There is a brick, and there is a mouth. In a dim root cellar smelling of dirt and brined cabbage, people cluster anxiously close. The whole village has come to watch a gruesome transformation. On the worktable, under a low ceiling, the body waits. They crane their necks to see it.
“Listen,” Yana says, and the villagers swallow sour breath. The earth here is warm with a cloying, unwashed sweetness.
“Be soft,” she says. “He could wake at any moment.”
Not a week ago, this body was a man. He was the stable master. His crown had grayed and his face was well lined when he died, but his arms were strong like ropes, thick and bristled with wiry hairs. He tamed some hundred horses in his life. Now his fingers are blue and swollen, his nails pressed into the putty of his skin like yellow shells. When Yana pulls his dry lips apart, his teeth grind together as though his body knows what is coming. A human mouth is much smaller than a brick. Most open only four fingers wide.
Yana reaches for a knife in her belt. She circles the table so all of them can see it: a short, intimate blade, no longer than her finger. When she cuts into the man’s smile, his flesh is stiff, resistant, like cured pork. Carefully, she splits him from gill to gill. Near the pickle barrels, somebody coughs like they’re trying not to be sick.
Yana’s mother trained her years ago to look at a body and see an object. Usually, she manages. With her fingers on his chin, Yana tests the dead man’s jaw. His head lolls against the wooden table, but his teeth stay clenched. From her bag, she lifts a blacksmith’s hammer and a long iron spike, the sort used for fixing rails to the earth. A murmur from the crowd—she raises a hand for quiet.
It’s easy here. Along the pockmarked road into the village, she passed a dozen pyres still glowing with half-burnt animal bones, the sheep and pigs shriveled by some cloven-foot plague. The village smokehouses stand empty while winter creeps closer every morning. Without a spark of hope, none of them will survive the snow.
Yana levers the spike between the man’s lips. With one hard smack of her mallet, his jaw breaks. Muscles pop, the crunch of bone chews the air. At the front of the crowd, jaundiced by gas lamps, the mayor and his wife clutch each other’s sleeves. He drags a handkerchief over his upper lip and balding skull,
and his gaze darts around the room, unwilling to linger on the table.
“I’ll take it now,” Yana says softly to the stable boy. He looks younger than her, light-haired and round-eyed. She thinks he must be stronger than he seems, if he can manage the horses alone, but fear shrinks him. He offers her the brick with two quavering hands. The weight of it could snap his white wrists.
Steady, whispers her mother’s ghost. Yana receives the brick with one open palm, and she does not tremble.
The man’s broken jaw yawns wide when she tilts his head back, his chin falling to his chest. She balances the brick delicately against the crooked fence of his teeth and takes her hammer by its worn oak handle.
While her mother was alive, Yana watched her perform this ritual from where the villagers now stand. The vampire hunter raises the hammer high overhead and lets it dangle. In that moment of waiting, the watchers become like the body: utterly breathless, utterly still. Yana’s mother looked like any woman, and they loved her for it. She could have been their own mother, their sister, their wife—and yet, what a thing she could do. She was so ordinary that she captivated them. For Yana, it’s different.
“People will think things about you,” her mother told her when she was a child, long before they lived by uprooting nightmares. Kneeling over their wooden washtub, she brushed the thick hair back from Yana’s face, dragged a wet cloth over her arms and legs, lingering where brown skin gave way to pallor, where she looked as though she’d been splattered by a broken jug of milk. She traced the crooked line down Yana’s face with a tender finger. “When they do, they give you power. You can use their thoughts against them.”
When Yana enters a new village, she makes sure the people see her. She takes off her hat and holds her chin high. “I have walked in both worlds,” she says, voice a low rumble. “I see creatures you cannot—those shades that make the winds cry, those monsters that chase the running rivers.” And with a glance at her uneven face, with the stories they know of demons and their slayers, they believe her. The simple fact is: they want to believe her.
When she is traveling, in between places, Yana sees the world stretch out ahead of her like a gray, fallow field dotted with hopeful pinpricks of light. Tall stalks of chimney smoke draw her eye across the horizon to places, to people, who need her. Every village is haunted in its own way. All of them want her to banish something without form.
In the root cellar, Yana lifts the hammer to her brow. The line down her nose disappears, and the villagers see two halves of a girl: one pale, one dark. Sweat slithers down her sides. The room holds its breath.
The muscles in her arms strain as the moment pulls taut. The handle threatens to slip through her palms. Don’t miss, she thinks, and brings it down.
