digging painfully into her side, but she barely noticed. She was wondering, the strzygi dangerously far from her mind, how he had lost that tiny notch of eyebrow. Quite unnecessarily, he put a finger to his lips. Ren was already looking at them.
For a moment, they were both silent and so close that she could hear every ragged breath.
Then, when the silence stretched and Ren not only heard every breath but felt it as well, he raised his head to look over the embankment. The rising sun caught the edge of his profile, haloing his hair and cutting him out in black and gold.
Ren’s heart skipped a beat, and she considered it a personal failure.
“What the hell are you doing?” she whispered angrily. More angry at herself than him, but that wasn’t any of his business.
She noticed that the crunching sounds had resumed in the clearing below them.
“Purple uniforms,” he murmured, unhurried. He pulled back from the ledge and slid down beside her. “Those bodies are from the Kamieńa king’s army. They’ve been there for years.”
Ren watched him check his rifle. The light seemed to follow him when he looked back at her. It suited him, she realized. The half-light, the shadow. The flames.
No wonder he hunted dragons, when the fire fit him so well.
Wait. Flames?
“Lukasz!” she whispered.
“It’s fine, they won’t—”
“Lukasz!” she shouted.
The trees began to shudder. The morning mist melted away. Sunlight filtered through the membranes of its unfurled wings, and the pine needles rained down on them.
And the Dragon descended.
Lukasz swore. He pulled the rifle off his shoulder, but Ren shoved him into the tangled roots.
“Quick—” she gasped. “Hide!”
They scrambled into the cover of the tree. The earth smelled sweet and rotten. There was barely enough room for the two of them. Beside her, Lukasz flipped on his back and searched the gnarled underside of the tree, as if expecting the Dragon to tear it aside at any moment. Insects crawled over her fingers and down her neck, and Ren fought the urge to shriek. The whole forest shook with each wingbeat, and Ren didn’t know whether the rushing in her ears was its wings or her heart.
“Go—” she whispered. “Let’s go—”
They wriggled through the tangled tree roots, in the space between the trunk and the forest floor. Ren hoped that they weren’t sharing their hiding place with any nocnica. Up ahead, between the roots, she could make out the green of the forest.
“Oh God,” whispered Lukasz.
Still concealed under the trunk, they had reached the edge of the embankment. Hidden from the Dragon, they were looking down into the clearing below.
The pale shapes of strzygi lurched among the skeletons, hanks of reddish hair catching the glow of the Dragon’s scales. At first, they ignored it. They devoured indiscriminately. Crunching the brittle bones of the long dead. Tearing at mummified flesh. Insatiable. Irredeemable.
“Ren,” said Lukasz, very close to her ear. “Look.”
The earth at the center of the strzygi began to tremble. It shook. The strzygi looked down, finally distracted from their feasting, and then they looked up. They raised inhuman noses to the sky. Oblong eyes rolled.
Ren wondered, in that moment, if something in them—if that small bit that was still human—knew what was coming. Perhaps some of them were not yet lost. Perhaps some small hope still hummed in those twisted veins, still lingered in those darkening hearts. Perhaps that sudden fear, that flash of self-preservation, that universal instinct to survive, was enough.
Enough to make them human, one last time. And maybe—just maybe—in that last moment, they remembered. Maybe they remembered what it had been like, gathering around tables. Building fires against the night. How it had felt: to smile, to sing, to sigh. To love. Perhaps they remembered, in that last moment, what it had been like to be human.
The silence filled with flames.
Gold lit up the dawn. A comet of fire shot from the Dragon’s black jaws, caught the tops of the trees. Flames raced down, blackening trunks. Blazing yellow devoured the killing field. It burned away the purple. It charred away the corpses. It lit, like fiery brands, the dozens of strzygi screaming, twisting, melting into oblivion.
One last screaming heartbeat of humanity.
Lukasz grabbed her arm.
“We need to go back—”
“We need to kill it,” she snapped. “That was the deal—”
Lukasz shook his head.
“I don’t have my sword,” he said. Ren couldn’t quite read his expression. “You can’t kill a dragon without a blood-coated blade. It poisons it. We’re better off watching, figuring out what we’re dealing