Page 29 of When Among Crows
“She’s buried in the wall here. But Baba Jaga’s rage at having been nearly fooled, and by an oath-breaker no less, was explosive. She couldn’t contain it. She created a storminside this place, soaking it through, ripping it apart with wind. Some of it, she restored, but she left the rest, I think as a warning.” He shrugs. “Best not to forget what we’re up against. Last chance to back out.”
“No one’s backing out,” Ala says.
Niko and Dymitr’s eyes meet, and Ala gets that feeling again, that something is strange between them. She smells sweet peach and honey, toasted walnut and warm sage, all intermingled. She can’t tell which one of them belongs to which man.
“Please,” Dymitr says to Niko.
So Niko draws his blade and presses the meat of his thumb against it, just hard enough to draw blood. Then he touches the bead of blood to the forehead of the skull set into the stone.
“Nazywam sie Nikodem Kostka,” he says. “Szukam Baby Jagi.”
8A SECRET TOLD
Dymitr’s grandmother went with him the first time. Before they set out, they met in the stone chamber to get ready.
The front of Dymitr’s family house was redone in a mid-century modern style, as his mother preferred. All primary colors and medium-toned woods and rounded corners. Tables that stacked, chairs that seemed like an italicized version of a regular chair, sofas that stood on skinny legs. The house itself was old, but you’d hardly know it, by the look of the interior.
In the back of the house, though, was the family history. A dim library packed with ancient volumes and nowhere to sit but the rigid seats in the center; a modest chapel with a floor-to-ceiling wooden cross; and the stone chamber, round and sunk under the ground, where the weapons were kept.
His grandmother usually wore soft slacks, long diaphanous skirts, prim blouses with tiny patterns. Today she wore the clothes of a Knight: a vest that Velcroed across her ribs, a leather jacket, duck canvas pants, and boots that laced up to mid-calf. Her hair was in a braid.
“Do you know why your father isn’t accompanyingyou?” she said. She went to the cabinet at the back of the room and took out a pot of red paint and a brush. Dymitr knew what it was for: a symbol of protection, to be painted over his heart. Most of them didn’t bother with it after they had a few kills under their belt, but for those first few times… yes.
“No, Babcia.”
He unbuttoned his shirt a few buttons, and when she stood in front of him with the open pot of paint, he tugged the fabric to the side to expose the skin over his heart.
“I asked him if I could do it instead,” she said. “This will be my last time. I have chosen you to witness it.”
She said it as if it was an honor, and it was. Dymitr knew it. He had three siblings, two older and one younger, and yet he was the one she had taught herself, the one she had decided was worthy of her wisdom.
She touched the cold paintbrush to his chest and swept it in a capable circle. She held the brush like a calligrapher held a pen, almost delicate. Almost.
“You have doubts,” she said as she drew. “Tell me about them.”
He hesitated, and she looked up, sharply.
“Don’t pretend,” she said. “We cannot rid you of your doubt if you hide it. You must bring it to the light.”
She dabbed the paintbrush inside the paint pot, and began filling in the symbol, a six-petaled rosette. It was pagan, as far as Dymitr knew, but if the Holy Order could make use of something, they did—regardless of its origins.
“It’s only…” He trailed off for a moment as he searchedfor the right words. “She seemed so human. Getting groceries like that.”
His grandmother nodded a few times. She closed the lid of the paint pot, and tucked the paintbrush behind her ear. Then she brought her hand up and smacked him hard across the face.
“Do not trust your eyes more than you trust your duty,” she said harshly. “Deception is in their nature; they make you believe that they’re close to human, that they’re capable of our virtues, but the truth is deeper and darker. The truth is, they are hunger and cruelty personified; the truth is, they can read your heart, and they will prey upon it if you allow them to!”
Dymitr’s cheek stung. He blinked the tears from his eyes. The paint was cold on his chest, still drying.
“My dearest boy.” His grandmother’s voice softened. “I don’t intend to hurt you, only to make sure that you remember. Remember what I have taught you.”
She touched his cheek, the same one that she had just hit. Her eyes were soft.
“You will be the best of us. You will do things that none of us have managed,” she said. “I know it.”
For a moment after Niko speaks, nothing happens. Then Dymitr hears something—cracking, and the shiver of dust hitting the ground. The stone falls away from the skull in the wall, leaving the brown of old bone behind. For a moment, Dymitr thinks he can see the face of the witch hovering over it like she’s stuck alive in the wall—young, with frizzy yellow hair and a puckered mouth—but then the skull takes its place again.
The eye sockets grow wide, like two tunnels are opening in the wall of the theater, or maybe like Dymitr himself is shrinking; he chokes on panic as his sense of reality warps and bends, and then a massive brown root, as if from the base of the world’s largest tree, spills over the edge of one of the eye sockets. It reminds him of the leszy with the daisy growing in his skull, only the root moves with the deadly speed of a snake. It weaves between the theater seats and splits, then splits again, its tendrils spreading down every row like a many-fingered hand. It reaches Dymitr’s feet, and he steps around it, but one of the roots snags his ankle and then grows around it as firmly as a manacle.
