Page 1 of When Among Crows
1A PRELUDE
This isn’t the forest guardian’s usual haunt. Every other day of the year, he stands guard over the huddle of trees in the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary along Lake Michigan, where the water’s stink is rich as chocolate to his bone-dry nose. But every year in June, on Kupala Night, he makes the journey to St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in West Town to guard the fern flower as it blooms.
He doesn’t like it here. He doesn’t like how his hooves sound on the wood floor, sharp and echoing. He doesn’t like the ceiling that blocks his view of the stars. And he doesn’t like religious spaces, in general—the obsession with wrong and right, purity and pollution, modernity and eternity, it doesn’t make sense to him.
But this is a natural place for deep magic, because it was bought at a great price. People came from the old country to the new to earn their bread, and they scraped the very bottoms of their wallets to build this place for themselves, though their wallets were not very deep. That kind of sacrifice creates a debt, and there’s nothing magic likes better than the great hollow of a debt. And so magic nestled here,heedless of what the adherents of this particular religion would think of it. It draws the leszy here, too.
The sanctuary is still and silent. The leszy tilts his horned head back to look at the mural painted on the dome above him. All the host of heaven, perched on clouds, stare back down at him.
The sanctuary doors open, and when the leszy lowers his head, a mortal man stands at the end of the aisle.
Unearthly smoke curls around the man’s black boots, the remnants of a sacred fire. There are many sacred fires lit on Kupala Night; this man must have leapt across one, to receive its blessing. Likewise, there’s a spray of white flowers—wormwood—tucked into one of his buttonholes, no doubt plucked from a vila’s crown of greenery. If the leszy’s senses hadn’t already told him this man wasn’t ordinary, those two blessings would have done so. He came prepared for the task at hand.
And there is only one task that could possibly be at hand: plucking the fern flower when it blooms.
The man stops at a distance from the leszy, and holds his hands behind his back like a soldier at ease. He looks wary, but not frightened, and that’s stranger than all the rest of him.
He only comes up to the leszy’s breastbone, and he’s half as broad. The leszy has the body of a man stretched beyond its capacity—long arms that end in big, clawed hands; sturdy, split hooves; and a stag’s skull as a head. His staff is the size of a sapling. Moss grows on his broad, flat shoulders, and flowers bloom in his eye sockets.
“Turn back,” the leszy says. His voice is like a tree tilting in the wind.
“My lord leszy,” the mortal man says to him, with a quick bow. “There are rumors of the fern flower in Edgebrook Woods and in all the parks that border Lake Michigan.”
“Then what reason can he possibly have for coming here?” the leszy asks.
The man tilts his head. His hair is the gray-brown color as the tree bark in the leszy’s usual sanctuary. His eyes are the same shade, as if painted with the same brush.
“One thing all the rumors have in common is you,” the man says. “So I followed you here.”
The leszy stands in silence. He remembers very little about his journey from the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary earlier that day. Cacophonous streets crowded with metal and plastic. Air thickened by exhaust. The sky crowded by buildings. He was guided only by his own sense of purpose—A holy kind of purpose,he thinks, with the mural of the heavenly host still staring down at him.
He doesn’t recall the man. But since the man stands before him with no apparent motive for deception, the leszy supposes he’s to be believed.
“So where does it bloom? In the courtyard? In the stoup of holy water?” The man tilts his head again, and a mischievous smile curls his lip. “In the altar?”
There’s something in the cadence of his voice that the leszy recognizes from long ago.
The leszy came here as so many of his kind did, lessthan a century ago, to escape the cruelty of the Holy Order that hunts all creatures who walk or crawl this earth. They came among mortals who were escaping other cruelties—mortal ones, though no less harrowing for it. He thinks fondly of the refuge those mortals offered him, the kinship they found in shared pain and shared escape.
He dwelt elsewhere before, playing guardian to a small patch of woods in the old country, right along a river, as is his preference. But he came here to escort a mortal woman. Or more accurately—to escort the plant that the woman carried. A fern swollen with the potential to flower on Kupala Night.
She, too, was driven by almost-holy purpose, unable to explain her attachment to the plant that she carried across the sea. He can feel the dirt that she scraped from beneath her fingernails after she lifted the fern from its pot to place it upon the altar, and the roots of the plant twisting into the stone there, impossibly. He can smell the incense from the thurible and he can hear, somehow, the chanting voice of Baba Jaga, the one who bewitched them all—
“What is he?” the leszy asks the man.
“I am a supplicant,” the man replies.
“He is a fool. Turn back.”
“I know you guard the fern flower. I know you’re tasked with keeping out the unworthy. How do I prove to you that I’m worthy?”
“He expects answers but does not give them. Turn back.”
“I am,” the man says gently, “a supplicant. And I won’t turn back.”
The leszy leans into his staff. The man has now refused him three times.
“A contest,” the leszy says. “If he wins it, I will stand aside. If he loses it, he will turn back.”
