Don't Call the Wolf

by Aleksandra Ross

  Ren crossed the great hall under the glow of dragon bones and the stars of ten centuries. The hearth was empty, without any wood or kindling. A tiny figurine was balanced on the otherwise empty mantelpiece. Ren picked it up; it was only two or three inches tall, carved from wood.

  It was a dragon.

  Then she looked from the dragon to the hearth, overflowing with soot. Thoughtfully, she replaced the figurine on the mantel.

  There is a glass sword in Hala Smoków, the Leszy had said.

  Before she could change her mind, she plunged her hands into the cinders. Spiders tumbled down the chimney and insects swarmed over her hands. Her fingers touched metal. Heart soaring, she pulled. The hilt slid out of the ash. Except it was lighter than she had expected.

  No—

  Ren wanted to cry.

  “Ren—”

  She turned and saw Lukasz, somehow looking even worse than before. When she spoke, her voice caught. “It’s broken.”

  The silver hilt resembled the jaws of a dragon, as if the blade should have issued from its open mouth. But where there should have been a blade, the dragon’s jaws were shut tight. It wasn’t even a sword. Just a silver hilt.

  Lukasz didn’t say anything. He just crossed the hall, and Ren held out the empty hilt.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, unable to keep the catch out of her voice. “It’s a trick. A cruel, mean trick. We shouldn’t have listened to the Leszy—”

  He took the sword from her outstretched hand. Ren broke off.

  As his bare hand touched the hilt, it changed. Black tarnish melted away, and the hilt glowed silver. The dragon’s closed mouth began to shiver. The jaws trembled. Then they yawned, opened wide, and a column of light shot from the broken hilt.

  The light hardened.

  In his burned hand, Lukasz held the glass sword. Its blade was whole. It issued the same creepy light as the skeletons, pure and thick with magic. Lukasz turned the sword over. The light caught his face, illuminated excitement and wonder. Then it dulled, like cooling iron.

  “And this can kill it?” whispered Ren.

  Lukasz glanced back at her without lowering the blade. For a moment, he looked terrible. All hard angles and predator eyes. He grinned wolfishly, teeth not quite coming together.

  Then he laughed. The sound echoed off the wooden walls and danced down the hallways. Ren saw only his dark brows, that one stubborn piece of hair, and that perfect, slightly crooked front tooth.

  “A thousand years of Wolf-Lords.” He flicked down the blade and offered her the sword, its blade full and forged of glass. “And you put us all to shame.”

  Ren hesitated. She took it from him, surprised by how heavy it felt in her hand. Lukasz turned away to rummage through one of the hidden cupboards.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. She felt like an imposter. This was his sword. It had come to life for him—

  “Here,” he said, returning with a belt and scabbard.

  “Lukasz, what—?”

  He looped it over her shoulders, across her body. He pulled her very close as he buckled it over her black coat. He looked down at her from his great height, and Ren almost pulled him closer.

  “What are you doing?” she asked instead. “Don’t you need this—?”

  “Ren,” he said. “It’s your sword. In case—you’re the queen, Ren. You’ve gotten us through everything. You should do this. You need to do this.”

  He was still smiling, but his voice had an urgent undercurrent. Ren didn’t quite understand. She wasn’t a Wolf-Lord. This was the Golden Dragon—

  But when she put a hand over his, Lukasz just stepped back.

  “With that sword,” he tried to joke, “you look like a queen.”

  He tried to move away, but Ren grabbed his hand.

  “I have always looked like a queen,” she said, pulling him closer. She found the buckle on the belt, readjusted it so the sword lay comfortably against her hip. Then added, “I am just not the queen you expected.”

  And suddenly, he was so close that if Ren had moved even the slightest bit, their lips would have touched. Ren could feel her own heart taking her away, could feel him giving in. And it was going to happen. There was nothing she could do about it.

  “You’re nothing like I expected,” he murmured.

  She almost moved forward. But Lukasz twisted away suddenly, eyes trained on the door.

  “Stop,” he said. “Someone’s here.”

  Jarek

  ONE YEAR EARLIER

  IT CAME AS NO SURPRISE that the last three brothers received invitations to the Royal Exhibition of the Unnatural. Lukasz figured he had Jarek to thank for that.

