When Among Crows (Curse Bearer, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Kiedy wejdziesz między wrony musisz krakać tak jak one.* —Polish saying * When among crows, you must caw as one.

Oświecony. Her mouth forms the word with ease. She speaks Polish, but sounds American; someone caught in between worlds in more than one way.

She’s a powerful witch—the powerful witch. She who defeated Koschei the Deathless; she who lures children and maidens and knights alike into dark tangles of trees and sells them favors at too high a cost; who rides a mortar and pestle and lives in a house that stands on chicken legs. Fearsome, eternal, capricious Baba Jaga.

“I know human men,” she says. “I have made their worst nightmares come to life around them. I have made them weep. I know what happens when they don’t get what they want from us.”

“No,” she says. “I never learned to speak Polish.” “Your mother didn’t teach you?” Most zmora are women, so it’s a safe assumption that her mother would have been the one to teach her. But Ala’s mother had resented being forced to learn it by her own mother, who used to slap her knuckles with a ruler if she didn’t use the Polish words for things, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict the same hardship on her daughter. Ala had grown up with the ache of not knowing it—not knowing where she was from, or what she was, really, as a result.

“Are you saying I inherited this foolishness?” she says. “That’s sort of a relief, actually. I thought it was a condition unique to me.” His smile fades a little, and he nods. “Keep your hopes up, Aleksja,” he says. “Disappointed hopes won’t be any worse than what awaits you now.”

“I don’t find it painful to be ordinary.”

Almost all the strzygi in the room are women, and that’s no surprise. Dymitr’s father told him that Chicago was a city ruled by monsters, and all those monsters were women—strzyga, zmora, and llorona, each a legend of wronged women, sinful women, mysterious women. Tragic and powerful figures, all, not to be underestimated.

“You only know what I’ve showed you,” Dymitr says. “That…” Niko touches his lips to Dymitr’s cheek, right beside his mouth. “… is true of everyone, all the time.”