Page 36 of When Among Crows
“No,” she says, with a hint of that weariness. “Well, enough of this.”
She tilts her head.
“Everyone always wants something,” she says. “I am not a person to them, I am simply the one who can bring their desires to bear. So tell me. Do you wish to hurt me? To use me for evil?”
“No.” Dymitr feels so heavy. So exhausted. His handthrobs and his shoulders itch. “No, I’m here to ask you to destroy a Knight of the Holy Order.”
“You have blood on your hands already,” she says. “Why can’t you get rid of this person yourself?”
“I…” He trails off. He doesn’t know where to begin.
“Which Knight?” Ala asks, with a sharpness that suggests she already knows what his answer will be.
Dymitr lets himself go to his knees.
“Me,” he says, and he closes his eyes.
“I may not have been honest,” Dymitr says. “But I didn’t lie.”
When he opens his eyes, the room is still bathed in green light from the lava lamp, which is now warm enough for the wax inside to swell into blue bubbles.
He focuses on Ala. She’s clutching something to her stomach—a packet of brown paper, faintly glowing from the wilting fern flower inside it. Her wide-set eyes are empty and passive, and he wishes he’d never told her not to lose hope—wishes he’d never done anything to make her like him, no matter how small, because now he’s about to crush her.
“I killed your aunt,” he says to her. “She was my first mission. I thought, afterward, that something inside me was broken. My siblings both came back from their firsts in triumph, and drank themselves stupid. I tried… I tried to act more like I was supposed to, tofeelmore like I was supposed to.”
He shakes his head.
“Your cousin—Lena—she troubled me. I recognized her as one of the younger students from my school the moment I entered the house,” he says. “And then she fought for her mother in a way that made me doubt what I’d been told. When the curse passed to her, I started to visit her in secret—with her permission. I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought. And then I found out my sister was assigned to execute her.”
He remembers Elza in her jacket, a smear of red paint over her collarbone where their mother had painted the protective symbol.Where are you headed?he asked her.Just some zmora,she replied, and he knew.
“I tried to help Lena, but I was too late,” he said. “I forced myself to admit that every person I’d killed had a soul, just like Lena. And I had to find a way to atone for those deaths.” He pauses. Swallows hard. “Thosemurders.”
“If you wanted to die,” Ala says distantly, “there are easier ways.”
“It’s not death I want. It’s… unmaking. Unraveling.”
Dymitr looks down at his hands, which are now their usual color. He remembers the stain flowing into them for the first time, right after the ripping of his soul. The heat in his palms and in his eyes, pulsing with his heartbeat, so hot he could barely stand it—
“Knights divide their souls in half—one half resides in our bodies and one half resides in our swords. My request is the destruction of my sword. I’ll survive, but I’ll be… diminished. The world will have one fewer Knight, but I’llstill live to carry the burden of what I’ve done. It seems… fitting. That I should still have to carry it.”
“You’ve chosen your own punishment.” Ala sounds angry. “You think your victims will be satisfied by your suffering?”
“I think my victims are dead.”
It’s too sharp, not quite the tone he intended, but… he meant it.
“I can’t be a Knight anymore,” he adds, gentler now. “Ihaveto… tear out the part of myself that is.”
“You want to wander the earth in pain,” Ala says. “But suffering isn’t atonement, Dymitr.”
“Then what is?” he asks, and she doesn’t answer him. She looks askance, at first at nothing in particular, and then at Baba Jaga, who still stands behind the table of bones, a pair of dice cradled in her palm. Dymitr almost forgot she was there.
“You can’t allow this,” Ala says to her.
“It’s his choice, not yours,” the witch replies. “I suppose that before Iunmakeyou, boy, you have a suggested use for that special item she’s holding? It bears your fingerprints, not hers.”
“She’s afflicted by a bloodline curse,” Dymitr says. “I thought if anyone could break it, it would be you. With the fern flower.”
