Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

I sleep uneasily, in a thrall of worry, belly quaking. Szabín’s words are looping through my mind, and my teeth are gritted around the shape of Nándor’s name. I’m shivering even under the reindeer pelt, my body contorting itself into a shape that fits Gáspár’s perfectly, a flesh memory of our nights spent in the frozen forest. I glance so often at his sleeping form that I’m disgusted with myself, and I drag my pelt toward the bear, instead. A bear is an enemy I can more easily understand, and fear or loathe accordingly. Even snoring, I can see all its teeth.

A purple dawn lifts off the ice, sunrise steaming behind a haze of clouds and fog. Gáspár turns on his side, eye open, and meets my gaze at last. I feel a twitch of shame, wondering if he saw me moving and thrashing through the night. The memory of our conversation is an insistent hum in the back of my mind, like the soft lap of water against the lakeshore. I push myself up, careful not to rouse the bear, and crouch beside him.

“Seven days,” I whisper. “There’s still time to find the turul, but only if we leave now.”

Gáspár nods and rises, a muscle feathering in his jaw. Wordless, he reaches for his ax, propped up against the woodpile. I have gotten quite good at deciphering his moody silences and I can tell something is caught in him like a burr in a dog’s coat, but I can’t press him for it now. From the small hut’s second room, Tuula and Szabín still haven’t stirred. I raise the hood of my cloak and push open the door, cold stinging my cheeks and nose.

He starts to climb down the rope ladder, and as soon as his feet touch the ice below I follow. I haven’t gotten far before I feel something snatch at my hood from above, and with a choked gasp I nearly slip from the rung. When my hood falls back I only see Szabín staring down at me, her lips pressed angrily, pendant glinting with a sharp and vicious light.

“Let go of me,” I bite out. “Or are we prisoners here?”

Szabín’s grip only tightens. “No Southerner has ever come to Kaleva without hunger in their eyes.”

I want to reply that being from Keszi hardly makes me a Southerner, but Szabín’s meaning is plain: to her, we are all Southerners. I steal a quick glance at Gáspár below, still holding fast to the ladder, and he looks back up at me in bewilderment.

“I’m already quite full of reindeer meat, thanks to Tuula,” I say, and smile as sweetly as I can manage. Szabín’s scowl only deepens. “What’s the use of renouncing your oath, sister, if you treat every pagan you meet with wariness and reproach?”

“You are the only one I’ve ever met,” Szabín says. She has the same muzzled disdain as Gáspár in the earliest days of our journey, when he alternated only between admonishing me for my barbarity and fretting over the state of his soul. “And you’ve done nothing to earn my trust.”

“I’ve done nothing to earn your ire either,” I say. The wind snarls past us with a renewed ferocity, shaking the ladder, and if Gáspár hadn’t been holding it from below I might have fallen. I have the odd, unbidden feeling that if I did fall, he would move to catch me. “It seems ill fitting for someone who shares their bed with a Juvvi to curl their lip at me. Do you take off your pendant before your coupling?”

My words are enough to unbalance her, to make her hold slacken at last. I wrench myself free, leaving a few hairs of my wolf cloak behind in her fingers, and hurry the rest of the way down the ladder. When my boots touch the snow I see that Szabín is still staring at me from above, her eyes narrowed, thin as gashes.

“What did she say to you?” Gáspár asks.

“Morbid Patritian dramatics,” I reply, voice short. Her words have pricked me in an unexpectedly tender place, or perhaps it’s only a deeper and older ember that she blew to life. Szabín is less a foe and more a fool, for believing that a Patritian could ever live in sated, happy peace with a Juvvi. Someone’s blade will swing between them eventually, or their own rages will burn Tuula’s hut to the ground. There is a small part of me that bristles with the knowledge that I am just as much a fool for ever finding comfort in the arms of a Woodsman. I turn up my hood again and face my gaze forward.

In daylight, the lake is as smooth as a polished silver coin, and the reflections of the dark trees are rippled on its surface. They are warped into something smaller and more comprehensible now, a tree I could have climbed as a child back in Keszi.

I step over their reflections as we walk, the ice groaning and creaking under our feet, but nothing breaks. I can’t even see the hole where I fell through, or the lacework of cracks. The ice has stitched itself back together like white silk over a black tear.