Iron slams hard against clay, and clay rasps chalky over breaking teeth. The stable boy heaves his breakfast onto the dirt floor. Yana lifts the hammer again, clipping the low ceiling and raining grit onto the table. With the second blow, she drives the brick firmly into the dead man’s throat.
People are praying. The cellar fills with sour bile, the sting of urine, coppery fear. Yana lowers the mallet to the ground and holds the railroad spike out to the mayor. Its sharp end is gummy with flesh gouged from the roof of the dead man’s mouth.
“The beast tethered to this man has done you all great harm,” Yana says quietly. “Your harvest has suffered. He has sucked the life from your livestock. You must bury him outside the village. Pin him down with this.” She
taps her breastbone to show where to drive the spike. “Plant thorned bushes around the grave, and once the earth settles, he will not trouble you again.”
Behind the mayor, the stable boy staggers sideways with an outstretched hand, as if to brace himself against the wall. He slumps to the floor with shuttered eyes and open mouth, having fainted.
On his weeklong journey home, Kiril rides through the nights. He can’t sleep. In the city, there was always noise: drunkards singing in the alleys, wheels on the cobblestones, the unconscious shifting of the other boardinghouse boys with their grunts and snores. Outside the ramparts, there is only the dying chirp of autumn insects, the light rustle of falling leaves. Night after night, Kiril is alone on the overgrown road, passing no other travelers.
When he lets his horse stop to rest, the silence leaves too much space for the ringing in his ears. At thirteen, foolishly brave, he dove into a frozen lake. After, when he complained of phantom chimes, his neighbors feared a haunting, or that Anka was somehow to blame. It wasn’t until he went to the city, almost a decade later, that he came to understand the workings of the ear and the damage he’d done to the delicate, cochleate pathways in his head. In this way, he is never alone: a tolling bell follows wherever he goes.
Vicious winds rip through withering fields of sunflowers, and he takes shelter in an abandoned barn. Someone has tried to burn it down and failed. Cinders paint the floor, and the punctured roof sags. Lying on his back, he can see the sky through the splintered ceiling. Still awake after the hazy moon has arced by and begun to set, he gets up and keeps riding, the wind freezing his hands to the reins, the horse kicking as he forces her on. Already, the past year away from home feels impossibly far, a dream unspooling in coils of smoke.
On his last night in the city, he sat with Hasan on the high stone wall of the hospital with a brass spyglass and the last bag of late-summer cherries between them. The street was dark beneath their dangling feet, the sky muddled overhead. Somewhere, music spilled from an open window. Hasan held a pad of papers in his lap, searching the breaks in the clouds.
“I do think I’ve changed,” Kiril said. His teeth scraped the pit of a cherry and he twirled the stem. On the street below, a prostitute slouched in a doorway, calling to the men who passed by. Her words didn’t carry, but Kiril could guess what she was saying. He leaned back and shot the stone through his teeth. Maybe one day it would sprout a new tree where it landed. They could have planted hundreds in the last month alone. “I’m different from that boy who left home.” It was true; something had shifted. That afternoon, as he packed his bag with gifts for his family, he had trouble recalling even the most important faces, though he closed his eyes and strained to picture each of them in turn: his uncle the Captain, his orphaned cousin Anka, his beloved Margarita. He exhaled into the dark. “I’m a different person here.”
Hasan hummed, his pencil hovering over the paper, his meticulous diagrams of orbits and angles. His heel tapped the wall, keeping tempo with the urgent violin below. “Is it a good change?” he asked.
Kiril rolled a cherry over his tongue, thinking. Overhead, the clouds opened, and Hasan gave a sudden, triumphant yell. He waved his drawing pad in greeting. A page slipped free and fluttered down to the alley, but he ignored it.
Among the stars, something was new. There was a rip in the sky, bleeding light. Hasan pulled open the spyglass and pressed it to his eye, his spectacles digging into the bridge of his nose, then passed it to Kiril and began scribbling on his paper. Through the glass, the star looked like a mistake in one of Hasan’s night paintings, a smudge with a long white tail.
“What did you call this?” Kiril asked. “A comet?”
he sketched an invisible path over their heads. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it? The orbit of this particular comet takes some three hundred years to complete.”
“You could be more specific,” Kiril suggested.
“Two hundred ninety six,” Hasan conceded, adding something to his notes. “And twelve weeks. The object we’re looking at right now—it could be older than anything on this earth.”
