“It’s fine,” lied Lukasz. He glanced at Ryś, who was sniffing at the undulating roots by the pit. He looked up and nodded vigorously. “It’s fine, it’s not that bad, Kosz, I swear—Ryś, watch out!”
He was too late.
The temporary lull had left Ryś alone by the pit. But under the onslaught by the opposite side of the campsite, the strzygi had—with a chilling kind of organization—switched their target.
Ryś looked up.
His pupils dilated as he saw the tide change. Lukasz dropped Koszmar. While the Wrony fell dazedly to his knees, Lukasz swung the rifle with his screaming shoulder. A single blow swept three strzygi back into the pit.
He could hear the others shouting. Jakub paused to reload.
The strzygi came. They pushed straight past Lukasz, didn’t even break stride when the rifle sent them flying. It was no use. There were too many of them. Ryś saw them coming. His ears flattened, and he crouched down.
Terror registered, starkly, on his face.
“Ryś!” Lukasz roared. “RYŚ!”
Lukasz threw aside the rifle, drew his sword. But it was too late. The strzygi covered Ryś.
The pit loomed. Smoking. It looked like a yawning, starving mouth. The lynx was being borne back, back . . .
“RYŚ!”
Entirely covered, the lynx was a mass of seething bodies. His head surfaced like he was drowning. Then he was gone again. Lukasz slashed and hacked, ignored the agony in his shoulder. The mass of strzygi pushed him back. Back to the pit. Ryś yowled.
Sweat poured down Lukasz’s forehead.
“HANG ON!”
Lukasz flung aside the bodies. Fought his way to the edge of the pit. Without thinking, he flung himself flat on the ground. Roots curled over his arm. He tore his hand free. More strzygi barreled toward him.
Ryś screamed again. The others shouted. Lukasz was deaf to everything else.
A paw shot out of the pit. Claws dug into his leather glove. Lukasz’s hand closed around the foreleg. Ryś was completely covered by the monsters. Movement flickered beside him, and when he looked over, Ren had thrown herself on her stomach next to him.
“RYŚ!” she screamed. “RYŚ, HOLD ON!”
A yowl. It was strangled. Lukasz threw down another arm, grasped the foreleg with his other hand. Long fingers wrapped around his gloves. Ren was practically falling into the pit.
“You’re okay.” Lukasz’s voice cracked. “I’ve got you—”
He had no idea what was going on down there, below the lip of the crater. What was happening to that poor lynx, hidden under the strzygi. Lukasz didn’t want to know.
Ryś let out a piercing scream, and Lukasz heard himself shouting:
“NO—”
The claws extended suddenly. Five toes spasming, every tendon straining under the fur. Ren was screaming, fingers scrambling. The claws tore free of Lukasz’s glove. Ryś screamed again. Lukasz grabbed frantically.
Fur slipped through his gloves. His hands closed around nothing.
“Ryś!”
Ren lunged down the pit. Lukasz grabbed her shirt, dragged her back. She thrashed against him, and he threw his arm over her shoulder. She shrieked and tried to throw him off, but he held her fast, pressed her into the ground.
“Ren, he’s gone—”
“Let me go!” She was screaming. Changing so rapidly from human to lynx and back again that he feared she would get away. He didn’t let go.
He kept her pinned to the ground, watched the blood from his shoulder trickling down the back of her neck. Watched it staining her shirt. The pit burned below them, from red then to maroon. Cooling, to depthless black. It reminded him, sickeningly, of the Leszy’s forge. Everything went still. Roots hung lifelessly. Darkness stretched down forever.
Ren stopped screaming. She stopped changing.
She lay flat and human and broken, hands over her face, sobbing.
Ryś was gone.
28
SHE HAD A MOMENT.
A moment of numbness, of horror. Of Lukasz holding her down, the only thing keeping her from diving down there herself, finishing them off. Bringing him back. A wild flashing moment when she considered every possibility, every single scenario where Ryś wasn’t gone, wasn’t gone, wasn’t gone, wasn’t gone—
Thud.
