Spring’s Arcana: Slavic gods on a road trip

Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow

2023’s Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow has atmospheric language and lovely descriptions. This is Book One of a duology, THE DEAD GOD’S HEART. The book is a road trip, taking us through exquisitely described scenes of fantasy, magic and mundanity. The language is gorgeous, but the story feels derivative, and the protagonist faces very little direct danger. The book ends abruptly midway through the main character’s quest, with the words “To be Continued.” Read it for the beautiful language, the flickers of wry humor, and a beautiful scene with a magical dressmaker.

The story is set in the present day. Nat Drozdova wants to save the life of her dying mother, Maria. To do that, she makes a bargain with Baba Yaga, who in this story is the goddess of winter. Baba Yaga will help Maria Drozdova if Nat brings her the Dead God’s Heart, something Maria stole years ago and hid somewhere on the North American continent. To ensure Nat’s compliance, Baba Yaga will send someone with Nat—Dmitri, who goes by Dima, and is a god of thieves and gangsters.

Hateful, selfish Maria is the goddess of Spring. She raised her daughter to be ignorant of her own nature, and has an evil plan to consume Nat as she reaches the threshold of her nascent power as Spring, thus extending Maria’s own existence at the cost of her daughter’s. For some reason, she needs Baba Yaga’s buy-in for this plan, hence the scavenger hunt and Maria’s promise to return what she stole, in order for Baba Yaga to allow Maria her cannibalistic scheme.

To retrieve the Dead God’s Heart, Nat will need to find three other magical objects or “arcana;” a knife, a cup and a key.

A magical scavenger hunt and gods on a road trip sounds pretty familiar, and the trope runs on familiar tracks here. Saintcrow clearly has a firm sense of the hierarchies and rules of the “divinities” as they call themselves, but it was never completely clear to me. There is a distinction between divinities who are “immigrants” (Baba Yaga, Dima and Maria), and those who are “native” to North America (Nat is a “native-born” divinity). There are also literary demi-deities, who apparently are created by the older divinities—for instance, wearing her magical dress, Nat goes to a glamorous party hosted by “Jay Gatsby.” It ends in a gruesome sacrifice. It’s an interesting idea that does not advance Nat’s story. Maria is an “old world” divinity, while Nat is a Spring of the Americas. This is discussed a lot but there is no sense of stakes for the world, if Maria extends her reign as Spring.

The scene where Nat meets a divine seamstress and has a dress made is magical in several senses of that word, vivid and lush, one of my favorite scenes in the book.

After about a hundred pages, in which Nat goes to the party and later gets trapped in Koschei the Deathless’s mirror-maze, she gets the scavenger hunt clues from her ailing mother, and she and Dima head west in Dima’s magical car. Ultimately, she stops in South Dakota where she encounters a big black horse and a cherry tree. Along the way, confronted with magic, she begins to accept that she might be magical herself.

Throughout this book, Nat endures a lot of emotional abuse (mostly via flashback), but she has zero difficulty finding two of the objects she will need to retrieve the heart. One is literally handed to her. The other, she finds at the well by the cherry tree, although the black demon horse/motorcycle who led her there does have a few tricks to play. It’s hard not to draw the parallels to American Gods and other works as more deities appear. A trickster god, and Death in particular, look very familiar.

Nat is apparently in danger from those who hunger, magical psychic scavengers, as well as from her mother, but she never seemed to face any real danger except being stuck in a car with Dima, who is a smoker.

There is an adolescent quality to both Nat and Dima, even though neither is technically an adolescent. Nat has been brainwashed, exploited and stunted by an evil mother. Dima’s background is evoked in a few brush-strokes, nothing more. We know that like Maria, he was “brought here” by human worshippers, but beyond that there’s nearly nothing about his story. He is defiant and violent. He thinks Nat, a higher class of divinity than he is, is “stuck up.” Given the Good Girl/Bad Boy romance forming here, the flattened characterizations are a let-down.

After her trip to South Dakota, where Nat retrieves the cup from the well, the book ends, abruptly, with no sense of lingering danger. Her mother’s evil plan is still in motion. There is still a mystery, because as far as we know Nat is nowhere near the hiding place of the heart of the Dead God, or even the third arcanum.

Spring’s Arcana is about 350 pages long. Book Two, The Salt-Black Tree is about 288 pages. They came out within three months of each other. Is it possible that this was one longer work that someone decided would be better marketed as a duology? If so, whoever came up with that idea was wrong. Having now read them back-to-back, I can say confidently that this would have been better as one single, longer novel.

Saintcrow has a flair for poetic language, and she’s clearly taken a road trip or two in her time, so Spring’s Arcana is worth reading for the beauty of the language and the fantastical imagery.