Page 42 of When Among Crows
“Why keep fighting foot soldiers when we can take out a general?” he said. “You told me, once, that you believed I would do things that none of our people have managed. Do you still believe that?”
His grandmother sipped from her cup of coffee. He could see the stiffness in her shoulders that came from leaving the bone weapon sheathed. She was too old to draw it now, her long life finally coming to its close. But her mind was sharp as ever, and for a moment, he was afraid that she would see right through him.
“Perhaps I do,” she said, with a small smile.
Baba Jaga picks up a jar of teeth and tips one into her palm, then grinds it to dust in the huge mortar she keeps on the table. She’s stronger than she looks, her bicep bulging in her sleeve as she presses down with the pestle.
“Niko, dear,” she says, without looking up. “Be a good boy and fetch me a dried thistle.”
Niko moves around the table to search the shelves behind Baba Jaga, and Dymitr frowns. He’d gotten the impression, before they arrived here, that Niko had only met Baba Jaga once before. She was the one who turned him from mortal to strzygon, but he seems to know this place with more than a passing familiarity.
Babcia,he called her, when they arrived.
Niko plucks a jar from one of the shelves and takes a dried thistle from within it with two fingers. He offers it to Baba Jaga, who adds it to the powdered tooth in the mortar and grinds it up.
Dymitr picks up the bone sword that he unsheathed from his body. It hums with the same feeling of rightness a person gets in their sleep when they shift into a comfortable position. He wonders if that will change, when he transforms. Will this piece of his soul ever feel likehisagain?
He expected to feel relief when he came to this decision not to live a half-life, to spare himself the pain of his unmaking. Even a Knight plagued by guilt is a human being, driven by the desire to spare himself annihilation, isn’t he? But he feels regret instead. He knows how to bear pain, hasbeen diligently instructed in the art of it since he was a child. Penance, before he took his oaths, and the splitting of his soul that accompanied them, and the unsheathing of the sword that came after, they were all ordinary to him. It would be easier, in some ways, to bear the pain of the sword’s destruction, than to embrace whateverthisis.
Ala’s eyes find his.
“Foolish hope, remember?” she says to him, and some of his regret ebbs away.
Baba Jaga pours the mixture into a pot, and sets it on a hot plate to boil. Her fingertips are stained green.
“I can’t say what you’ll become, exactly,” she says. “No ordinary zmora, to be sure. Magic is not mastered and it moves as it will, even through me. But the allegiance you feel to the Holy Order will be broken. They will hunt you as if you are a dangerous animal, and that is, I assume, what you want. To make an enemy of those to whom you once belonged.”
He wouldn’t have put it that way, maybe, but she’s right. He began the process much earlier than this, too. When he fought his sister with her own sword, defending Niko’s life with his own. When he fled the Holy Order with a series of grand lies in his wake, and came to this city with only his bow and arrows and a bag of necessities. And even before that, when he refused to draw his sword at all for months, and honed his skill with the bow instead, so he wouldn’t have to touch the hilt that weighed heavy on his shoulders. He has been betraying them since before Lena died. At least now he’ll do it thoroughly.
Baba Jaga takes the bubbling mixture from the hot plate and pours it into a mug. It’s dark red in color, and thick as syrup. She offers it to him, and he takes it in both hands.
“Drink it all,” she says. “Then you’ll fall asleep, and when you wake, the world will have one fewer Knight.”
He holds the mug against his sternum. Despite the fact that it was just simmering on the hot plate, it feels like ice against his chest. Then he raises it to his lips, resolved to swallow it all at once. The last things he sees are Niko’s fire-bright eyes and Ala’s freckled nose.
He turns his face into the worn yellow pillowcase and takes a deep breath. It smells like detergent—the starchy, industrial kind they use for hospitals. He takes a deeper breath, and he can smell something else, too. Bacon. Lavender. And something sweet as powdered sugar.
He opens his eyes, and finds himself staring at Ala.
She’s sitting in a chair beside the bed. She looks different than she did when he last saw her. It takes him a few seconds to realize it’s that she no longer looks even faintly monstrous to him. She just looks like Ala: half stern, half soft, always skeptical, rarely unsure.
“Hello,” she says to him.
“Something smells sweet,” he replies. He turns his face into the pillowcase and breathes in, but he can’t find the scent there. She laughs a little, and holds her hand out to him so he can smell her fingers, like a dog.
But then he smells it, that powdered-sugar scent. Pleasant, and light, like angel food cake.
“I’m worried about you,” she says. “That’s what it smells like.”
“Makes me hungry,” he says. “That’sannoying.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Dymitr considers her. She never struck him as a tender-hearted person before. Yet here she is, sitting in an uncomfortable chair next to his bed, fretting over him.
“You’re worried about me?” he says. “Why?”
“You just haven’t thought about it,” she says. “You were made from the same blood as me. That means you’re my brother, and I’m your sister, and we’ll always worry about each other from now on.”
