Page 7 of When Among Crows
The illusion falls away from Klara’s eyes, as well as the room around them. He relaxes a little as the floor reappears beneath him.
“I know that the fern flower unravels most curses,” he says. “But it can only be touched by mortal hands.”
Klara’s eyes stay locked on the fern flower.
“How did you get that?” she says, her voice rough.
“I was tested,” he replies.
The memory of his own heart pulsing in front of him, of the bare, dry rib cage of the wraith, swells in his throat like a pill too big and too dry to swallow. He breathes, in and out, in and out, aware that he’s now been quiet for far too long.
Klara sniffs, and smiles a little, presumably as she tastes his panic.
“I was tested, and I was found worthy,” he goes on. “A fact you should not take lightly.”
He folds the paper over the flower again, and tucks it into his pocket. Then he touches her wrist, guiding the needle away from his neck. She allows him to.
“What is it you expect in return?” she says.
“That is between me and your cursed zmora,” he replies. “So if you would tell me how to find them, I would be grateful.”
Klara slides the needle back into the knot of hair at the back of her head, and smooths down the front of her shirt. She glances at Tom, still sitting at the projector and playing solitaire on his phone, as if nothing is happening behind him.
“Tempting though that offer is,” she says, “I can’t give you what you ask for without knowing what you want. I have to protect my people.”
“You are afraid of a human?”
“A normal one, no,” she says. “But the Holy Order blend in too easily, and they have killed too many of us.”
Dymitr looks at Tom, who has just won at solitaire, the cards spilling across his screen.
“Fine. I’ll tell you,” he says. “I seek an audience with Baba Jaga.”
Klara looks a little surprised. He doesn’t blame her; most humans aren’t stupid enough to look for Baba Jaga. She’s a powerful witch—thepowerful witch. She who defeated Koschei the Deathless; she who lures children and maidens and knights alike into dark tangles of trees and sells them favors at too high a cost; who rides a mortar and pestle and lives in a house that stands on chicken legs. Fearsome, eternal, capricious Baba Jaga.
“What makes you think that the zmora you’re looking for will know how to find her?”
He shrugs. “I think she’ll know more than I do, which is a start. Or perhaps you’ll share something useful with me on her behalf.”
“And when you don’t get anywhere,” Klara says. “What will you do? Renege on your side of the deal?”
“I’ll get somewhere.”
“I know human men,” she says. “I have made their worst nightmares come to life around them. I have made them weep. I know what happens when they don’t get what they want from us.” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “They get angry. They seek out a member of the Holy Order. And they have us killed.”
The Holy Order—the bogeyman of the bogeymen. She speaks of them the way his mother used to speak of Baba Jaga stealing his toes if he didn’t stop running in the hallway. He wonders what kinds of stories the zmory tell their children to scare them into behaving. Do they tell them the Holy Order split their souls to make their swords? That they have to wrench them from a sheath of vertebrae every time they fight?
He asks, “What will it take to convince you that I mean no harm?”
“There’s nothing you can say or do that will convince me of that,” Klara says. “Men always mean harm. The question is simply ‘when’.”
She gestures to the door, dismissing him.
“If you change your mind,” he says, “I’ll be at the Thorndale Red Line stop at midnight. I’ll wait for half an hour.”
He picks up his beer bottle, shoulders his guitar case, and leaves the projection room with the fern flower heavy in his pocket.
He’s walking down a dark stretch of Clark Street, past a defunct furniture store withEVERYTHING MUST GOscrawled on one of the windows, when he hears the footsteps. They lack the purpose of someone walking home, and the purposelessness of someone stumbling away from a bar. They’re light and even, and when he stops, they stop.
