his words, and she asked:
“How?”
Jakub began gathering up his papers again. There weren’t many left, and when he’d finished, he began rearranging them in the leather sleeve.
“Fever,” he said. “She was only a few days old, in Szarawoda. My wife died at her birth.”
“What’s Szarawoda?” asked Ren before she could stop herself.
Jakub returned to sit on the fallen log. He put the sleeve of papers between them, and Ren was grateful for the distance.
“It’s a town,” he said. “In the southwest.”
“Of my forest?”
“Of the country,” said Jakub. Then, seeing her expression, he sighed. “Here—”
He took a stick and began to draw in the dirt at their feet. He drew squarish, blob-shaped thing. He drew a big circle on the right side and scraped at it with the stick.
“Your forest is here,” he said.
He drew an X at the bottom of the blob with his stick.
“This is Miasto. That’s the capital.” The stick tapped the north part of the map. “That’s Granica, the northernmost port. Everything above it is water.” He tapped a spot in the southwest. “That’s Szarawoda.”
Ren was silent.
The scratched-out area of her forest was so . . . small. It was barely an eighth of that giant country, and she had never even seen the whole thing. Lukasz had come from Miasto. . . . She stared between the X and her forest, tried to gauge the distance.
She couldn’t. It was beyond comprehension.
“And,” she began, hoping she did not sound as ignorant as she felt, “there are . . . humans out there?”
“Ren,” said Jakub. “There are humans everywhere.”
She didn’t dare look at him.
She suddenly felt small and childlike, as if she had never done anything in her life. How on earth could it be, she wondered, that all this existed? That—
“Miasto,” began Jakub, filling her embarrassed silence, “is the most beautiful of cities. The houses are tall, with pink and green fronts, and statues on pedestals at every corner. Fifty of these houses surround the Miasto square, and every day, white horses pull carriages full of people to stores and ice-cream parlors and shows. In the center of the square is the Miasto cloth hall, where vendors sell everything—from fabric to guns to toys for children. In the southeast corner is the great Basilica of Saint Barbara, with ceilings fifty feet high.”
Ren stared at the map.
In her mind’s eye, she saw a country filled with copies of her own castle, full of the sad, angry villagers. It seemed like a terrible place to her. Were there monsters? What had happened to the animals?
Ren couldn’t tear her eyes away from the map. No wonder Koszmar treated her like some kind of savage. She must have looked like a barbarian to someone who came from a world this big. She must have seemed like a rat in a hole to them, trapped in here for so long.
“Are you all from out there?” she asked.
“I was born in Miasto,” said Jakub. “But I have lived all over the country. I was an Unnaturalist. A scientist studying unusual phenomena. It required that I move around often. Felka is from the village. Koszmar is from God knows where. And Lukasz, as you know, is a Wolf-Lord.”
And yet . . .
And yet he had seen all this. He had been everywhere. Ren loved her forest with all her heart, and she’d have been happy to live in it for the rest of her life. But she was also curious. She had always liked to explore. She had always been a little too fearless.
And now, irrationally, she was jealous of these humans.
Then she asked, “Are the humans happy there?”
Jakub smiled, seemed to think for a long moment, and then said: “Few humans are.”
Ren nodded. They lapsed into silence.
It was a strange experience, sitting here in the dark with him. With the man she had attacked for doing the most human thing possible, hunting an animal. It was strange to hear about his world, so much more vast than her own. Strange to feel jealous of the person she’d tried to kill.
“I was not going to hurt him, you know,” said Jakub suddenly.
At his words, Ren was twelve years old again. Scrambling around in the snow, tearing at the knots of a snare. A black wolf, coated in blood, heaving and whining in the cold.
“You caught him in a snare,” she said, without expression.
“Not to hurt him,” said Jakub. There was a pleading note in his voice. “I only wanted to study him. To learn.”
Ren