12. A Monster’s Death
When he told his grandmother he wanted to go to America to find and destroy Baba Jaga, she considered him for a long time.
They were at the coffee shop where she’d once picked out a zmora from a crowd of strangers. He drank his coffee black, now, with honey instead of sugar. He bit down on the hard biscuit that came with it, and met his grandmother’s gaze.
“Why?” she asked him.
“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 strzygoń, 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 like his again?
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, has been 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 whatever this is.
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’s annoying.”
“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.”
“Brother and sister.” He thinks of Elza, with a sharp pain, and rolls onto his back to stare at the ceiling. There’s a crack there, where the paint has bubbled away from the drywall. It reminds him of the lines in his palm.
He looks at her again.
“Are you sure you want a brother who’s done what I’ve done?” he says.
“You’ll find there’s a lot of family drama among zmory,” she says, with a smile that he thinks would have looked menacing to him before, but now seems gentle. “We wouldn’t be the first to reconcile after one has killed another’s aunt.”
“Really.”
“Really,” she says. “Eternity is long, Dymitr. Time enough for hearts to soften.”
He wonders what he would look like to a llorona now. If the halo of sorrow around his head would still be as brilliant to them, or if untangling the curse from Ala’s blood, and hearing that she wanted him to be whole, has healed over some of the loss that divides him.
He sits up, and he startles himself with how quick the movement is, and how forceful—he falls to his knees on the carpet right in front of the bed. Ala laughs.
“The old legends used to say that we could transform into a hair and fit through a keyhole,” she says. “We can’t, of course, but we do tend to be fast and light.”
He lifts a hand and stares at it. His fingernail has grown back, and the wound in his palm is healed over. He comes to his feet, and meets his own eyes in the mirror above Ala’s dresser.
He looks like himself—there’s some relief in that. His eyes are still that odd shade of brown-gray, his hair still matches them, as before. The scar in his lip is still there. But there is something different about him, too. Something sharper, and wilder, like a fox that wanders into a suburban neighborhood in search of food—capable at any moment of ferocity.
Ala stands beside him, and he sees some similarity between them. That keenness.
“Sister,” he says to her, and she nods.
“No visions?” he asks her. “Memories?”
“Gone,” she replies, and she smiles so wide it looks like it might split her face in half. “Let’s go say hello to Niko. You can find out how worried he is.”
She leads him out of the room. The scents of her apartment hit him all at once. Stale crackers and dust. Old bacon, rubber boots, petrichor. Mold, rust, and blood. He considers the blood for a moment—he has a feeling about it, an attachment. He follows that feeling into the kitchen, where he can focus on nothing else, though there are plenty of other things to see. He follows it to the kitchen trash can, which he opens, and removes a square of gauze stained brown with blood.
He stares at it. It’s his blood, from the gauze that covered the pulled fingernail.
“Did you wake up a vampire?” Niko’s voice asks.
“No, he’s just discovering his new nose,” Ala replies. “Give him a moment.”
Dymitr drops the gauze back into the trash. Niko is leaning against the sink, his arms folded, the light of the sun glowing behind his head. The menace that Dymitr used to see in his face isn’t gone, exactly. It’s just that it no longer creeps up Dymitr’s spine the way it used to. Instead, he can see that Niko is beautiful, like a statue of a Roman soldier, like a Kupala Night fire, like a well-made sword.
Niko asks Ala, “Do we call him a ‘zmora,’ since he’s male? Or is he a ‘zmoron’?”
Ala laughs. “Technically, it’s ‘zmór,’” she says. “Though if you want to call him a zmoron, I suppose you can.”
Niko smells like powdered sugar, and—Dymitr steps closer, and closer, following his nose to the curve of Niko’s neck in a way that would have been embarrassing, if he’d been in his right mind. He touches his nose to Niko’s throat, and breathes in. He smells like some kind of flower, and ever-so-slightly of dark chocolate—
“You are worried about me,” Dymitr says, pulling away. “And… a little bit afraid of me?”
Niko’s eyes are wide. They skip all over Dymitr’s face, and Dymitr wonders how he looks to Niko, if he’s still beautiful enough to fight for.
“The word you’re looking for,” Niko says, “is awe. I am a little in awe of you.”
Dymitr opens his mouth to argue, and Niko holds up a hand to stop him.
“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll ruin it.”
He curls his fingers under Dymitr’s chin and draws him closer. His breath smells like coffee and mint toothpaste. He kisses Dymitr, gentle and slow. It lights up parts of Dymitr he wasn’t sure existed, as if the fire that flickers in Niko’s eyes has kindled in Dymitr, too.
“See?” Niko says. “It’s good to be something new.”
The leszy sits on a stump in the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, and breathes in the moonlight. A moth flutters around one of his horns, and then settles at the edge of his eye socket, where all the flowers that once grew are now dead, dormant for winter.
He can smell snow in the air, though it hasn’t fallen yet. He is as eager for the forest to fall asleep as he will be for it to wake again, come springtime. He enjoys the sound of the trees settling in for their long sleep, and the earth going quiet as all the things that wriggle and scuttle and busy themselves inside it go still. He stretches out one hoof, and listens.
He hears the pressure of footsteps, too light to be human footsteps, and lifts his stag head to see a man standing in the clearing across from him. He carries a bow and quiver. The leszy recognizes him, though it’s been months since he last laid eyes on the man’s face. He thinks he could even remember the man’s name, if he reached for it, but he doesn’t. The leszy has never understood the wraith’s fixation on names. A leszy has no name, he has only the forest of which he is a guardian.
“He has found me again,” the leszy says.
The man nods, and walks closer. The leszy can tell by his movements that he is different than he used to be. No longer human, perhaps. It’s a strange thing to observe, since it happens rarely, but it does happen, every now and then. And so he accepts it, as he accepts the changing of the land, the changing of all things.
“I am leaving soon on an errand from Baba Jaga,” the man says. “But before I go, I came to test your bow again, if you’re willing.”
The leszy tilts his head.
“The fern flower won’t bloom for several months,” he says. “And he will no longer be able to pick it, even so.”
“This is just a friendly contest, my lord leszy,” the man says. “I no longer have need of the fern flower.”
The leszy considers this for a moment.
“Oh,” he says at last. “Then let me make a target.”