Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

The afternoon light wends its way across the sky, the sun pale and cloud-wreathed. The Élet River foams beside us, carrying water all the way from the Half-Sea, through Kaleva, and past our southern border with Merzan. We have seen more winter villages along the riverbed, their sod houses like rock outcroppings, small windows orange with firelight, but we have taken care to avoid them, diverting our path through the scraggly brush instead. Gáspár has lapsed back into silence. I don’t know what has rattled him more: that the witch nearly killed him, or that I saved his life.

Our horses’ footsteps are hushed in the soft, damp soil. There is only the low churning of the river, oddly companionable as it threads through the slopes and valleys of Szarvasvár. In the aftermath of our encounter with the witch, a giddy relief has cracked open inside me, muffling many of my previous fears. I keep thinking about the way her body came apart in my hand, hunks of red clay and dust, still painted into the creases of my palm. Having spent so long being afraid, sublimating myself to the magic of the other wolf-girls, this sudden fearlessness is like a song that begs for singing, the words and the melody bubbling up in me boldly, loudly.

I let my muscles unclench from the back of my mare, belly gnawing with hunger. When I suggest to Gáspár that we stop so I can hunt, he gives me a morose stare.

“You can’t possibly have an appetite after that,” he says.

I consider telling him that he sounds as waspish as Virág, since the comparison always makes him scowl, but thinking of her or anyone in Keszi makes my throat tighten, all that bold certainty curdling like sour milk. “If I’m to die Király Szek, as you’re so certain I will, I would like to die with a full stomach.”

His face darkens. He has never appreciated my black humor, but it seems to rankle him differently now, when I speak with a flippant smile about the possibility of my death. Now it doesn’t make him flush with anger, only go thin-mouthed and silent.

“We’ll have to get a bit further down the river first,” he says finally, voice curt, “if we’re to arrive in time for Saint István’s feast.”

I bite my tongue on a reply. Though I’ve mentioned it in jest, I have not truly allowed myself to think of what awaits me when we reach the city; I have only held on fiercely to my coin and to the conviction that I will be able to find my father, and of course protect myself with my magic. If I let my mind wander long enough to consider so many grisly possibilities, fear will wither me up like a wildflower that has been cut and I will walk into one of the sod houses and wait for the soil to close over my head.

“We ought to stop for water at least,” I tell him. “You look woozy.”

He does scowl at that, but he doesn’t argue. We bring our horses to a halt and leap down, boots soundless in the wet soil. I lead my silver mare toward the water to drink while Gáspár kneels at the riverbed. It’s true enough that I wanted to stop, but I wasn’t lying about Gáspár’s appearance: though hours have passed since we left the witch’s house, his face looks particularly pale, and there is a fold of worry between his brows that makes my stomach twist with a mirrored concern. It seems almost impossible to remember that I had been so terrified of him once, that I had wished him dead. He removes his gloves and dips his cupped hands into the water, shoulders bowing. In the early days of our journey I would have considered how easy it would be to put a knife between his shoulder blades while his back was turned. Now I am looking only at the way that water clings to his lips, almost iridescent in the late-afternoon light, delicate as drops of dew.

I bend beside him and lift a handful of water to my own mouth. I think of my trysts by a different riverside, the one near Keszi. Mostly quick and shameful, my knees in the dirt so our eyes would never meet, sometimes brusque enough that it bloodied the insides of my thighs. I imagined that when the same boys took Katalin to the riverside, they had her like an oyster strokes out its pearl, delicate and slow, and when they finished, they helped her brush the dirt from her cloak and untangle the dead leaves from her hair. Gáspár wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and squints through the light, watching me. It is frighteningly easy to envision him on his back in the dirt: he would be as fumbling and gentle as a fawn, I think, and afterward anxious to conceal any bruises he had left.

Of course, he would sooner curl his lip and bristle at a wolf-girl’s touch. Since leaving Kaleva behind, there’s no need to anchor each other against the cold, and if he’d felt my hands run over his bare chest, he would have leapt away from me with a start.

The question rises in me anyway. “Are Woodsmen forbidden to wed?”

Gáspár’s shoulders lift, and I hear him draw in a breath. “Yes. It’s a holy order—none of the men are permitted to take wives, or to father children.” He hesitates, a breeze feathering his black curls over his forehead. “Why?”

“Because I know you Patritians have your silly laws,” I say, almost regretting it even as I do. “Laws that forbid you from coupling outside of your marriage bed.”

