Page 39 of When Among Crows
He’s heard of his mother summoning crows, his father summoning wolves, of a trail of blood that can bewitch a single sigbin or an entire pack of upiór, of pain that lights fires and rends flesh and muffles screams. But he’s never heard of the kind of magic that warps a creature’s powers or creeps through their blood. He wonders how many times she’s used it; he wonders what, exactly, she’s done.
“Our task as Knights is to step closer to the dark so that other humans, humans less suited to bear its influence, don’t have to. And these curses… these curses are even closer to the dark than most Knights dare to go,” she says. “None of my children had the disposition for it, so I withheld it from them. But I believe you can bear this burden, Dymitr. You can be our curse-bearer.”
She lays a cold, dry hand against his cheek.
“Before you sleep, you must do penance for your fear,” she says. “Ten times, to root it out from your heart before your ceremony tomorrow. Understand?”
He suppresses a shudder.
“Yes, Babcia,” he says, clutching the book to his stomach.
11A PROMISE KEPT
When he surfaces from the memory, he’s on his knees in the dark blood he and Ala spilled on the carpet, his hand still clutched in Ala’s with the ribbon binding them together. She looks at him with an expression he can’t name. She lifts her free hand like she’s going to touch his face, and then she doesn’t—she lets it drop back into her lap instead.
“The petal,” she says to him.
She reaches into her pocket for the brown paper, and offers it to him. He unwraps it as carefully as he can, given how hard he’s trembling. The fern flower rests inside it, almost as fresh now as the day he picked it, which feels like it happened in another life. It looks almost like a lily, with big, thick petals that taper to an elegant point, symmetrically arranged around a central labellum. He pinches one of the petals and breaks it away from the flower. It doesn’t feel like it’s as powerful as it is, but maybe that’s just how powerful things are—like the zmory, like Baba Jaga herself, they don’t always need to declare themselves.
He puts the petal in his mouth, and chews it. It tastes likegreen,there’s no better word for it—like grass, or leaves,with just a hint of sweetness. He swallows, and as he swallows he can feel the petal carving a line of heat down his esophagus and into his stomach.
Pain comes again, but this time it’s less focused, and more of a burning that envelops his entire body at once, as if he’s been thrust into a fire. Heat swallows him up, and he can tell by Ala’s whimper, across from him, that she suffers the same thing; they reach for each other at the same time with their free hands, and clutch each other, the ribbon straining around their knuckles.
Their eyes meet, and the pain disappears. He sits back on his heels, panting, the fern flower fallen to the carpet by his ankle.
Baba Jaga bends over them and cuts the ribbon with the paring knife. But they don’t release each other right away.
“It was her,” she says to him in a whisper, like it’s a secret.
“It was,” he says. “And she chose me as her successor.”
He says it bitterly, because he knows what it means: that she saw in him the same capacity that she feels in herself. He peels his fingers away from her hand. They’re tacky with blood.
“But you aren’t,” she says to him. “You came to me instead.”
But he can’t look at her, can’t possibly bear her mercy now.
The smell of this place is familiar to Niko. All witch houses seem to smell the same, like lavender and smoke and salt. And now blood, of course, the combined blood of Ala and Dymitr staining the rug between their knees. As they pull their hands apart, Niko is relieved to see their bleeding has slowed, the wounds returned to normal. They come to their feet, and Niko bends to pick up the ribbon that fell between them. He knows Baba Jaga too well to leave her with such a token; there’s a lot she could do with it.
He tucks the ribbon in his pocket. He wouldn’t have said, before, that you could see the curse on Ala… but he can certainly see its absence. She stands straighter, and her eyes are brighter. He doesn’t know much about the visions that haunted her, except—It was her,she just said to Dymitr, and he seemed to understand. Something strange has passed between them, something Niko can’t comprehend.
Baba Jaga is waiting. Niko can tell by the restless shift of her bare feet. Her toes are red with Ala’s and Dymitr’s blood. Her eyes lift to meet his, and for a moment he sees a spark of light there, like a child’s delight. It’s a feat for a woman who has seen and done so much, to still find room for wonder.
“And now we come to the main event, I think,” Baba Jaga says, when Dymitr turns to face her, Ala and Niko at his back. She leans against the table behind her, jostling some of the jars with the heels of her hands. Teeth clatter together in one of them; live moths flap their wings against the glass in another.
“Make your request, Knight,” Baba Jaga says to Dymitr.
“I’d like you to destroy my sword,” he says to her. “So the powers and the oaths of my kind are beyond my reach.”
“You wish to hobble yourself,” Baba Jaga says. She tilts her head a little as she regards him, and it’s easy to see the strzyga buried deep in her blood, this way. Baba Jaga is neither strzyga nor zmora nor mortal nor wraith, yet she’s collected bits and pieces of so many things in her long years that she can, at times, resemble every one of them.
“Why?” she asks him.
“I have done wrong,” Dymitr says, and he sounds exhausted, just as he did in the foyer.
“And you were taught that pain is penance,” Baba Jaga says.
Dymitr receives this in silence. Niko looks at Ala, who is biting down on her lip almost hard enough to draw blood. The look she gives him carries a question. He suspects it’s something like,Are we really going to let him do this?And if Niko didn’t believe so much in letting people make their own choices, perhaps the answer would be no. But he does.