When we finish our crossing I could kiss the hard, solid ground in relief, even despite the ceaseless danger of the wood, thrumming as if with its own green-white heartbeat. Wreathed in fog, the forest is unchanged: there are the huge trees, lichen-thick and turned dark with snow melt, the frost glittering on each pine needle like strewn glass.

I remember the certainty I felt only a little over a day ago, some unnamable instinct flaring in my chest as I stared up at the tangle of branches, all knitted together like the weave of a basket, blue sky scarcely bleeding through. I feel none of that same certainty now. There is only Nándor’s name gliding through my mind, and the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days pattering after it like a hunting dog trailing its quarry. I press my palm against the nearest trunk, but if I ever did have some primal witch’s sense, it is gone now.

Despair looses in me. “I don’t know anymore. I thought the turul would be here, but now . . .”

Gáspár’s expression doesn’t shift; it’s as if my words have glanced off him. There is only the same hard look in his eyes, as if he had scarcely expected anything less. I don’t know why that, his disappointment, wounds me worse than anything.

Then, a flicker in his eye. “Do you hear that?”

I pause, balled fist falling to my side. It’s the ground, not the trees, that’s throbbing beneath our feet, and all of a sudden the wind has gone silent. I open my mouth to reply, but the words shrivel in my throat as a giant hand curls around the trunk nearest me, its fingers the precise color and texture of the bark. The hand twists for a moment to find its purchase, and then it wrenches the tree from its roots, flinging it upward into the oblivious gray sky.

The creature standing before me has no eyes, just two misshapen slits in the corrugated bark of its face. Its grizzled beard is made from garlands of pine needles and dead leaves, held together with sticky yellow sap. Its body is as thick as two trees, dovetailed, and its arms and legs are fat with moss and rot. A single bird circles its head, as if looking for a place to nest among the animate foliage.

I am still staring, openmouthed and dumb, when its fingers wrap around my torso and lift me into the air.

Gáspár shouts my name, those three syllables that shocked me so completely the night before, and then I hear the rasp of metal as he draws his ax. The creature turns me over in its hands, letting me slip from its grasp and then catching me again, like a cat with some curious plaything. Every time the ground comes rushing up at me my stomach roils in nauseated protest, but I am too rattled to even scream, much less try to reach for my inscrutable new magic.

I am overwhelmed only by my own desperate stupidity when the creature picks me up by my cloak, threadlike in its giant fingers, and holds me above its open mouth. Its breath reeks of burning flesh and rotted wood and a few tears prick at the corners of my eyes, futile and doomed. Gáspár’s ax clangs furiously against the creature’s wooden leg, and the immediacy of his action shocks me now: there’s no hesitation, not like the way his blade faltered in the tent with Kajetán.

And then, inexplicably, another voice rings out sharp and clear: “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”

The creature pauses, letting me dangle squirming from its fingers. The bark of its face crumples like a furrowed brow. With its free hand it scratches its head, puzzled—looking, for a moment, quite human.

Tuula is a brightly colored speck in the snow. She repeats, “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”

The creature’s eye-slits narrow. When I slip from its grasp, I squeeze my own eyes shut, bracing to hit the ground hard. But the impact is muffled, muted. I open my eyes and find myself draped across Bierdna’s back. The bear twists its head around and sniffs at me, and my breath catches on the words thank you. When have I begun to imagine that it can understand me?

Gáspár freezes halfway in his path toward me, ax held tight, face pale. When he looks me up and down I don’t think I am inventing the concern in his eye, but he stops himself before he reaches my side.

I slide off the bear, still gasping. Tuula looks down her nose at me, arms folded, Szabín at her back. Once I can manage to speak, I can only ask, “What is that?”

“Just one of our pesky, awful wood giants,” Tuula says. “They’re very strong, as you can see, but very stupid. If you tell them a riddle, they’ll be stuck for ages trying to solve it, and stand still until finally they forget what you said in the first place.”

I just stare up at her, miserable and cowed. True to her word, the creature is rooted to the ground, still scratching its wooden head.

“It’s a river, by the way,” Tuula goes on.

“A what?”

“The answer to the riddle.” Her voice hitches. “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves. A river. I suppose you ought to know, since you’re planning on braving the woods alone. I won’t relish saving your insipid life again, wolf-girl.”

I swallow the insult, at least half-deserved, and get to my feet without breaking my stare. Reindeer and crows, wood giants and bears. Tuula has knowledge and magic that make the North look like water in a cupped hand, something that can be held fast and close. If she were to draw a map of Kaleva, it would be marked with paths that circumvent the monsters and moving trees, lines that cleave through danger to safety. Even the women of my village could never dream of moving through the forest with such assurance.

