Regardless, it’s not typical for a Knight to take a break in the middle of a mission, as if theirs is a job that offers paid leave and vacation days. But then, a mission like his—to find and kill the most powerful witch who’s ever lived—is not typical, either.

  “So, important enough to take you across the world, but not important enough to keep you there after a setback,” Marzena supplies, and all around them people are pretending not to hear, the young cousins chopping herbs at the kitchen table, Krystyna squeezing out the wet rag she used to clean Filip’s body, Elza studying the wall clock.

  Ten years ago, or maybe even five years ago, he would have cowered in response to Marzena’s disapproval. But once his grandmother started teaching him, paying attention to him, encouraging him, he found that his mother no longer had that power.

  So he says, “Patience is not a fault.”

  “It is when it’s a disguise for dawdling. I thought we taught you better.”

  “Perhaps I simply don’t remember what you taught me, given how sparse your lessons were.”

  Marzena sneers. She opens her mouth to reply, and the creaky voice of Dymitr’s grandmother speaks from the living room.

  “Enough of that,” she says, and he turns to face her.

  His memories of Joanna diminished her. She’s no ordinary old woman in floral-patterned blouses, with rings on her age-spotted hands. She stands upright and sturdy in old work boots, her silver hair in a tight braid. She may be too old to draw her bone sword, but she’s far from finished.

  He hears Baba Jaga’s voice in his ears. Thirty-three swords drawn from the spines of the dead … you will begin with the one you call Babcia.

  “Dymek,” his grandmother says to him.

  “Babcia,” he replies.

  She gestures for him to come to her, and he does, bending his head so she can press a kiss to his cheek. She smells like the ginger-and-clove muscle balm she uses on her arthritic hands, and the bergamot in her perfume, and the death that clings to her fingers. She doesn’t smell like fear, not even a trace of it.

  “You’re different,” she says quietly.

  Fear pulses in his chest and makes his skin prickle. There’s no way she can know, he reminds himself. She can’t identify a zmora with human sight alone. She can’t.

  “I wish I had better news of my mission to lessen the sorrow of the occasion,” he says, because he thinks it’s what he would have said, before. Back when his successes felt urgent, like they might save humanity.

  It’s the right thing to say. Her eyes soften, and she pats his arm.

  “Great works take time. Get your grandfather’s rosary from my dresser. We’ll wrap it around Filip’s hands.”

  He nods, and walks through the living room to the bedroom beyond it. Despite telling Ala that he knew this would be fine, he’s trembling with relief.

  * * *

  He always liked funerals, as a child. He didn’t really understand what they meant back then. Everyone talked about the deceased person being with God, and dying in service to humanity, both of which sounded like good things, so though funerals always had a few people crying at them, he was never sure why. The permanence of death hadn’t yet become clear to him.

  What he liked was that they felt like holidays: a full house, a warm kitchen, everyone busy, music in the air. He wore a black suit even when he was a child, and though it was itchy and heavy on his shoulders, he liked that it made him look like one of the adults, and he liked that his grandfather or his father would polish his shoes, liked the smell of the polish and the way they spit on the leather and the little brush they used to do it while the shoes were still on his feet. He liked to sit at one of the little tables they’d pushed together to make one long one, and eat łazanki until he was much too full.

  Even now, some of what he loved as a child lingers on, as he goes with Elza to the trunk in her bedroom where all the fine linens are kept and takes out a big stack of them so they can spread them over all the tables—the little round one from the living room where their grandmother takes her afternoon tea, and the kitchen table, and the folding table the cousins take out when they play cards, and the desk from Dymitr’s bedroom. They don’t say much, but she points out the little stains, from when Piotr made Kazik laugh and chocolate milk came out of his nose at Easter dinner, remember? And that year Filip and Krystyna fought about whether the tree was crooked or not, and Krystyna gestured so hard she knocked over a glass of wine.

  He’s used to the ache of his missing sword, but a new one joins it now. When he was in Chicago, it was easy to pretend that he didn’t miss his family, that he didn’t love them; it was easy to focus on what they were instead of who they were to him. But now he watches the youngest cousin, André, in the kitchen, spots on his cheeks, stirring up sour cream; now he watches Kazik wiping down chairs from the storage shed to get the cobwebs off; now he sees Joanna nudging Marzena with her shoulder as they line up the tables, and he remembers.

  He remembers that Knights, like the creatures they hunt, are people.

  His people.

  So he aches, even as he casts a long look at the bathroom sink where the book of curses is hidden. If Elza wasn’t with him, he could grab it, and there would be no need for Ala to come into this house at all. But his sister is waiting for him at the end of the hallway, her arms piled high with linens, so he follows her to the living room. He has to stick to the plan he made with Ala.

  He just hopes Niko doesn’t derail it.

  Everyone shows up after dark, squeezed into old cars that he recognizes from a decade ago, in some cases. They’re dressed in black, and the older women wear scarves over their hair, and the older men shuffle in on unsteady feet. Cousins, second cousins, great-uncles and -aunts. The family is big, though not all of them can make it; he doesn’t recognize half of them, though some of them know him by reputation. Like the old man who squints at him from the doorway, holding his hat against his stomach, and then nods in greeting.

  “Curse-bearer,” the man says.

