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The first time Damian’s mother asks him to kill someone, they are on an overnight passenger train to St. Petersburg, and the target has just stepped out to smoke through their fifteen-minute rest break in the chill of the Vladimir station.
Truth be told, Damian would quite like to join him. The train’s an older Soviet model – all smudged windows and cramped hallways and gray-black carpets that ruck up underfoot – and this late in the season, they’ve got all the heaters cranked to the max. Both he and Mother have stripped down to the lightest of their house clothes, and even still Damian can feel the thin trickle of sweat itching, half-dried and salty, between his shoulder blades.
The only source of relief is the compartment door, half-cracked to let in the relatively fresher air from the passageway beyond. When Mother closes it, Damian can’t help but glance out the window at the line of people, silhouetted haphazardly against the stolid off-white concrete of the station and the cool, heat-sapping darkness beyond.
He wouldn’t go out to smoke of course – even if anyone was fool enough to offer a cigarette to an eight-year-old, Damian doesn’t see much use in cheap, non-decomposable-waste-producing stimulants.
Still. Some fresh air would be nice.
This is Mother though, and she’s never been one to do something for no reason, so instead of whining about it, as he’d do with his teachers, Damian simply sits up straighter in his pulled-out bunk and narrowly avoids hitting his head on the sloped ceiling.
“Careful, Habibi,” Mother says, lips quirking upwards for a half second. From this angle, her eyes seem especially dark, the black wing of her eyeliner cutting and precise. Then, in one deft motion, she reaches out to grip the exposed metal frames of the bunks flanking the door and, ignoring the cheap plastic ladder precariously balanced against the wall entirely, leaps onto the mattress beside him.
Damian blinks up at her expectantly. “I’m always careful,” he says, because it’s true. “I adapted, didn’t I? ‘Just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.’”
If anything, this just makes his mother look even more amused. “You’ve been sitting up there for the past half hour. I’d say those conditions are pretty constant.” Ducking her head to avoid the low ceiling, she tucks her knees underneath herself, leaning back on one hand to observe him for a minute.
There is a thin patch of dark in the underarm seam of her white tank top. Nevertheless, her face is completely devoid of sweat. “Tell me what you know of your tutor.”
Damian glances, again, out the window, to where the man in question is busy puffing down his second Bond Street Blue, engaged in deep conversation with one of the conductors. In the sea of pale faces, he stands out – shorter, stocky, obviously foreign. The line of his shoulders says he knows.
Still, after a second or two, he shifts his weight to stand closer to the conductor, smiling through the smoke as he pulls the cigarette from his mouth. It makes the gold tooth in the back of his mouth flash, crinkles the skin around his eyes in a way that makes him look kind. Whatever he says is too quiet to hear through the thick glass of the window, but it makes the other man laugh and clap a hand on his shoulder.
His flirting techniques leave much to be desired.
Damian turns back to his mother. “Ivan Ivanovich,” he says, rolling the patronymic in his mouth with relish. “Solidly mediocre with most forms of ranged weaponry but gifted in areas of animal handling and maintenance.”
‘Gifted’ is, if anything, an understatement. As a rule, the League refrained from hiring those who were not experts in their fields.
His documentation might name him part of Damian’s personal guard, but everyone and their mother knows Damian has been capable of protecting himself since the age of six.
Ivanovich had, first and foremost, been brought on for his skills as an equestrian. He’d taught Damian how to ride a horse without a bridle, not two months ago. Once they’d finished with the lesson though, he’d sat him down and walked him through the entire painstaking process of grooming her, coaxing him through the motions with gentle hands.
At the end, the horse had nuzzled her soft pink nose into Damian’s palm, and his tutor had grinned, dark eyes crinkling.
‘What’d I tell you? You just need to get on her good side.’
At the end of the bed, sat firmly in the here and now, Damian’s mother inclines her head. Waits for him to continue.
Damian swallows. “The name on file is almost certainly a pseudonym,” he says, more hesitant now that they’ve passed the bare bones information he’d been provided with upon Ivanovich’s assignment. “No mother in her right mind would ever name a child ‘Ivan Ivanovich.’ Knowing him, I’d say he probably panicked during the initiation process and said the first name that came to mind.” He waits for a minute, then bows his head. “Still, he is very private. I don’t know his real name.”
Mother just tsks quietly, tongue clicking against the back of her throat. “Nationality? Family? Personal code of ethics?”
Damian hesitates again – one second, two. Then— “His accent implies Central Asia. Former Soviet state—likely Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Russian isn’t his first language, meaning he’s from somewhere that’s undergone a more stringent derussification process over the past thirty years.”
“Or he’s from somewhere that held out against Russification in the first place. Can you narrow down the country of origin?”
Damian opens his mouth to speak. Closes it again. “No, Mother,” he says finally, looking down at the beige-brown fuzz of blanket underneath him.
Mother frowns, looking slightly put out. “You’ve been living in close quarters with the man for nearly six months now,” she says. “Any son of mine should be more than capable of going beyond the general-access information provided in the League’s freelance profiles.”
The brown of the blanket underneath him is making his calves sweat. Unbidden, a lump starts to swell in his throat.
He shifts his weight to one side to expose his calves to the open air, and again, the image of Ivanovich’s dappled grey mare floats before his vision, hazy and unfocused in the half-remembered sunlight.
‘Remember, Damenke, the most important thing to remember is ‘don’t fall off.’ There may be worse ways to go than getting trampled underfoot, but I don’t like to think about them.’
