looked appallingly skinny here in the dark. She barely spent any time as a human, these days. There was no time for it. No use.
A raccoon family trundled past, probably on their way down to the cellars to curl up in the empty vodka barrels and bicker with the badgers.
Ren swallowed and confessed: “I . . . I saved a human today.”
Czarn didn’t say anything, but his tail gave an involuntary twitch. He had suffered the most at their hands. He deserved to hate these humans more than anyone else.
Ren couldn’t look at him.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said softly. “I mean, I didn’t want to. He came up to the river, and the Golden Dragon—Czarn, it . . . I think he wanted to fight it, but it left. It left him alone.”
Still, Czarn didn’t say anything. Ren watched the gray sky turn purple, watched the black smoke disappear into darkness. Wondered, for the first time, where that human was now . . .
“He fell into the river,” she said. “And a rusalka almost killed him.”
Here, Czarn took a sharp breath in.
“I’m sorry, Czarn,” she whispered, knotting and unknotting her hands. “I’m so sorry. I just had to know—I was curious. He—he was strange, Czarn. Different from the villagers. There was blood—dried blood that turned to fire—on his sword, and his horse had antlers on its head and—”
“What?”
Czarn’s voice was sharp.
Ren finally looked up. He was not looking at her with anger or disappointment, but—maybe she was imagining it—hope?
“You said his horse had antlers,” said Czarn slowly. “Are you sure? On its bridle?”
Ren thought back to the horse on the riverbank, before it had bolted into the trees.
“Yes,” said Ren, trying to remember the details. “One pair on its bridle. More on the saddle. There must have been hundreds of them.”
Czarn exhaled through his fangs. It brought up a rumbling growl. When he spoke again, his voice was low and heavy, and it hummed in Ren’s heart.
“What did he look like? This human?”
Ren shrugged.
“Black hair.”
“He may have been wearing a fur vest?” asked Czarn. “And a belt! Wide, made of leather.”
“No.” Ren shook her head. “He wore all black.”
“Long hair? A beard?”
Ren shook her head.
Czarn searched her face.
“Ren, did he have blue eyes?”
“Czarn, I don’t know. I was kind of busy killing rusalki,” said Ren exasperatedly. “Why does it matter?”
Czarn stood abruptly and leapt down from the alcove. He paced in front of the window, eyes on the floor. His tail twitched, swishing back and forth across the floor, scattering dust. His limp was worse, and guiltily, Ren wondered if he’d hurt himself fighting the strzygi.
When he finally spoke, his voice was deeper than usual, cooler: as if forged by the Mountains in which he had been born.
“We used to say that to enter our Mountains was to die in them,” he began. “The cliffs move in tides every night, and never to the same place twice. If you don’t get lost in them, then you will be crushed between them. And the dragons. The Mountains were once filled with them. Dragons and wolves. That’s all there was, for a very long time. Dragons and wolves.”
In that moment, he seemed much older than her. An ancient sort of quality had entered his voice, for he was telling the oldest stories of his world.
“But then came the Wolf-Lords,” he whispered. “They were not like other men. They were fearless. They carved out their home up there in the cold, and they killed the dragons. Decorated their lodges with their bones, wore their fur, mounted their antlers on the heads of their horses. And they understood those Mountains.”
Ren had never been to the Mountains. They lay well outside the forest boundaries, and she’d only ever seen their low purple shadow against the sky. Sometimes she heard their murmur on the quietest nights. They had always seemed, to her, to carry secrets. Held close to blue-rock chests, whispered in one another’s ears.
“I think,” continued Czarn, as if reading her thoughts, “it’s easier for us animals, being closer to the earth, to understand the Mountains. But the Wolf-Lords . . . they were different.”
Czarn’s voice had changed again. He paused by the window, glancing out to the Mountains where he’d been born.
“We were brothers,” he murmured. “We swore to protect one another from the dragons and the danger, up there in the cold. And for a thousand years, we did. The Wolf-Lords never came down from their wooden lodges. They preferred the cold