  Because the thing was, Jarek was good at pretending.

  Early on, when there had never been enough food, Jarek had pretended he wasn’t hungry. Whenever they were invited to some fine party or elegant soiree, he pretended to be flattered.

  And he also pretended he liked hunting dragons.

  Jarek’s pretending made him easygoing and likable. His shyness and kindness made him all things to all people. He was also less threatening, taller than Franciszek but shorter than Lukasz, with a haunted kind of handsomeness that the young ladies of Miasto found romantic. He was, although it baffled him, wildly popular.

  The night of the exhibition, the three brothers descended the four hundred steps that led into the belly of the Wieczna Salt Mine. From there, they walked the mineral-crusted passageways and entered the great salt ballrooms. Salt chandeliers hung from the ceilings. Bas-reliefs in salt lined the sparkling gray walls.

  And overhead, monsters.

  It was, after all, an exhibit.

  Dragon skeletons rotated slowly, like obscene mobiles with iridescent silk stretched between the bones of their unfurled wings. Banniks, stuffed with sawdust, were arranged with their arms cranked back, hurling invisible rocks at their enemies. Common things, like psotniki and nocnica, were interspersed among the rarer beasts. Their curator, Professor Damian Bieleć, held court beneath them.

  The professor had chosen the salt mine especially. Lukasz supposed there was a kind of thrill in admiring demons next to hell.

  “Monstrosity is relative,” Lukasz overheard him saying. “For some of these creatures, evil is simply a way of life. Take this strzygoń . . .”

  The Unnaturalist gestured to a silver-gray monstrosity revolving slowly overhead. It had been killed in the moment of its birth: the new strzygoń emerging from the torso of its human vessel. The gray bulging eyes stared down at them. Lukasz turned his head to the side for a better view.

  The sight took him back to the cellars of Szarawoda, looking at another strzygoń, at another scholar of monsters. . . .

  “These creatures are a miracle of survival,” Professor Bieleć was saying. “For the survival of their species is based, most unusually, on the consumption of others. . . .”

  “Close your mouth,” Lukasz muttered, catching up with Jarek. “You look like a fish.”

  Jarek, who had been staring up at the revolving dragons, started and almost dropped his glass.

  “Where’s your date gotten to?” asked Lukasz.

  In the sallow lighting of the salt mine, Jarek looked even more romantically haggard than usual.

  Franciszek approached. They formed an island of black and legend in the center of the chamber.

  “Turned out she didn’t want me,” Jarek was answering, returning his empty glass to the tray of a passing waiter. “Just my gold.”

  “The women you fall for,” said Franciszek. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Thank you,” replied Jarek mildly. “And here I was hoping she wanted me for my wickedly good looks.”

  Jarek always carried a small wooden dragon with him. When they’d been boys, he’d broken it off one of the wall carvings at Hala Smoków. It was tiny, whittled of varnished wood, and now he turned it thoughtfully in his hands.

  “Youth is temporary,” said Franciszek wisely. “Gold is forever.”


  Lukasz snorted.

  “It certainly is not,” he muttered.

  “Maybe not the way you spend it,” rejoined Franciszek sweetly.

  Lukasz was twenty, bored, and a little tipsy. He lit a cigarette, which Franciszek immediately snatched out of his teeth, hissing: “You can’t smoke in here!”

  Lukasz jerked back. Franciszek crumpled the cigarette in the cupped palms of a stuffed bannik.

  Jarek flipped the tiny dragon nervously between his fingers, watching them.

  “Jarek,” Lukasz heard his older brother saying. “Did you see the sculptures in the next chamber? I think you’d be quite interested in them—”

  They left Lukasz to drain his glass, hunt down another. Damian Bieleć was still lecturing some attendees, now standing next to a wooden model of a small cabin supported by a chicken leg.

  This is how he makes money, thought Lukasz. This is how he makes friends.

  Fake monsters. Fake thrills. Jarek was too mild to notice. Franciszek was so damn excited about being included. Lukasz was the only one who saw the invitation for what it really was. He and his brothers weren’t guests, for God’s sake.