The evening wore on. As the music died away, Kiril felt in the bag and dug out the last cherry. “You’ve hardly had any of these,” he said. He held it out, but Hasan just hummed, chewing his pencil. The longer they looked at the comet, the brighter it seemed to glow. The other planets and stars faded away one by one.
From the street, there came the sound of a door opening and closing. The prostitute had gone inside. The city was asleep. Somewhere, a gentle ringing. Hasan shut his pad and adjusted his glasses. “You don’t need to go back there,” he said, like he’d been mulling over the thought for some time, like it was one of his equations. “You said yourself you have more to learn here.”
Around them, the night had grown cold. Kiril fastened another button on his coat and dropped the cherry into his pocket. He crumpled the empty bag in his fist.
“I came to study medicine because they need someone,” he said. “There’s no physician there at all, just an old apothecary who still believes in balancing humors.” Was that true? He felt shame as soon as he said it. Margarita’s father wasn’t to blame for the villagers’ superstitions, for the many stillborn children and those who couldn’t survive their first nights. How to explain that he had to return to help them, and to save Anka from their bile? It felt too grandiose. He twisted the cherry stem around his finger. “It’s not just the village,” he said at last. “I have to go back for my family, too.”
Hasan smiled. “How noble,” he said. He nodded to the sky. “Write and tell me how well you can see it from home. How long it stays visible—it’ll be around forty days, I think, before the sun is too bright for it. Write me—I’d like more data.”
“I’ll make careful observations,” Kiril said, though he knew he would never send a letter.
Hasan put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a warm squeeze. “We’ll meet again,” he promised. “Travel safely, my friend.”
His feet were quick along the spine of the wall as he went. His shadow stretched long and thin until it became just another piece of the city, another spire or minaret cast along the ground. Kiril listened to his steps growing distant. Then he took the last cherry out of his pocket and swallowed it without chewing, pit and all. It hurt, burrowing through his chest.
He’s trying to sleep beneath the wind-bent crown of a dead willow when he finally marks the comet again. This time, he’s close to home. It is the final night of his journey: he recognizes the rocky ridge ahead. He’d begun to wonder if he could even discern it again with naked eye, without Hasan’s guiding hand. Maybe he’d traveled too far; maybe he’d dreamed it. But all at once, there it is: a small blur in the sky, bigger than it looked in the city.
The peak of the Witch’s Hump is in sight. He wonders if Anka sleeps any better than she used to, or if his cousin is awake and watching the stars, just like him. He could explain it to her—a comet, circling every two hundred and ninety-six years. He imagines the two of them cloaked in blankets and leaning halfway out her bedroom window, close to falling. He’d hold her tight. The night before he left for the city, Anka had been furious with him. She begged him to take her along, and when he insisted he couldn’t, she stood in the open second-floor window, her face twisted red, and sobbed, Just push me out, then, if you want to leave me to the wolves. Eventually, she came down.
In the morning, as the sun crests the steep, blank face of the cliff, Kiril’s horse gives a whinny of exhaustion, and the earth levels beneath her hooves. The wind exhales. Nailed to a tree beneath a swatch of red paint, an old wooden sign names the village. Just like that, he’s come home.
Anka’s blackberry basket is light as her path through the brambles winds nearer the stranger’s campsite. Her belly is full, and her hands
are bloody with juice, though she’s meant to save the fruit for supper. Yulia will scold her for the mess—she’s left stains all down her front and on Kiril’s letter in her apron pocket.
She took the letter when she left the Captain’s house this morning. Kiril wrote only once all year, to announce his return. He addressed himself to their uncle, who chuckled as he read and then passed the paper across the table. The note was short, the page bumpy where Kiril had dug in hard with his pen, and it made no mention of Anka at all. Still, she keeps running her purple fingers along its tortured back as she picks her way through the woods. She has no idea she’s being watched as she rustles towards the hidden camp.
Who will Kiril be when she sees him again? The letter gave nothing away. She shouldn’t hope that he suffered in the city, but she imagines him heavy and humbled with regret. She discards a knuckle-sized pine cone that’s snuck into her basket and puts another berry in her mouth. Seeds crunch and fill her back teeth; she likes the challenge of picking them loose with her tongue. Maybe she should have fled again this summer, when she had the chance. If life was like this, just a cool breeze through sweet trees, tart juice on her tongue, then she might want it.
