Page 1 of To Clutch a Razor
1A PRELUDE
Baba Jaga tugs the curtain back from the window with a gnarled hand. The reflection of the sun on the river is sharp as a knife. It cuts at her and she lets the curtain fall again.
Centuries of life have taught her there are certain patterns. Not just in other people’s behavior, but in her own. She falls into them without meaning to, and her body knows before she does, remembering its old shapes. When she turns back to the Knight, she’s young and sturdy, a warrior, with an as-yet-untested womb and a muscled arm.
If he’s startled by the change in her, from old woman to young, he doesn’t show it. But then, that’s what she expects from this particular Knight. And though she reacts to him as if he was truly a Knight—a zealot with a holy mission to execute so-called monsters, such as herself—she knows that pattern doesn’t actually apply to him. He chose a new path, one she’s never seen walked before.
He asked her for destruction, and then, when that didn’t suit… for transformation.
“And how are you settling into the new skin I gave you?” she says.
The last time she saw him, he had the look of someone who was creeping toward the edge of a cliff. Now he’s unchanged in all the ways that would matter to a mortal—still tall, still strong, still with that dusty brown hair and eyes to match it—but in the ways that matter to an immortal, he’s fundamentally altered. He looks shifty to her, like he might become something else entirely if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.
“Ala is teaching me,” he answers, and it’s that accent, too, that carries her back to another time. He’s fresh from the mother country, still on a guest visa, his consonants going still in his throat, his vowels too short.
“Ala,” Baba Jaga repeats.
The experience of time is relative to age, with the minutes stretching long and lazy for a child and imperceptible for an adult, and so it might as well have been a second ago that she turned this Knight into a fear-eating nightmare creature. She amplified the few drops of zmora’s blood that had crept into his veins until they drowned out the rest of him. That makes him a zmora, too, but perhaps… not all the way.
“Ah yes,” Baba Jaga says, because it was only a second ago, after all, that Aleksja Dryja knelt on the rug not two feet from where the Knight currently stands. “Aleksja Dryja. A capable illusionist, I hear. But unimportant.”
“Unimportant.” He looks offended.
“A young Dryja who, up until you brought me the fern flower to cure her, was a ticking clock.” Baba Jaga drums her fingers on her sternum, a habit she’s passed along to some of her wraiths. The sound it makes is louder and higher than it should be, like her chest is hollow.
“The other Dryjas will not be so welcoming,” she predicts.
“I don’t expect to be welcomed.”
“No, you don’t, do you?” Baba Jaga laughs a little. “You expected death, and pain, and a life of suffering. You came to me for those things, thinking they would be your penance.” She moves closer, her feet bare on the hardwood floor. As she walks toward him, the Knight’s head bows further. “But soon you will get used to this new life, and you’ll begin to want things you don’t deserve. Acceptance, and trust, and yes—welcome.”
She reaches out, and flicks beneath the Knight’s chin to get him to raise it, to look at her.
“Already you want something you don’t deserve: your sword. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To inquire about your sword?”
In truth, she’s the one who summoned him here. But not everyone comes when she calls—the wise know it’s better to flee. Only the desperate turn up at her door, and she knows the source of this Knight’s desperation.
It hums behind her, fixed to her wall. A longsword made of bone, bright white with a gilded hilt. It was made by magic, but not a magic Baba Jaga understands orrespects—a magic that uses pain as currency, the magic of monster-hunting Knights of the Holy Order. She can feel the agony that brought it into being every time she walks past it, like a sour taste in her mouth, like an echo of a scream. It used to be buried in the Knight’s back, formed by splitting his soul in half. And now it’s hers—and by extension,heis hers, until he manages to earn it back.
He seems to know it, given how he stands before her like a soldier reporting to his commanding officer. Shoulders back, body still, eyes forward. She would enjoy it more if he didn’t seem so damnsadabout it. She can’t tease someone who’s yielded so completely.
“Yes, I…” The Knight looks down again. “You said I could get it back, for the right price. So I am here to ask what that price is.”
“And what is the cost to you, exactly, if I keep it in my possession? Do you even know?”
He hesitates. She isn’t sure how a Knight reacts when parted from their soul sword. She knows they can feel where it is, and they can use that feeling to track it. She knows it’s not pleasant. But that’s the extent of her knowledge.
“So far, the cost is… pain,” he admits, after a moment.
“But you don’t really care about pain, do you?” She tilts her head. “You believe it’s no more than you deserve. Perhaps you even crave the punishment. So what do you care if the sword lives in my apartment?”
“I…” He frowns. Looks away. “It’s more than that.The Holy Order believes that if your sword can’t be integrated with your body after you die, you will… wander the earth forever, neither alive nor dead.”
“TheHoly Orderbelieves,” she repeats. “And what do you believe?”
The Knight hesitates again. “I don’t know.”
“You should maybe find someone who does,” Baba Jaga says. “It may give you some urgency that you currently lack.”
