It’s simple in structure, just a wide cylindrical base with a column of water and light falling from the ceiling. It’s the light that’s remarkable, displaying patterns in the falling water that passersby stop to marvel at, even if they’re in an obvious hurry. Right now, the Statue of Liberty glows green in the water column, her torch held high.

  Ala tucks her hands into her pockets and takes out something hard and beige. It’s an old baby tooth—her mother saved them for her, for just such a purpose. She balances it on her thumbnail and flicks it as hard as she can, so it lands in the middle of the fountain’s base—not exactly the kind of fountain you’re supposed to throw coins in, but once it touches the metal grate, the tooth disappears, and all of the hair on the back of Ala’s neck stands on end.

  Standing beside her is a woman. But not merely a woman. She has long hair—most wiła do—and her feet are bare, but otherwise she’s opted not to look like a figure from an old book of fairy tales. She wears, not a flowing white gown, or a crown of flowers in her hair, but a hot-pink dress that makes her skin look even duller and greener than it would have otherwise. In an attempt to mitigate this, perhaps, she’s wearing a lipstick to match the dress—but it’s garish on her, and incongruous, like it’s painted on a corpse.

  Not all women are beautiful by the standard definitions, and not all wiła are, either. This one isn’t. There’s something froglike about her round eyes and her wide mouth.

  “My lady,” Ala says, bending her head a little in greeting. The wiła is smaller than Ala is, but much older. It’s obvious in the way she appraises Ala, like she’s about to correct her posture or scold her for bad manners.

  “A zmora,” the wiła says, her voice raspy. “How interesting. Are you on a journey, zmora?”

  “I am. Back to our homeland.”

  The wiła snorts. “What reason do you have to go back there? Everything you need is here.”

  She gestures to the room around them. No one is paying attention to them, not even Dymitr, who’s turned away from Ala, his phone still pressed to his ear. Everyone is moving more slowly than usual, too, which is likely due to the magic created by her tooth donation. It’s the price of speaking to this particular wiła, who’s an odd one—living inside an airport, for one thing; separated from her sisters, for another.

  Wrapped around the circumference of the large room are restaurants and shops. A Dunkin’. A Hudson Booksellers. A Starbucks. She supposes, depending on your priorities, the wiła has a point: everything she needs is here. A body of water, in the fountain. The lives of mortals, to observe and occasionally intrude upon. Food, if she desires it. And all the little debts and sacrifices that build on each other day by day—taking an earlier flight to see a loved one sooner, or giving up a seat so the plane can leave on time, or just the thankless labors of the airport employees who frequent this place—which create the potential for strong magic, if someone knows how to make use of them.

  “Is that man your friend?” the wiła asks. When Ala nods, she says, “I had friends, once.” She sounds wistful. “We used to dance and sing together in the river. Then mortals came and built a dam, and the river dried up, and we had to scatter. I don’t know where my friends are now. I gave up looking for them long ago.”

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” Ala says.

  The light from the fountain is reflected in the wiła’s dark, round eyes.

  “The world always changes,” the wiła says. “For now, it changes to exclude us. Someday it may change to suit us once more. But not yet.” She looks at the fountain again. “You’ve come to ask me for something, but I only help warriors, and most zmoras I have met can’t claim to be warriors. Are you an exception?”

  She looks at Dymitr, who still has a phone pressed to his ear, and says, “I’m going to kill a Knight.”

  The wiła raises her thin eyebrows. “And you believe you can accomplish this?”

  “I’m not an experienced killer,” Ala says. “But I’m excellent at illusions. I have a plan to get close to her. I just need your help for the last part of it.”

  “Then you’d better ask, zmora. Your tooth won’t buy us much more time.”

  “I don’t speak the language, where I’m going,” Ala admits. It’s not exactly shameful, but it makes her feel sheepish, like it’s some personal failure. As if she doesn’t deserve to claim their mother country if she can’t speak its language … even though it wasn’t her choice, not to be taught.

