The world, in the wake of their union, had become a different place for Ina. It was not just the newfound, shocking intimacy of her body, the memory of Juraj's touch a constant, warm hum beneath her skin. It was the very air she breathed, the ground she walked upon. It felt… more. More vibrant, more saturated, more alive. She had always been attuned to the rhythms of her island, but now it was as if a veil had been lifted, revealing a layer of reality thrumming with a secret, potent energy.
And at the center of that energy was Juraj.
In the days following their first night together, they were inseparable. He helped her in the field, his powerful hands surprisingly deft as he tied lavender bundles. He sat with her in the shop, his quiet, immense presence both a comfort and a distraction. They walked for hours, exploring hidden coves and ancient footpaths, their fingers laced together, their conversation a quiet, meandering stream of shared discoveries.
It was on these walks that she first noticed the strangeness.
They were walking along a coastal path, high above the sea, the wind whipping her hair around her face. She was telling him about a particular strain of lavender she wanted to cultivate, her hands moving animatedly as she spoke. She stumbled slightly on a loose stone, and Juraj's hand shot out to steady her, his grip firm on her elbow.
As his skin made contact with hers, a patch of rocky, barren ground just to their left, where only a few stubborn, grey-green weeds had clung to life, suddenly erupted in a carpet of vibrant, star-shaped flowers. They were a blue so intense it hurt to look at, blooming not in a slow, natural unfurling, but in an instant, as if a painter had dashed a loaded brush against the soil.
Ina stopped mid-sentence, her mouth agape. She stared at the flowers, then at Juraj, then back at the flowers.
"Did you see that?" she whispered, her heart beginning to beat a strange, frantic rhythm.
Juraj followed her gaze. A faint, almost imperceptible frown touched his brow before it smoothed away. "See what?" he asked, his voice calm. "The plava cvijet? They are stubborn. They bloom in the most unlikely places."
He said it with such casual authority that she second-guessed herself. Had they been there all along? Had she simply not noticed? The human mind, she knew, was a master of filling in gaps, of creating coherence from chaos. She shook her head, a little laugh escaping her. "I must be more tired than I thought. I could have sworn they just… appeared."
He squeezed her hand, his earth-dark eyes warm. "The sun is strong. It plays tricks."
She allowed herself to be convinced, to be led further down the path. But a tiny, bright seed of suspicion had been planted.
A few days later, it sprouted.
In the corner of her garden, behind the stone cottage, stood an old, gnarled olive tree. It had been there longer than the cottage itself, its trunk twisted into agonized, beautiful shapes by centuries of sea wind. For the past few years, it had been sickly. One of its main branches was completely bare, a skeletal arm reaching for the sky, its wood grey and brittle. Her grandfather had told her it was dying, and she had accepted it with a sad resignation, a part of the natural cycle.
Juraj was admiring the tree one evening, his hand resting lightly on its ancient, fissured bark. He was silent for a long time, his eyes closed, as if listening to something only he could hear.
"It has seen many springs," he murmured, his voice a low, resonant hum. "It remembers the songs they sang to the olives when the world was young."
He leaned forward then, and pressed his lips against the rough bark of the withered branch, a gesture so intimate and strange it made Ina's breath catch. He whispered something, a single, guttural word that sounded like the earth cracking open.
Then, he straightened up and turned to her, smiling. "It will be fine."
They went inside, and Ina thought little more of it. The next morning, however, she went out to feed the chickens and stopped dead in her tracks.
The dead branch was no longer dead.
It was covered in a fuzz of tender, silver-green leaves, delicate as newborn skin. As she watched, utterly paralyzed, she could almost see them unfurling, growing, reaching for the sun. The grey wood was now tinged with green, vibrant with sap. The entire tree seemed to stand taller, its other, healthier branches seeming to rustle with a new, vigorous life.
This was no trick of the light. This was not her imagination. This was a miracle.
A cold, thrilling dread washed over her, so powerful her knees felt weak. She stumbled back into the cottage, her mind reeling. The instant flowers on the path. The unnaturally warm water in the cove. The sea blossoms. The way he spoke of the land as if it were a living, breathing relative. His confusion with modern things. His strange, archaic language. The sheer, overwhelming power of his presence that seemed to bend reality itself around him.
The seed of suspicion burst open, and a terrifying, wonderful vine began to grow, twisting through her thoughts.
He is not just a man.