  They were part of the exhibit.

  “Jarek,” growled Franciszek through gritted teeth. “Why is he still drinking?”

  Lukasz glanced up, dazed. Realized that he was sitting alone, in a deserted passageway. Someone, somewhere, was screaming.

  “Do you hear someone screaming?” he asked, but both brothers ignored him.

  “He’s twenty, little brother,” said Jarek. Lukasz noticed that Jarek was just as drunk as he was.

  Strange, he thought. Usually, Jarek didn’t drink at all.

  “C’mon,” Jarek muttered. “Let him have some fun.”

  At that moment, the youngest of the Wolf-Lords was violently sick in the mineshaft.

  “The—king—is—here—” growled Franciszek.

  “I saw,” said Jarek with unexpected venom. “Tell me, did he ask you to read for him?” He ruffled Franciszek’s hair. “Such a lovely party trick. I say we take bets. We’ll make a killing; that lot out there is sure to bet against you—”

  “Shut up,” hissed Franciszek. “You just have to ruin everything, don’t you? We’re being honored tonight, you ungrateful—”

  Jarek’s voice was deadly calm. Lukasz had finished being sick and was now sprawled on the cavern floor, moaning.

  “Finish that thought, little brother,” said Jarek. “I dare you.”

  For a moment, the pair of them stood silently in the dark vault. In their sparkling black uniforms, clean-shaven and not covered in soot and blood for once, they almost looked like Wrony.

  When Franciszek didn’t answer, Jarek’s mouth stayed flat and cold.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, without an ounce of triumph.

  He straightened up with Lukasz half draped over his shoulders. Jarek fit in with the Miasto citizens. He’d always been the best pretender. But neither gold spectacles nor books could hide the dogged look in Franciszek’s eyes, the way his mouth hung crookedly, like Lukasz’s did. If anything, the effort Franciszek took to fit in had made him stand out even more.

  “Just take him back to the hotel,” said Franciszek at last.

  “You even talk like one of them now,” Jarek said, smirking. “No accent.”

  Mock applause from Jarek. Lukasz tried to join in, only succeeded in slapping his own face. Franciszek’s gaze was flat. Sober. Cold.

  “Just go.”

  And they did. And although Lukasz did not remember how or when it had happened, Jarek had somehow gotten him back to the hotel, because he woke up there the next morning. The front page of the newspaper had a picture of the exhibition. The three brothers flanked the tiny Damian Bieleć, four glasses raised, four smiles. Two of the brothers had crooked front teeth.

  They looked happy. Looking at those three, thought Lukasz, no one would have ever guessed they were pretending.

  But by then, Jarek, who had always pretended not to care, was long gone.

  36

  REN AND LUKASZ TWISTED AROUND at the same time.

  It took her eyes—human eyes—a moment to adjust to the darkness beyond the arches of the hall. The human vision didn’t bother her, like it would have once upon a time. She wondered if that was weakness, and if it was, she wondered why she didn’t care.

  But then her eyesight sharpened, slowly and with some squinting, as human eyes sometimes require, and a girl moved into the blue starlight. Ren sensed—almost felt—Lukasz stand a little straighter. The girl wore a dress almost exactly like the one Ren had left behind in the hallway, with green embroidery and ribbons in her braids, all white and lace and long black hair. She held a violin in one hand and a bow in the other.

  A film of dust grayed the long black hair. Gauzy threads trailed from delicate eyelashes, whispered across the bow of her mouth. Ren let her eyes slip into their familiar feline acuity, and she realized, with a sharp jolt of fear, that the girl was covered in cobwebs.

  She stepped back, stiffly, into Lukasz.

  His hand closed on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured as his lips brushed her ear and sent a second, very different jolt though her. “Look.”

  And Ren, unsure whether she used her lynx eyes or her human ones, noticed the dark horns uncurling from her hair and the fluffy tail swishing across the floor behind her.

  At the same time, it dawned on her who had led her to the glass sword: a domowik.

  The girl smiled. Then she put the bow to the violin, and she played.

