Page 37 of When Among Crows
Baba Jaga raises her eyebrow at Ala. Ala holds out the packet of paper, and unwraps it, revealing the red flower within, emanating light like a firefly. It looks limp, but its color hasn’t changed since he first picked it.
The witch nods.
“I see,” she says. “They were right to name you for the harvest, weren’t they?”
Baba Jaga leans over the fern flower, her hair draping over Ala’s hand like a curtain. Ala is afraid—afraid that the witch will straighten and declare that the fern flower is defective, or too old now to be useful, or not a fern flower at all, the process of picking it an elaborate ruse to trick foolish mortals. She isn’t sure she can bear it. She’s been feeling the curse creeping through her, devouring her eternity, for the last several years, without understanding. It was like watching water go down a drain. She wasn’t human, with a human’s limited awareness of mortality. She was supposed to last, and trimming her centuries down to a handful of years was a cruelty she was hardly able to endure.
But now she can have them back. If only Baba Jaga chooses to give them to her.
Ala glances at Dymitr. She can hardly look at him now, knowing what he’s done, what he is, what he intends. But he meets her eyes for only a moment.
Baba Jaga straightens, a smile playing over her lips. One of her incisors—pointier than the norm—sticks out like a fang for just a moment before she tucks it away again.
“Very well,” Baba Jaga says. “The fern flower’s power lies in its ability to attract and devour dark energy. Mortals have misinterpreted this, as they so often do, to meanthat it will bring them wealth or luck or good fortune, but really it is like a poultice that draws pus from an abscess; it is useful only if you are already afflicted. Take it into your body, and it will draw the curse away from you. But the paradox of it, for you, is that since you aren’t mortal, you cannot touch it without dying. But you will die without touching it.”
Ala waits, expecting more—a recipe, maybe, or a set of instructions, like crushing the flower beneath a full moon and circling a fire three times, something an ancient and powerful witch might say. But Baba Jaga only gazes at the flower still held in Ala’s hand with a glint of greed in her eyes.
“Then what do I do?” Ala says.
“How did you pick something you weren’t allowed to touch?” Baba Jaga says. “How did you carry it without being able to bear it? Yet you ask me how you can take it in?”
“Witches and their riddles,” Niko says, sounding almost bored. But the light in his eyes reveals that he’s anything but.
Dymitr considers the flower, his head tilting. He’s still on his knees, his hands limp in his lap.
“Idid it for you,” he says, after a moment of thought. “Ipicked it,Ibore it.” He glances at Baba Jaga. “So I can swallow it for you, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Ala says. “How can it work as a… poultice, if it never enters my body?”
“You have spent too much time with mortals if you expect magic to move in a straight line,” Baba Jaga replies.She points at Ala, and then bends her index finger so it’s shaped like a hook. “Magic is crooked, and so are we.”
She turns to Dymitr.
“I will transfer the curse from her to you,” she says. “Then you will eat the petal, and it will be gone. But it will only work if you are willing to take it in.”
Dymitr’s gray, solemn eyes are on Ala’s.
She knows she should hate him. He’s an enemy of her people—of all who walk the earth who aren’t human. He killed her aunt and failed to save her cousin. He was the reason the curse ever leapt to her in the first place. And he lied to her, to Niko. Manipulated her.
But all she can think about is how young he must have been when he was sent to her aunt’s house to kill a zmora—barely more than a child. She remembers the look in his eyes in the back of the car when he told her not to lose hope. How soft his voice was when he promised he wasn’t toying with her.
“Of course I’m willing,” he says to Baba Jaga, to Ala.
Baba Jaga beckons them into the next room—so to speak. All the rooms of Baba Jaga’s house appear to be part of a continuous whole. But the walls narrow at one point, and Dymitr tugs a curtain back from a window to see, not the glow of the Harold’s Chicken sign below them, but the winking lights of the Chicago skyline and the shimmer of the river in the moonlight. He stares, forgetting to be subtle about his snooping.
“Crooked,” Baba Jaga says to him, and she brushes a fingertip down his arm. The shadow of a nearby bookcase falls across her face, and Dymitr sees deep lines around her mouth that weren’t there before, reminding him that she’s far older than she appears. He shivers, and pulls away from the window.
The apartment is indeed crooked, far larger inside than it should be, in addition to—apparently—being in the wrong building. After the walls narrow, they open up again, and Dymitr’s ears pop, as if he’s suddenly changed elevation. There are no windows in this part of the apartment, only a heavy wooden table that looks older than the city itself, with herbs hanging above it in dry bunches and ribbons dangling among them in every color. A huge mortar and pestle made of stone stand in the center of the table, dusted with whatever she was grinding up last. Jars of shriveled and dry ingredients are in dense clusters at the edges of the table and on narrow shelves fixed at random heights to the walls behind it. He thinks he sees eyes staring at him from one of them, and there’s another one full of dark liquid that looks like blood.
He doesn’t know how she intends to transfer a dark curse from Ala to him. But when she takes a paring knife from her pocket, and plucks a red ribbon from the ceiling with a flourish, he doesn’t flinch.
“Your hand,” she says to him, and he gives it to her, resting his knuckles against her palm. She digs the paring knife into the meaty part of his thumb, suddenly and fiercely enough to make him wince. Blood bubbles upfrom the wound, and he ignores the stinging in his palm to watch Baba Jaga gesture for Ala’s hand, too.
Ala holds it out to her. Baba Jaga seizes it and cuts it without ceremony. Holding Ala’s wrist, she turns the zmora’s hand and brings it down on top of Dymitr’s, so their blood intermingles between their palms. Ala looks up at him, startled, as Baba Jaga ties the red ribbon around their hands. She whispers words he can’t hear over them.
Ala’s fingers lace with his. She doesn’t really look like Lena, and doesn’t sound like her, either. They grew up across the world from each other, in different generations, speaking different languages. But Lena spoke of her fondly, Aleksja, her last remaining cousin, the American, gentle enough in spirit to live among mortals but fierce enough to endure their cruelty.
Baba Jaga knots the ribbon, and steps back. Somewhere in the apartment he hears the ticking of a clock. Then pain, deeper than the shallow cut in his palm, reaching its white-hot fingers all the way down his arm. His knees threaten to buckle; he locks them, tightening his hold on Ala.