The thought was absurd. It was the stuff of the folk tales her Baka used to tell her by the fire, stories of the vile and the vila, forest spirits and mountain gods. They were charming superstitions, the quaint relics of a simpler time. They were not real.
But what if they were?
She remembered the first day in the field, the hum, the shimmer in the air, the feeling of being watched. He had been there. He had been watching her.
A cascade of memories, once mundane, now took on a terrifying new significance. The way animals—birds, cats, even the bees in her field—seemed to quieten in his presence, not in fear, but in respect. The way the very soil seemed to sigh with contentment when he walked across it. The scent of damp earth and blooming jasmine that clung to him, to them, after they made love.
God of spring, fertility, passion, and rebirth.
The words from the old books, from the half-remembered tales, echoed in her mind. She had researched him, hadn't she? After the market, after the espresso machine, she had gone to the library, looking for a clue to his strange nature. She had found mentions of a god named Juraj, a minor figure in the Slavic pantheon, often conflated with Jarilo, the god of vegetation and fertility.
She had dismissed it as a charming coincidence. A man named after an old god.
Now, she was no longer sure.
She began to watch him with new, hyper-aware eyes. She saw the way he would absently stroke the petals of a rose in her garden, and the rose would seem to arch into his touch, its color deepening. She saw the way a wilting basil plant on her windowsill perked up within an hour of him standing near it. She saw the way the wind would sometimes still when he spoke, as if the world itself was listening.
The evidence was everywhere, a pattern she had been too blissfully ignorant, too human, to see.
The terror was real. It was a cold, clawing fear in her stomach. This was not her world. This was beyond her understanding. She was a simple woman who owned a lavender shop. She dealt in the tangible, the measurable—the weight of a harvest, the yield of oil, the simple, predictable cycle of the seasons. He was… he was a force of nature. An eternal, powerful being. What was she to him? A passing fancy? A momentary diversion in his endless life?
But intertwined with the terror was a wild, impossible wonder.
He had chosen her. This magnificent, ancient power had walked into her shop, had looked at her with those deep, soil-colored eyes, and had seen something worth loving. The passion she felt from him was not human passion; it was the passion of the earth coming to life, fierce, creative, and all-consuming. It was terrifying, but it was also the most glorious thing she had ever known.
The conflict raged within her for days. She became quieter, more withdrawn. She would catch herself staring at him, searching for the god in the man. She saw it now, in the unearthly stillness he could command, in the raw, untamed energy that lay just beneath his skin, in the ancient knowledge in his eyes.
He noticed her distance, of course. He was too perceptive not to.
"You are quiet, ljubavi moja," he said one evening as they sat on her sofa. He traced the line of her jaw with his finger, his touch, as always, sending a shower of sparks through her. "Your thoughts are a tangled forest. I can feel the thorns."
She looked up at him, her sea-blue eyes wide and serious. The words trembled on her lips. What are you? But fear sealed them inside. If she spoke it aloud, if she named the terrifying, wonderful truth, everything would change. The beautiful dream would end. The god might remember his place and leave the mortal girl behind.
So, she deflected. She leaned into him, pressing her face against his chest, inhaling his scent—the scent of life itself. "I'm just happy," she whispered, the half-truth feeling like a betrayal.
He held her, but she could feel the tension in his body. He knew she was hiding something. The god in him could sense the shift in the atmosphere around her, the sudden growth of doubt in the fertile soil of her heart.
That night, as she lay beside him in bed, watching the moon trace a path across the floor, the suspicion solidified into a heart-pounding certainty. He was asleep, his breathing deep and even. His face in repose was both peaceful and profoundly powerful, a sleeping king. As if drawn by a magnet, her gaze fell to his hands, resting on the sheet between them. They were the hands that had brought her such pleasure, the hands that had touched her with such tenderness.
And they were the hands that had brought a dead tree back to life.
She reached out, her own hand trembling, and hovered just an inch above his. She could feel the energy radiating from him, a low, potent hum of vitality, the same hum she had felt in the field that first day. It was real. It was all real.
A tear escaped her eye and traced a cold path down her temple. She was in love with a god. The stories were true. And the other stories, the ones Vida had whispered of in Juraj's dream—the stories of tragedy, of mortal hearts broken by immortal love—they were true, too.
The seed of suspicion had not just grown; it had burst into a full, blooming, and terrifying truth. She was no longer just Ina, the lavender girl. She was Ina, the mortal who loved a god. And she had no idea what terrifying, wonderful fate awaited her now.