Ren’s heart slammed into her chest.
Thud.
Lukasz swore.
Thud.
Then they were both on their feet, Lukasz weighing the sword in his hand. She’d been so distracted that she hadn’t realized a battle was still raging behind them.
Jakub, Felka, and Czarn had kept the strzygi away from her and Lukasz. Done her, she realized, the same kindness they had done Jakub among the mavka. Now Jakub had the firewood hatchet and was wildly hacking in every direction. Felka kept firing and reloading Koszmar’s revolver. Czarn fought with tears in his eyes. On the other side of the clearing, Koszmar had drawn his saber, surrounded by strzygi.
A shadow fell across the trees.
Ren crushed everything in her that wanted to scream and cry. She held up the rifle.
The sky disappeared, replaced by a sparkling gold canopy. The sun blazed through the membranous wings of the Golden Dragon. It circled once. And then, even through the screaming monsters and the sickening thuds of Koszmar’s blade, through Lukasz’s heavy breathing, even through a sound that she realized was her own sobbing, she knew what was about to happen.
The Dragon had come to join the fight.
Ren dragged Lukasz back as a stream of gold shot across the clearing and fire lit up the world.
The strzygi twisted upward, deciding whether to feast or to burn. The first wave of flames incinerated a dozen of them, left the rest to stumble, still burning, around the clearing. Fed by flesh, the fire flared higher.
The others reeled. As the flames closed in, she saw Felka drop the spent revolver to yank Jakub away from the blaze. She dragged back on Lukasz’s arm. His face was livid in the golden light, his eyes almost black.
“We have to go,” she gasped. “Get Koszmar—”
“KOSZ!” he was already shouting. “KOSZMAR!”
But the fire had separated them from the blond Wrony. If Koszmar had heard them, then he didn’t show it. He just hacked away at the monsters around him, still attacking despite their already charring limbs.
The Dragon roared again, shot out a second jet of flames. By luck alone, it lit the trees behind them, lighting the roots around the pit and barely missing them. Heat broke over Ren’s back.
“Koszmar!” she screamed. “Kosz!”
Through the dancing curtain of fire, the Wrony looked up. Even through the haze of heat, Ren saw his expression change. She watched realization dawn.
“KOSZMAR!” yelled Felka. “COME ON!”
Koszmar moved slowly. He looked up at the Dragon. Blood covered one side of his face, and for the first time since Ren had known him, his hair was a mess. He had his cavalry saber in one hand, his remaining revolver in the other. He was still for a moment, staring upward into the gold. Then he turned back at them. His image shivered with heat. He smiled, and his mouth moved. It was too loud to hear him over the shrieking, but Ren could read one word on his lips.
It seemed like the same secret voice of the nimfy. A quiet monosyllable of enchantment, a two-decade game of cat and mouse, summed up in a single syllable.
Run.
And Ren knew.
“NO!” Lukasz shouted. “NO, KOSZ, DON’T—”
He didn’t listen. Koszmar never listened. He only did what he wanted. He only did what suited him. He was cruel and mean. He was arrogant and angry and sad, and worst of all, he was Ren’s friend.
“NO!” shouted Ren. “Koszmar!”
The revolver rose. A shot sounded. And behind the flames, Koszmar fell.
“NO!” Felka was screaming. “NO!”
Lukasz dragged on her arm. Pulled her back, but Ren was screaming, crying. She would have run rig
ht through those flames. She would have dived back down that pit. She would have done anything, she would have burned, she would have taken on the Dragon at that moment, with nothing but her claws, if it only meant—
“Ren,” said Lukasz, pulling her almost off her feet. “Ren, he’s dead.”
And they left Koszmar to burn amid the dying strzygi, and they ran.
How long had he been dead? Hours? Who knew. It was still night.
The longest night of her life. They’d caught the horses on the way from the clearing, Ren still sobbing. Felka and Jakub had been white-faced and silent. Ren could not look at Czarn.
