and Koszmar absorbed in cleaning the nawia blood off his perfect uniform, Lukasz took his time untacking Król and brushing him down. Though it had healed—somehow—his shoulder was still sore from the nav’s blow, and it twinged as he lifted the dragon-leather saddle from his horse’s back. The antlers chimed. The only lullaby he had ever known.
What the hell was he doing?
He felt oddly light-headed. Nauseated, even. He reached inside his jacket to run his hand over the spot that had healed. He wasn’t sure what he expected—a gaping wound, maybe? But the skin was smooth.
Boots crunched beside him.
Lukasz looked up and met Rybak’s single, unnerving eye. The Unnaturalist had looked earnest for a moment, but now his brow furrowed.
“You all right, boy?”
Lukasz swallowed against the sudden urge to vomit. He found himself leaning heavily against Król’s side.
“What were you thinking?” he asked. “Coming after us? We could have all been killed.”
“With or without me, the mavka would have come for you,” said Rybak. “They are the souls of the unbaptized—”
“I know, I know,” interrupted Lukasz, and then quoted, almost verbatim: “‘They’re of a violent nature and prey on humans and lure their victims with their songs and decapitate them.’”
He rubbed his hand over his chin and around the back of his neck, without taking elbows from Król’s back.
“How did you know that?” asked Rybak, single eye widening.
Lukasz smiled wryly. “How did you know that?” he returned.
Rybak didn’t answer, but he pointed up to where a white eagle flitted in and out of the branches. It reminded Lukasz, sickeningly, of the Kwiat library and Rafa?.
“You can talk to her?” he asked, suddenly realizing what Rybak was implying.
“Most animals are willing to talk,” replied the Unnaturalist. “It’s the humans who don’t listen.”
The underbrush rustled on the other side of the campsite. Even from twenty feet away, Lukasz saw Koszmar’s hand go to the rifle in the grass. Then Felka emerged, followed by the queen, who was human once more.
“How could you do this?” Rybak asked Lukasz quietly. “How could you kidnap her?”
The queen sat down cross-legged, flanked by her lynx and her wolf. The wolf flipped over on his back, tail thumping the ground, while the queen rubbed his belly and chatted with the lynx.
“I thought—” began Lukasz.
“No,” said Rybak, in that moment sounding very much like Franciszek. “You didn’t think.”
Lukasz reminded himself, feeling a bit scummy, that there was a debt, and that he needed to collect. For Franciszek, he thought, trying to block out the image of Jakub Rybak crying over the little nav.
This is for Franciszek.
“I saved your life last night, Jakub,” he said levelly. “That’s the second time.”
“When was the first?”
“In that cellar in Szarawoda,” said Lukasz. When Rybak tried to turn away, Lukasz’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm. He added, in a low voice: “You owe me.”
Rybak’s eye shifted from Lukasz’s face to his hand, clenched around his shirtsleeve. Lukasz dropped the arm.
“What do you want?” asked Rybak.
Lukasz remembered the book of demons in Kwiat. He remembered Raf, playing with dola and leading them all to destruction. And then he thought of someone else. Someone with gold-rimmed spectacles and an unfailingly neat uniform and a wildly good heart hidden under its stiff, boring exterior—
Lukasz spoke through gritted teeth.
“Teach me to read.”
The nawia had been a close call. Lukasz was lucky he remembered anything at all—was lucky Franciszek had chosen that particular page. But if he had been able to read . . . who knew what else he could have learned?
And if he couldn’t hunt dragons, what the hell was he going to do with his life?
Rybak inclined his head.
“Very well.”
Lukasz watched the Unnaturalist cross the clearing. He was barely the ghost of the man he’d met six years ago. Felka trailed after him, looking a little awkward. She obviously wanted to comfort him. Just as obviously didn’t know how to start.
Lukasz propped his Faustian-fur saddle pad against a tree and settled down on the ground. Koszmar was fiddling with his own saddle on the opposite side, his hand never straying far from the saber at his side. He was watching the queen. They stayed close together, strangely fractured. Circling like predators. Watching one another. Keeping tabs on these new, strange partners.
Lukasz needed her.
They didn’t have Franciszek’s original notebook, the one with the map. Whatever Rybak thought about the forest changing, it would have been better than nothing. As it was, they had no clear path to the Mountains. But this queen had spent