Page 26 of To Clutch a Razor
“Your sister says you were awfully comfortable around the local population when she saw you,” Marzena says.
In this context,local populationdoesn’t refer to humans, but to creatures.Quasi-mortals. Ala also calls them “monsters” with a kind of fondness, like she’s referring to a pesky little brother—but he doesn’t think the word would sound the same, coming from his mouth.
“We all have our sources,” Dymitr says.
“True,” Marzena acknowledges. “Some more tolerable than others.”
Dymitr slides his phone out of his pocket, and with a surreptitious glance at the cousin beside him, unlocks it.
“What was the one in town you told me about, Mother?” Kazik asks her. “The one who could barely keep its spit in its mouth.”
“It was a wieszczy, and I’ll thank you not to remind me of its spitting habit. I had to shower after talking to it,” Marzena says. “But it gave me a czart that turned out to be a windfall. I’m going to go back in a few months, see if it will give me anything else. And if not…” She turns her knife over her fingers, a small smile on her face. “All sources become targets, eventually. I hope you didn’t get attached, boy.”
Dymitr thinks of the czart he saw in the strzyga club,with his small horns and even smaller smile, like he was keeping a fond secret. He keeps his voice steady as he says, “My heart isn’t as soft as you imagine.”
“Tell that to the mice you used to cry over,” Kazik says, with a grin.
Dymitr looks down, like he’s embarrassed, only it’s just an excuse to look at his phone. He pulls up his messages, and opens the text chain he started with Ala earlier that day. With a few taps, he’s sent Ala the message they agreed on: a book emoji.
While he’s here at dinner, and certain that everyone is too busy to notice a hole in the house’s magic, Ala will sneak in through his old bedroom window and retrieve the book of curses from its hiding place. She’ll be gone before anyone feels its absence. Not that they would know where to search for a magical disruption like that anyway—only he knows where he put it, and only Elza knows to look under the bathroom sink.
“In his defense, I had just watchedCinderella,” Elza says. “Maybe the cartoon mice made too much of an impact on him.”
Dymitr rolls his eyes and puts his phone back in his pocket.
“It wasn’t because ofCinderella,” Joanna says, from farther down the table. She speaks a little coolly, as she often does when she hears Kazik taunting him. “It was because the traps didn’t usually kill the mice, and he didn’t like to watch them suffer.”
Dymitr has a vivid memory of one of the mice with its hips trapped under the metal bar, broken. It was scrambling with its front legs, its eyes bulging. He can hardly keep himself from wincing at the thought of it, even now.
Joanna goes on: “I explained to him that killing them was a mercy—that death is not the worst that awaits any creature, but suffering. He handled them well enough after that.”
“It shouldn’t be so hard, to kill something with no soul,” Marzena points out. “Not for us.”
Joanna says, “The things we hunt, they are clever in their deceptions. They convince us of their morality, their vulnerability, their wholeness. He pitied the mouse because he imagined it had a human’s awareness of doom, a human’s understanding of suffering. It’s because the monstrous things of this world remind us ofhumanitythat some of our number pity them. And we need Knights who have an acute awareness of humanity, or we will become as twisted as the evil things are.”
These kinds of speeches used to make Dymitr’s heart swell in his chest like a balloon. They used to make him feel not only that he belonged in the Holy Order, but that he was an integral part of it, offering it something that no one else could. Before, his grandmother’s speeches could make him shake off frustration and press through pain, they made him go eagerly to the weapons room to do penance, they made him pore over every detail of every missionto ensure he hadn’t missed anything, until the early hours of the morning.
Now, he feels cold, all the way to the core of him, as Joanna focuses on Dymitr, a solemn look on her lined face.
“If he falters in his belief,” she says, “it’s his task to do penance to correct the flaw in his heart.”
And he had, hadn’t he? He knelt on dry peas for hours. He prayed as he mortified his flesh with holy magic. He begged whatever and whoever was listening to wrench the doubt out of his heart by force and firm his resolve.
Joanna looks at her daughter, then, adding: “But if you have no human heart, Marzena, you must do penance as well.”
Marzena looks down at her plate. For once, she looks almost ashamed. Kazik offers Dymitr a nod of apology. The silence is strained, and then there’s the sound of footsteps outside, and the door shivers as someone pounds on it with a heavy fist. For a terrible, irrational moment, he thinks it’s Niko coming to kill his mother or die trying. Then it opens, and standing on the mat is Dymitr’s father,Lukasz.
He’s a tall man, as tall as Dymitr and Kazik, but broader and sturdier, with a thick beard and ash-brown hair that’s thinning at the temples. He has round, shallow-set eyes that seem to bulge when he widens them. But now his face is pinched with fatigue and grief.
Joanna rises to greet him, and slowly, the others rise todo the same. Filip andLukasz went on missions together often; they were as close as twins, each one half of a whole. Though Krystyna is Filip’s wife, it’sLukasz who carries the most grief for his brother, felled by a strzyga.
As Dymitr watches his cousins giving his father a warm welcome, he thinks of Nikodem Kostka, his eyes like lit embers, his curve of a smile.
Some people move into the living room to join the singers, clearing a space in the middle of the table forLukasz to sit. He piles a plate high with food:lazanki with breaded pork nestled beside it, red cabbage and mashed potatoes with sour cream and dill. He skips the pierogi, which André is already eyeing hungrily.
“Well, now thatLukasz is here, you must tell us the tale,” Joanna says to Marzena.
Marzena doesn’t seem like a natural storyteller. She’s curt and impatient with foolishness. But war stories are different—they bring out another side of her, one that’s lively and engaging. Dymitr has always liked his mother best when she was telling stories.