Lukasz was the only one who kept it together. He moved mechanically. Efficiently. Like he’d run from flames and left behind the dead, and like it was all so familiar, so easy for him now, like he’d been doing it his whole life. And of course, as Ren knew, he had.
She owed Lukasz her life. If it hadn’t been for him, she would have died back there in the clearing—twice, once for her brother and then again for Koszmar, and her poor brother—
They stopped when the horses could go no farther.
Czarn had tried to stop her. Ren couldn’t look at him. It was all a blur. All a terrible, horrible blur.
She left them. She left them and went to the water. Because the water kept you safe from flames. Because water was where this had started. Because she had always loved the water, and because she’d always been happy in it, and because despite the rusalki and their horrible skulls, she chose to believe that nothing bad could happen in water.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, cold in the shallows. Watching her skirts float in the black. The river was up to her chest; her arms were wrapped around her knees. She wondered if she was cold. She couldn’t feel it.
Footsteps sounded behind her. She recognized them. Slightly uneven. The limp he thought he hid.
Lukasz waded into the shallows, and Ren wiped the tears off her cheeks.
“Don’t,” she said, keeping her face down. “You’ll get wet.”
It began to rain, a thousand tiny bullets hitting the smooth river surface. Lukasz lowered himself down next to her.
“I’ll get wet anyway.”
The rain crescendoed to a murmur. It enveloped them in the blackness, the trees blurring. In that moment, they were alone in the world: a wet black uniform and a wet blue wraith.
He didn’t look at her. But he asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
Ren’s throat felt stretched to the breaking point. He’d called her Malutka. He’d been the only creature alive who’d known how small she could feel. In the entire forest, the only one who saw her as a sister first and a queen second. His claws opening. His fur slipping through her hands. Her human hands.
Ren pressed her fingers under her eyes, tried desperately to hide the tears. Lukasz pretended not to notice.
“Are you okay?” she asked instead of answering him.
Was she asking about her brother, or about his? She didn’t care. It didn’t matter. They were all dead. His and hers. Ten of them. Dead and gone. Not even buried. Just lost, lost forever.
How was she going to tell Mama?
That thought brought the tears.
They slid down her cheeks, dripped off her chin, dotted her soaked, shaking body. Got lost in the rain. Ren covered her face with her hands. They transformed into lynx paws. She raked her claws through her hair.
When Lukasz finally spoke again, his voice was low and hollow.
“I let go.”
The monsters swarming like ants over her older brother, her wildest brother, the brother who had followed her and who had loved her and who had hated her plan but who had defended her to the death.
“No.” She swallowed against the pain in her throat. “He let go. He knew.” She swallowed again, hard. “He knew he couldn’t get away.”
Like Koszmar. They had both known.
Ren let out a ragged sob. Clamped her half-lynx hands tight over her mouth. Wished he wasn’t there to see her cry. She hadn’t always been like this. So on the edge that she feared the moments when anyone asked her how she was holding it together, because she knew that one day she wouldn’t, that everything would fall apart.
“I . . .” Lukasz’s voice cracked. “I don’t know what you need me to tell you.”
The water, now dancing with rain, began to roil. Ren watched, somehow distant, as the river came to life. Long silver bodies, long silver hair. Long beautiful fingers and sleek beautiful faces, nimfy twisting in every direction.
Lukasz stiffened beside her.
To him, water meant monsters. To her . . .
Deceptively human, with those lithe bodies. But beneath the river algae clinging to their scales, they were anything but: all magical bones and sparkling organs and hearts and minds that changed on a whim and picked favorites. Loved and lived and drowned with the same reckless abandon. There was nothing human at all under that sparsely scaled, silver skin. Quiet creatures. Simple creatures. Magical, only playing at humanity, in love with this dark, murderous world.
Creatures like her.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whispered.
His voice didn’t crack again. It was hollow, deep. It echoed in her soul.
“I can’t.” Then: “I don’t know if it’s going to be okay.”
The uniform put an arm around the shoulders of the wraith.
And Ren, who had never been comforted by a human in her life, let him pull her in. Leaned against his shoulder, rested her cheek against the rough angle of his jaw.