The brown of his hands against the mare’s silver flanks as he helped Damian climb onto her back. The way his eyes had crinkled when he smiled. The glint of a golden tooth.
‘Course, I always had a bit more gear on her back when I used to play with the big leagues.’
Damian swallows. “He said he used to play a sort of game, back before he got into the business. Kokpar. ‘Polo, but on horseback,’ he called it.”
His mother inclines her head, listening.
Confidence growing, Damian keeps talking. “If he’d grown up in any of the bordering states, or if he’d first learned about it from a secondary source, he’d have called it Kok Buro or Buzkashi. But he didn’t – he used Kokpar, the Kazakh word for it.” He blinks, tongue dry. The line of sweat between his shoulder blades itches.
“So?” his mother prompts.
Damian looks outside again. His tutor has smoked his way down to the filter, but doesn’t seem inclined to leave. His shoulder brushes up against the conductor’s companionably, hands shoved deep into his pockets. The conductor laughs again and doesn’t move away.
“So,” Damian says, tongue thick in his throat, “he’s from Kazakhstan.”
After a beat, his mother nods approvingly. “Fine work, Habibi,” she tells him. “Your father would be proud.”
And that – that makes something warm swell at the root of Damian’s chest. He can’t quite tamp down the smile as he scoots closer to his mother. “You really think so?”
His mother cups his cheek in her palm. Her fingers are warm. In the heat, they stick and drag against his skin. “Oh, love,” she says. “I know so. You did very well. We’ll make a detective out of you yet.”
It’s childish to fish for compliments like this. Still, Damian can’t help but smile wider.
His mother cocks her head to one side, lips still curved upwards. Even after six hours of travel, the dark stain of her lipstick is perfectly adhered to the line of her mouth.
For a moment, she just looks at him, studying his face. Then: “His real name is Maksat Nurzhanovich,” she tells him. “It’s important to me that you know this. Do you know why?”
Damian feels his smile slip slightly. He shakes his head.
His mother traces a hand along the brown fuzz of the blanket. “We’ve talked to you about this before, Habibi. About the preciousness of this world.” She pauses for a moment, contemplating, then looks up to meet his eyes. “The taking of a life — no matter how necessary it may be — should not be as easy as ticking a box in a list. You need to hold the weight of it in your palm.”
The warm light in Damian’s chest flickers out.
Eyes soft, his mother reaches out to brush a thumb down his cheek. “I know you have grown close with your tutor these past few months,” she says softly, her eyes dark-lashed and sincere. “We hired him to teach you his skills, and your grandfather and I believe he has been successful. But he has never truly followed the path of the Demon’s Head.”
Damian can’t bring himself to look out the window. He has been living with his tutor for nearly six months now – he knows his train stop habits well. Within a few minutes, he will disappear into the station proper, heading for the public toilets undoubtedly located inside. The man beside him will wait a few minutes longer, then either follow, or head back to the train alone.
He doesn’t need to look to know the clock has already started.
“Can I ask,” he says woodenly, “Of what crime Iv—Maksat has been accused of?”
His mother takes a while to answer that, clearly mulling the words in her mind before she speaks. Then: “He is a freelancer, love. His skills with ranged weaponry may not be up to our standards, but that doesn’t mean he’s not desirable to others.”
Damian looks at her. He is not good at being patient.
But it is here, for the first time, that his mother looks away. “He… your grandfather recently discovered he’s been hiring out his… skills to a group of poachers,” she says carefully, voice a thin veil of control. “Black market pelts, sold right under our noses. Hunting materials bought with the money we paid him.”
Damian stares down at the brown-beige blanket between them. There is a thin line of black thread smeared across the artificial fleece. It’d probably come loose from the seam of his house pants sometime in the last six hours.
He thinks of the grey horse in the sun. He thinks about the leopard he and his grandfather had found one morning two summers ago, limping through the mountains with a bullet lodged in her tibia, eyes glazed. Too fast for the hunters who shot her, too slow to outrun the infection that followed.
He thinks of the fetuses, half-grown in her abdomen. He thinks of the faded Polaroid of a little girl in his tutor’s wallet.
For the leopard, the knife had been a mercy.
Still, the lump in his throat swells up again with vengeance.
His mother reaches out and grabs his hands in hers. “I know it hurts,” she says softly, rubbing a satin-smooth thumb across the line of his knuckles. “But this is the price of being a leader, Damian. We cannot show favoritism, even to the ones we love.”
When her hands withdraw, she has pressed a small dagger into the palm of his hand.
Damian stares down at it. Where it hasn’t already fogged from the heat of his mother’s hands, the blade shines clean and true. Six inches of finely-sharpened steel in the palm of his hand, complete with leather-wrapped grip.
His mother smiles – that small, secret smile she only ever gives him. It makes the corner of her lip edge up unevenly over one canine.
It is a sad smile. But not an unhappy one.
“It will be a good lesson for you, no?”
Damian licks his lips. Then, uncoiling his legs from underneath him, he slides out of the top bunk and lands lightly on the floor below them.
The knife is coiled in his fist.
In the half-fogged blade, he sees the glint of his own reflection and thinks about dappled grey flanks in the chill glare of the autumn sun and strong, tanned hands showing him exactly where to brush.
He looks out the window. Maksat Nurzhanovich has put out his cigarette and already begun the trek down to the station lavatory, leaving his companion dawdling by the tracks.
“Sure,” he tells his mother. “A good lesson.”