Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

Kaleva’s empty wasteland slowly gives way to green: scraggly, wind-battered elms and long tracts of chewed-up grass, trampled under the cloven hooves of the wild racka sheep with their great spiraling horns. The hills bubble toward a black stretch of mountains in the distance, the outline of which I can only see if I squint and hold up my thumb to block the sun. The mountains are a natural border between Régország and the Volkstadt, our western neighbors, who, as Gáspár told me, had a head start on the Patrifaith and are much holier than us.

Gáspár has scarcely spoken to me since we left Kaleva, wind and snow chasing us south. I offer him my killed rabbits only once they’re skinned and bloodless, but he doesn’t answer my attempts at reconciliation with anything but a steely nod. And at night, he stamps away from me, far on the other side of the fire, lying down with his back turned. I huddle under my cloak, seething in my own stupid hurt. I know I shouldn’t be hungering after the warmth of a Woodsman’s embrace, but a part of me wants to rage at him anyway. If I showed him the scars latticed down the back of my thighs, would he accept my reasons for not wanting to return to Keszi? More likely he would flush and stammer at his first sight of a woman’s bare skin. I sleep fitfully, if at all.

One morning, we come upon a cluster of weatherworn stones, rising out of a hilltop like jagged teeth. Lichen-covered, they are washed nearly white with time. In the center of each stone is a hollow circle, big enough for me to put my fist through. Seeing them makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Gáspár circles them on his mount, horse whinnying.

“Are they a pagan creation?” he asks finally, as though he can’t swallow his curiosity any longer. “A site of worship for your gods?”

It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice in days, and it makes my stomach quiver in a funny way, relief twining through with despair. I shake my head, brow furrowed. Inside one of the holes is a strip of sun-bleached fabric that might have once been red, and a smear of something dark that looks like dried blood. One of Virág’s stories bristles in my mind, and I feel Ördög’s threads tightening their grasp on my hand. Whoever bled here was older than the pagans. These stones were arranged by something far more ancient, something as old as the Earth when it was new.

I am so desperate to hear him speak again that a question flutters up in me, embarrassingly earnest. “Would you like to hear the story of how Isten made the world?”

Gáspár’s lips thin. “I think I’ve heard too many of your fairy tales, wolf-girl.”

Now that he’s angry at me I am a wolf-girl again, and I ought to think him only a Woodsman. I should wring his kindnesses out of me like water from my hair. I should forget that he ever fell asleep with his arms around me, and think only of finding my father. But I feel like a dog with its teeth in something, holding fast and hard, knowing it will hurt too much and maybe take my teeth out with it, if I let go.

“Afraid you’ll start to enjoy them?” I ask instead. If I can’t win back his camaraderie, at least I can make him sulk and flush like our earliest days. Anything is preferable to this stone-faced silence.

“No,” he says shortly. “And since you are so eager to die, perhaps we ought to ride faster toward Király Szek. Saint István’s feast is in two days.”

I stand up, brushing dirt from my knees, and try not to let his words ruffle me. Ördög has blessed me with his power, and it only takes a flicker of my will, a phantom pain in my absent pinky, to wield it. Its potential coils inside me, like a serpent under a sun-warmed stone.

“Perhaps I’ll tell you anyway,” I say, clambering back on my mount. “Unless you can think of some way to silence me.”

“Enough,” Gáspár murmurs, a low warning. His fingers are clenched tight around the reins, but he doesn’t give another word of protest.

And so I speak into the green silence, wind scarcely rustling the slender elms.

“Once there was only Isten, alone in the Upper-World, his hair white with seven eternities. He did not think he could survive another one without companionship, because gods get lonely too. In his anguish, he began to weep. His tears washed over the barren land below with such vigor that they became the first ocean, made of salt and water and grief.

“But even when the ocean flowed, Isten was still alone. Yet now, as he surveyed the beautiful thing he had created, he was not angry or heartbroken. He was at peace, and that is the only time when you can make a sacrifice that works. So Isten cut out a piece of his own flesh and let it fall to the earth below. When it landed there, it began to stretch and change, until it became the first men and women of the world, sweet and pliant and peaceful.

“Isten’s new world was beautiful, and only a fool would not want to live there. There was no word for summer, because every day was as warm and bright as the last. There was no word for full because not a single belly had ever ached with hunger. There was no word for happy because no one had ever been anything else.