I expect Gáspár to make a noise of reproach and stand, flicking my question off his back like a horse ridding itself of a fly. Instead he blushes profoundly, all the way from forehead to chin, but he doesn’t look away from me.

“Of all our laws, that one is perhaps the most frequently violated,” he says. “Most of the Woodsmen are boys of eight or nine when they first make their vows. They don’t know what they’re promising when they make them. I suppose it’s easier that way, never knowing what you have to live without.”

Even I am flushing by the time he finishes, but I don’t want to shrink back and give up what ground I’ve gained. Gáspár is still looking at me, a remarkable feat of cultivated tolerance. A fortnight ago he would have skulked off into the woods or threatened to gag me.

“So I ought not pity you too much,” I say, wiping my damp hands on my cloak. “Since you’ve never known the touch of a woman, I suppose you only dream of gold and of glory and of one day wearing your father’s crown. What else is there for men to desire?”

Gáspár’s lips quiver. For a moment I think he will scold me after all. But he only says, “I was made a Woodsman when I was twenty. I had plenty of time to consider what I would be living without.”

I blink at him, unable to summon words. I suppose I could have guessed, from the clumsy way he wields his ax, that he was bereft of the typical Woodsman training, but I hadn’t thought to calculate exactly how long he’s worn the cloak. Five years only, far less than most of his fellow soldiers, and scarcely long enough to scrub the impieties of manhood off him. Knowing this, and thinking of the nights we spent pressed together on the ice, makes my heart leap into my throat. Perhaps I shouldn’t have considered him so prudishly detached from the same desires that have plagued me these past weeks, that have dogged me both sleeping and waking.

I am silent for so long that finally Gáspár rises, stalking back toward his horse. The amber light of the waning sun pools on his chin and along the bridge of his nose, making him look like something engraved in gold, though far younger than his father’s profile on my minted coin. My cold brush with death had brought me to the dizzy, half-conscious revelation that he was beautiful. Looking at him again now, backlit by fire instead of ice, I come to the same epiphany, my stomach twisting in defiance of my brain.

Slowly, I rise to my feet and follow him. The dark is quickly chasing the light from the sky, like a wolf after a white lamb. The teeth of dusk are grinning up over the clouds and snarling jaggedly around the sun, and in the patches of shadow the river looks like something to be afraid of, cold and depthless. I look back at Gáspár, his face still suffused in sunlight, as if the shadows can’t touch him at all.

A languid, mosquito-flecked evening falls over us, and the Élet River begins to weave through one of Régország’s rare forests. We follow its labyrinthine path, darting like a silver blade between copses of dark oaks and dense, raveling thickets. Animals with yellow eyes blink at us from their tree holes, and red-tipped birds cast winged shadows onto our path.

This forest is unlike Ezer Szem—it is full of only mortal, comprehensible dangers like lurking wolves and steep, hidden ravines. The absence of obvious peril forces my mind to wander onto other things: the hazy shape of the capital, still distant and unreal, and Nándor, whose face is little more than a pale smudge, like a print on a windowpane, and of course my father’s coin, somehow warm enough that I can feel it suffusing heat through my cloak.

Gáspár steals frequent glances at me, tight and nervous, as if he’s afraid I’ll vanish when his head is turned.

“It’s not too late, wolf-girl,” he says. There’s no malice in the epithet, but not for lack of trying—his brow is furrowed with the effort of barbing his words. “We’re two days from Király Szek. You can still go back to your village.”

If I am a wolf-girl again, then he is a Woodsman, though there is more misery than ire in my voice when I speak. “I’ve already told you there’s nothing for me there. I can count the rest of my years there in lashings, Woodsman, and loveless, bloody couplings by the riverside. You must truly loathe me, to want to damn me to such a cold life.”

I say the last bit with more cruelty than I thought I could muster, and just because I want him to flush. He does, and then abruptly his face hardens.

“You are being unrepentantly stupid,” he says. “You might return to Keszi shameful and cowed, but with your heart still beating in your chest.Whatever magic you do have, it doesn’t matter. Király Szek is no place for a wolf-girl who values her life as you claim to. Your mother and all the other women my father brought had magic, and none of them survived the capital either.”

“And what about you?” I demand, blood pulsing thickly now, almost bewildered by my own sudden fury. “If Nándor has as much power as you say, you are no less stupid than I am for thinking you can survive him. You ought to flee east and find some obliging Rodinyan lord with a pretty daughter you can wed, and then he can raise his armies against Nándor. You would be safe there.”

Gáspár gives a laugh, humorless and short. “Because, unlike you, I care for others besides myself. Your people, pagan and Yehuli both, would be damned in the meantime. And I would leave my father to die in my absence like a coward.”

