She leaned down and kissed his cheek. His stubble was rough on her lips. His lashes flickered with the effort of keeping his eyes open.
The Baba Jaga returned with a tea tray, which she set on the nightstand. On it sat a single teacup filled with amber liquid. Ren stared. The Baba Jaga spoke.
“He must drink.”
Lukasz managed to get up on one elbow, and Ren helped him lift the teacup. He choked and swore. Then he lay back and coughed and twitched some more.
“Cider,” explained the Baba Jaga over her shoulder as she stumped back to the kitchen. “Now we wait.”
The bodiless hands fastened an apron around the old woman’s waist. Brandishing a meat cleaver the size of a badger, she called out to Ren:
“Come, little one, and eat.”
The cleaver lowered to the kitchen table, hacking at some doomed onions.
Ren had to duck under the clotheslines to reach the kitchen. The laundry was in all shapes and sizes.
The Baba Jaga set a bowl of steaming stew on the table before her. Then she cut Ren a generous piece of bread and slathered it with butter. Ren glanced back at the clotheslines, wondering why the Baba Jaga could possibly need so many outfits.
Realization dawned at almost the exact same time that the Baba Jaga spoke: “I made stew.”
She had killed—had she eaten—?
“It’s only vegetables,” she cackled, looking at Ren’s expression and the untouched bowl. “I know you have sensitive tastes.”
Ren was starving. She started with the bread, just as soft and perfect as the bread from the Leszy’s table. The Baba Jaga cut a second piece, and Ren devoured that, too. The stew was delicious. It reminded her of the forest. When Lukasz and Jakub had made hunter’s stew of nocnica, and Felka had chased Koszmar around the fire, and when Ren hadn’t trusted them and the woods hadn’t seemed so dark.
She put down the spoon, feeling tears in her eyes.
Poor Koszmar, she thought. Poor Koszmar, who had been so mean and so unhappy and still, somehow, had shot himself so that they could live.
“Will he be all right?” she asked.
The Baba Jaga raised her eyebrows. Actually, as she did not have any eyebrows left, she raised the mottled skin above her eyes. The effect was rather gross.
“We are two queens alone in the world and meeting for the first time,” said the Baba Jaga. “Let us speak of something other than men.”
“It’s not like that—” Ren started hotly.
“These humans,” said the Baba Jaga, ignoring her. “These humans are all the same. So desperate to live. So desperate to make deals. Help me survive, they ask. Help me get to the Mountain, they say. Save my beloved, they beg. So desperate for mercy, these humans.”
The Baba Jaga paused.
“Do you know what I do?” she asked.
Ren glanced toward the clothes.
“You . . . eat them?” Ren hazarded.
The Baba Jaga chuckled and cut her another piece of bread.
“I eat them,” she confirmed.
“But you didn’t eat us,” said Ren.
“Because you, my dearest, are not human at all.”
“I know.”
She didn’t act like one. She didn’t feel like one.
Maybe it was the humans’ fault, for forcing her into the creature she had become. For keeping their doorsteps dark, for throwing rocks. They’d called her a monster, they’d blamed every human death in that forest on her. They’d feared her so much they’d made her a legend—and they’d almost made her believe it. Maybe it was the humans’ fault, and they’d made her what she was: all broken nails and sharp tongue.
Or maybe, thought Ren, it was the monsters’ fault, for cutting her off, fencing her in. Forcing her to fight for that forest, day in and day out. Or maybe, she thought suddenly, it was the king and queen’s fault, for leaving her alone in the world.
Or maybe it was just her fault.
She’d attacked Jakub. She’d failed Ry?. Koszmar was dead. In her absence, the strzygi had closed in on the village, and she’d almost ignored it, in this obsession with the Dragon. The whole damn forest was going up in flames, and all she’d done was make it burn faster. It was her fault. It fell on her shoulders. And hers alone.
Her voice came out clipped, broken up with emotion.
“I have been a bad queen,” she said.
When she raised her gaze, she thought she saw pity in the Baba Jaga’s eyes.
“You have fought monsters for seventeen years,” said the old woman.