“Then, one day, a woman went to wash her clothes by the riverside. She knelt on the shore and dipped her dress in the water. But as she did, her hand skimmed against a rock, sharp and slick. The water around her streamed red, and when she lifted her hand into the light, she saw that she was bleeding, even though she had no word for blood. She could not explain to herself or to the villagers what had happened, but Isten had seen it all. He thought: I did not make rocks sharp enough to cut. I did not make human flesh soft enough to bleed.

“Soon enough, the vegetables that the villagers pulled from the earth became black and putrid with rot. The ground beneath their feet had grown hard and white with frost. And when one villager looked at his reflection in the lake, he saw that his face was creased with deep wrinkles. The villagers had to create a word for what they saw, so they called it despair.

“They begged Isten for an answer to their troubles, and so Isten searched. He came down to the Earth and walked upon it like a man. He walked until he heard a rumble beneath his feet, and the rumble was a voice.

“‘Hello, Father,’ the voice said. ‘I believe you are looking for me.’

“Isten looked all around, but he could see nothing. ‘Who are you?’

“‘Look below,’ the voice said.

“So Isten did. He peeled back the layers of the world he had made and found there was another one beneath it that smelled of damp and rot. Flies circled Isten’s head and maggots writhed under his feet. It was too dark to see anything ahead, but the strange voice still echoed around him, as if the blackness itself had a sound.

“‘It’s you,’ Isten said. ‘You are the one who brings decay to plants and flowers. You let frost lay upon the earth. You make my people grow white hair, and make their skin fold with wrinkles. You let them bleed, and you let them feel despair.’

“‘Yes,’ Ördög said. ‘All of these things are true, and I am all of these things.’

“‘How did you do it?’ Isten asked. ‘I did not create a world to rot or bleed.’

“‘But you did create me,’ Ördög said. ‘When you cut out a piece of your flesh to make the world, I was born alongside it. Creation can only exist alongside destruction, peace alongside pain. Wherever there is life, I will also be.’

“Isten thought, He called me Father.

“Isten left Ördög’s kingdom and returned to Earth, only now he called it the Middle-World, because there was another one beneath it. In this way, it became the world we know—a world where growth could easily become rot, where peace could easily become pain. A world that had a word for happiness, because now there was a word for despair. It was not Isten’s world anymore.”

When I finish the story, I feel breathless. Gáspár is staring determinedly at the blank space between his horse’s ears, but his eye darts toward me, and I can see the gleam of reluctant interest.

“Is that all you think of death?” he asks finally. “No wonder you’re so keen to throw yourself into my father’s arms.”

I blink at him, unmoored by his reaction. “What do you mean?”

“This god of yours, Ördög”—he says the word with a wrinkled nose, as if the very shape of it on his lips repulses him—“he doesn’t subject the denizens of his Under-World to hellfire and torment, and every human soul finds its way to him when it dies, no matter how good or evil they were on Earth—in the Middle-World. What’s to stop humans from doing harm, if you don’t fear for the fate of your soul after death?”

On the backs of my thighs, my old scars flare. “I think humans are perfectly capable of punishing each other. What a terribly absurd question to ask, when you’re sitting there with your missing eye. You should know better than anyone that people can be as cruel as any god.”

“It’s not about cruelty.” Gáspár has finally turned to face me. “It’s about power. Without power, all you have is anger and spite. Cruelty comes when you have the strength to turn your anger on someone else.”

For a moment he sounds like the smooth-voiced prince again, armored in his eloquence, so stubbornly certain. I have missed this thread of petulance in him, but I will never admit it.

“Yes, I know that well,” I say. “People turned their anger on me every single day in Keszi.”

Gáspár goes silent again, angling his face away from me. After a moment, he says, “Is that where you got the scar on your eyebrow?”

I didn’t think he’d ever looked at me closely enough to notice. My hand flies up to touch the pink slit of scar tissue, cleaving my left eyebrow in two.

I almost want to ask when he noticed, but I’m afraid it will make him put up his shield again. Instead I say, “Another girl in my village blew fire in my face. Katalin.”

The shame of the confession hardly occurs to me. Gáspár doesn’t purse his lips in pity, and I think about him telling me how he stood between his mother and father as a child, relaying their cruelties and enduring their blows. His jaw unclenches, ever so slightly. “Why did she do that?”

“Because I stole one of the cabbage rolls off her plate. I think. It’s hard to remember.”

Gáspár’s breathing hitches. “And did you often find yourself under threat of fire?”

“You already know that I did,” I say, feeling heat rise in my chest. “Do you think that they drew lots to see who would be used to trick the Woodsmen? There was never a question. Never a word of protest. They all wanted it to be me. How would you like to crawl back into the arms of the people who cast you out to die?”