“I know,” she whispered, feeling selfish. “I know.”
They didn’t speak again. Instead they watched as the nimfy shivered and twisted and undulated through the rain and the darkness and the sorrow of an evil forest.
29
WATER ABOVE THEM, WATER ENVELOPING them, the strzygi long gone and Lukasz shoulder to shoulder with the creature he admired, the creature he loved, the creature he feared he might devour.
In the end, Koszmar had been the braver man. He’d seen what was waiting for him: an eternity of slow transformation, of gradually forgetting, of peeling skin and yellowed teeth. It could have ended in monstrosity or humanity, and Koszmar had done the brave thing. He’d chosen how to die. He hadn’t relied on the Dragon to kill him. He hadn’t left anything to chance.
He’d pressed the gun into the underside of his jaw, squeezed the trigger, and chosen death.
He’d chosen humanity.
Lukasz wrapped his arm tighter around Ren.
Now was not the time to tell her what was happening to him. Not when she was hurting like this. She didn’t need to know about the monsters he imagined were under his skin, seething. Writhing. Clamoring to get out. She didn’t need to know that he was afraid: afraid he was not as brave as Koszmar. Afraid that when the moment came, he didn’t know how he would choose. Didn’t know if he could end it, choose death as a man. Wondered, instead, if he would hang on until his dying breath—whatever throat it tore itself from. Maybe he’d cling to those last heartbeats, caught up in the universal, obsessive instinct to survive. Maybe, oh God, probably, he’d go out sputtering and slobbering, a monster desperate to live.
Lukasz shuddered. He hoped she didn’t feel it.
Or—he let that last bit of hope have a moment—or maybe he’d survive. Maybe this was just a passing fever. Maybe the Leszy was wrong, maybe mavka were nothing like strzygi, maybe he’d laugh about this in a week, in a month—
She wept. She placed her hands flat against her cheeks, spreading them out over her eyes.
“I don’t know what you need me to tell you,” he said at last.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whispered. And her voice cracked.
Maye it was because of the strzygi. Because Ryś was gone. Because Koszmar had been brave enough to die and let them run, and because Lukasz didn’t know if he could do the same. But whatever the reason, all Lukasz wanted was to pull her in. To pry her hands a
way. To finish what they both knew had started on a rotten riverbank in a different lifetime, before he had known how much he cared.
But he didn’t pull her in. He didn’t finish it. He couldn’t. Not now. Not like this.
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s going to be okay.”
“I know.” Her voice caught. “I know.”
She cried quietly, settling her cold wet hair under his chin. And he didn’t get used to having her in his arms, and he didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.
Years ago, he had stood in the shadow of dead brothers and sworn not to die, not like this, not out here, not in the service of guilt and ghosts and a Golden Dragon. But tonight his mind was burned, his veins were black, his arms were full with the creature he loved, and tonight at least, he was still human.
For the first time in twenty-one years, Lukasz prayed for death.
30
THE SKY TURNED GRAY WITH dawn. The horses stood in the rain, grazing on moss. Lukasz’s saddle glimmered in the damp dark green. Koszmar’s saddle was plain black leather, with a W inside a crown embossed on the skirt. Czarn, maybe seeking the company of animals, lay at their feet.
Felka felt terrible for him. Her eyes burned. She felt terrible for all of them.
They had all lost someone. All of them, from Ren to Lukasz to Jakub.
Why are you here? Koszmar had asked, smirking.
I was born, she’d said sarcastically. Unfortunately.
She had never appreciated it before, but there were advantages to being alone. Felka was eighteen years old, and she had never lost anyone in her life. Not that she had ever had anyone in her life, either. But there were worse things than being alone.
Please, he’d said. Just take it.
Felka wiped at her cheeks. This was worse than being alone. She wrapped Koszmar’s Wrony greatcoat around her shivering shoulders. She wished she’d kept his gun. Somehow, a weapon seemed more representative of who he’d been.
“Where is the queen?” asked Jakub.
He rose from across the glowing coals and brought her a mug of coffee.
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