How are we not savage?
“The Mountainth are our home,” said Eliasz. “Thooner or later, we have to go back.”
We’re exiles, Raf had said.
He’d seen it, in Rafał’s eyes. He’d seen how much his brother had missed Hala Smoków. Missed the Mountains they all talked about. Missed the wolves. Missed the wooden lodges and solitude. Missed their home.
Lukasz put down his plate.
But it was not his home. He’d cut his teeth on broadswords and he’d tracked dragons by smoke alone. He had been raised by the road, by the hunt, and by that magic kind of desperation, unique to strangers stranded in hostile words.
Lukasz looked from face to face. The candlelight flickered between them. From scar to missing teeth. From half-shaved head to bloody beard. Lukasz memorized them in the half-light.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “Please, don’t do it. Don’t go back.”
The others were silent.
“It’s our duty,” said Michał heavily. “We don’t belong here. We owe it to our people.”
“What about your brothers?” demanded Lukasz. “What about us? You can’t keep leaving. What happens when we’re all dead—?”
“Lukasz—” started Eryk.
“We won’t die,” interrupted Eliasz.
“We survived a Ływern,” said Michał.
“Only after it practically killed both of you!” protested Lukasz. “Come on, we could stay here. If you’d just try—”
Michał looked sad. The purple cut undulated and twisted in the shadows.
“Don’t go,” whispered Lukasz. “Please.”
“They’re calling,” said Michał. “I’m sorry.”
If you were sorry, you wouldn’t go.
“You’ve been hurt,” said Lukasz. “Anything could happen.”
“More of a reathon to go.” Eliasz shrugged. “Anything could happen.”
19
“DO YOU SMELL THAT?” ASKED Ren, wrapping her cloak tightly against the cold.
Felka passed her one of the tin mugs of coffee.
“Smell what?”
“Smoke,” she said. And dew, she thought. And that particular smell—a smell she knew too well—of damp leaves burning. High above them, green boughs blocked out the sky.
Felka shook her head.
“I don’t smell anything.”
Morning mist, thin and low to the ground, clung to the edges of the campsite. Lukasz was gone, and Jakub was still asleep. Ren sniffed again. She was sure she was right. She suddenly wondered whether what she had assumed was mist might actually be smoke.
“Cold?” asked Koszmar, emerging from the trees.
It took her a moment to realize he was addressing Felka.
“I’m fine,” said the girl flatly. Ren could see the goose bumps on her skin.
“Your lips are blue,” Koszmar pointed out.
As he sauntered past his horse, he tugged some fabric from under the saddle. It was another black greatcoat, almost identical to the one he wore. This one was fancier, decorated in extra gold braid and edged in black fur. He held it out.
“I do not want it,” said Felka in the same flat voice.
“Please,” said Koszmar. It was as if he couldn’t hold Felka’s gaze. His eyes drifted toward the trees, then back to her. As if it cost him a great effort, he repeated: “Please. Just take it.”
“No,” said Felka.
Koszmar held the coat out a moment longer, then dropped his arm. He crossed back to the other side of the fire and dropped it in a heap. When he looked up, he asked, in an entirely different voice:
“Why are you here, anyway?”
Felka stiffened. Ren could feel it. But she could also still smell the smoke, and now she wasn’t sure whether it was her imagination, but she could almost hear something, too.
“I was born,” Felka was saying. Her eyes flickered, without humor. “Unfortunately.”
Ren began to move toward the edge of the trees. Behind her, Koszmar picked up the tin mug. Turned it over in long, elegant fingers.
“No, no,” he was saying, in that soft, slightly rushed voice of his. “I mean, why are you here? What interest could someone like you possibly have in the Dragon?”
Even half paying attention, Ren caught the tone. Insult.
A shape moved in the trees. Ren transformed her eyes. The shape was gone . . . if it had ever been there at all. All the same, she got to her feet. She couldn’t be too careful. There could be anything out here.
Behind her, Felka said: “Who said I was interested in the Dragon?”
“I’ll be right back,” Ren said over her shoulder as she stepped into the trees.
The forest was cool. Moss, damp and coarse, carpeted the trees and the ground. Her bare feet sank into the cool green, and except for the distant chirrup of crickets, the forest was silent. She kept glancing over her shoulder, trying to keep her bearings. Overhead, Jakub’s eagle—Ducha—flitted between the trees.
Ren suppressed a shudder, glad of the company.
As she walked, a wall of smooth white rolled into view. She laid a cautious hand against the side and nearly gasped. The surface was knotted and rough under her palms, and familiar. A tree. It had fallen in the forest, but its trunk was so tall and wide that it had almost looked like an enormous, curved wall.
Ren changed course, walking beside it, fingers trailing along the bark. Ducha dutifully followed. As she went farther, the trunk began to expand and then split into roots, still half-embedded in the forest floor.
Partially uprooted, the fibers that remained tendriled out to her like a many-headed monster. A faint scuttling noise emanated from the other side of the trunk. There was also the sound of someone smacking.
Like a moth to a candle, Ren approached the tree. Its skeletal roots ran directly into the ground, forming a tiny jungle of bare, twisting fibers.