As soon as I finish, I’m flushed with chagrin. His ax and his cloak and his missing eye that terrified me—they are all a testament to his father’s loathing. Coming back to save the king must hurt as much as being expelled to save Katalin. It’s hard to think that it took me so long to realize that the shape of our wounds is the same.

There is no apology, no rejoinder, but the air changes between us, like sunlight beaming through the tree branches. When I catch Gáspár looking at me, his eye is narrowed and keen, as if he’s trying to follow something that’s moving farther and farther out of sight.

Still, we lapse back into silence, listening to the heavy pants of our horses and the sound of the river as it rushes downstream. I am about to suggest we stop and let our horses drink when a wonderful, familiar smell wafts toward me—the heady scent of boiling meat and the tangy finish of paprika, like a long breath followed by a sharp inhale.

We’ve eaten well in Szarvasvár—black birds and rabbits and one gamy rackasheep—but the smell of gulyás reminds me of feast tables and Virág’s fried bread, the memory more of a comfort than anything else that comes to mind when I think about Keszi. As much as Gáspár mocked me for craving peasant food, he’s stopped his horse to sniff the air too. In the distance, I can glimpse the green roof of a sod house.

Neither of us speaks, but we press on toward the village, dug right out of the riverbed. It’s a winter village, a place where the farmers and herders retire when it’s too cold for tents and the whole plain is pale with frost. Fires are burning in the windows of the houses like lighted eyes, and the smoke that wreathes out of them is curled like a beckoning hand. There are no doorways, just black holes in the sod that remind me of gaping mouths. The roofs are thatched with grass, and a seashell chime rattles in the threshold of the nearest house. The gulyássmell is almost thick enough to taste.

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing, to beg some hospitality,” I say, hopefully hiding my desire with nonchalance.

Gáspár is quiet, considering. “Perhaps you can have your peasant fare after all,” he says, as if he has heard my earlier thoughts.

The wind rattles the seashells as we climb down from our mounts. I wonder how the villagers have managed to get them. Régország is landlocked on all sides, except for the small strip of coastline in Kaleva that clings to the frigid edge of the Half-Sea. Curiosity tugs at me, but the pull of the gulyás smell is stronger.

The interior of the sod house is cramped but tidy, as tidy as any place made out of dirt can be. Wooden shelves are notched into the wall, housing row after row of glass jars full of herbs and brightly colored spices. A table and two chairs are crammed beneath them, and at the very center of the sod house is a hearth with a big boiling pot, and an old woman hunched over it.

“I beg your pardon,” Gáspár says. “We are travelers on our way to Király Szek. Could we trouble you for a meal? As soon as we eat, we’ll be on our way again, and we won’t ask you to show us more kindness than that.”

Anyone would be charmed by such a polite entreaty, and Gáspár is dressed in the Woodsman’s subabesides. The woman turns around slowly, a smile inching across her wizened face.

“Certainly,” she says. “My house is always open to weary travelers, and my gulyás is almost ready. Please, sit.”

The wooden chairs are a welcome relief after days riding on a saddle and nights spent sleeping against the hard, freezing earth. The woman stirs her cauldron, profile cast gold in the warm firelight. She has a sharp little nose and squirrel-bright eyes, which look almost squashed under the mudslide of her brow. She wears her hair long and loose, gray strands skimming the dirt floor.

She doesn’t look much like Virág, except that they are both old enough to be my mother’s grandmother, but the resemblance is enough to fill me with a low, skulking sadness. If all goes to plan, I will never see Virág again. I try to sit up a little straighter in spite of it, and do my best to emulate Gáspár’s deferent tone.

“My name is Évike,” I say. “What’s your name?”

But the old woman doesn’t reply; she just keeps stirring the pot. Frankly, of all the things she could have done to evoke Virág, her ignoring me summons perhaps the greatest guilty nostalgia. The woman doesn’t seem remotely perturbed by my presence, bloodstained wolf cloak and all. Maybe her vision is going, and I look like a vaguely girl-shaped smudge.

“Have you always lived in Szarvasvár?” Gáspár asks. I wonder if he’s thinking about the seashells on the door.

“I have always lived along this riverbed,” the old woman says.

Closer now, the gulyás is even more tempting than before. She ladles two servings into bowls of hammered tin, lumpy with carrots and potatoes and thin strips of meat. The spices have dyed the broth red.

It hasn’t been long since we’ve eaten—two rabbits that I shot near where we found the circle of stones—but I am suddenly ferocious with hunger.

I lift the spoon to my lips. “What is this meat?”

“Mink,” the woman says.

