After a storm, Jagna and Jarek find a strange feather at their doorstep and follow its trail into the old Weles Forest, where a hidden voice seems to know their names.
For as long as anyone in Strzygonka could remember, the Weles Forest had pressed against the village like a dark green wall. In summer its shadows stayed cool and damp when the fields glowed in the sun, and on some days the mist crept between the trunks so quietly that it seemed to be listening. The grown-ups avoided it whenever they could. Jagna and Jarek did not.
To them, the forest was not only old and strange, but full of paths waiting to be found. They knew the places where roots rose like crooked fingers, where foxgloves leaned over the moss, and where the wind made the leaves whisper in a voice that almost sounded human. Still, even they had never seen anything like the feather lying on the doorstep after Sunday’s storm.
It was small and bright, flashing blue and green whenever the light touched it. Jagna crouched and held out one finger. The tip of the feather tingled, as if it were warm from a living wing. Jarek leaned closer, his eyebrows pulling together.
“Not a sparrow,” he said at once.
Their grandmother had once spoken, half in a whisper and half as a warning, about a kingfisher that appeared only when the forest was unsettled. Jagna lifted the feather and tucked it into her belt.
“We should follow it,” she said.
They packed bread and butter into their rucksacks and slipped past the last cottages, where the road gave way to trees. The deeper they went, the more the forest seemed to change around them. The birdsong thinned, then rose again in sharp, uneasy bursts. The mud held clear tracks beside the path: small prints, too narrow for a fox, with the ends marked like claws.
Jarek swallowed. “This is it,” he breathed.
Then the mist came.
It rolled out from behind the oldest oak, thick and white as milk, and the air turned suddenly cold. In its center, something shimmered blue and green, turning once, slowly, as if it were watching them back. Jagna reached for Jarek’s hand. Above their heads, branches rustled though there was no wind at all.
And then a voice spoke from the mist, deep and clear:
“Why have you come into the forest, children of men?”