Don't Call the Wolf

by Aleksandra Ross

  “With Lukasz,” said Felka, adding: “You’re bleeding.”

  Jakub had a cut above his remaining eye, and there was blood crusted down his cheek. He rubbed ineffectively at it for a moment, before Felka raised her arm and—feeling mechanical—used the damp sleeve to wipe it away.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Felka smiled, then looked down at her coffee.

  For a moment, neither of them knew what to say.

  A twig snapped. Jakub’s hand closed on the hatchet. Felka twisted around. But it was only Ren, materializing from the trees. She was soaking wet, her hair plastered to her neck and shoulders. Between the wet hair and the shadows under her cheekbones, she looked less like a terrible queen and more like the drowned heroine of some tragic fairy tale.

  Czarn did not stir.

  “Here.” Felka removed her coat and wrapped it around Ren. Then she put the coffee in Ren’s hands, and behind her, Jakub began making a second pot. “Sit down.”

  She did not ask if Ren was okay. She knew she wasn’t. None of them were.

  Ren’s eyes were rimmed in red. Her lashes were stuck together. She looked different, thought Felka. She wasn’t sure how, but she looked different.

  At last, Czarn rose. He padded across the campsite and laid his head across her knees. Ren gave this sad, twisted sort of smile that threatened to break into tears, and put a hand on his head. He sighed, and Felka missed being alone.

  Jakub brought more coffee and handed one mug to Felka. Moving a little stiffly, he sat down next to Ren. The dawn paled to a lighter shade of gray. Over Ren’s shoulder, Felka noticed Lukasz returning. He, too, was soaking wet. His easy, slightly uneven stride took him to Król’s side, and he unhitched the rifle from the saddle. He looked better than she did.

  Then again, he’d been on hunts before. He’d lost brothers before.

  “What was her name?” asked Ren at last.

  No one spoke.

  “Your daughter,” Ren repeated. “What was her name?”

  Lukasz was still standing near Król, one arm crooked over his saddle. He weighed his rifle in his other hand, tossing and catching it slightly. He looked restless.

  “Anja,” said Jakub softly.

  Ren twisted her human fingers together. Then, suddenly, she took his hand and squeezed it. Felka noticed that even though her hand was dirty, with broken nails, it was still so elegant that it made Jakub’s look coarse and heavy.

  “It was the worst week,” he said. His voice became blurred at the edges. “But it was the best week. My wife died at her birth. Six days later, my daughter followed.”

  Felka’s eyes prickled. She wished she could put her arms around him. Let him weep. She wished she could bring Anja back. She wished none of this had ever happened. She wished, for a moment, she was still alone.

  It was unfair, she thought. She wished she was still alone; she wished they had never met; she never wanted to leave any of them again. Unfair that if you loved people, you had to feel this way.

  “I want you all to go back,” Ren said.

  Czarn lifted his head. Felka and Jakub fell silent. Lukasz sauntered over, rifle in hand.

  “I don’t—” Ren gulped and looked down at her hands. “I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

  Her voice cracked on the last syllable.

  Czarn spoke.

  “Ren,” he said. “We love you. We knew this when we came with you. We all did.”

  Ren smoothed down the fur of his ruff. She smiled at him, and she looked very pale.

  “I know,” she said. “But I am also worried about the forest. And . . .” She swallowed, and Felka thought that what she said next took great effort: “And the village. I know Ducha said that things are worse. And the Leszy did, too.”

  There was a beat of silence before Lukasz said, “Ren’s right. You should all go back. We’ll—we’ll go on to the Mountains.”

  They were quiet. Felka could feel their indecision. She knew it was Jakub’s dream to see the Moving Mountains, to walk the varnished halls of Hala Smoków. His fascination was what had led him to make that deal with the Brothers Smokówi six years ago. His fascination with them had cost him his face five years ago. Felka knew he wanted to go on.

  She wanted to go on, too.

  Not just because Jakub was her friend. But also because Ren was her friend: possibly, ridiculously, her best friend. She wanted to be here. She wanted to help.

