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Liska hesitates before taking off her shawl and hanging it on the rack. The simple act makes her situation feel more tangible somehow—yes, she lives here now, and she hangs her outerwear beside that of a skull-headed monster.
They stare at each other, demon and girl, each startled to have the other for company.
What did I expect? Something befitting an all-powerful demon? No, of course not. I have razed battlefields and summoned storms and created wonders from magic alone, but she wants me to grow cabbages.”
Clever, clever fox, with your inexplicable charms. You are my penance, aren’t you?”
“Fox,” he says steadily. “Demon,” she replies, uneasy.
I end and begin in the Driada, and that is how it will be for eternity. The wood must always have a warden.”
Everything there is ancient; the library comes and goes, the candles light themselves, and there is a skrzat of dubious intentions who lives in the stove. It’s all rather frightening.”
if the world has not prepared a place for you, you must take up a hammer and chisel and carve one out for yourself.”
It is far too late. In a way, her heart has turned into a forest too—the Driada is in her veins now, and she has begun to love it, all its treachery and darkness and monsters.
She wonders if a sculptor feels this way when he chisels stone into statue, knowing it can never return to its previous form.
“My dear, terrible demon,” she whispers into the silence. “You open and close like a door caught in a draft.