“Maybe you should care for yourself a bit more, then! Your father has earned none of your unbending loyalty,” I say sharply. “You are a wiser and gentler and more courageous son than he deserves.”

We both fall silent then, wind scuttling through the branches. My face heats with the feeling that I have confessed something I ought not have confessed, not when we are robed in a hundred years of boiling hatreds and both staring down the end of his brother’s blade. Gáspár draws in a breath, and I brace myself for his response, but he only lets it out again, wordless.

“If I were you, I would leave him to die,” I say, just to fill the unbearable silence, though even as I do, my chest tightens. Virág’s face, Boróka’s face, even Katalin’s face float up at me. If I succeed in finding my father, it means I will never see them again.

“I know,” Gáspár says, quietly.

And then neither of us can bear to say any more. Gray-washed evening light is falling through the tree cover, the path before us quilted with planks of sun and shadow. My vision is glazing over the endless thatch of trunks and coils of bramble when I see something move behind the trees. A flash of white skin among the evergreen leaves—something small and mortal-looking.

I glance at Gáspár, his eye flashing. In our shared second of silent indecision, a cry rings out from the brush. It is a human cry, and that makes our choice for us. I dig my heels into the horse’s flank, and my mare bolts through the tangled bramble. The pounding of hooves on the ground tells me that Gáspár is close behind.

The chase ends as quickly as it started. The figure has stopped inside a copse of willow trees, lithe branches swaying in the scant breeze, their fronds gossamer as a widow’s mourning veil. I jerk the reins and my horse skids to a halt.

There is nothing inhuman about her, I realize with a long breath of relief. No red-clay skin or unseeing white eyes. In fact, it’s very apparent how human she is, because she wears no clothes at all. A curtain of dark hair falls over her breasts, its color stark against her ivory skin. The soles of her feet are black with dirt.

I only notice her eyes as I slide off my horse. They are bluer than any eyes I have ever seen, bluer than Katalin’s, which inspired one of the village boys to compose a keening ballad in their honor. As children Boróka and I had cried ourselves laughing about that preening youth, even as we both tacitly wished he would sing about our eyes.

These eyes, though—there would be no songs written about their beauty, only their haunting pull. They are spangled bright with tears, even though her lips are a pale unfeeling line. Bewildered, I try to marry the anguish in her gaze with the pitiless cut of her mouth, like knitting together the hides of two different animals. Gáspár’s boot steps fall on the ground behind me.

“What’s happened, miss?” he asks, reaching out one gloved hand to bridge the space between us and the girl. “Why are you in the woods alone?” He leaves unsaid the question of where her clothes are, but I can tell by the pinking of his cheeks that he has not managed to entirely avert his eye.

The girl lifts her head, almost shyly, settling her bright-blue eyes upon me. For a moment I’m stunned in the path of her gaze, like a deer catching a hunter’s downwind scent, even as my heart clangs in my chest. She turns to Gáspár, and her stare roots him there too.

Then she speaks. It’s not a language I recognize; it’s not even that old Old Régyar. I don’t think it’s a language made for human ears. It sounds like leaves rustling in the wind, or the ice of Lake Taivas fracturing beneath my feet. Words spill out of her mouth as her lambent blue eyes water, and I realize that we were both terribly wrong—she isn’t human either.

Her colorless lips curl into something that resembles a smile.

Trembling, I reach for my knife, but my fingers won’t move the way I want them to. My gaze is tethered to her, and I can’t pull it away. She speaks again, the crackle of flames in a dying hearth, and I hear Gáspár choke something out. It sounds like my name, though I can’t be sure.

She moves toward me in a flash of white, pale lips parting. Inside her mouth is red and berry-bright. I don’t notice her teeth, rows and rows of them, slender and sharp as needles, until they are on my throat.

I can only manage a muffled gasp of pain as her teeth glide through my skin, right above my collarbone. My vision goes starry, then white. She releases me, jaw unlatched, a flap of my skin hanging over her bottom lip. Snakelike, she swallows it whole, with a gory slurping sound.

There’s a slow trickle of blood pooling in the hollow of my throat. Still frozen, my caged heart throbbing its panicked beat, I watch her lean forward again, mouth opening, her lips jeweled with my blood.

And then she crumples. Her body ripples, all her willowy limbs going limp. She tips to the ground, Gáspár’s blade in her back, and once she hits the dirt her body fissures open, a spew of ruby-gilded rot and droning black flies. They crawl all over the mangle of her face, split down the middle into neatly mirrored halves, and eat away at the flesh still clinging to the vault of her rib cage. Sensation returns to me slowly, with one staggered breath and then another, and all I can do is watch the flies devour her.