  Czarn got to his feet. The damp had made his fur spiky, and it was pushed up over one of his forelegs, revealing a pink, mottled scar under the white fur. Felka realized, suddenly, that he must want to go on just as much as they did. The Mountains were his home more than any of them.

  But he said, “I’ll go back, Ren.”

  It never ceased to unsettle Felka, hearing the animals speak. She knew it shouldn’t have surprised her, for she’d heard Jakub talking to Ducha enough times.

  “But Czarn, your Mountains—” Ren said.

  “Ren,” he said, shaking his head, “please. Let me do this for you.”

  “I will go with him,” added Jakub. “Back to the village. I will warn the villagers.”

  Felka watched Ren. Even in such a short time, losing her brother had changed her. She did look different.

  “My daughter was so alone, for so long,” Jakub was saying. His voice was dry. “You saved her from being alone forever.”

  Felka felt suddenly selfish. She couldn’t believe she’d ever wished to be alone.

  She glanced between Ren and Lukasz. There was something new between them—she could feel it. They’d all lost friends and brothers the night before. And yet, despite all their deals and agreements, today was the first time that the pair of them actually looked like partners.

  Now Lukasz glanced at Ren. Felka had never seen him look at her like that. With concern and hope, and more . . .

  And Ren said, in a very small voice, to all of them:

  “Thank you.”

  Then Ren hugged Jakub. She turned to Felka, looking as shy as she had that day in the village. Felka felt her eyes get wet.

  Felka didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to leave her friend alone. She didn’t want to be alone. But it was what Ren needed. And for the first time since she’d met him, Felka trusted Lukasz. She couldn’t help feeling that somehow, when it came to Ren, he would do the right thing.

  “I’ll go back,” she said at last. “Ren, be careful.”

  Ren smiled, and only because she didn’t know what else to do, Felka put her arms around the queen’s neck, and she hugged her only friend goodbye.

  Anzelm

  TWO YEARS EARLIER

  ANZELM WAS A HARD MAN to dislike. For one thing, he was certainly too beautiful for a dragon slayer. Alone among the ten, you could almost believe that Anzelm belonged in the vaulted white ballrooms of Miasto and Granica.

  He always swept people up in his beauty, in the way his eyes sparkled, in his unfailing good manners, his unerring kindness. While Lukasz gambled with thieves, Anzelm memorized the placement of table cutlery. While Lukasz posed for photographs with increasingly impressive dragon kills, Anzelm perfected the season’s most fashionable polonaise. While Lukasz gave interviews peppered with a charming number of curse words, Anzelm guest lectured for the uniwersytet’s department of medicine.

  And although Lukasz didn’t realize it until afterward, Anzelm was also in love.

  It happened in Saint Klemens Hospital, where Jarek was getting his arm stitched up after a run-in with a very nasty bannik.

  “I’d’ve been fine,” slurred Jarek, who had been given a lot of pain medication. He gestured, dripping blood on the floor. “If ’e ’ad just ’eld shtill—”

  Anzelm had procured a suture tray and was trying to teach Lukasz how to stitch a wound.

  “Will it shcar?” muttered Jarek.

  Anzelm clapped him on his shoulder.

  “Only if Lukasz keeps pulling those knots too tight.”

  Lukas
z rolled his eyes, but he made sure the next suture was loose enough. As Anzelm had taught him, he took care not to let the skin pucker under the thread’s tension. He actually kind of liked suturing. For someone who couldn’t write like Franciszek or draw like Jarek, he was pretty good with his hands.

  Thinking of his brother, he wondered where Franciszek was. Either asleep or studying, most likely. Lately, he was researching each new job with an increasing obsessiveness. It was bad enough that he’d delay their jobs for weeks, insisting that he had to wait on a loan of rare books, that he had to study the curve of this particular tooth, that he had not yet finished analyzing the schematics for a given lair—

  “Didn’t have schematics for the Faustian,” Lukasz would mutter.

  “And now you have a limp,” Fraszko would retort.

  Then Anzelm would chime in, across the gilded hotel rooms, the expensive coffee clubs. “Relax, Fraszko,” he’d say, laughing. “We all know this isn’t the dragon that’ll kill us.”

