faded, lips going white, eyes filming over. Even the darkness seemed to drain from her hair.
She was dead.
Someone touched her shoulder, and Ren whipped around, fangs bared.
“Hey—” Lukasz jumped back. Her hair, wild and sweaty, fell in her eyes. “It’s okay. It’s a trick. We’ll be all right—”
A roar split the forest. It blasted across the trees and blew out the flames. The horses reeled.
Probably instinctively, Lukasz grabbed her shoulder and dragged her in. For a moment they were close, so close that Ren could see the tiniest nick of a scar on the underside of his jaw, and then he looked up and away from her.
“What the hell is that?” he shouted.
The shout reverberated in his chest.
The earth shook. The trees trembled, branches raining down on them. Another jarring tremor. The horses reeled again. A third tremor.
Are those—?
“Those are footsteps!” bellowed Czarn.
“Is it a giant?” stammered Koszmar. He spun around, brandishing his saber.
“I AM NO GIANT,” boomed a voice far above them.
Lukasz didn’t let Ren go, and she was glad. She wrapped her fingers in the collar of his shirt, stared up at the sky overhead. Her eyes raked the trees. She was so focused on the world overhead that she never noticed that the bodies at their feet had disappeared.
The booming voice continued, and the forest shook once.
“I AM A GOD.”
22
NOW THAT THE VOICE WAS joined by a body, Lukasz realized that the giant—or the god, or whatever it was—was a bear. It stood as tall as the trees as it stepped toward them, each of its claws the length of Król’s body.
Ren’s hand tightened and she pulled herself closer to him. It irritated him how easily she distracted him, how her tangled hair warmed his skin wherever it touched, how every time she was there, he wasn’t thinking, and then she whispered to him, “Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“Didn’t realize I was allowed to,” he muttered back. “Isn’t it your forest?”
Ren released him, jostling his wounded shoulder as she let go. It sent a stab of pain down his arm.
Jakub’s and Koszmar’s horses kept backing up into one another. Ry? was hissing. Czarn was barking. But Lukasz wasn’t panicking. He was still focused on where her hand had landed on his shoulder to push him away, and that was exactly the kind of thinking that was about to get him killed.
“WHO DARES DISTURB MY WOOD,” boomed the bear. With each word, its eyes blazed more furiously.
Felka was brandishing one of Koszmar’s revolvers. Lukasz had a feeling that of all of them, she was the only one who wasn’t scared. Well, he wasn’t scared either, but that was because he was being stupid. Felka was actually being brave.
“I am the queen of these woods!” Ren shouted, almost deafening him.
Where her touch distracted him, that shout always brought him back. It usually meant someone—he—was risking evisceration.
“Ren.” He grabbed her arm, but she wrenched away. “What are you—?”
Ren ignored him.
“I was raised on the courage of lynxes and the wits of the wolves,” she screamed. “I have faced the monsters of hell and I am not afraid of you!”
Lukasz might not have been the toothiest psotnik in the rafters, but even he knew that threatening this thing—whatever it was—was not a good idea. And he wasn’t sure what he expected to come next, but it certainly wasn’t . . .
The bear guffawed.
. . . laughter?
The trees shook and birds scattered. Then somewhere, someone snapped their fingers.
And all of a sudden, the bear began to shrink. Its shoulders narrowed and its snout shortened and then it was slender instead of heavy, winnowing down by the second. A moment later, the creature—for there was no way it could possibly be a bear—disappeared into the trees.
Lukasz could hear Ren breathing hard.
“Why did you yell at it?” he exploded. “Ren, it said it was a bloody god, for Christ’s sake—”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” retorted Ren. “Did you want to hit it with a shovel?”
“Come on, you two—” started Koszmar.
The trees rustled, and a tiny man emerged from the bushes. Reflexively, Lukasz dragged back on Król’s reins.
Not a man. Whatever it was, it was barely waist high and nearly covered in thick brown hair. It had a long gray-brown beard that trailed on the ground and a bright blue cap pulled low over a pair of enormous, fuzzy ears. An uncomfortably big club trailed from one furry hand.
“What’s the matter?” growled the little creature.
As he shuffled toward them, his beard swept up a generous quantity