  “To purchase fluency would be costly indeed.”

  “I don’t need it to be permanent. Only while I’m visiting.”

  Ala is wary of her own request, wary of its cost. She could have gone to a lesser witch for something like this, but a lesser witch might give her the ability to speak Polish, but only in someone else’s voice, or they might have made her forget English in the process, or she could speak Polish, but only at night or only at the full moon. Everyone knows that if you want something to do with the voice, you go to a wiła. She’ll do it properly.

  “For as long as you speak our mother tongue, you will lose the ability to speak for twice that time upon your return,” the wiła says, after a moment. “If you stay for a day, you’ll give me your voice for two days. If you stay for a week, you’ll give me your voice for two weeks. Understand?”

  “Yes, my lady.” Ala doesn’t love the idea of losing her voice for that long, but of all the bargains she could have made, it seems the most straightforward she could have hoped for. Because wiła only help warriors, they tend to be more up front about the costs of their magic. If they’re going to turn on you, they do it right away, before the bargaining even begins.

  The wiła reaches into the pocket of her puffy skirt, and takes out a crystal bottle, small enough to fit in her palm. She takes the stopper out of it, and offers it to Ala.

  “Whisper your name into this bottle,” she says. “And it will be done.”

  Ala takes the bottle and holds it up to her lips. “Aleksja Dryja,” she whispers, and then the wiła takes it and stoppers it. For a moment, Ala thinks, Is that all? She’s not good at sensing magic, as a general rule. But then she smells petrichor, and the fountain in front of her starts to look … strange. Strings of water pull away from the column like hair blowing in a strong wind. They stretch toward her and then wrap around her, not quite touching her, but distorting her vision. It’s like trying to see through a waterfall.

  She looks at the wiła through the curtain of water, and notices for the first time that her bare feet don’t seem to be touching the tile. She’s floating a half inch above the ground.

  Ala can tell the moment the time-slowing magic runs out, because all the water collapses against her at once, soaking her from head to toe. She splutters, water running into her eyes and ears and mouth. Everyone around her stares at her like they’re waiting for an explanation, but Ala doesn’t offer one. She just walks back over to Dymitr, running a hand over the back of her neck to keep a drop of water from rolling down her spine.

  He’s staring into the middle distance, his phone still in hand. When she touches his shoulder, he startles a little, and blinks at her.

  “What happened?” she asks him.

  “Why are you wet?” he replies.

  “Say something in Polish and I’ll tell you.”

  “Um … why are you wet?” he asks again, and for a moment she thinks he just said it again in English, before her lagging mind processes the sound of the words he spoke.

  “I understood that.” She grins. “Thanks to the wiła who lives in the fountain. It’s only temporary.”

  She can feel her mouth moving in unfamiliar ways over the consonants, but she can no longer remember the feeling of not understanding them. It’s as if this is knowledge she’s had all her life.

  Dymitr is staring. “You sound different. Your voice is … lower.”

  “So is yours.” And it’s interesting to hear him in his own language, how much deeper and flatter he sounds. More authoritative than in English, where he’s more tentative, maybe, or gentler. And maybe it’s because the languages define a shift in him, with Polish the language of his Knighthood and English the language of his transformation.

  She looks at the phone in his hand, clutched so tight his knuckles are white.

  “What happened?” she asks again.

  “My sister left me a message. Our uncle is dead.” His matter-of-factness is a little startling to Ala, though not surprising. Her mother was like that, too, in her declarations. Why dress it up? Better to just say it, she often said, when Ala scolded her for insensitivity.

  But she’s gotten to know Dymitr over the last few weeks, and while there are many shades to his grief, the darkest one is when he shows no emotion at all.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “He was a Knight.”

  “I’m not sorry for him; I’m sorry for you.” She touches Dymitr’s arm, lightly. He’s wearing a black denim jacket from the resale shop. When he got it, there was a patch on the shoulder from a national park, but he picked out the stitches to remove it, and now there’s just a dark circle where it used to be. “Your sister wants you to go to the funeral?”