  Franciszek’s mouth would get thin. His eyes would cloud and he would look like an ancient warrior chieftain. Not the kind of man who smoked good cigarettes and preferred purchasing journals to buying guns.

  Anzelm loved telling stories of the Mountains. Lukasz often wondered how much was memorized and how much was invented. But it was part of his charm.

  Anzelm’s favorite story was the story of Lukasz’s birth.

  How proud their father must have been, he would say, to lift his tenth son from his crib of golden bones! His father, the Lord of the Moving Mountains, had taken the black-haired boy in his arms and carried him from room to room, through the entire wooden lodge of the Wolf-Lords. In an ancient truce, Kamieńa’s villagers had brought the stone down from the Mountains to build their king’s castle; in exchange, the Wolf-Lords had carried the wood up from the forest to build their city.

  Anzelm told them how their father had moved Lukasz’s tiny fingers over the wood carvings that spoke of their history and shown the baby the dragon antlers on the walls. And in the Mountains above, the wolves—for there were still wolves among the cliffs then—peered down from between the purple rocks and saw Hala Smoków, the city of Wolf-Lords, alight with gold and music.

  There is another, they had said in the dark hills. A tenth Wolf-Lord is born.

  “Lukasz,” said Anzelm presently, “divide the cut in half with each suture. Don’t go end to end. Otherwise it won’t line up.”

  “It won’ line up!” slurred Jarek, from the bed.

  Lukasz looked guiltily at his rather crooked sutures.

  Then Anzelm spoke, as he always did, about how their father took this youngest son—his last son—out to the great wooden verandas of the lodge. There they were swept up in wind and in snow and in starless nights, and he had shown his son the blue slopes of the Mountains and the silver-crested peaks of their world.

  Today, Anzelm left out part of the story, but Lukasz had heard it enough times that he knew the words by heart. Not that he remembered them being said by his father. But his brothers had been fathers to him, and Miasto’s paved roads had been his mountain paths.

  Outside these Mountains, their father had said, they fear us. Outside these Mountains, they warn their children not to call wolves from the forest.

  But this is not a forest, my son.

  And we are the wolves.

  Anzelm did not say this part out loud. But Lukasz, counting stitches, said it to himself.

  Then his older brother settled against the windowsill, cradling an imaginary baby in his arms, and Lukasz tried not to laugh. But Anzelm had very few faults. Lukasz could forgive his melodrama.

  “Listen close, my Lukasz,” said Anzelm. “That’s what our father said. If ever you are lost, or alone, or frightened, remember that this is your home. These Mountains will always call you back.”

  He pushed himself off the window and inspected Lukasz’s handiwork.

  “Excellent. Perfect skin alignment. Well done.”

  Then Anzelm returned to lean heroically on the windowsill, one hand on his hip and the other on the frame, and it was as if he were looking at the hills themselves, not the dirty streets below.

  “Shrouded in blackness and keeping away from the light,” he whispered, “the wolves howled their congratulations to the Lord of the Moving Mountains.”

  Then Anzelm gathered up the tray to take it back to the supply area. He left Lukasz alone, sitting with Jarek on the wrought-iron bed, sunlight streaming through the high window.

  And then Lukasz heard them.

  “One of the men from the Mountains.”

  It was a girl, a few years older than him, who spoke.

  Lukasz stood up and listened at the door. He couldn’t quite see into the hallway.

  “Yes, well,” answered another person’s voice. “Don’t get too attached.”

  “But Ola—”

  “Agatka, what did I tell you?” whispered the other voice. “Our father will never allow it. Flirt with him all you like, but it will never happen.”

  “Ola!”

  “They’re savages,” snapped the first voice.

  Lukasz went very still. Surely they weren’t . . . ?

  But the etiquette book on his brother’s nightstand . . . ? And the guest lectures? The polonaises? They couldn’t . . . they couldn’t really think—Lukasz’s mind turned cartwheels, and in a kind of delirium of shock, it silently screamed:

  The dinner forks, for God’s sake!

  “Savages, do you understand me?” repeated the voice. “They drink human blood in those Mountains. They made deals with demons to keep their hold on them. Agatka, we won’t have you mixed up in it.”