But there are no minks in Szarvasvár. There are no minks anywhere south of Kaleva, now, because soldiers and missionaries from the south hunted them to extinction. Virág has a pair of mittens made of sleek brown mink fur, and I remember rubbing my hands across the surface of them, imagining what it might have been like to live in Régország before the Patrifaith beat down its doors.

I look down at the stew again, and I gag.

Coiled vipers and earthworms are writhing in a horrible knot. The edges of the tin bowl are greasy with mud and pitted with the corpses of fruit flies. Perched carefully on my spoon, a tiny gray toad gives a diminutive croak.

Ice in my veins, I turn to Gáspár. He’s lifting his own spoon to his mouth. I launch myself across the table and knock the spoon out of his hand, tipping both of our bowls onto the ground. The vipers go hissing and skittering across the floor, while the earthworms wriggle blindly in the dirt. The mud laps at the old woman’s skirt like dark water.

“What are you doing?” Gáspár demands.

I grab his chin and tilt his face toward her. “Look.”

The woman is not a woman anymore, or, rather, she never was one at all. Her hair is swamp grass. Her eyes are two smooth white stones. Beneath her dress and her apron, her skin has a sheen of red and hardness that was not there before; her wrinkles are lines that someone has etched into the mud of a dried-up riverbed.

“Come eat, children,” she says, in a voice like the sound of wind rasping through the cattails. “You’re tired. You’re hungry, and there’s plenty to go around.”

Suddenly, I feel very tired indeed. Gáspár slumps back down in his chair, eyelid fluttering under the weight of her enchantment.

My own eyelids are heavy, but through my lashes I can see the not-woman looming over me, hands outstretched. She has fish scales for fingernails that look iridescent in the firelight. Dirt is caulked under those nails, crumbling and black.

Her fingers curl around Gáspár’s throat, and I watch, trancelike, as his veins throb and darken, a poison threading down his neck and under his dolman. His chest heaves, and a blind panic knifes through the haze of her enchantment.

Still woozy, I reach for her, but my limbs are stiff and too heavy. I fall out of the chair, collapsing on my hands and knees in the dirt. Gáspár slumps in his seat, eye shut. The blackness in his veins is pulsing, and I can smell the green rot of blighted wood and it reminds me of Peti dying and I nearly retch. With great effort, I reach for her ankles, sturdy as twin oaks beneath the fringe of her white muslin dress.

Witches don’t bleed, of course. There’s no skin to blister. Ördög’s magic does its work anyway: a chunk of her leg breaks off in my grasp, like the handle of a clay pot. The not-woman releases Gáspár and stares down at the wound, blank pebble eyes narrowing in impossible shock.

She reaches for me, hobbling on the crooked stump of her leg, and then I reach for the other one. Another piece of her comes away in my hand, staining my palms with red dust. She crumples, and as she falls to the ground, her clay fingers close around the hood of my wolf cloak. She smells like pond water gone green and stagnant in the summer heat. Hunks of her crumble over me, a shard of cheek and the nub of her thumb. I grasp her by the wrist and don’t let go, until the roughhewn bits of her are scattered across the dirt floor.

My cloak is dyed crimson with clay-grime. I cough and splutter, pushing myself to my feet, still dizzy with the ebbing of the witch’s spell. Gáspár is slumped and motionless, tarry blackness pulsing in his veins. I drag myself toward him, but then I feel a pull in the opposite direction. I turn. There’s a green vine nosing out of the dirt, and it has laced itself around my ankle.

Fear closes around my heart. For the first time since killing the witch, I look around the house. The roof is not thatched with grass at all. It’s hair. Human hair. The jars on her shelves are teeming with earthworms and red-bellied snakes, tiny toads and plaintively buzzing flies. In one of them I swear I see a pink wedge of tongue, still wriggling.

I force myself forward, nails scraping through the dirt, against the tug of the vine. Its thorns are goring through the leather of my boot. As the weariness sloughs off me, I manage to turn and tear the vine from its root, then scramble toward Gáspár and loop his arm over my shoulder. He feels impossibly heavy—even as I lift him and stagger toward the door, I worry that I’ll collapse before I reach it.

The knife-slit of light ahead is narrowing. At first I think it’s a trick of my hazy mind, but then I feel the dirt under me roiling, rising. The sod walls are shrinking in on us, so tight and close that my lungs fill with the scent of damp soil and I can scarcely breathe. No, not shrinking.

Swallowing.

Strung limp over my back, Gáspár gives me no help. My vision ripples and blurs.

