Page 2 of When Among Crows
“A contest of what?”
“Something he can do that I can also do. Does he dance?”
The man smiles. “No, my lord. Not unless enchanted by vila.” He taps a toe on the floor, to draw attention to the trace of sacred fire still clinging to his boots.
“Does he sing?”
The man shakes his head.
“He is raised to violence, as all of his kind are,” the leszy says. “Perhaps he can wield a bow.”
“As it happens,” the man says. “Yes.”
The leszy nods. He raises his staff—an old branch, crooked and dry—and suffuses it with life to make it pliant, like a young sapling. Then he reaches up to his eye socket, and plucks one of the flowers that grows there. It comes out with blossom and stem and white root all together, pinched between his claws.
All the plants of his forest owe him a debt, so when the leszy asks, the plant responds, growing long and thick as string. He fastens each end of it to the now-bent staff to make a bow.
The man watches. He marvels, as a mortal marvels, but his breath doesn’t catch.
The leszy has known men for centuries. The ones who know how to see him also know that they should fear him.The only ones who don’t fear him are the ones who prefer him dead. This one is an oddity, neither fearful nor murderous.
“What is he?” the leszy asks again, picking up a pencil from the nearest pew to grow it longer and sharper, so it resembles an arrow.
“I’m a supplicant,” the man says. “That’s all.”
“It’s not ‘all,’ or even much of anything.”
“It’s enough.”
The leszy can’t argue with that. Having finished fashioning the bow and two arrows, he sets them aside on a pew while he finds a target. Though he doesn’t share this mortal reverence for the saints, he doesn’t like the idea of using one of them as target practice. It seems unwise.
The leszy urges one of the plants in his eye socket to bloom, filling the space of the one he plucked. He points at one of the paintings on the wall diagonal from him. They’re fixed between the windows, each one depicting a significant moment: a man on a cross, a man multiplying bread and fish, a woman washing a man’s feet. But this one is in a garden.
“The target will be that one’s eye,” the leszy says.
At the mortal man’s raised eyebrow, the leszy adds, “Surely you do not object to the eye of a snake as a target?”
“My objection is to the defacing of private property. I have no interest in getting arrested,” the man admits.
“I will mend it when we are finished.”
The man nods. The leszy nocks the arrow and draws the bow taut. He breathes the musty smell of incense. Hereleases the arrow, and it stabs directly into the eye of the serpent, curled around a young woman’s ankle in the Garden of Eden.
He then offers the bow to the man.
“If he nestles his arrow beside mine,” the leszy says, “I will consider him the victor.”
The man takes the bow from him. At first, the leszy isn’t sure he’ll have the strength to draw it—the leszy is much larger than the man, and if he were ordinary, he wouldn’t even be able to pull the string. But whatever he is, he’s stronger than most. He places the arrow and draws it, and breathes deep and slow.
Even before he releases the arrow, the leszy knows the man won’t win. His hands are too unsteady on the bow, the weapon too big for him. The arrow buries itself in the serpent’s throat, just below the target. The man’s head drops, and he offers the bow back to the leszy.
It’s only then that his hands tremble.
“Please,” the man says.
The leszy has heard men say a thousand things. Dares and challenges, questions and demands, prayers and bargains. He has rarely heard them beg.
“Please,” the man repeats. “I know enchantments surround the fern flower, and they’ll test me. All I ask is that you let me be tested.”