  They moved away. It was the first time that Lukasz realized, no matter what praise they received, that he and his brothers stood apart. They would never truly belong—never be accepted—among this world of paved roads and elegant parties. Not even Anzelm. Outside, the carriages rolled on in the street, clattering below and breaking over Lukasz’s ears like a thunderstorm.

  It was a long time before Lukasz realized that he didn’t want to belong.

  He never found out what happened, exactly. But Agatka must have told Anzelm what her sister had said. Or maybe what she really thought of him herself. Lukasz wasn’t sure. But a few days later, he saw Anzelm chatting with Agatka outside the hospital. While Lukasz watched from across the square, he tucked her arm in his, and together they ducked into an ice-cream parlor. Fifteen minutes later, Agatka came back.

  Anzelm did not.

  31

  REN AND LUKASZ REACHED THE Mountains by the evening of the next day.

  The trees thinned around them, then disappeared. Ren had never seen a world without trees. Never seen a sky so big. Unfiltered by the forest and reflected off the glittering peaks, the sun almost blinded her. Everything was barer, sharper, somehow harsher. The air was ice-cold and clear, filled with the rush of wind and the scent of snow.

  Ahead, they faced a gorge a mile wide, extending parallel with the forest in both directions. Beyond its vastness, the Mountains rose from a mist of snow and fog. Purple and blue and gray, they formed an unending vertical wall. Ren had never felt smaller.

  She spared one last glance behind, absurdly sad to be leaving the dark. The forest—her forest—stretched behind them, smooth tree trunks fading to brown murk. She knew she was lying to herself, but from out here, it looked safer in there. In there, the world knew her name.

  Out here, she was just another heartbeat in the silence.

  These Mountains didn’t care if she was the queen. Didn’t care if she’d lost her brother. Didn’t care if the world was under attack. These Mountains had been here for thousands of years, and neither queen nor monsters had ever stopped their tides.

  When she looked back, she caught Lukasz’s eye. He must have been feeling worse, because he’d asked her to take Król’s reins. There were dark circles under his eyes. Shadow and beard darkened his jaws, pooled beneath his cheekbones.
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  “What?” he asked wearily.

  It was the first time either of them had spoken since the morning.

  “Nothing,” she murmured. Her voice sounded pathetically small in the vastness.

  She didn’t like how their words echoed in the silence. Didn’t like how the air made them somehow louder. It was too empty here. So unlike her forest, always cramped and wild and ready to close in. Except for the rush of wind, the cliff was silent.

  “How do we get across?” she asked at last.

  “There’s a bridge up ahead.”

  He motioned for Ren to direct Król along the path of the gorge.

  As he leaned forward, she felt his chest against her shoulder, the rough edge of his jaw against her cheek. It was as if they were in the river again, and again he was refusing to say the things she needed to hear.

  But he hadn’t said those things then, and he didn’t say them now. Ren noticed, with an uneasy feeling, that he smelled like blood.

  The promised bridge appeared first as a shadow, outlined by the sunlit clouds. It gathered detail as they got closer, supported by giant arched columns that extended downward to disappear into the cottony gray clouds.

  The bridge was moving.

  Scaly creatures undulated over the stone rails, like enormous snakes. They coiled in perfect, hypnotic rhythm. As they neared, the creatures gave a deep, guttural hiss.

  No, Ren thought. Not . . .

  Dragons uncurled around the bridge. There were two of them, with faces that were equal parts serpentine and equine. Sets of antlers, each with at least thirty tines, crested their heads. Thick silver fur ringed their necks like manes, only to merge into scales on their backs. Glittering feathered wings unfurled from their long snakelike bodies.

  Ren wanted to disappear behind Lukasz. Run back into the forest. Never come back here. To this. They reminded her, horribly, of the Dragon.

  They reminded her of Ryś.

  “It’s okay,” said Lukasz behind her. “They’re statues.”

  At his words, Ren could make out a grainy edge to their fur and wings. And they weren’t merely the color of the stone bridge; they were part of the bridge itself. The Faustians beat their wings against the sky. Slowly, they began to descend. Their coils hit the stone with clouds of dust.