When Among Crows (Curse Bearer, #1)

by Veronica Roth

But every year in June, on Kupala Night, he makes the journey to St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in West Town to guard the fern flower as it blooms.

And he doesn’t like religious spaces, in general—the obsession with wrong and right, purity and pollution, modernity and eternity, it doesn’t make sense to him.

But this is a natural place for deep magic, because it was bought at a great price. People came from the old country to the new to earn their bread, and they scraped the very bottoms of their wallets to build this place for themselves, though their wallets were not very deep. That kind of sacrifice creates a debt, and there’s nothing magic likes better than the great hollow of a debt. And so magic nestled here, heedless of what the adherents of this particular religion would think of it. It draws the leszy here, too.

The leszy came here as so many of his kind did, less than a century ago, to escape the cruelty of the Holy Order that hunts all creatures who walk or crawl this earth.

But he came here to escort a mortal woman. Or more accurately—to escort the plant that the woman carried. A fern swollen with the potential to flower on Kupala Night.

he can hear, somehow, the chanting voice of Baba Jaga, the one who bewitched them all— “What is he?” the leszy asks the man. “I am a supplicant,” the man replies. “He is a fool. Turn back.”

She is a południca—a noonwraith. She’s not at home in the dark any more than the leszy is at home indoors. But for the fern flower, she makes an exception. All of those whom Baba Jaga tasks with its protection do.

“Oh, my,” she says softly, after a moment. It’s a sigh, and the leszy can’t tell what kind. “What is it you see, my lady?” the leszy finally dares to ask. She looks at him as if only just noticing him, though they’ve met before. Few mortals make it to this point, but “few” is not “none.” “He will have the flower,” the noonwraith says. “My lady?” “That is my word. And my word is my word.”

“She is a zmora,” Grandmother said. “Have you studied them yet?” “Zmora,” he said. “A nightmare?”

“Don’t be fooled by her human face, her human voice,” she said. “That is no woman.”

All zmora are Polish, like he is, though they have creature cousins all over the world.

That she’s a zmora is more obvious for her than it is for the bartender—there’s too much time in her eyes. Klara Dryja is her name, and she’s the one he’s here to meet.

“What are you, then? Oświecony? Or your zmora mother bore a human boy? Or you have a zmora girlfriend? How do you know what we are?”

He can’t feel the weight of the name, but he thinks she can. A name is a gift, but a name is also a weapon. It makes him vulnerable to her. She can use it to find him, even to curse him. She could, in theory, give it to someone else on his behalf, but she won’t. If she did, its power would be lost; no one can use it against him unless he’s the one to hand it over.

Not all babies born to zmory are zmory, after all. Humans born to creatures—or monsters, as some call them—are “oświecony”: enlightened. Aware of the creature world, or the World That Endures, as Dymitr’s mother calls it, since it’s full of beings with long lifespans.

The Holy Order—the bogeyman of the bogeymen. She speaks of them the way his mother used to speak of Baba Jaga stealing his toes if he didn’t stop running in the hallway. He wonders what kinds of stories the zmory tell their children to scare them into behaving. Do they tell them the Holy Order split their souls to make their swords? That they have to wrench them from a sheath of vertebrae every time they fight?

“There’s nothing you can say or do that will convince me of that,” Klara says. “Men always mean harm. The question is simply ‘when’.”

She’s a rusalka—a water maiden.

‘When among crows, you must caw as they do.’ Because we’re supposed to fit in among mortals. Mimic them.”

“The Kostkas,” Dymitr says. “That’s the big strzygi family, right?” She nods. “And they come here, why? They love the atmosphere?” “The city owes this place a debt,” she says. “These workers—not just our people, people from all over the world—made the beams that hold up the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building. They poured their sweat into the mill, and none of them got much in return. Derision, mostly, for their trouble. Then when the mill closed, they had nothing.”

She crooks a finger at Dymitr, still not really looking at him. Her fingernail is long and acid green. Strzygi fingernails are matte black, like bird talons, so most strzygi paint them. “He’s oświecony,” Ala says. “A cousin.” “We’re almost at capacity.” “Well, I was told to hurry, and I’m fighting,” Ala says. “Which, last time I checked, means I can bring somebody in to mop up my blood.” The strzyga narrows her eyes at Dymitr. They’re inky black. Owl eyes.

rows of seats arranged around the ring and a wet bar along the far wall. The room is full of creatures. Ala and Dymitr walk past a cluster of strzygi, recognizable by their yellow, glinting eyes; an alkonost, with her wings tucked against her back and her long, straight hair in a braid; a row of banshees, their big, dark eyes alighting on Dymitr right away, like he called them by name; a handful of czorts, their short, stubby horns uncovered. Ala shivers as they walk past a wraith in the form of a ghostly boy with one skeletal hand.

These three types of creatures—the zmora, the strzyga, and the llorona, or banshee—represent a trifecta, each consuming one of the primary negative emotions.

The picture his Chicago informant painted was one of a kind of underground network of emotion farming, of which the Crow Theater, the boxing ring, and the banshees’ small franchise of hospice facilities was just a fraction. The families at the head of those “farms” are the Dryjas, the Kostkas, and the O’Connor-Vasquezes, respectively. This particular banshee has auburn hair and freckles he assumes come from the O’Connors, but the women across the boxing ring, with their dark eyes and shiny black hair, seem to favor the Vasquezes.

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.

“No, you wouldn’t have encountered my kind, would you.” Her voice is soft. There’s nothing menacing about Sha, exactly—but there’s something unsettling about a person who knows as much as she does, who hears whispers of what’s next. Her quiet is like the sky reflecting on still water: it obscures the depth and the dark of what lies beneath it. “They fled your country during the war along with all the other Jewish people. Or—the fortunate ones did.”

She dabbed the paintbrush inside the paint pot, and began filling in the symbol, a six-petaled rosette. It was pagan, as far as Dymitr knew, but if the Holy Order could make use of something, they did—regardless of its origins.

gave me the magic to do it. I put her to sleep, first.” Dymitr braces himself against the back of the Jeep, where the spare tire is fixed just above the bumper. He sees a puddle of rainwater in the middle of the street. Strange. It hasn’t rained in days.

Now it’s his palms and fingers that are stained the deep red of the Holy Order.

She took him to see Baba Jaga a week later. To this day, he had no idea what his mother traded in exchange for his immortality.

Niko stumbles back and his sowa form—the owl form—recedes, that he sees the purple-red staining Dymitr’s hands like a birthmark, and the bright red sheen in his eyes.

We bear the sword, and we bear the pain of the sword—isn’t that what they say?

from the mouth of a dying man, like a final prayer, not to his God, but to the other half of his soul, buried in that damn weapon.

There’s a welcome mat, though, that says WITAMY with the Polish eagle behind it.

The names “Elza” and “Dymek” were scrawled in crayon under the sink, right above the bottles of cleaning fluid.

Dymitr picks up the bone sword that he unsheathed from his body. It hums with the same feeling of rightness a person gets in their sleep when they shift into a comfortable position. He wonders if that will change, when he transforms. Will this piece of his soul ever feel like his again?

The last things he sees are Niko’s fire-bright eyes and Ala’s freckled nose.