to mind him,” said Ren. “The man is a wreck. If we’d left him with the nawia, he’d have been happy to die.”
Czarn didn’t respond at first. At least not out loud. His reply echoed in the silence between them. Was caught in Rybak’s mangled face. Trapped in the stained fabric. Screaming, loud and clear, from the scar on his paw.
At last the wolf’s lip curled.
“Perhaps you should have let him.”
Ren rubbed Ry?’s belly, and he purred appreciatively.
She remembered that day very well. Whatever the villagers thought, he was the only human she had ever hurt on purpose. And so what? She wasn’t sorry—she couldn’t be sorry. She’d had to do it. She’d been a child, wandering far from her castle on a snowy day. She’d seen the wolf caught in the trap, and when the hunter had burst out of the trees with his rifle, she’d panicked.
She’d been a child. She’d never expected—
Ry? yelped.
Ren snatched back her hand. Her fingers had transformed to claws and scratched him.
“Sorry!” Ren hastily smoothed down his ears. “I’m so sorry—”
Ry? grumbled, licking down the fur on his chest where she’d nicked him.
“You think a little hairball like you could hurt me—”
“We should go back,” interrupted Czarn, still harping on the same topic. “We should not help them.”
“Oh, get a grip,” growled Ry?. “None of us like them. We can kill them if we need to. What we can’t kill is that Dragon.”
“Ry? is right,” said Ren. “It’s the lesser of two evils.”
Czarn glanced at Ren. His blue eyes lingered on her human clothes.
“Czarn,” she said, trying to be reasonable. “Please. I don’t understand. You agreed this was a good idea, and now you’re just—”
“They hurt you!”
The words exploded in a flash of yellow fangs and pink gums.
On the other side of the clearing, the humans had gone still. Only Lukasz looked unperturbed. He was still sitting with Felka, leaning back against a tree stump. Casually he struck a tiny flame and began to smoke again. He watched Ren, eyes slightly narrowed, dark brows low and thoughtful.
The clearing filled, slowly, with the smell of tobacco smoke. Ren did not like it.
“Oh, Czarn,” Ren whispered. She wrapped human arms around his thick neck and pulled him in, burying her face in the soft black fur. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I know this didn’t start right. But we can finish it.”
He relaxed in her arms. She kissed his soft black cheek.
“It’ll be okay,” she murmured. “We’re all going to be okay.”
At that moment, a voice sounded above them. Ren took her face out of his fur.
“Hey,” said Felka. Her eyes swiveled between Ren and the wild animals. She did not seem especially intimidated. “This is yours.”
Felka held out some pale blue fabric, and it took Ren a moment to realize it was the cloak she’d worn to the village.
“It’ll get cold at night,” she said. “You should hang on to it.”
“So we are clear,” said Ren, taking the cloak, “I have slept in this forest before.”
Felka laughed. It was loud and, it suddenly occurred to Ren, probably the prettiest thing about her.
“I wasn’t expecting someone like you to have a sense of humor,” she said.
Ren folded the cloak over her arm and returned the girl’s gaze.
“What do you mean, ‘someone like me’?” growled Ren.
“Well,” said Felka matter-of-factly, “you’re not like us.”
There it was. That little twist—the same twist in the village, seeing that family through their window. Seeing the cat. After all, it wasn’t as if the girl was wrong. If anything, Ren agreed. If anything, she was more like the nawia, or even the rusalki—a little bit human, a little bit magic, a little bit . . . wrong. That strange resemblance to humanity, tempered with all the darkness in the world. That same hypnotic fascination.
The same thirst for vengeance.
“I would do it again, you know,” she said abruptly.
Felka looked confused.
“I would attack him again,” she clarified. “Your one-eyed man. Jakub. Or Rybak. Whatever. But he is not yours, is he? Not really.” Ren put her head to the side, thinking. “But for some reason, still you came for him.”
At that, even Felka’s freckles paled. Her thin mouth opened and closed. “He’s been kind to me,” she said at last. “You’ve never lived with people. You wouldn’t know how rare that is.”
Ren was curious. She waited for the other girl to elaborate, but Felka remained silent. It irritated Ren.
“I don’t care,” Ren said. “Czarn is my best friend, and he was going to kill him.”