried a fretful smile. “I’m Ivan—I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m the curator’s son. Let me show you and your friends the altar. The museum is closed today, so that’s all you’ll be able to see.”

I followed him between two smaller marble altars on either side of the nave, censers dangling above us, to the enclosure of the main altar. Its walls were painted a deep maroon, like the inside of a heart; Malina, Niko, and Luka were already there, on the narrow benches on either side. Three curved tiers rose up from the altar, each wider than the previous one, the last holding a tabernacle supported by mottled green marble pillars. Above them stood the painting of the Madonna and child, surrounded by cherubs and seraphim, a chiseled marble curtain shielding it from above.

“This is a replica of the painting found by the Mortesi? brothers, painted over plaster,” he said. “The original icon is in a museum. Safer than it would be here,” he added, again with that trace of outrage.

Looking up, I saw a delicate confection of glass, its loops so finely wrought it made me long for the blowpipe at my lips, the molten give of the bubble, or the gather, at the end of the pipe. From below, some of the shapes even looked like the bulbs and buds of flowers. They practically quivered in my sight, wanting to burst into fractals like some hostile hybrid of glass and weedy plant, and my breathing went shallow. I screwed my eyes shut and snapped the band around my wrist, trying to rein myself in.

“And see all these dried wreaths and bouquets hanging from the lintels?” I heard Ivan saying, but I didn’t dare look at actual flowers, even dead ones. “Those are votive gifts from brides who get married here. They give their bouquets and ribbons and jewels as offerings to Our Lady, to safeguard their marriages and their husbands when they go off to sea.”

Why would Dunja have wanted to come here? I wondered. Despite my reaction, my still-buzzing scalp and the milling unease like centipedes down my spine, I could feel that this place was meant to be a sanctuary, if not one for me. What could she have been looking for in this homespun little church?

I turned my attention back to our reluctant guide, who was biting his chapped lower lip. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “We don’t usually show this to the larger groups in case of damage or accidents, but since it’s just the four of you . . . do you want to touch the first stone, behind the altar? The one that held the painting when the brothers found it on the sea?”

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