?
The brush at the boundaries of the farm property was clearly flush with rabbits by the gnawed bark around the lower parts of the trees and bushes and the dark pebbles of scat. He reached into his pocket, where he’d tucked a few crusts of bread as a treat for Vihar – not the most appetising snack, but the horse wasn’t picky. He crumbled the crust into smaller pieces and scattered them among the dead grass. Hopefully half-starved animals were equally as undiscerning.
He settled beside a tree in the lacy shadow of its branches, waiting in stillness for quarry to come. It didn’t take long for a crunch and flutter to reach his ears. A grey-plumed grouse, her white neck-ruff puffed with concern, stepped forward and gave a cautious peck. Ilan held his breath and readied his weapon.
He was good but out of practice. His first shot scattered dirt and roots, the bird taking off with a shriek that made him groan. The second struck too true, the rabbit who had come to investigate dead before it could try to run. He took a few test swings and said a prayer to guide his aim as scrubby leaves shook. The heft of the rock and the rhythm were a rare nostalgia. His mother had taught him when he was old enough to crave the excitement of a hunt, too young to be trusted with a bow, and for years he and his littlest sister had taken the place of their hounds as the champions of the gardens. The cooks and furrier had always indulged them by making their catch useful.
He stretched out his legs, a twinge in his lower back. Crouching for hours hadn’t felt this bad when he was eleven.
Dry dead vines shook as something approached. Rabbit or grouse or vole – hopefully whatever appeared was something he could leave alive enough to see what the Izir would do with it. Three chances was more than most hunts offered.
A rabbit, its nose and muscles twitching as it weighed safety against nourishment. Ilan swung. The next launch hit true. The rock cracked the creature’s back and it cried out with a stomach-churning bleat, its front legs grasping for useless purchase against the dirt as it realised it couldn’t run. He picked it up by its scruff, still screaming, and carried it inside where Mihály had turned his examination table into an altar, laying his own coat down and putting a small dish on it. Csilla gasped and reached out for the struggling creature, but he elbowed her away. He’d offered up his own hands for this stain.
‘Took you long enough,’ Mihály said, propping a hand on the table. Ilan squeezed the slingshot. The Izir’s skin would look quite nice with a few round bruises.
The creature had begun trembling and turned glassy-eyed in shock. Ilan set it on the table, and Mihály looked between the pair of them. ‘Who wants to give me blood?’
‘You do it,’ Ilan said, before Csilla could volunteer. Her palms were together, fingertips against her lips.
‘Hurry up,’ she said, voice stiff. ‘Don’t let him suffer.’
Mihály made a quick slice on the pad of his finger with a small, scalpel-like blade, hissing and cursing all the while. He squeezed out three fat beads of red onto the clay surface of the dish.
Then he pressed the rabbit down and cut its throat, its legs kicking weakly against the wood. Fresh blood pooled on his jacket, but he held his hand cupped around something Ilan couldn’t see.
‘Come close,’ Mihály whispered, his voice urgent and deep. He placed his hand over the dish, then let it fall back to his side.
Csilla’s face was white, as bloodless as the creature dying before them, her chest still with held breath. Ilan stepped forward, looking between the drops of human blood and the dark trickle slipping down the matted fur of the rabbit’s neck. The air had a humid, coppery tang that sat in his mouth.
There was a new tint to the Izir’s blood, and for the briefest second it pulsed, struggling for fresh life as it reached for something invisible and holy. The droplets rolled then stilled, dying a second death. Ilan’s mouth went dry. He hadn’t blinked. He couldn’t deny what he’d seen.
Mihály had moved a soul.
The bastard wasn’t lying.
Csilla’s lips were slightly parted, breath shallow, her large eyes lit with warring disgust and reverence. Ilan fought the urge to step in front of her and block the wretched sight, cutting off whatever hope it had ignited.
Mihály looked up, his perfect smile back. ‘There, now you’ve seen it. A little bit of blood, a little bit of soul.’
Ilan made a gesture over the blood, warding it against dark uses. He wasn’t entirely sure that what he’d just seen wasn’t dark. ‘That’s...’
‘Shadow work?’ Mihály’s tone was obnoxiously teasing. He was breathless, elated, intoxicated by his own success. ‘You just saw a miracle, and you’re going to complain?’
‘I’m . . .’ Not complaining.Concerned.
‘I know you want to kill the man.’ Mihály continued. ‘Do you really care how much of his blood gets spilled if you’re the one to do it? If it doesn’t work, at least we’ll have taken a murderer off the streets. And if it does, Csilla gets her blessing.’
The open hope in Csilla’s eyes at that was painful in its sincerity, an ember to be smothered before the blaze took the whole house down. A part of him wanted to take her head and force it to look back at the raw mess of open vein and clot-covered fur that was the price of this mad power.
This holy power.
Was the violence here so different from what he wrought in his calling? The knowledge that he, too, had spilled blood in his work sat uneasily in his chest. But he’d only struck the deserving and used pain to remove their sins. Csilla saw this as salvation, but it could damn her.
‘You’d give her a soul that stained? She’ll have to work it off the rest of her life.’
Csilla only lit more brightly at that. Of course she wouldn’t mind the thought of a life sworn back to service. He looked back to Mihály; far easier to maintain the proper disdain in his tone.
‘No, I don’t need the killer’s soul; I’ve already got one of those. I just need enough of their blood to hold it while I do the work,’ Mihály sniffed.