  The melody was soft. The instrument was out of tune. But all the same, the notes sailed through the empty room and hung in the air. Deep. Confident. A melody of such shape and such magic that Ren knew it was one she would never forget: not in a year, not in a hundred years, not if the Golden Dragon bore down on them now and burned these halls down around them.

  The girl approached. Her heels echoed on the hardwood. She came close, the somber melody filling up every inch of the room, and even though she passed mere inches from Ren’s face, Ren realized the girl had no scent, beyond the resin of the strings. No sound, beyond the song. No life, beyond the dark, unmisted light burning in those sharp blue eyes.

  “I think,” said Lukasz, in a gravelly voice that brought the world—for the barest moment—back into focus, “she wants us to dance.”

  “I can’t dance,” whispered Ren, slowly revolving to watch the girl move past.

  Her turn brought her very close to Lukasz. Close enough to know that he smelled like horse and blood and a dozen varieties and intensities of smoke. Close enough to know the quiet rasp in the back of his throat when he tried to hold back a cough. Close enough to know that there was nothing hazy, nothing deathly, nothing cobwebbed or misty about him: he was hard angles and bright colors and flashing lights and Why, she realized, he is the last man alive in this world.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I can.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I was fifteen.” He grinned, slipping a hand around her waist. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

  And Ren knew, with a tiny, worried feeling, that she would like that. It also scared her that there might not be a next time. That when this was over, if they both survived, he’d disappear to Miasto. He’d be with Franciszek or he’d be alone, but he wouldn’t stay here. And she’d fade back to her forest, and it would be like they’d never met.

  But she would always know. She would remember. . . .

  Without quite realizing what she was doing, Ren took his burned hand in hers. The leathered skin felt strange and foreign against hers. She wondered if he could feel anything at all through that scarring. Then she put a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched.

  They were close enough that his messy hair brushed her cheek when she leaned forward.

  “You’re falling apart,” she whispered.

  His lip twitched. He leaned down and whispered by her ear: “I
t’s part of my charm.”

  Their first steps were unsteady. Lukasz seemed to know the way, but Ren felt awkward rather than confident. This was different than running or pouncing. She had been built for battle and trained in war; she had no understanding of things like music and careful steps and keeping time with another person depending on her.

  The domowik’s song echoed around them. The creature drifted with them, slowing the tune when Ren stumbled. But when she got the steps right, the creature smiled a ghostly, hollow kind of smile. The song became thin, only a few notes, as Ren managed to follow Lukasz’s scuffed boots across the floor.

  The melody returned. Powerful and confident, and somehow no longer out of tune. It found Ren, and caught her, and held her—like the thrill of a chase, the power of an attack. Ren felt it. Her steps were surer. She knew where Lukasz stepped before he even moved. Around them, the music swelled and doubled in volume.

  For the first time, she looked up from her feet. A second domowik appeared on the other side of the hall, smiling at the two of them. Like the first, she had long black hair and white clothes, and she, too, had a violin. Her strings answered the first domowik’s notes, and circling one another, they played back and forth across the expanse. Music surrounded them.

  She could hardly believe it. Lukasz sped up, and she followed easily. They whirled across the hardwood, dust billowing under their feet and eddying under the stars. As they spun, Ren caught glimpses of more domowiki: they emerged from the doorways with instruments, they crept out of corners, and one soot-faced creature even clambered headfirst out of the fireplace.

  The song swelled around them, and the hall exploded to life.

  A thousand unlit candles burst into flame at the same time. Fifty domowiki couples came spinning out of doorways, all in white, catching Ren and Lukasz as they twirled across the floor. Flowered skirts flickered against white trousers, black boots tapped the floor, and near-human hands clapped in time. The fire roared. The crest over the mantel glittered. Music enveloped them. They never missed a note.

  Above, the chandelier blazed like a sun in the night sky.

  Ren and Lukasz were covered in blood and dirt. Their clothes were torn. They were the only black coats in a sea of white. But Lukasz was grinning like a devil, and suddenly, the waxiness was gone. Perhaps it was pure magic; perhaps it was the music. Ren didn’t know how and she didn’t care why, but she danced as she had never danced before, and she knew she would never dance again. It was as if the two of them had raced backward twenty years and nothing evil had ever happened in these Mountains.