I clench my four-fingered hand, still pale with its untested power. Tuula is watching me with her black hawk’s glare, as if she can even see into the animal part of my mind, can see the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days, or the hunger in my eyes. Szabín was right about one thing—no one would come to such a bitter, brutal place unless they were desperate.

“You know where it is, don’t you?” I say, pushing to my feet. “The turul.”

Tuula’s voice comes back sharp and quick. “The turul is not for you to find.”

The briskness of her reply makes heat bloom in my chest. I stride toward her, even as the bear growls, showing her yellow teeth. “You knew we were here for the turul. All this time and you didn’t say a word.”

“Of course I knew,” Tuula snaps. “You wouldn’t trudge this far north except to make some reckless grab for power. And the Woodsmen all want the same thing. If they’re not trying to stamp out the Juvvi, they’re trying to steal the magic that keeps us safe from them.”

I turn to Gáspár, heart pounding. He hasn’t taken a step closer toward us, but his hand has gone to his ax. Storm clouds are brushing across his face.

“Why bother saving us, then?” I bite out. “Why not leave us to die?”

Tuula’s mouth puckers, like she’s tasted some fruit gone foul. “I told you, wolf-girl. I’m not entirely black-hearted. Woodsmen are human, underneath those ridiculous uniforms and all their fanatically devout loathing. I hoped that in your gratitude I might persuade you to give up this senseless quest.”

Her voice is relentlessly smooth, and it makes an awful helplessness well up inside of me. Gáspár’s words are circling my head like a flock of crows, my father’s coin burning me through the fabric of my cloak.

“You may be content hiding here in the corner of the world,” I say, and this time I look toward Szabín, too, scowling under her hood, “but there are so many people who don’t have the protection of the ice and snow and magic. If the turul is the only thing that can match Nándor’s power, you’re damning them by concealing it.”

“I’m not concealing anything.” Tuula steps toward the bear, resting her hand on the breadth of its huge shoulders. “The turul is not for you to find. And perhaps I made a mistake, not leaving you to freeze. The prince has gotten his poison into you—you might as well swear fealty to their god, too, because your village will not take you back if you deliver the turul right into the hands of the king.”

Rage sweeps through me with such a viciousness that it makes my eyes water. I look at Gáspár, blank-faced, stupidly. I have tried for so long not to think of Virág, not to think of the turul tumbling out of the sky, my arrow in its breast. But I have always known, of course, the truth: that killing the turul will sever me from Keszi for good. I cannot go limping back to Virág with its blood still wet on my hands; she would let the wolves at me this time, and not feel a twitch of guilt.

I open my mouth, but no words rise from my throat. The bear huffs, moisture beading on its black nose. And then Gáspár says, “It’s no use.”

Words rise quickly, furiously. “What?”

“It’s no use prodding her; she won’t reveal the turul.” His voice is hard and flat, and he gives Tuula a flint-eyed stare. “Besides, we’ve lost too much time already. Saint István’s feast is in seven days, and if I linger any longer here, I won’t be able to stop him.”

“You said you couldn’t stop him without the turul.” In turn, my voice sounds as wavering as the wind. “We struck a bargain.”

“I know.”

He says nothing more, and I can only look at him: his sharp, square jaw, his skin like polished bronze. His dark lashes and petulant lips. Only he’s not scowling now: his eye is steady, but almost too bright.

“It’s not my fault,” I manage, thinking of the Woodsmen running through our village, of all the ways that the king would find to punish Keszi. “Your father—”

“I know,” Gáspár says again, in a hushed, plying tone, like he’s trying to coax a rabbit from its burrow and into his trap. “And I swear to you that I will keep my father from having his vengeance on your village, but I have to return to Király Szek now. There’s no more time to waste.”

The tenor of his words makes me feel child-small, my face pink against the blister of the wind. “And what am I to do?”

“Go home,” he says.

For a moment, I let myself imagine it. I think of dragging myself back through the tundra, across the Little Plain, past the villagers with their pitchforks and their burning eyes, the word witch on their tongues. I think of facing down the monsters of Ezer Szem and bursting through the tree line, panting and gasping, and seeing only the other villagers’ empty stares. Katalin will breathe her blue flame at me—but not before tearing her wolf cloak off my back. The boys I’ve coupled with will look away, flushing in shame. Boróka will make her wheedling protests. I can’t even let myself think of Virág. And they will all hate me twice over, for not dying when I was supposed to.

