Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(51)
“Is that it?” I whispered. “Is there anything else?”
“Mama told me a story to go with it,” Niko said. “Because it scared me so much, and also made me sorry for Marzanna. It’s a mishmash of things, a patchwork tale. A lot of these legends crossed the country borders, carried by the Romany. Mama said she was a Polish witch-goddess who ruled over winter, nightmares, and love. They say even Death was so fascinated by her that she never died.”
“So, Mara and Death, biffles, understood,” I said. “But what about all those other names?”
Malina looked up from her phone. “They’re all the same person. Deity, whatever. I just checked. They’re what they call her in different places. Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak. Everyone has a name for her, all the Slavs and Baltic people.”
“But Mara,” I said softly. “Mara is her first name. Is there anything else, Lina?”
“It says that in Poland, they kill her every spring equinox. First they make an effigy of rags and clothing, and they decorate her with ribbons and baubles before they burn her. And then whatever’s left, they dunk into every body of water along the way of the parade, drowning her in every lake, pond, and puddle. They sing witch-burning songs the entire time. The one Niko has must be a Romany version of those. Oh, and . . . wow.”
“What?”
Lina chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. “It even mentions Our Lady of the Rocks. Apparently there’s a side story—sort of like an urban legend, I guess, but religious—that the Mortesi? brothers who found that icon actually found something much older there, an ancient figurine of Marzanna. And that they intended to dedicate the island to her name, but were too afraid of being labeled heretic pagans. So they pretended they’d found the Virgin Mary icon instead.”
“But why?” I whispered, tugging at the ribbons in my own hair. “Why is she so terrible that she needs to be both burned and drowned?”
“That was the part Mama told me,” Niko said. “To make her sound less like she might eat me in the night. I wrote it down along with the song. The story goes that she was a human woman long ago, back when migrants crossed all the way from India, before they settled here and split into the Indo-European tribes who became us. And even though she’s been deathless since she befriended Death, she isn’t evil.”
“Yeah,” Lina added. “That’s what this says, too. That there has to be a sacrifice to keep things orderly. For winter to end, Mara has to die and birth Jarilo, god of spring—though really, he’s just another form of her, because she never truly dies.” She shuddered. “I don’t know. It still sounds awful to me. Maybe you just have a higher tolerance for the hideous. You did make me watch Paranormal Activity three times.”
“Only twice, the third time was the sequel. The good one.”
Lina rolled her eyes. “It’s always the fine print with you.”
I thought of the woman in the frozen, snowy clearing, her intensity and wildness, the bloody powders pounded from murdered things smeared all over her face. The fractaled sigils and dried flowers around her, the sharpened stones for cutting, and that glittering pile gathered up in front of her. Whoever that woman was—whatever she was, witch or god or both—the things she had done had been intentional. There was no mistaking the willfulness that blazed in her. Whatever she had done, maybe she’d earned herself this endless burning and drowning.
“But what does this have to do with us, or Mama?” Lina was saying. “Why are we dreaming about her?”
“And why do we have ribbons in our hair?” I mused. “That seems related, if it’s important enough that even a story about her would mention them.”
We all fell silent, frowning at our hands, until the tinkle of the bell above the door and Nev’s brassy voice broke our quiet.
“Riss! Lina!” She rushed at us in her gangly way, dropping a massive plastic bag beside her as she knelt and flung her arms around me. “Oh, dollface, I’m so fucking glad to see you. And you, Lina, my condolences, sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry about Jasmina. I still—I just still can’t believe it’s true. I can’t imagine how this is for you.”
She smelled so wonderfully familiar, the vanilla extract that reminded me of all the hours I’d spent working beside her in the café as she baked with Mama. I fought back tears even as I pulled away from the hug like a kitten squirming out of fond arms; it was too much to feel her sympathy. It made the strangeness of the truth feel worse somehow, a confinement Lina and I could share only with Luka and Niko.
She let me go, with a wordless look of understanding at my discomfort. “I baked some baklava for you,” she said tearfully. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought Luka or Niko could bring it over for you, but this is much better.” She cupped my cheek for just a moment before pulling back, and I thought for the thousandth time how nice it would have been to have her as an older sister.
She dove headlong into the bag and lifted out pan after pan of the sticky, glossy dessert, liberally sprinkled with nuts, enough for a battalion. Even Niko began looking a little fazed as stacked pans teetered on top of each other on the table between us.
“Go on, have a little,” Nev said, flapping a hand in the general direction of the baklava. Her ivory sailor dress was smudged with syrup on the bodice; I wondered how long she had been toiling away at this, if this was the shape of her grief. “I made it with hazelnuts instead of walnuts, I know you both like those better.”