Page 35 of To Clutch a Razor
Joanna nods. “Elza, go keep watch on the house while Dymitr searches. Marzena and I will stay here and question it.”
Ala looks at Dymitr. He sees nothing of the real her in the eyes of the illusion. She looks at him like he’s less than nothing.
“Just don’t kill it, please, Babcia,” she says. “It knows too much about me, and I’d like to find out how.”
She slides the bolt away from the door, and walks out ofthe room with Elza at her heels. No one stops her. Dymitr sags with relief.
Ala is out. Ala is safe.
Dymitr was afraid of the book of curses for a long time. Joanna gave it to him the day before he became a Knight, so there was a lot to distract him—namely, the splitting of his soul, a procedure that was outlined in the pages of the very book he sought to avoid. So he brought it back to his room and set it on the desk and tried to forget about it.
But after the agony of transformation was past, he was still the curse-bearer, the one entrusted with the Knights’ magic. He couldn’t avoid the book forever. So one evening he made himself sit down and read it cover to cover.
It contained all the things he expected: the magic of the bone sword, the incantations for summoning deadly crows and wolves, the instructions for tethering a pack of upiór to your will. But it also had things he would never have dreamed of: bloodline curses to eradicate entire family lines, like the one that almost killed Ala; spells to take a creature’s senses, or addle their thoughts, or rob them of their magic; and worst of all, an entire section for torments.
They were in no particular order. Spells for the skin, to shrink, or harden, or split, or burn. Spells for bones, to break, bend, twist, and shatter. Spells for the heart, to race or slow or to change its rhythm. But worst of the worstwere the spells for the mind: to convince it of falsehoods, like that the body was being devoured by a clew of flesh-eating worms, or that the tormentor was a member of the victim’s family, inflicting harm for no reason; or to control its thoughts, bringing forth old horrors again and again, or erasing pleasant memories so that only sorrow was left, or inducing panic, paranoia, hysteria, hallucinations, rage.
A Knight’s magic came from pain, but pain took on new meaning as he flipped through the pages of the book of curses, discovering new sensations you could force a mind to conjure—to feel more, to feel less, to feel wrong.
So he knows what to fear when his mother grabs him by the hair and slams his forehead into the stone floor, knows what awaits him when his grandmother kneels on his spine and binds his hands behind him.
And he begs, accordingly.
“Please,” he says. “Please, have mercy—”
He can’t insist on his true identity now. Ala got out, but the only reason they’re not hunting her down is that they think she’s the real him. And besides—what would they do, if they knew the truth? They would kill him anyway, for being a zmora.
Her voice is harsh and hard. “There is a wieszczy in town. I am not a fool; I know a distraction when I see one. So what is the wieszczy intended to distract us from?”
He has no answer. She kicks him in the side. Her boots are heavy and she has the strength of a Knight; he curls in on himself, his ribs shrieking with pain.
Dymitr tastes blood. “I have nothing to do with the wieszczy—”
His grandmother brings the back of her hand down on his face so hard that he sprawls with his hands bound behind him.
“I do not believe in coincidence,” his grandmother says, so quietly he has to strain to hear her. “I wish to know what you’re planning. I wish to know how you were able to pass among us so easily, what magic you did to learn so much about my grandson. And I wish to know how many of you there are. You may begin with the latter, since that question is simplest.”
He looks up at her from the corner of his eye.
“I’m alone,” he says.
“Liar,” she replies.
Marzena crouches beside him, and presses her knee into his throat so hard he can’t breathe, let alone speak.
“Do you want to do it, or should I?” Marzena says to his grandmother.
“I’ll do it,” his grandmother says, and Dymitr struggles against his mother’s hold, his body thrashing like he’s a fish on a dock struggling back toward water. But Marzena is strong, and Joanna kneels on one of his legs, then presses him down with her full weight.
His vision is going dark at the edges when his grandmother rolls up her sleeve to her elbow and starts dragging the edge of the blade across her forearm, making short but deep cuts that bleed rich red.
“Tenfold hurt, tenfold lasting,” she says in a low whisper. “Ten times given and ten times spoken. Ten by ten what’s suffered must be… tenfold felt what’s tenfold broken.”
He recognizes the spell from the book of curses.Amplificarewas written beside it. A pain amplification spell, to intensify his physical pain by a factor of ten.
He can smell it when it settles over him. Copper, that’s the odor of Knight magic. It smells like blood and like sickness, like wrongness. He wonders how he could have missed it, before; he remembers that he could never smell it, before. And then he feels the rough stone digging into his skin, and the ache in his ribs and in his cheek intensifies so much he lets out a loud, desperate sob of pain.
The pressure of his mother’s knee lets up on his throat, but he can still feel her—and smell her—behind him. His grandmother stands.
