Free Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey

impolite to the captain, without realizing they would have to dine together; he wanted to drink heavily, but the drink was a Madeira, which he detested. He found the ship’s motion made him almost ill, which was a thing his kind rarely suffered.
    By the end of the five-day voyage to Cadiz, his neckcloths were all crumpled from constant tugging, he had opened his knuckles on the paneling of his tiny cabin, and between the missed dinners and the never-ending pacing, he’d lost enough weight to make his breeches begin to droop at the waist. He surged ashore, barely remembering his belongings.
    He ran, first, away from the people and the bustling port, over the tumbled rocks along what was left of the ancient city wall and up a sun-scoured hillside. His legs itched with the time spent confined. He dumped his things under a patch of scrub, his coat and his neckcloth and even his boots, and he ran until his feet bled slick.
    He limped back down toward the town in the evening to find that an animal had mauled his belongings about, and his coat lay spread in the dust. It smelled of herbs and dried shit. He put it to rights as best he could and went to find meat, drink, and the latest news of the war.
    What he found instead was a dying woman.
    She lay in a narrow cul-de-sac where a house butted up near to a high section of the fortification. Maksim had heard the city had been shelled in many places during last year’s siege, but here the wall was as sturdy as ever. The woman was a faint, pale splash in the twilight of its shadow: white underskirts tumbled up over a torn spring-green gown. She whined very quietly.
    She was bleeding. The smell came to Maksim like liquor, threading through the scents of frying fish and horse dung and ocean breeze. He was across the street in an instant, forgetting the more mundane needs that had driven him down from the hills. His mouth sprang with saliva.
    Here was blood, and once blood had been spilled, more would always follow, and Maksim would be in the thick of it, one way or another. He did not stop to think that the war had moved on from here, that if this woman had been injured by a soldier it had been one of the allied soldiers stationed here or passing through, that any violence he would be drawn into on her behalf would only see him exile himself from yet another city. He did not think at all, just knelt on the dusty cobbles outside the spreading pool and reached to touch her throat. Her skin and hair were fair and fine. Her heart beat like a jeweler’s hammer.
    â€œVen aquí, cobarde,” she murmured.
    â€œI speak no Spanish,” Maksim said in Russian. He looked at her eyes: one blue, one nearly all black where the pupil was blown. He looked at the injury to her head, but it was obscured by clots of blood dried messily into the curls of her hair.
    He brought his face close to hers and sniffed along her brow, where the red ran freely, and he touched the tip of his tongue there, just for a moment.
    â€œMuere conmigo,” the woman said, and she stabbed Maksim in the stomach.
    Maksim swore. He rocked back on his heels.
    The knife slipped free and blunted its tip on the cobbles. Maksim poked a fingertip into his injury and found it deep enough to bleed, but not at all vital.
    â€œWould you care to try again?” he said to the woman, in English this time. He felt like laughing, the pain a bright bubble just below his rib cage: surprise was already becoming so rare a thing in his life.
    â€œYes,” the woman snarled, almost soundless.
    â€œEven though I have not hurt you?”
    â€œYou would,” she said, and with that, Maksim could not disagree.
    Moved by something he hardly recognized, he placed the knife in her hand and folded her trembling fingers about it. One of her palms was opened to the bone.
    She could not raise herself enough to strike at his body again. Gasping, she lashed the blade across his forearm and then dropped it again.
    â€œI