And then, without my willing it, another flood of images comes volleying up. I think of Gáspár’s arms braced around me inside the damp tree hollow, roots holding us in that timeless suspension. His soft, weary voice in my ear, the pine-salt smell of him. Him diving into the ice after me, and putting his own cloak around me even as he froze. My stomach folds with shame. I’d told him how much they all loathed me, how they wanted to leave me to be eaten, even confessed the awful secret of my waning grief: that sometimes I couldn’t remember my mother at all. I sheathed my claws and hid my teeth for him, and now he wants me to go soft and toothless back to Virág with her reed whip, and Katalin with her fire, and all the other villagers with their pitiless gazes.

Anything I can think to say feels abysmally stupid. So I turn away from Gáspár, away from Tuula and Szabín and the infernal bear, and trample through the snow, toward the lake’s pale, unblinking eye.

The way Virág’s story goes, Vilmötten left his home for Kaleva, nothing but his kantelestrapped to his back. He traveled for so long that he found himself no longer in the Middle-World, the mortal world, but in the Under-World, Ördög’s kingdom. All around him he saw the souls of the departed, dead of illness or old age or grievous injury, their skin black and fetid, worms writhing in the sockets of their missing eyes.

No mortal had ever traveled to the Under-World and returned. Vilmötten knew that. But he began to pluck his kanteleand sing, a song so beautiful that it moved Ördög, the god of death himself, to tears.

“You may go,” he told Vilmötten. “But you can never return.”

And so Vilmötten was allowed to enter the Middle-World again. But later, when he fell down and cut his hand on a sharp rock, he saw that the cut was not bleeding. The skin had stitched up again in an instant, tight as a drum. Vilmötten looked at his reflection in a lake of ice and saw that all his wrinkles had been smoothed, the gray on his temple dyed black and new. He was young again, and no wound or fever could harm him. Ördög, the god of death, had given Vilmötten the gift of life.

The story is the origin of the other girls’ healing magic, only they are not quite as immaculate as Vilmötten. Their hair still goes silver and their skin still creases with time, just slower than others’. Slower than mine. And the healing takes something from them: I have seen Boróka’s face grow paler and paler as she worked, sweat pearling on her brow, and afterward she was so tired she slept through two sunrises without waking. It almost seemed like it aged her, the work of her magic eating away at the years of her life.

As I skid across the lake, toward the dark mound of Tuula’s hut in the distance, I stare down at my hand with its missing finger. I remember closing my fist over the fire, watching the flames die beneath my touch, and it occurs to me: if the other wolf-girls can make fire and I can snuff it out, it means that perhaps, where they heal, I can hurt.

I’m too afraid to wonder what it will take from me. I clamber up the snowbank, panting hard. Just past her hut, Tuula’s reindeer move in blurs of silver, like clouds drifting. Their antlers are bone grails, holding cupfuls of sky. They are still nosing the ground absently as I approach, their sleek flanks rising and falling with their breath.

The threads around my wrist go taut. I reach my four-fingered hand toward the nearest reindeer, and I almost hesitate. My intent wavers for a moment, and then snaps back again, like a scale righting itself after the weight is lifted. I splay my fingers against its flank, feeling the soft give of its fur.

Moments whip past me, wind snarling. And then the reindeer rears its head and grunts and bolts away from me, but not before I see the burned mark on its side, a red blister in the shape of my hand.

The rest of the herd startles with it, bucking down the plain. I let them shoulder past me, waiting for the repercussion. Waiting for what I have done to echo, for it to reverberate in my ear like a plucked bow string. Nothing. I wait and wait, and I don’t realize that I’m crying until I feel the tears freezing on my cheeks.

If it were so easy as that, I could’ve had power long ago. If I had known, I would have lopped off my finger in a heartbeat. I would have killed all of Katalin’s blue flames, and I would never have lowed for any of Virág’s lashings. I feel like a guileless child that I had to wait for a Woodsman to teach me what it meant to sacrifice. That I hadn’t understood the stories of my own people until I’d spoken them aloud myself, with Gáspár listening.

My people.Katalin would have snatched the words right from my mouth.

