Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(57)
NINETEEN
EVEN WITH THE RAIN THAT LASHED AT THE WINDOWS, I knew it was hot inside the Stari Mlini, but not even the shawl wrapped around my shoulders could keep me warm. Usually I loved it here, the exposed wooden beams, rough-hewn furniture, and bronze candelabras on every table, the water wheel spinning in the stream outside as the night rain sheeted down on it. And it smelled of warm things, curling cigarette smoke, beeswax, and grilling fish. But I couldn’t stop trembling. My insides felt like slush, sliding around a skeleton of ice instead of bone.
Someone had set a bowl of bean stew in front of me at some point, recently enough that it still steamed. Plump sausages bobbed between the kidney beans, and I caught a savory waft of spices, enough to make my stomach growl. So I was hungry, then. That was good to know.
Malina sat across from me, her hands wrapped around her own bowl. I could see her fingers shaking, the torn edges of her cuticles. Niko was next to her, an arm slung around her shoulders. By my side, Luka gripped my own arm, massaging me briskly as if I actually needed a boost in circulation.
“It wasn’t you, Riss,” he said. I had the dim sense that he’d been saying this for a while. “That was not you. Those things you said . . . they didn’t come from your mind. Not the mind I know.”
“It was me. It was her, speaking through me, but it was me, too.” That also sounded like something I’d said before. From the moment I’d stepped up to that reliquary, time had taken on an elastic quality that reminded me of how I’d felt after finding Mama broken. Every moment felt as long as an opium dream, but at the same time I barely remembered the ride back to Cattaro after Luka wrapped me up in the shawl and tucked me into the backseat. He’d kept me on his lap for a long time, his long body folded awkwardly in the small space so he could hold me, rocking me and crooning in my ear as I shook with tears against him. He’d asked Malina and Niko to meet us here on our way home, so neither his father nor ?i?a Jovan would see me like this.
“How can this be happening?” I said through numb lips. “Who is she to us? Is she—is she even real? Because this is more than just dreams. This is some kind of open connection, a conduit. She was in me, I could feel her, and I wanted . . .” Aftershocks rippled through me, and I took a shuddering breath. “I wanted to rip apart that reliquary. Crush all those bones. Because they hate her, and she hates them for hating her, and even then I loved her so much I wanted to keep her safe.”
Malina reached across the table and grasped my hand. “I felt it too. A shadow of it, at least, nothing as strong as you. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there, but I’m still plugged in somehow, like you are. Do you think it’s these?” She reached tentatively for her hair, stopping short before her fingers grazed the ribbons, as if they might singe her. “I don’t think they have anything to do with Mama, anymore. I think someone else put these in for us. Maybe we should take them out, Riss? I hate it, I hate it so much thinking that something at the other end can feel us through them.”
A violent shudder ripped through me at the thought of a stranger creeping over our windowsill, bending over us as we slept the way I’d imagined Mama had. “We can’t do that,” I murmured. “What if we do, and they don’t work anymore? We need to know what they do, and what they have to do with the thefts. Maybe they can bring us to wherever Mama is.”
“I was thinking about that,” Niko said. Her dark eyes had taken on that hawk focus she shared with Luka. “It could be that these are two separate things—a bifurcation of what was once a single process or event. Ribbons aside, think of all the objects this Dunja has been taking. So far, it’s your belongings, a votive gift, and a saint’s bone.”
“That we know of,” Malina added.
“Right. Looking through Mama’s recipes and cantrips today reminded me of why it was bothering me. For spellwork—at least the small kind Mama did, sympathetic magic—you need symbolic ingredients that have specific connections with whatever you’re trying to achieve. Like parts to represent the whole. I have no idea what that would be in this case, obviously, but that’s what this reminded me of. Someone gathering ingredients for a spell.”
I met Niko’s eyes with an effort. I was saggingly tired, exhausted to my marrow, but it wasn’t time to stop yet. “But without talking to her, to Dunja, we have no idea what she’s trying to do, or what it has to do with Mama and us. And we don’t know how to find her. So that’s a dead end. Did you find anything else while you were looking?”
“Just one thing,” Niko replied. “It’s one of Mama’s original tincture recipes—it looks like Jasmina asked Mama to craft a scent for her.”
“Why couldn’t Jasmina have done that for herself?” I asked. “She used fragrances and essentials all the time in her cooking.”
“But she didn’t blend tinctures on her own, and Mama and I did,” Niko said, sounding a little miffed. “It’s not like it’s a witch-exclusive skill, last I heard. The rest of us can muddle through making nice things, too.”
“Fair enough, peace,” I said wearily, holding up a hand. “What’s in the one Ko?tana made for Jasmina?”
“Orange blossom absolute, lots of it,” Niko said. Lina’s eyes flicked to mine, and I knew she was thinking of the vial we’d found in Mama’s treasure chessboard. “Also amber, myrrh, a touch of honey, and three different kinds of musk—pink, skin, and Egyptian.”