But Radovan could not deny the oddness of Zorya, to use her given name – or the name by which she identified herself, which was not necessarily the same thing – since little about her could be confirmed, and all of Radovan’s meticulous yet discreet inquiries had yielded hardly any useful knowledge about her. He knew only that she came from the country of the Vlachs, an ethnic minority of Romanian descent that inhabited small communities in the harsh, isolated landscape of eastern Serbia. The Vlachs had long been associated with both black and white magic, even after adopting Orthodox Christianity, or some version of it that permitted them to invoke Jesus and the Virgin Mary alongside whatever other non-Christian deities they also worshiped. The more sensationalist Serbian newspapers and media outlets occasionally ran stories ascribing blame for murders and ritual killings on Vlach witches, all of them nonsense. Like most allegations of witchcraft since the dawn of time, they were largely aimed at elderly women living in communities that sometimes lacked even the most basic of support structures for the more vulnerable, whether medical, psychological, or emotional.

The Vlachs, often marooned in countryside dotted by abandoned or barely functioning mines, frequently mired in poverty and, like many in Serbia, watching their young folk leave to seek better lives elsewhere, were forced to rely on one another, and so a people with their own dialect and traditions became more anomalous still. Their name was derived from the Old High German word meaning ‘walh’, or ‘foreigner’. They were perennial outsiders in a nation that was suspicious of strangers, yet still they survived. During the conflicts that had followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, their close familial bonds kept money flowing into the country from abroad, and they had shared some of that modest income with their non-Vlach neighbors. Radovan would never have considered describing his Serbian brothers and sisters as tolerant of those unlike themselves, but it was as good a word as any to describe the texture of their relationship with the Vlachs.