  “Yes.” Dymitr doesn’t quite meet her eyes. “Well, that too. She wants me to come to the house for the pre-funeral rituals with everyone.”

  “With everyone?”

  “Cousins. Aunts and uncles. My brother and parents. Everyone.”

  Ala’s chest tightens. The plan was to go to Dymitr’s near-empty house to steal the book—where they would be alone, or nearly alone, with his grandmother. Now the house will be stuffed to the brim with Knights?

  She’ll have no chance. No chance at all, to rid the world—and herself—of this woman who haunts her dreams. To spare Dymitr the pain of having to do it himself, or else surrender to madness.

  “We should find out if they can change our tickets,” she says. “How long does the funeral last? We could maybe go next week—”

  “What do you mean?” Dymitr says. “I’m still going. It will give me a good excuse to show up there, and the chaos will make it easier to get the book. They’ll be too busy to pay close attention to me.”

  “You can’t possibly be considering this,” Ala says. “You have to at least wait until the funeral, when the house is empty. Don’t give them a chance to see you like this.”

  “I know you’re worried. But trust me, it will be fine. They have no reason to suspect anything of me. And my uncle…” He slides his phone into his pocket, and looks down. “My uncle was kind to me. I’d like to mourn him properly.”

  There’s just a slight wavering—in his voice, in his lower lip. Then he picks up his bag.

  She wants to argue with him. No matter how confident he is that his family won’t suspect him, she’s still unnerved by the thought of him walking into that house like nothing has changed. Can’t they tell that he’s not one of them?

  She can. She has from the start.

  But he’s right—they have no reason to suspect that he’s changed. Not when they believe change is impossible.

  She’ll just have to find an opportunity to get his grandmother alone. Maybe on her way to the funeral, maybe the day after, while she sleeps, maybe—

  He says, “Come on, I want to see if the shop has Baked Lay’s,” and she decides to save the brainstorming for another time.

  Instead, she makes a face. “The entire array of American snack foods is in front of you, and you’re on a quest for Baked Lay’s? They taste like almost nothing.”

  “No, they taste both salty and bland,” he says. “All the comfort of a saltine cracker but with the satisfying snap of a chip.”

  “Are the Lay’s people paying you to say this? Blink twice if you’re being blackmailed.”

  Dymitr just grins, and leads the way to the store.

  Ala ignores the gnawing in her stomach. It feels a lot like dread.

  7

  A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

  The red tile roofs are how he knows he’s home. The little stucco houses clustered together with fields all around. The wrought-iron gates and metal fences. Narrow roads with village dogs running along them. Sagging sheds of corrugated metal or rotting wood.

  Ala sleeps in the passenger seat as he drives the rental car, which smells like old cigarettes and whatever cleaner they used to get that cigarette smell out, like stale french fries and floral perfume and windshield wiper fluid. He stops at a gas station and picks up a packet of paluszki. He has one between his teeth like a cigarette when Ala wakes.

  “How long before Mieczyk?” she asks.

  The town of Mieczyk is nestled in the trees southwest of Gdańsk. It’s big enough to disappear in, so it’s big enough that mortals and not-so-mortals alike live alongside each other. A half hour north of it is a village, small and overlooked, where Dymitr’s family lives. Dymitr spent most of his life going back and forth between Mieczyk and the village, close enough to the forest to disappear there when he needed to. And he often needed to, thanks to the relentless teasing of his cousins and brother.

  Some people in Mieczyk know what Knights are and what they fight. Some don’t. His grandmother always knew which people were which.

  “Twenty minutes,” he says, because even though the town’s not far from them, they need to drive all the way around it to get to the hotel without passing through his family’s village.

