Page 48 of To Clutch a Razor
His expression is answer enough, but when he opens his mouth to speak he seems unable to produce any sound at all. He closes his mouth.
She sets the pestle down and presses her palm to the paste she’s made of all the healing ingredients. She drags her fingers around the edge of the mortar to smear the sticky substance over her fingers. It’s yellow-brown and grainy.
“Hold still,” she says to the Knight, and she touches her thumb to the bruise on his cheek. He pulls away.
“I’m going to heal you, child,” she says. “It’s disconcerting to see you this way.”
She dabs his cheek with her thumb, and uses her index finger for the delicate skin around his eye, her pinkie finger for the cut on his lip, her middle finger for the stained skin on his forehead. The paste shines for just a moment before sinking into him, and it takes each wound with it.
By the time she’s finished, he looks just as he did a week ago, when he pleaded for his sword. She wipes her hand on the handkerchief she retrieves from her pocket, and then tosses it behind her. It disappears into thin air.
“Better,” she says, and then she gestures—a request—and the house, ever-generous, provides. Two chairs appear in front of her, facing each other. She takes one, and she glares at the Knight until he takes the other, sitting on the very edge of it.
“Do you know that a complete transformation is almost impossible?” she asks. “Something of the old version usually remains. My grandson, for example, will probably never live as long or age as slowly as most of his kind. I warned him of this before I made him what he is. It didn’t seem to trouble him, but then, he did always have a thread of cheerful nihilism in him.”
She smiles at the memory of little Nikodem Kostka, dragged into her apartment by his terrified mother who couldn’t stomach the eventuality of death. She shooed the woman for the actual transformation, and sat with Niko on the floor, old bones be damned, to tell him it would hurt to become a strzygon. Niko only shrugged. Alreadyunderstanding, perhaps, that pain was as meaningless as its lack, and as inevitable.
“I have known of only a few occasions on which a change was comprehensive and unalterable,” she says. “One of those occasions, I lived through. I was born human, you see, with no particular aptitude for magic. I made great sacrifices to acquire that aptitude, which I will not enumerate for you now. But in order to make it permanent, I had to endure the unthinkable.”
She looks into the Knight’s stormy eyes.
“I had to kill the one I loved most in all the world,” she says. “It was for the good of all, but that isn’t the reason I did it. I did it because I was desperate to change, fully and completely, and I was willing to do anything to accomplish it. Even rip out my own heart.”
She says it without emotion. Long ago, she locked her memories of that day in a box and buried them—literally, with a shovel and a lantern in the dead of night, at a place no one else knows. So she can’t see the man’s face at the moment he realized she betrayed him; she can’t remember how it sounded when he breathed his last. It’s better that way.
Even though the Knight has every reason to despise her for what she told him to do, he looks a little sad at her recollection. What a soft heart he has, she thinks, and it’s as great an impossibility as she has ever seen, for a boy raised as a Knight to have a soft heart.
“Your grandmother had to give her blood to you so that you could split your soul, did she not?” she asks.
The Knight raises his eyebrows. “How did you know that?”
“Your sword sang a little song,” Baba Jaga replies. “And I heard it.”
The Knight looks down at his hands. “The curse she put me under, when I was there. It ended when she died.”
“Another curse born of her blood.” Baba Jaga nods.
“So the magic that split my soul.” He scratches at the back of his neck, like he’s remembering drawing the sword from his spine. “I couldn’t be rid of it until she died. That’s why you told me to kill her.”
She reaches out and touches his knee. “I am often cruel. But I am not usually cruel without reason. This was the crucial first step in making your transformation real and lasting.”
His head bobs. Baba Jaga takes her hand away.
“You came here to make me an offer. I think it’s time you make it.”
The Knight straightens in his chair. “I have in my possession a book of Knights’ magic. It’s one of the only ones in existence. If you return my sword to me, I’ll give it to you.”
Baba Jaga smiles. She stands, and walks over to the little bookcase in the corner. The books arranged on it are old and leather-bound, their spines cracked and their pages worn and musty. Sometimes she takes one out justto stick her nose between the pages and breathe in the scent of it.
She takes a slim green volume from the shelf, and offers it to him.
He opens it, and his face falls. It’s written in Cyrillic, so he likely can’t read the letters, but he seems to recognize the diagram of the bone sword on the first page.
“You mean a book like this?” she says. “I have several. Each one is in a different language. They have significant overlap, but there’s always one spell or another that’s distinct in each one. I collect them.”
The Knight sags in his chair, staring at the drawing of the bone sword. Baba Jaga curls her fingers over the back of her own chair, her dark fingernails drumming against the wood.
“So you see, you still come to me with almost nothing. But all is not lost.”
