Page 18 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)
A TENSE CONVERSATION
The house is in chaos, and Dymitr feels sick to his stomach. Marzena’s words are pounding like a headache. It, she called the strzyga. It didn’t even warrant the drawing of my sword.
He tries to go through the motions of cleaning the kitchen with the others, but the words chase him. I sent the wolves ahead of me, and watched them overtake it. He doesn’t flinch when the vase breaks, just kneels to pick up the pieces.
André is sitting on a stool in the corner, a wet rag on his head. He got faint during dinner, but he doesn’t look like he’s about to pass out now—if anything, he looks more focused than usual, staring at Dymitr as he puts the shards of the vase into a dish towel.
“Feeling okay?” he asks his young cousin.
“Never better,” the boy replies, in a deep voice that doesn’t quite belong to him.
Before he can puzzle over this, though, Kazik comes back to warn them of the wieszczy, and Dymitr’s stomach lurches. It can’t be a coincidence. This must be Niko’s doing. A well-timed distraction designed to sow chaos among the Knights.
Whatever Niko is planning, it’s happening now .
When they were finished with it, there wasn’t much left.
Some entrails and some feathers.
All he wants is to stay behind while the search party looks for the wieszczy that may or may not be Niko’s accomplice; all he wants is to stay here and clean the kitchen and pretend that he doesn’t come from a family full of gleeful, righteous murderers.
But he knows what he has to do: he has to go out there with the others and try to find the wieszczy before any of them do, to warn it away.
No small feat, since he’s far from the best tracker among them.
He puts on his boots. The front door is open, letting in the night air. Two reedy voices sing in the living room, keeping up their determined vigil even while the rest of the house prepares for battle. When he straightens, his grandmother is standing in front of him, Marzena lingering behind her.
“Go to the weapons room with Marzena,” she says. “She and I need to tell you something before you go out with the rest.”
There’s only one possible response to an order like that, especially with his mother watching: “Yes, Babcia.”
The weapons room is in the back of the house, separated from the living quarters by a small courtyard.
Technically, a hallway connects the front of the house to the back, but it may as well be a covered walkway.
It’s never had glass in the windows in all the time he’s lived here, and its stone floor makes it cold even in summer.
A chill passes over him as he follows his mother down it, observing the overgrown greenery in the courtyard that no one can be bothered to tend, the statue of an angel holding a horn.
Dymitr looked it up once and found out that it was Saint Michael, the leader of the army of heaven, holding the symbol of ?wi ? towit, the Slavic god of war.
Someone had even attached a—real, sharp—dagger against the statue’s spine, as if he was a Knight.
Knights of the Holy Order take all symbols as their own, even if it’s blasphemy.
Marzena opens the door to the weapons room, which is all stone and heavy wood, with no windows.
Weapons line the walls, and heavy cabinets against the far wall hold the other gear—armor, mostly.
His mother ushers him in, and he looks at the bench that Filip sat on to remove his bloody boots, a pew taken from an old church.
The memory catches him in its current, for a moment. He thinks of Filip handing his younger self the bloody boots, as if it was normal to let a child scrub gore from your shoes after you’d returned from a murder.
Every memory he has here is a horror, even the good ones.
He hears his grandmother’s footsteps behind him, recognizable because of their halting rhythm. She’s holding a sword, and that’s not strange, because she’s about to go out hunting, and her spine sword has been too difficult for her to draw for years now.
But then Elza steps into the room, followed by… him.
Dymitr is looking at an exact copy of himself. Black trousers, black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Scarred lip. Pale cheek. Scuffs on his shoes. It’s like he’s looking into a mirror, only his reflection is moving, and he’s completely still.
The other Dymitr is staring wide-eyed at Joanna like she’s a particularly terrifying beast he’s never encountered before.
The smell of him is rich and dark. We can’t read emotions that aren’t fear, Ala told him, in one of their many lessons.
But sometimes we can make sense of what the fear is woven together with.
In this case, the fear is bitter with rage.
“So you see,” Joanna says, pointing to the exact replica of Dymitr standing across from him, “why we have a problem.”
Then Marzena is closing the door behind them, and dragging the bolt across it. Locking them all in together.
He doesn’t dare speak. He knows that the person standing across from him must be Ala, with such a strong illusion layered over her that he can’t see behind it.
It takes incredible skill and strength to project an illusion so sturdy and so perfect—and so detailed, because even the folds of their sleeves match exactly.
He would marvel at it if he wasn’t so terrified by it.
Ala came here to help him. She came here, and now she’s a zmora locked in the weapons room with three Knights.
She’s going to die if he doesn’t convince them to release her.
“I—” he begins.
“Shut up,” his grandmother says. “I don’t need you to speak to identify which one of you is real and which one isn’t.”
She steps into the circle of light cast by the fixture above his head, the creases in her face even more pronounced because of its harshness. He watches, frozen with horror, as she drags the sword’s edge against the meat of her palm, just enough to draw blood. Her eyes turn deep crimson.
Even if he was capable of producing an illusion to rival Ala’s, he wouldn’t try. The only way to get her out of here safely is to pretend not to be himself. He’s helpless beneath his grandmother’s stare. She looks at him, and then at Ala, and he prays her illusion holds up to a Knight’s scrutiny.
His grandmother turns back to him.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice a zmora right under my nose?” she demands, and then she swings the sword, striking him in the side of the head with the hilt.
Everything goes dark and hazy for a moment, and he has to put a hand on the floor to steady himself. He tastes dark chocolate in the back of his throat, and lifts his eyes to Ala’s—to his own.
“Now that we’ve resolved that issue,” Ala says coolly, “I should go search for the other one.”
He holds his throbbing head. She sounds just like him, which must be part of the illusion, too. He wonders, though, if this is how she hears him. If he sounds this… hard. Businesslike.
“The other one?” Joanna demands.
“I suspect I was pursued here by the zmora and the strzygoń I deceived in Chicago.” Ala looks at Elza using Dymitr’s eyes, Dymitr’s face. “You know who I mean. You’re the one who revealed my true nature to them, after all.”
Elza looks away, her cheeks pink.
“I did,” she says, after a moment. “Which one do you think that is?”
She points at Dymitr. He doesn’t dare speak—doesn’t dare move —until Ala is safely out of this room.
“Hard to say,” Ala replies. “That could be a zmora projecting a strong illusion. Or it could be a strzygoń altered by magic. I’ll go search for the other one—it can’t be far, they’ve been moving in a pair.”
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 of the 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 worst were 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. Amplificare was 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.
“Let’s begin,” she says.
Marzena draws the knife from her boot, and grabs him by the hair again to drag him upright.
He has to bite back a scream at the pulling in his scalp, which feels like she’s trying to rip off his skin.
His eyes are full of tears, though he’s never cried from pain before, not even when he was strapped face down at his Knight ceremony and his grandmother was cutting a line across his shoulders to create space for the bone sword.
“What,” his grandmother says, her mouth twisted into a sneer, “are you planning?”
“I can’t—” He chokes. He’s already in so much pain, and they’re only just beginning. “I can’t tell you—”
Pain explodes across his back as Marzena drags her knife over his shoulder blade.
He screams.