楓の緒語

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

摘自PDF第65頁︰

“Say what you want,” Damian argued. “I am only trying to keep you safe.” 

I had opened the door, expecting Aleks, only to find the captain of the guard instead. I had told him I was busy, and this was true. This week, business had grown stronger. We could not produce enough baguettes to feed demand. The loaves, like my rolls, were sweeter than anything my father had ever baked. Aleks joked with me, and said he had a secret ingredient, but he would not tell me what it was. Then it would only be an ingredient, he said. 

Now, I listened to Damian as he lectured me in my kitchen. “An upiór?” I said. “Those are folktales.”

“There's a reason tales get told. What else makes sense? The livestock was one thing, Ania. But this . . . this beast is going after humans.” I had heard of them, of course. Of the undead who rose from their coffins, unsatisfied, and gorged themselves on the blood of others. An upiór would eat its own flesh, if it had to.

Old Sal, who sold baskets in the village square, was superstitious. She never walked near a black cat; she threw salt over her shoulder; she wore her clothes inside out the night of the full moon. She was the one who buzzed about this upiór that was terrorizing our village, whispering every time we set up shop beside each other at market. You can spot them in a crowd, she had said. They live among us, with their ruddy cheeks and their red lips. And after their death, they complete their transformation. If that's already happened, it's too late. The only way to kill an upiór is to cut off its head, or cleave open its heart. And the only way to protect yourself from one is to swallow its blood.

I had dismissed Old Sal's stories, and now, I would dismiss Damian's. I folded my arms. “What is it you want me to do, then?” 

“It's said that you can catch an upiór if you can distract it,” he explained. “Once it sees a knot, it has to untie it. If there's a pile of seeds, it has to count them.” Damian reached above my head, took a bag of barley grain, and dumped it on the counter.

“And why would the upiór happen to wander into my bakery?” 
“It's possible,” Damian said, “that he's already here.”

It took me a moment to understand. And then, I was furious. “So because he's an outsider, he's the easy target? Because he didn't go to school with you like all your soldier friends, or because he has a different way of pronouncing words? He's not a monster, Damian. He's just different.”

“Do you really know that?” he challenged, backing me up against the wall of the brick oven. “His arrival coincided with the killings.” 

“He's here all night, and at home with his brother all day. When would he even have time to do the things you claim?”

“Are you with him, while he's working, watching him? Or are you asleep?” 

I opened my mouth. The truth was, I had been spending more and more time in the kitchen with Aleks. I told him about my father, and about Baruch Beiler. He told me about how he'd wanted to be an architect, designing buildings so tall that you became dizzy standing on the top floors. Occasionally I fell asleep curled at the table, but when I did I always awakened to find that Aleks had carried me to my bed. 

Sometimes I thought that I liked staying up late with him because I knew he'd do that.

I started to sweep the barley up with my hands, but Damian caught my wrist. “If you are so sure, then why not leave it and see what happens?” I thought of Aleks, running with his brother from town to town. 

I thought of his hands at my throat, sewing me whole again. I met Damian's eyes. “All right,” I said.

• • •

That night, I did not meet Aleks in the kitchen. I was not even there when he let himself inside. Instead, when he knocked softly on my bedroom door, I told him I was feeling ill and wanted to rest.

But I didn't. I imagined him distracted by the barley, sorting it into piles. I imagined blood on his hands and pooling in his mouth. 

When I couldn't sleep, I lit a candle and crept down the hall to the kitchen. 

I felt the heat through the wooden door, radiant from the oven. If I stood on my toes, I could peer through a chink in the wood. I would not have a panoramic view of the kitchen, but maybe I could see Aleks working as he usually did, allaying my worst fears.

I had a perfect view of the butcher-block table, with the bag of barley still spilled on its side. 
But the pile of grains had been organized, seed by seed, into military formation.

The door swung open so suddenly I fell inside, landing on all fours. The candle I was carrying rolled out of its holder and skittered across the stone floor. As I reached for it, Aleks's boot stepped down, extinguishing the flame. “Spying on me?” 

I scrambled to my feet and shook my head. My gaze was drawn to the barley, in neat rows.

“I'm a little behind in my baking,” Aleks said. “I had a mess to clean up when I arrived.” 

I realized that he was bleeding. A bandage was w rapped around his forearm. “You're hurt.” 
“It's nothing.”

He looked like the man I had laughed with yesterday, when he did his impression of the town drunk. He looked like the man who had lifted me into his arms when I saw a mouse skitter across the floor and refused to walk in the kitchen until I was sure it had been caught. 

He was so close, now, that I could smell peppermint on his breath; I could see the flecks of green in the molten gold of his eyes. I swallowed. 

“Are you what I think you are?”
Aleks did not blink. “Would it matter?” 

When he kissed me, I felt like I was being consumed. I was rising, expanding from the inside, frustrated that there was skin between us, that I could not get closer. I clawed at the small of his back, my fingers slipping beneath his shirt. He held my head in the cradle of his hands, and gently, so gently that I did not even feel it, he bit my lip.

There was blood in my mouth and on his. It tasted like metal, like pain. I pulled away from him, drinking the taste of myself for the first time. 

In retrospect I could only think that he was as shaken by the moment as I was. Or surely he would have heard the approach of Damian, who flung open the door with his soldiers, their bayonets trained on us.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------