Other than the smacking sound, the forest was silent.
Keeping close to the desiccated bark, Ren crept toward the sound. What was left of the tree overhung a kind of mossy embankment, the forest stretching onward below it. Ren lowered herself to her belly and crept up to the edge.
She froze.
Strzygi.
They dug around in the clearing, chattering. A wagon lay on its side, surrounding by a half dozen skeletons. The strzygi tore through them, clawing at their clothes. Chewing on their bones. They picked. They snuffled. They feasted.
A hand—a claw?—closed on Ren’s shoulder.
Her attacker slammed against her, propelled her into the ground. Her elbow struck a rock, and she twisted around, hands flashing into claws. A hand clamped over her mouth. Ren felt her teeth change, and she bit down.
Lukasz swore. Loudly.
Below them, the strzygi went still.
Ren froze. Lukasz ducked his head and froze. It brought them very close together.
“You—”
“You bit me,” he interrupted. She could tell he was trying not to smile. It annoyed her.
His knee was still digging painfully into her side, but she barely noticed. She was wondering, the strzygi dangerously far from her mind, how he had lost that tiny notch of eyebrow. Quite unnecessarily, he put a finger to his lips. Ren was already looking at them.
For a moment, they were both silent and so close that she could hear every ragged breath.
Then, when the silence stretched and Ren not only heard every breath but felt it as well, he raised his head to look over the embankment. The rising sun caught the edge of his profile, haloing his hair and cutting him out in black and gold.
Ren’s heart skipped a beat, and she considered it a personal failure.
“What the hell are you doing?” she whispered angrily. More angry at herself than him, but that wasn’t any of his business.
She noticed that the crunching sounds had resumed in the clearing below them.
“Purple uniforms,” he murmured, unhurried. He pulled back from the ledge and slid down beside
her. “Those bodies are from the Kamieńa king’s army. They’ve been there for years.”
Ren watched him check his rifle. The light seemed to follow him when he looked back at her. It suited him, she realized. The half-light, the shadow. The flames.
No wonder he hunted dragons, when the fire fit him so well.
Wait. Flames?
“Lukasz!” she whispered.
“It’s fine, they won’t—”
“Lukasz!” she shouted.
The trees began to shudder. The morning mist melted away. Sunlight filtered through the membranes of its unfurled wings, and the pine needles rained down on them.
And the Dragon descended.
Lukasz swore. He pulled the rifle off his shoulder, but Ren shoved him into the tangled roots.
“Quick—” she gasped. “Hide!”
They scrambled into the cover of the tree. The earth smelled sweet and rotten. There was barely enough room for the two of them. Beside her, Lukasz flipped on his back and searched the gnarled underside of the tree, as if expecting the Dragon to tear it aside at any moment. Insects crawled over her fingers and down her neck, and Ren fought the urge to shriek. The whole forest shook with each wingbeat, and Ren didn’t know whether the rushing in her ears was its wings or her heart.
“Go—” she whispered. “Let’s go—”
They wriggled through the tangled tree roots, in the space between the trunk and the forest floor. Ren hoped that they weren’t sharing their hiding place with any nocnica. Up ahead, between the roots, she could make out the green of the forest.
“Oh God,” whispered Lukasz.
Still concealed under the trunk, they had reached the edge of the embankment. Hidden from the Dragon, they were looking down into the clearing below.
The pale shapes of strzygi lurched among the skeletons, hanks of reddish hair catching the glow of the Dragon’s scales. At first, they ignored it. They devoured indiscriminately. Crunching the brittle bones of the long dead. Tearing at mummified flesh. Insatiable. Irredeemable.
“Ren,” said Lukasz, very close to her ear. “Look.”
The earth at the center of the strzygi began to tremble. It shook. The strzygi looked down, finally distracted from their feasting, and then they looked up. They raised inhuman noses to the sky. Oblong eyes rolled.
Ren wondered, in that moment, if something in them—if that small bit that was still human—knew what was coming. Perhaps some of them were not yet lost. Perhaps some small hope still hummed in those twisted veins, still lingered in those darkening hearts. Perhaps that sudden fear, that flash of self-preservation, that universal instinct to survive, was enough.
Enough to make them human, one last time. And maybe—just maybe—in that last moment, they remembered. Maybe they remembered what it had been like, gathering around tables. Building fires against the night. How it had felt: to smile, to sing, to sigh. To love. Perhaps they remembered, in that last moment, what it had been like to be human.
The silence filled with flames.
Gold lit up the dawn. A comet of fire shot from the Dragon’s black jaws, caught the tops of the trees. Flames raced down, blackening trunks. Blazing yellow devoured the killing field. It burned away the purple. It charred away the corpses. It lit, like fiery brands, the dozens of strzygi screaming, twisting, melting into oblivion.
One last screaming heartbeat of humanity.
Lukasz grabbed her arm.
“We need to go back—”
“We need to kill it,” she snapped. “That was the deal—”
Lukasz shook his head.
“I don’t have my sword,” he said. Ren couldn’t quite read his expression. “You can’t kill a dragon without a blood-coated blade. It poisons it. We’re better off watching, figuring out what we’re dealing with—”
“I want it dead!” she screamed.
