hands tending to the washing, of Lukasz’s shape on the bed. She was aware of guilt. Pouring through every vein, burning hot and bright.
“I have failed,” said Ren.
“We have all failed,” said the Baba Jaga. “They are too numerous. Do you really think they’ve confined themselves to your queendom? They are running amok, and you are the only one to have stood in their way. What have the humans done? They have hidden themselves. They have given up. In the cities, they have thrown up their hands. Oh, they write articles and they write books and they even occasionally discuss it in their parliaments. But they’ve sealed off this place. Called it forgotten, but only because they have chosen to forget it. While the humans of this world have hidden, and you have fought.”
Perhaps she was right, thought Ren. It was certainly easier to accept. To think of the humans as complacent, enamored of denial. To say they drew lines in the sand, these humans, and never stepped beyond them. She remembered what Lukasz had said: I don’t think you’re an animal. Then: I don’t think you’re a monster.
And I never did.
He hadn’t called her animal. Monster. Even human. He hadn’t drawn lines for her, and he’d never asked her to stay within them.
“You and I must help each other,” said the Baba Jaga into the silence. She pushed some stringy hair back under her cap. “We are the same. Neither quite human nor quite monster. Powerful beyond all reason.”
Ren felt a flash of familiarity. Another in the wilderness; another alone with dark things.
Someone who, unlike her, had never known a Lukasz.
“They call us monsters,” said Ren.
Ren remembered what Jakub had said about predilections to evil. She remembered the mobs of strzygi, all once human, all thronging together on the hunt. How they died was not so very different, she realized, from how they had lived. So fragile, so changeable. So easily influenced. Monster. How quick the villagers were to attack. You killed them. How quick they were to judge. They saw Ren, they saw the Baba Jaga, and then they threw back their heads and howled monster to the moon.
Ren had once said that of her monsters, she feared the ones who had been human most of all. She’d always assumed it was because she secretly feared a fate like theirs. Now a new thought occurred. Perhaps they had not transformed after all. Just realized what had always been in their souls.
“Of all the monsters to have set foot in your forest,” said the Baba Jaga, “by far the most evil has been man.”
And then the words came back to Ren, from another lifetime.
“My brother said that,” she said sharply. “Where did you hear that?”
The Baba Jaga smiled a bone-chilling smile.
“My home is more than Mountains, Little Queen,” she said.
Ren was quiet for a moment. Ry? had said that days ago, fighting strzygi on the outskirts of the village. Before any of this. Before they’d really known their humans. Jakub, who—despite everything—had turned out to be one of the kindest, gentlest souls Ren had ever known. Felka, so sharp and smart and quick to love. Koszmar, at once desperately unlikable and so desperate to be liked; Koszmar whom they had all disliked, whom none of them had wanted; Koszmar, who in the end had given up everything for them.
Poor, dear Koszmar, she thought.
Perhaps he’d been the best of them.
“You’re wrong,” said Ren suddenly.
The Baba Jaga gave her a piercing gaze.
“You’re wrong,” she repeated. “I mean, you’re right. It’s true. They are selfish. When they want something, they don’t care who they hurt.”
She thought of Jakub, so obsessed with his research that he didn’t care who he hurt. She thought of Lukasz, kidnapping her for his brother.
“But the humans,” continued Ren, and the Baba Jaga’s expression turned piercing. “I like them. Perhaps they can be cruel, but they can also be kind. I think of Jak—of one of my friends. He respected my forest; he loved it. He never wanted to hurt it—only understand it.”
Jakub had ventured out into the forest to save her. Patiently, kindly, he had shared his knowledge with her. He had grieved for Ry? with the same sorrow as his daughter. He had given up the only things he cared for: his daughter, to save them from the mavka; his dream of the Mountains, to go back to the village that feared him.
Ren thought of Felka, who had welcomed her from the moment she had set