Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(50)

It was painfully easy to lie to him, when he was so clearly unmoored when it came to us—how to keep us both safe and happy, now that we were in his care. “I would rather you stayed with me today, at least until we hear something from the police or the hospital. I know you want to be with your friends—”

“Jovan, please?” Malina broke in softly, reaching across the table for his knobby-knuckled hand. “We’ll be with Niko and Luka, and their father will be there too. It’s such a public place, who’d come after us there? It might even be safer for us there, maybe?”

His eyebrows drew together at the thought that he might not be able to protect us on his own. He’d always been a fiercely proud man, and even though I’d only ever known him old, I’d seen how it frustrated him that age had stolen so much of his skill and strength—his once-steady fingers trembling and a stoop hunching his tall frame. But he’d never let the prickling of his pride get in the way of keeping us safe.

“All right, then,” he said stoutly. “But I’ll walk you there, and take my battle cane. Let someone try to cross either of my girls’ paths with me standing in their way.”

THE PRINCE WAS a little busier than usual, for so early in the day, but it was Friday; the flood of tourists would be swelling over the summer weekends, regular as the tide. There was already a group of giggly Dutch girls in one of the nooks, nibbling on biscuits and coffee as they puffed on a peach-mint nargileh.

Otherwise it was just us, Luka tending the bar and serving while Niko knelt on the tasseled cushions with us, striking in a scarlet wrap dress and a choker of tambourine zils strung on black cord; it had the look of Ko?tana’s handiwork, and I wondered if she had made it for Niko, if Niko was wearing it in her mother’s memory.

Niko’s collection of her mother’s writings sat on the floor between us. I had been expecting something more mystical, somehow, maybe a leather-bound grimoire with tarnished clasps. But I’d forgotten that Niko had been barely thirteen when she made it, out of a simple black binder that she’d plastered with a collage of Ko?tana’s photos. Ko?tana was smiling in all of them, so widely you could see her one gold molar glinting—Luka had once told me how much it mortified him that she adamantly refused to swap it out for a regular white cap—and her children’s faces pressed next to hers like a gradient of color. Luka’s tan skin, Niko’s olive, and their mother’s even deeper brown. Her right ear was cuffed with piercings, from the shell down to the lobe, just like Niko’s was.

There were even gummy bits of glue where a younger Niko had bejeweled the binder with little plastic gems that had dried and fallen off, though a few clung to the edges. At the very top, she’d written in sparkly, looping cursive, “My Mother Ko?tana’s Book of Everything.” And beneath it, the saying, “Jedna je majka.”

There is only one mother.

It broke my heart to look at it, to know what she must have been feeling, both now and when Ko?tana died. Niko’s face was painstakingly placid as she flipped it open, but Lina’s eyes swam with held-back tears.

“Thank you for showing this to us,” she said. “Really. I know how precious this is to you.”

Niko leaned her temple against Lina’s shoulder. “It doesn’t do anyone any good moldering in the dark, does it? She would have wanted it to be useful. Especially to you two.”

“Even still,” I said. “Thank you. Lina said you’d already looked through it, that you found something?”

“I was right—it was in one of her songs.” Niko flicked deftly through the pages with her slim fingers. “That name you mentioned, of the woman in your dream. Marzanna. The song is Romany, but I translated it for you this morning, set it to rhyme as best I could. She only sang it for me once; I remember because I was asking her about magic, the little things she sometimes did for the changing of the seasons. I asked her why, what it was for. And she sang me this.”

She ran her finger down each line. “It’s called ‘Kill Her in Winter, So She Can Birth Spring.’”

My stomach felt like a nest of baby snakes had hatched in it all at once. I clutched a fist against it, and looked over to Lina, whose face had gone bloodless.

Niko began:

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,

Her lips are the kiss that will steal your last breath.

Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.

Strip her arms bare of glitter or silver,

Choke her and flay her, force her to deliver,

Drown her in lakebeds, or quick-running streams,

Dunk her in pond scum to smother her screams,

Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.

To chase out the winter, build her to burn her,

Make her a body, the better to spurn her,

Build her of twigs, and of scraps, and of sticks,

Then build up the fire, and sing loud as it licks,

Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.

Niko stopped, laying her hand flat on the page as if she could blot out the words. Lina’s eyes were so wide I could see the whites all around them, and I wondered if I looked like that too, like a cornered animal.

It sounded exactly like her, like the woman in the clearing. And like Sorai, too.