Page 27 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A BONE SWORD

Baba Jaga likes to go for walks on summer nights in Chicago.

Even she isn’t immune to the charms of this time of year.

She wraps herself in a younger woman’s skin and walks the hot sidewalks with people coming in from the beach, still covered in sand.

She lets panting dogs trot alongside her and nudge her with their wet noses.

She listens to the screeching of the cicadas and the lapping of Lake Michigan against the rocks that hold it at bay.

She swats at mosquitos and spots robins plucking fireflies out of the air and teenagers hiding their beers when they hear her approach.

The Knight is sitting on her steps when she returns to her house that evening.

His face is spotted black-and-blue, and he sits like that’s not the worst of it, but it’s his aura that concerns her most. He wears his sorrow like a very heavy crown, indeed.

The banshees and lloronas of the neighborhood could all feast on him at once and still leave sated.

He looks up at her, and sniffs —such a zmora greeting, they’re like a pack of dogs that way, only trusting their noses. He seems to recognize who she really is, but he doesn’t move out of her way, or come to his feet to let her pass. He’s here to be an obstruction.

She sighs. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Knight. You can come in.”

He stands up, then. Stiff as an old man in his movements, and she wonders if she should offer to heal him just so she doesn’t have to see him wince like that. But not until she knows where the pain came from—not until she knows what it’s teaching him.

She climbs the creaky steps with their worn carpet, the smell of fried chicken following her all the way to the third-floor landing.

The door opens for her, and the apartment lights up at her approach, every lamp at once.

The lava lamp in the corner over the table of bones; the pink art deco lamp with the fringe shade; the lamp with the Tiffany-style shade covered in blue flowers; the fairy lights strung over one of the archways that wink on and off every second.

She unwraps the shawl that makes her look like a younger, lighter-haired woman, and hangs it on a hook on the wall.

Beneath it, she’s old and weathered, which suits her mood. There’s gray mixed with the black of her long, thick hair. She beckons for the Knight to follow her deeper into the apartment, and stands before the apothecary table where she once mixed the cure for what ailed him.

Now, she arranges the ingredients for a healing potion, just in case she decides to give it to him.

A thin slice of dried starfish, a tiny spoonful of salamander eyes, a pinch of yarrow root, three drops of aloe vera, a preserved calendula petal.

She puts them in the huge mortar, but doesn’t crush them with the pestle yet.

“And so?” she says to the Knight.

“I’ve come to make a deal with you,” he replies.

She laughs, and takes up the pestle. It’s so big it only just fits in her hand; hardly necessary for this particular blend, but she grinds the eyes and the petal and the yarrow and the starfish slice into a paste with the aloe vera.

“You came here before as a supplicant, and now you’re here as a businessman,” she says. “What changed?”

He hesitates, and she hears a murmur in that hesitation that interests her. She cocks her head, and then looks over her shoulder at his bruised face.

“You killed her,” she says softly.

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 strzygoń.

Niko only shrugged. Already understanding, 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 just to 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.”

She snaps her fingers—a request—and the cloth-wrapped bone sword floats toward her from its place on the wall, landing gently in her hands. The Knight looks at it like it’s a flagon of water and he’s dying of thirst.

“I asked you for thirty-three deaths. I will settle for the death of your grandmother in addition to thirty-two broken curses, instead.” She starts to unwrap the bone sword, unwinding the black cloth that covers the hilt.

“Use that book you stole. Undo some of the harm your people have done. Unravel their magic, and you will earn your full transformation.”

A promise sometimes has the feeling of magic. This one certainly does. She lets the black cloth fall, holding the white sword in her hands.

“Do we have a deal?”

“Thirty-two broken curses, and you’ll give me back the sword?”

“Thirty-two broken curses, and your soul will be fully healed.”

“Zgadzam si ? ,” he says. Agreed .

“Shirt off, then. And kneel.”

He gives her a confused look. But it seems he’s beyond defiance. He unbuttons his shirt, and shrugs it from his shoulders. Then he stands from his chair, and kneels in front of her, as he did before she changed him the first time.

Baba Jaga walks around him, bone sword in hand. His back is covered in deep wounds—harsh red lines from the drag of a blade. It’s as if he was beaten, only the wounds are too intentional for that. Each one of these was cut into him by a deliberate hand.

She turns the sword so that it’s upright, then holds it over his back, so the hilt will stretch across his shoulders, and the blade will follow his spine.

“Ready?” she says.

The Knight nods, and she presses the sword to his back. For a moment it hovers in place right over his skin. Then it shimmers, like the bone is turning to glass. The bright light pricks at her eyes, making them water.

But the bone doesn’t turn to glass—it turns to gold.

Then the bright wounds on the Knight’s back start to pull open like hungry mouths, seeking, undulating with hunger.

The Knight screams a horrible scream, but Baba Jaga hardly notices it; she’s too busy trying to peer through the glare of the magic to see what will happen next.

The sword presses to the wounds, as if to cauterize them. It sizzles against his skin, and he screams again, falling forward onto his hands. The metal sword sinks into him, but only barely; it stays at the surface of his skin, the perfect impression of a longsword now flush with his back.

The light of the magic fades. The Knight’s back shifts with his breaths, the sword flexible enough to accommodate him.

He straightens, and reaches over his shoulder to touch the sword. He looks up at her, eyes full of wonder.

“It’s still there?” he says. “But—”

“I told you that complete transformations are nearly impossible,” she says. “When you’re finished with this task I’ve given you, you’ll have done the impossible, and the sword will be gone. Curse by curse, it will disappear.”

He no longer looks sick, she thinks. His cheeks are bright, his eyes lively. She feels… better.

“Thank you,” he says.

She shrugs, and as she shrugs, her skin tightens, and her gray hair turns dark brown, and buoyancy returns to her joints.

“I want to ask you a favor,” she says. “You can count it among your broken curses.”

“What is it?” he asks.

She walks away, but pauses before stepping into the next room—the one that’s in Hyde Park.

“Protect my grandson,” she says. “The Kostkas are trying to get him killed, and I’ve grown rather fond of him.”

A soft reply: “I would have done that anyway.”

“I am an excellent negotiator,” she says. “So you can assume that when I’m not, it’s intentional. Show yourself out.”