Somewhere above them, the Dragon roared. She clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified. Lukasz glared at her.
“Trust me,” he hissed. “Now is not the time.”
Ren looked back down at the strzygi. They were charring away, only a few of them still screaming. A pit opened up, earth crumbling away in its center, ringed with orange flames and twisting roots. It gaped wide in the forest floor.
“The pit,” breathed Ren. “It’s making more. It’s making more monsters.”
“But it just killed them all,” said Lukasz, brow furrowed.
“Lukasz, don’t you see?” she whispered. “It doesn’t care.”
He didn’t answer as they eased back from the ledge. The trees were silent, except for the crackling flames. Ren was half afraid one of the roots might tap her on the shoulder.
Or worse.
“We should stay here,” she said quietly, “until we’re sure it’s gone.”
Beside her, Lukasz nodded. He had dark circles under his eyes. Suddenly, without any warning, Ren wanted to touch him. To run her hands over his face, to feel the rasp of that sharp jaw under her hands. To let him know, whatever had happened, it was going to be all right. To say she hadn’t meant to pry—
No. She was being stupid and weak, and—
“Don’t grab me again,” she said.
He raised his gloved hand. A few wet drops glittered on the torn leather.
“Don’t bite me again.”
“I’m serious,” snapped Ren. “I’m not just some animal you can push around.”
He wiped the blood on his pant leg and didn’t look at her as he answered.
“I don’t think you’re an animal, Ren.”
“And—” Ren stopped, then decided she did not want to process his words. “I’m not some monster, either.”
He didn’t look at her. His face was half-hidden in shadows, which darkened his brows and turned his eyes to liquid dark. For some reason, that suited him, too.
“I don’t think you’re a monster,” he said.
Then he added quietly, “And I never did.”
For a moment, silence yawned between them. There had been too much silence between the two of them. Too many moments without words. Without explanation. Ren didn’t realize it, but she licked her lips. Too many false starts.
He snapped the lighter open and closed, the flame bursting to life and dying. Over and over. The click, click was as rhythmic as a dragon’s wingbeats. His expression was dark. Haunted.
Click, click.
“How did you know that?” she asked. “About the nawia?”
“Know what?” asked Lukasz.
The lighter clicked on and off. Click, click.
“That they needed to be . . .” She could not remember the word. “Sent away.”
He paused before he answered.
“They weren’t ordinary nawia,” he said. “They were something called mavka. If a child dies before it is baptized, then its soul wanders for seven years. If the seven years pass without a baptism, that child becomes a mavka. They are doomed to wander the forests forever.”
Ren blinked.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
Click.
“My brother told me.”
“The brother you are looking for?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“And what is a baptism?” she asked.
When he turned around to her, Ren saw the surprise in his face.
“It happens in a church.” He tugged the silver cross out of his jacket and showed it to her. “Like a church. You know—people go on Sundays, tell their sins. Listen to sermons. God is watching. Hell is waiting. All that.”
Ren thought hard.
“I know some gods,” she said at last. “Like water gods. Some say that Wodnik is just the ghost of a drowned boy, but he’s a kind of god, too. He rules over the river.” She paused. “You know, this forest probably has a god, too.”
Lukasz was listening with his mouth slightly open. Then he put the cross back in his jacket and said, “Those are the small gods. But there were real gods before, mighty ones—gods of
crops, goddesses of hunting and death—”
“I don’t think I like a hunting goddess,” Ren said, frowning.
“Neither did the early Christians,” said Lukasz dryly. “They drove out the old gods. Replaced them with their new one. Absorbed every old pagan custom—including things like getting rid of mavka. The baptism—it’s part of the new religion.”
Ren sniffed.
“Well, I haven’t seen your new god around here.”
Lukasz shrugged and said in the same dry voice, “Well, I doubt He’s in Miasto, either.”
Ren couldn’t tell if it was a joke. If it was, she didn’t understand it.
“What’s a baptism?” she asked instead.
“Like a christening,” he said. “When you’re born, someone gives you a name. They take you to a church and they say a Mass, and they give you a name. It means that you’re part of the Church. That if you die, you’ll go to heaven, not to hell.”
Ren frowned.
“I do not understand.”
“My parents baptized me Lukasz,” he said. “Kosz’s called him Koszmar. And yours—” He stopped abruptly.
The surprise melted to something else. Ren waited. And then he asked heavily:
“Someone named you, didn’t they?”
She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but he looked suddenly older. His eyes had sunken back and darkened, nearly black. He looked sad.
“Do you ever miss them?” he asked when she did not answer.
Ren blinked.
“What?”
“Do you ever miss them? Your family?”
Ren blinked again.
“I’ve only been away from them for a few days.”
“I meant—” He made a gesture with his hands that somehow struck Ren as being helpless. He was still wearing his gloves. “I meant your real family.”
“My real family is at the castle,” she said.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” she interrupted. “My parents are lynxes. They loved me when I was a human. They loved me as a lynx. They love me even though I am different from them, and they never cared where I came from.” Her voice came out brittle, with an undercurrent of a growl. “My family—my lynxes—they chose to love me, when no one else would.”
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