  He turns onto packed-dirt roads and they drive through fields of overgrown grass and stretches of tall trees with slim trunks. Sunlight dapples the ground in front of them. He opens the window to breathe in the smell of dirt baking in the sun. He feels a kind of pressure against the right side of his head, like a headache is building.

  “Do you have any other siblings?” Ala asks.

  “A brother. Kazimierz,” he says. “Or Kazik, as we call him.”

  She must hear something in his voice, because she grins. “You don’t like him.”

  “He was fine when we were younger. But when he got too old to play with us, he became insufferable.” He glances at her. “As if you’re ever too old for a cool fort in the woods.”

  Ala laughs, and says, “Kazik, Elza, and Dymitr. An interesting assortment of names.”

  “We’re named for well-known Knights. Kazik’s namesake was Polish—one of our ancestors—and killed by a wraith. Elza’s was from a Latvian family, and she was killed by a vilkač—like a werewolf. Mine was Russian. Killed by a strzyga.”

  “So they’d find your choice of romantic partner … especially galling?”

  Dymitr’s mouth curls into something that he’s sure looks like a smile, even if it doesn’t feel like one. “That’s the least of my worries, at this point.”

  Ala nods, and rubs her temple with her fingertips. “The air feels weird here.”

  Dymitr doesn’t answer for a moment. He listens to the wind shuddering through the car. He smells something like horseradish in the air; likely from garlic mustard plants growing nearby. They pass a field dotted with gladiolus, the flower that gives the town its name.

  Eventually he says, “We’re driving around the place where my family lives. So I think what you’re feeling is their magic.”

  “It doesn’t feel like magic.”

  “The Holy Order’s magic comes from pain. The pain is a sacrifice, so it creates space for magic, like any other sacrifice—but it’s different. It feels different.”

  He’s been able to sense it since he split his soul to become a Knight. But he didn’t feel this way about it before. Before, coming home felt like stepping into a quiet room. Like a museum or a library. It felt sacred. But now, the way it presses against him … it’s like something that was alive in the air, something that danced around him, is now dead. The silence is stifling.

  He takes a strange, circuitous route to the hotel, and he’s relieved when that pressure, that silence, lets up again. The hotel is at the end of a dirt road, surrounded on three sides by fields. There’s a pile of rubble next to the parking lot—an abandoned construction site—but the hotel itself looks nice enough. It’s a white building in the Tudor style, with a red roof. It looks more like a large house than a hotel, but the reviews were good and the rooms were cheap.

  A bored-looking twentysomething checks them in, and they set their bags down in a worn-out room with bright orange carpeting. There are two twin beds with thin mattresses inside it, but the bathroom is clean and there’s an air-conditioning unit on the wall, so they won’t be too hot when they sleep. Dymitr takes the bed closer to the door, and he falls into an uneasy sleep while Ala takes a shower.

  He dreams about Ala’s cousin, Lena. The last zmora he killed—or at least, the last zmora he didn’t stop his sister from killing.

  She looked like Ala—or like a version of Ala that could have existed in another world. She wore black eyeliner with sharp wings, and tight black clothing no matter the weather. By the time he arrived, she was already dying, a short sword sticking out of her belly. Elza had gone ahead of him to the house. Lena’s father wasn’t there—probably draining his second beer while Knights killed his daughter, at his request.

  But in the dream, Lena is sitting at the table when he arrives, her father across from her. He’s slumped on the white lace tablecloth—sleeping or dead, it’s hard for Dymitr to say. Lena is writing a message on a yellow legal pad, but she’s using a quill and red ink. She doesn’t greet him, but she reaches out to stick the quill into her father’s mouth, and it comes away red, which is how he recognizes the ink as blood.

  It’s a mundane scene, though grotesque, but Dymitr can’t look away from it, and it fills him with such dread he can hardly stand it. That dread follows him to the waking world, where Ala is stepping through the door, her short hair mostly dry. He stares up at her for a moment, still half-convinced she’s another Lena. The other half, the half that still feels guilty for Lena’s death, knows that can’t be true.