She could leave, she thinks, watching a fat caterpillar inch over a branch. It creeps onto her hand, over her raw nail beds, and tickles her skin with green fuzz. Soon, Margarita won’t need her anymore. She could run now, and it would be nightfall before she’s missed. Even the Captain no longer worries about letting her wander alone. For a month, illness drained him so weak he couldn’t lift his head, and still, she stayed. Like a horse that no longer needs a fence, she’s been domesticated. With Kiril’s return, her invisible tether grows tighter.
Anka stops short by a cluster of glossy, black berries with flat, green leaves. She was very young when Yulia first taught her to avoid belladonna, and she has always wondered about the taste. She’s heard the fruits are sweet, dangerous especially to children. It would be easy to secret some away in her pocket. She kneels, about to touch one bell-shaped flower, when a loud, animal huff startles her from beyond the trees.
In a clearing guarded by nightshade, she finds a donkey hitched to a cedar. He chews fallen needles outside a makeshift tent: over a soft bed of pine, someone has laid a woven mat and strung waxed cotton on a cord for shelter.
Anka creeps in close to the remains of a fire, hemmed by stones and recently snuffed—the coals are still warm under a handful of dirt.
She peeks over her shoulder, then into the tent. Stored inside, she finds four leather saddle bags. The first contains a change of clothing: a folded shirt and pants, a woolen blanket. The second, some food and supplies for cooking. The third—a whetstone, oil, and a lumpy leather bundle. It clinks as Anka unrolls it over the ground and reveals a dozen sharp blades. One corner of the leather case is stained dark.
Gooseflesh rising on her arms, Anka tugs a dagger free of its rawhide loop. Its handle is hammered brass, and the point of the blade is dull, the tip broken somewhere long ago. The edges are still sharp, well cared-for and gleaming. Who wields this knife? She grips the handle and imagines how much larger its owner’s hands might be. A trapper, who uses these blades to slash and dress their prey? A woods witch, flaying the tender flesh of her victims, catching her knives in hard bone? What stained the case that color? Not blackberry juice.
Across the clearing, the donkey brays. Anka goes still, her fingers tightening around the dagger’s hilt. Nobody ever comes to Koprivci. She could stay and wait, hide among the leaves and see who this stranger is—but then what would she do, cornered until they left again? What would they do if they found her?
At her back, a branch snaps. A hooded crow caws, and the tree shakes loose a flock into the gusting wind. Get out, get out—the birds vanish with the beating of wings. Anka hooks the basket on her arm and flees. She loses her harvest as she runs, berries rolling on the ground.
She doesn’t stop until she’s passed the tree line—her pulse runs quick until she’s in sight of the Captain’s house. When she reaches for the door, at last she remembers the stranger’s broken dagger. She still has it clutched tight in her hand.
The square is crowded. Kiril thinks he may have lost track of the days, that his neighbors are gathering for Sunday service, but nobody is going inside. A half-moon of people butts against the wide, flat steps of the church, pulled towards
a lodestar he can’t see. Their feet stir yellow dust into a low fog. He catches fluttering glimpses of their expressions, disgusted and afraid.
His horse parks herself in front of the first trough. She gives an irritable swat with her tail when he tries to urge her on, so he dismounts and hitches her in place. His spine clicks as he wrings out his traveler’s hunch. Nobody looks interested in his arrival.
“Step back,” someone is saying. “Really, there’s no need to panic.” Kiril recognizes the priest’s nervous voice. Ivo is a tall, reedy man whose anxious habit of pulling at his beard has left him with a patchy brush of whiskers that trembles from the tip of his chin during sermons. Around him, the crowd is a frantic hive.
Kiril pushes to the front, ignoring the looks that land sourly on him, then turn confused as they try to place him. As rare as strangers are in Koprivci, rarer still are men who return once they’ve left. He steps around two women praying side by side, their faces tear-streaked and their hands clasped so hard that their chapped knuckles are turning white. A breeze curls something like dandelion fluff around them. The priest raises his voice; his wide black sleeves drape him like a bat when he lifts his hands. “Please,” he cries, “we will resolve this calmly.” But his long face is scrunched, and the large brown mole on his cheek quivers like an agitated housefly. A toothless old man turns from the scene in disgust, and through the gap he makes, Kiril sees that the stone steps are strewn with white and brown feathers. Unnaturally flattened onto its back, in a circle of down, lies a dead chicken.
The chicken’s wings have been broken to stretch wide, as if it could soar. Someone has taken a blade to its breast. Its chest cracks open, ...
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