I hear the shuffle of footsteps behind me. Quickly, I wipe the frozen tears off my cheeks and turn. Gáspár is pacing across the plain, wind carding through his dark hair. Something hard and hot rises in my throat.

“What an odd reversal of fortune,” I say, as he halts before me. “A Woodsman chasing a wolf-girl back to Keszi.”

“I’m not chasing you,” Gáspár says. His lip twitches, like he’s trying especially hard to keep from scowling. “You are not a seer. The king would have no use for you anyway.”

The old wound still prickles. “I’m not a seer, but I have power. You’ve seen it.”

“An even odder reversal of fortune.” Gáspár’s eye narrows. “A wolf-girl begging for a Woodsman to take her to Király Szek.”

“I’m not begging you,” I say. With a sudden rush of feckless spite, I add, “Would you like it if I did?”

I only said it to make him flush, and it succeeds. His ear tips turn pink, but his gaze is unflinching. “I suppose it depends on what you were begging for.”

My cheeks fill with an answering warmth. I hadn’t expected his rejoinder, or the way he’s looking at me so intently, without blinking.

“I don’t have to beg,” I say. “You can’t stop me. You said that if you knew your mother was alive, you wouldn’t stop looking for her. My father is alive in Király Szek and Nándor has lit a fire at his feet. What else am I to do?”

A long, rough breath comes out of Gáspár’s mouth, as pale as mist in the cold.

“You’re a fool,” he says baldly. “A bigger fool than a Woodsman who thought he might make a bargain with a wolf-girl, or who thought he might find the turul. Whatever power you have, it’s not enough—it’s not nearly enough. Nándor is a worse threat, it’s true. But there is no safety for a wolf-girl in my father’s city either. I swore once that I would tell you what the king does to the women that he takes.”

My fingers curl into my palm. “And will you?”

“No,” he says. “But I will tell you that when I was a boy, my father had decided that my mother shouldn’t leave the castle. He had a number of chambers set aside for her, and they all had iron bars on the windows. He would only come in at night, and berate her in words she didn’t understand. So I would stand there, speaking Merzani to my mother and Régyar to my father, translating his slurs and her pleading, and pushing myself between them, so his blows would land on me, instead.”

Shock twists through me, and then a torrent of grief. Thinking of him as a little boy almost undoes me, and I open my mouth to reply, but Gáspár speaks first.

“I don’t say that to earn your pity. I am the one who ought to be pitying you, for how little you understand about what you plan to do. My father is a weaker man than Nándor in some ways, but he is hardly less cruel. If he would do such a thing to his wife, only because she was a foreigner, and to his son, only because he dared stand between them, what do you think he will do to you? The wolf-girl who swindled him?”

I shake my head fiercely, as if his words are arrows and I can keep them from hitting their mark. Shivering against the wind, I reach for the coin in my pocket. I have traced its engravings so many times that I have memorized their strokes, even if I don’t understand their meaning. If it is a choice between drowning in the same river that has dragged me down a thousand times or walking into a pit of fire that has never burned me once, I will choose the flames and learn to bear it. But I cannot bear one more moment of Katalin’s fury, or another lick of Virág’s reed whip. Not when my father is somewhere in Király Szek, frothing at the shore like a tide missing the pull of its moon.

“Then perhaps you’ll get to see me bare after all,” I tell him, squeezing out the jest around the lump in my throat. “Does the king pluck his wolf-girls like roosters before he cooks and eats them?”

Gáspár just stares at me, lips parted, his eye filled with all the hazy midday sunlight. His face wavers somewhere between incredulous and furious, and I see the shift, the moment when he chooses his mute fury: he raises his shoulders around his ears, fists clenching at his sides, and stalks away from me without another word.

It is dark again by the time we are saddling our horses, by the time we have shaken Tuula and Szabín. In the Kalevan winter, the daylight hours slip through your hands like water. Overhead, the stars are bright jewels threaded through the quilt of evening sky. My mare’s coat gleams white, her mane like streaks of moonlight. Gáspár’s black mount is almost invisible in the night, and when he leaps on the horse’s back, all wrapped in his suba, he looks almost invisible too.

He doesn’t speak to me as we set off across the tundra. I armor myself in the certainty of my power, that red handprint on the reindeer’s flank, and the memory of my father’s voice, distant as the calling of a crow. They are enough to keep my back straight, my eyes fixed forward and south. But around the reins, my fingers are trembling.