  When Joanna gave him the book of curses, she told him it was a secret—and it is, because no one else in the family is supposed to lay eyes on it. But the fact that he has it in his possession is not a secret anymore. She told everyone last Christmas, so they knew how the knowledge was being passed down. Dymitr still remembers how Kazik looked at him, then, like he’d betrayed his older brother in some profound way, by being the one she chose. It was the same way Dymitr had looked at Kazik, once, when their father decided to train him.

  “Sir,” he says, with a nod.

  He doesn’t want to talk about the curses. It only makes him think of Ala, who will be taking a huge risk, helping him tonight. Retrieving the book isn’t as simple as grabbing it and tucking it under his waistband—it’s too big for that, and too powerful to go undetected. It would only draw attention.

  He slips into the kitchen, where his older cousin, Agnieszka, is chopping a cooked sausage to go in the łazanki. Her shirt is too big for her, and it’s slipped down her shoulder to reveal the sliver of gold from the hilt of the bone sword. She looks back at him.

  “How was America?” she asks him. “Did you see the Empire State Building?”

  “That’s in a different part of the country,” he says, smiling a little. “Chicago has some nice buildings, though.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go there.” She winks. “Maybe you need a partner for your mission?”

  He looks across the room at Elza, who’s arranging the chrysanthemums someone brought in a vase.

  “It’s something that has to be done alone, I’m afraid,” he says. “How are the kids?”

  Agnieszka beams as she talks about her twin sons, who both love soccer, even though one of them kicks hard, but can barely run without tripping over his feet, and the other is fast, but always misses the ball.

  She says, “Together, they would make one good player. Separately, they’re terrible.”

  He laughs, and Elza thrusts another bouquet of chrysanthemums at him. They’re a deep fuchsia, their petals narrow and pointed. He thinks of the fern flower, and how it unfurled so elegantly, like a ballerina’s skirt as she turns. He remembers how it tasted, green, almost herbal. And how it burned the darkness from his blood, and then transferred that cleansing fire to Ala.

  “God, I hate these,” Elza says, of the chrysanthemums. “Especially the purple ones. How did they end up becoming the official funeral flower, anyway? They’re worse than carnations.”

  “I like carnations.”

  Elza nods. “Oh, I remember. You gave Celina Nowak a bouquet of them on Valentine’s Day once, remember?”

  He makes a face. That was before he realized that thinking a girl was pretty and wanting to sleep with her were two different things—and he only felt the former. “That’s right—the petals were dyed blue. She was very polite about them.”

  “And then she very politely stuck her tongue in Bartek Adamczyk’s mouth later that day,” Kazik says, clapping Dymitr on the shoulder. He’s holding two small glasses of clear liquor. “Let’s drink.”

  “None for me?” Elza says, pouting her lower lip a little.

  “Oh, they’re both for you,” Kazik says, putting both glasses in her hands. “You think I don’t remember how you can drink? You put us both to shame that one Christmas. What were we drinking? Vodka?”

  “Jägermeister,” Elza says, with an exaggerated shudder. “I still can’t have licorice. That’s all I tasted when it was on its way back up.”

  Kazik goes to pour another glass, and Elza gives Dymitr one of her two. They stand in a triangle in the kitchen, on the laminate floor, and touch their glasses together.

  “Prost,” Kazik says.

  “Santé,” Elza says.

  “Cheers,” Dymitr says, with a weak smile.

  And then, in unison: “Na zdrowie!”

  They all drink, and Dymitr thinks it was a mistake, coming back here. A month ago, when he set out for Chicago, he thought he was going to his death—or near enough to it. If Baba Jaga had done as he asked, and destroyed his bone sword—and half of his soul—he would have wandered the earth diminished, in a haze of pain and emptiness. The Knights who had suffered that fate in the past hadn’t been able to articulate it except in verbal accounts, since they lost the ability to write afterward. What little they were able to describe was a miserable kind of detachment from their own bodies. They were capable of basic functioning, but no connection—no emotion, and no relief.

  He wouldn’t have cared, then, about his siblings or his cousins or his grandmother. He wouldn’t have cared about anything at all.

  But now, he’ll have to say goodbye to them knowing they would hate him if they knew what he really was. Knowing that he’ll only ever be able to lie to them. Knowing that he still loves them, no matter what they’ve done, and no matter what lies they’ve believed.

  And how can he blame them? He believed those lies, too.

  * * *

  It’s strange to eat with a body in the next room, but they do, squeezed in so tightly Dymitr can hardly move his fork without elbowing Agnieszka. In the living room, a few people are already singing hymns to keep the evil spirits at bay. Elza gives him pained looks across the table whenever the singing voices hit the wrong note—which is often—and he tries not to laugh. Their mother, on Elza’s right, appraises him.

  “Your sister says you were awfully comfortable around the local population when she saw you,” Marzena says.

  In this context, local population doesn’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 watched Cinderella,” 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 of Cinderella,” 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 of humanity that 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 mission to 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, Łukasz.

  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 to do the same. Filip and Łukasz went on missions together often; they were as close as twins, each one half of a whole. Though Krystyna is Filip’s wife, it’s Łukasz 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 for Łukasz to sit. He piles a plate high with food: łazanki 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 that Łukasz 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.

  In the next room, the singers drone on, and the mournful tune is, somehow, the perfect background music for the tale of Filip’s strzyga.