I barrel through the threshold just before the sod roof caves in on us. Through the snarl of weeds and dirt, I hear the wind chimes pealing out our exit—only they’re not seashells but finger bones, all cobwebbed up in black thread alongside a small child’s skull. When the house crumples, the bones ring with their own demise.

All the fires in the other sod houses have gone out. A wind sweeps through, blowing yellow hair off their roofs. I collapse to the ground, Gáspár rolling limp onto his back. His eye is still shut and wind shivers into the hollow of my ear and I want to cry out, the way I did for seven days and seven nights after my mother was taken.

Tamping down the urge to weep, I tug at the collar of Gáspár’s dolman, trying to see how deep the poison has gone. His chest is still rising and falling, only more slowly now, with more beats between each breath. With mounting panic, I loose the gold buttons down the front of his jacket, fingers sweeping through the fur lining. Underneath he wears a chemise of black leather, blood-slicked.

I can’t get it off him without pulling it over his head, so I reach for my knife, instead. I draw a long slit down the front of his shirt, cleaving the leather in two. It opens like black petals over his bare chest. His veins are dark as pitch, cobbling in an inky swell over his heart. My four fingers close into a fist, and I realize with a flood of helpless anguish that my newfound magic will do him no good: all I can do is hurt.

I kneel over him in the dirt, hands shaking, a sob rising in my throat at how I might as well be the same girl I was when I left Keszi, impotent and weak, and then suddenly the blackness starts to recede. The way the witch’s enchantment waned from me slowly, Gáspár’s veins return to green. That cobbled murk over his heart quivers and fades. And when his eyelid flutters open again, I have to steel myself so I don’t start weeping, this time in relief.

Now that the danger has passed, I am suddenly aware of his bare skin under my hands. His chest is bronze and well muscled, with three long bands of scar tissue running along his abdomen. The mark of the creature’s claws, I remember, from what seems like so long ago by the edge of the lake. I stare down at him, blinking, and then I realize Gáspár is watching me stare and I snatch my hand away, feeling weak in the knees for far too many reasons.

He pushes himself up onto his elbows and buttons the dolman closed over his chest, though I can still see snatches of skin. A flash of his hip bone. I swallow.

“I thought you were going to die,” I say, as if making some defense, though I’m not sure for what. My voice is trembling shamefully.

“What happened?” Gáspár asks. Though his face is still ashen, a stubborn pink creeps over the tips of his ears. I feel so glad to see it I almost laugh. “The last thing I remember is the woman—she wasn’t a woman . . .”

He trails off, eye wandering over the mound of hair and dirt behind me. A white finger bone is knuckling out of the soil.

“A witch,” I say. “She was a witch.”

Gáspár shifts onto his knees, brushing dirt from his suba. When his gaze draws back to me, there’s a furrow in his brow. “How did you stop her?”

I hold up my hand, splaying its four fingers, and try to pin a smirk on my face. “Ördög can do more than snuff out flames.”

My attempt at a smirk falls flat, and Gáspár only frowns at me in return. I have spent so much time studying his expressions that I can tell when he’s truly vexed, and when he’s only scowling because he feels like he’s supposed to. When he’s looking at me like I am just a wolf-girl, and when he’s looking at me like he wishes I were only just a wolf-girl. This time, I can see his lips quivering, as if he is trying to decide whether to scold me or to thank me, and which will damn him more.

To spare us both more of his miserable wavering, I say, “I wasn’t going to let you die before you could atone for the sin of saving my life.”

He only makes a noise of reproach, shaking his head. Gáspár rises to his feet, and after a moment, so do I. I can see the ripple of muscle in his chest as he walks, through one of the gaps between the buttons of his dolman, and I press my lips together, grateful that he cannot guess at the indecent things running through my mind. Wishing that I was not thinking such indecent things about a Woodsman at all, and certainly not after we both nearly died. I imagine him berating me for my single-minded vulgarity. I imagine Katalin sneering at my doomed, unrequited desire, her blue eyes mean and laughing. A rabbit might as well lust after a wolf that plans to eat it.

Gáspár climbs back onto his mount, watching me as I straddle my silver mare. His expression is unreadable, but he cannot miss the flush on my cheeks. I have long since given up waiting for his gratitude when he brings his horse close to mine, their flanks nearly touching, and says, “Thank you, Évike.”

I am so surprised to hear my name on his lips that I can’t think of how to reply. The wind unspools over us, howling softly. I give a stiff nod, holding my chin up, and then Gáspár urges his horse forward, toward the river’s edge. I hold the echo of his voice in my mind for a moment, and then follow after him.