HARD MAN to dislike. For one thing, he was certainly too beautiful for a dragon slayer. Alone among the ten, you could almost believe that Anzelm belonged in the vaulted white ballrooms of Miasto and Granica.
He always swept people up in his beauty, in the way his eyes sparkled, in his unfailing good manners, his unerring kindness. While Lukasz gambled with thieves, Anzelm memorized the placement of table cutlery. While Lukasz posed for photographs with increasingly impressive dragon kills, Anzelm perfected the season’s most fashionable polonaise. While Lukasz gave interviews peppered with a charming number of curse words, Anzelm guest lectured for the uniwersytet’s department of medicine.
And although Lukasz didn’t realize it until afterward, Anzelm was also in love.
It happened in Saint Klemens Hospital, where Jarek was getting his arm stitched up after a run-in with a very nasty bannik.
“I’d’ve been fine,” slurred Jarek, who had been given a lot of pain medication. He gestured, dripping blood on the floor. “If ’e ’ad just ’eld shtill—”
Anzelm had procured a suture tray and was trying to teach Lukasz how to stitch a wound.
“Will it shcar?” muttered Jarek.
Anzelm clapped him on his shoulder.
“Only if Lukasz keeps pulling those knots too tight.”
Lukasz rolled his eyes, but he made sure the next suture was loose enough. As Anzelm had taught him, he took care not to let the skin pucker under the thread’s tension. He actually kind of liked suturing. For someone who couldn’t write like Franciszek or draw like Jarek, he was pretty good with his hands.
Thinking of his brother, he wondered where Franciszek was. Either asleep or studying, most likely. Lately, he was researching each new job with an increasing obsessiveness. It was bad enough that he’d delay their jobs for weeks, insisting that he had to wait on a loan of rare books, that he had to study the curve of this particular tooth, that he had not yet finished analyzing the schematics for a given lair—
“Didn’t have schematics for the Faustian,” Lukasz would mutter.
“And now you have a limp,” Fraszko would retort.
Then Anzelm would chime in, across the gilded hotel rooms, the expensive coffee clubs. “Relax, Fraszko,” he’d say, laughing. “We all know this isn’t the dragon that’ll kill us.”
Franciszek’s mouth would get thin. His eyes would cloud and he would look like an ancient warrior chieftain. Not the kind of man who smoked good cigarettes and preferred purchasing journals to buying guns.
Anzelm loved telling stories of the Mountains. Lukasz often wondered how much was memorized and how much was invented. But it was part of his charm.
Anzelm’s favorite story was the story of Lukasz’s birth.
How proud their father must have been, he would say, to lift his tenth son from his crib of golden bones! His father, the Lord of the Moving Mountains, had taken the black-haired boy in his arms and carried him from room to room, through the entire wooden lodge of the Wolf-Lords. In an ancient truce, Kamieńa’s villagers had brought the stone down from the Mountains to build their king’s castle; in exchange, the Wolf-Lords had carried the wood up from the forest to build their city.
Anzelm told them how their father had moved Lukasz’s tiny fingers over the wood carvings that spoke of their history and shown the baby the dragon antlers on the walls. And in the Mountains above, the wolves—for there were still wolves among the cliffs then—peered down from between the purple rocks and saw Hala Smoków, the city of Wolf-Lords, alight with gold and music.
There is another, they had said in the dark hills. A tenth Wolf-Lord is born.
“Lukasz,” said Anzelm presently, “divide the cut in half with each suture. Don’t go end to end. Otherwise it won’t line up.”
“It won’ line up!” slurred Jarek, from the bed.
Lukasz looked guiltily at his rather crooked sutures.
Then Anzelm spoke, as he always did, about how their father took this youngest son—his last son—out to the great wooden verandas of the lodge. There they were swept up in wind and in snow and in starless nights, and he had shown his son the blue slopes of the Mountains and the silver-crested peaks of their world.
Today, Anzelm left out part of the story, but Lukasz had heard it enough times that he knew the words by heart. Not that he remembered them being said by his father. But his brothers had been fathers to him, and Miasto’s paved roads had been his mountain paths.
Outside these Mountains, their father had said, they fear us. Outside