Gáspár lifts his ax, the edge of it slick with blood and rot. “Are you all right?”

I touch the wound on my throat. There’s a muted jolt of pain as I do, something fuzzy and far-removed. I nod, still mostly numb. “Was she . . .”

“A monster,” he says. “Just like the witch in the sod house.”

Virág has told stories of girl-shaped creatures that move behind the tree line, shadowless, their feet leaving no prints upon the earth. Their targets are guileless hunters and unfortunate woodcutters who roam the forest at dusk, alone. I can only guess that her power was not enough to hold both of us at once. I almost want to laugh, manic with relief, and then, abruptly, with chagrin: I should not have believed that old magic was stamped out everywhere but Keszi.

“Your forests are just as dangerous as mine.”

He snorts in acknowledgment.

I draw in another breath and let it out, shakily. Gáspár stares at me, brow furrowed with concern, eye darting from my face to the small wound on my throat. I watch something red drip from the corner of his mouth.

“You’re bleeding,” I say.

He lifts a gloved hand to his lips, and his fingers come away damp. Frowning, he looks back at me. “So are you.”

“I know,” I say, touching my neck wound. “It’s nothing.”

“No,” he says. “Your mouth.”

I wipe my lips with the back of my hand, staining my skin. There is something gathering under my tongue, and I let it dribble out, onto my chin. It’s as dark and glossy red as boiled cherries, with a sweet-sharp taste.

“Juice,” I say, in a voice that sounds nothing like my own.

Gáspár’s lips and chin are smeared with it too. I feel a coiling heat in my belly, unexpected and strange. The edges of my vision are still blinkering as I take a step toward him, fingers clenched.

He stares down at me, gaze wavering. I like seeing the puzzlement on his regal prince’s face, his flushing indecision. “Let me look.”

Then he reaches toward me and sweeps the hair from my neck, leaning closer to examine the wound. The pain of it has ebbed entirely. I can only feel the gentle pressure of his fingers against my throat and my jawbone.

“It’s nothing,” I say again, and this time my voice is little more than a whisper. “I can do worse to myself.”

As if to prove the point, I hold up my left hand, looking odd and skewed with only four fingers. Gáspár removes his hand, letting my hair fall back against my throat.

“You’re worse than any monster, it’s true,” he says. He gives a soft laugh, but his eye is solemn, humorless.

Ordinarily I might have chafed at his words. Now I only feel a small quiver go through my chest, a heady pulse of thrill twined with fear, the way the air grows thick and close before a storm. “And why is that?”

“You have the uncommon ability to make me doubt what I once thought was certain,” he says. “I’ve spent the last fortnight fearing you would destroy me. You may still.”

I laugh then, too, a sound without an echo. “I think you are forgetting yourself. You’re a Woodsman and a prince, and I’m a trifling wolf-girl. All my life I’ve been terrified I’d wake to see you at my door.”

Gáspár swallows. I see his throat bobbing, skin streaked with that red juice. He lets his ax slide from his grasp, thudding softly to the ground. Then he raises his hand and tugs at the clasp of his suba, letting it pool around his feet.

I stare at him then, unarmed and uncloaked, though still with that stubborn set to his jaw. I remember looking at him down beside the lake outside Ezer Szem, when we were both panting and slick with monster blood, hatred burning a hole in my belly. The memory cleaves open without my willing it, and another flowers from the black space: him holding me in the hollowed tree, his gentle breath in my ear. The nights on the ice, anchored in the warmth of his body. Him wrapping my wound with such vexed tenderness, like he couldn’t believe the stirring of his own hands.

I step closer to him, toeing the abyss. I could slit his throat; there’s no blade or mantle to stop me. Maybe they’d throw a feast in my honor if I came back to Keszi with a Woodsman’s head.

My hand curls around the hilt of my knife. “Would you let me destroy you, then?”

“It would be just as well,” Gáspár says miserably. “I should be struck dead, for wanting you the way I do.”

His words brush something inside of me, like flint touching tinder. That unnamable heat, coiling and strange, hardens into a feeling I can name: want. All my lewd imaginings come roaring up at me, those guilty moments of wondering how he would look pinned between my thighs. Gáspár’s gaze doesn’t lift from me, his black eye burning with perverse agony.

I let go of the knife and clasp my hands on either side of his face, knuckles white. And then I bring my lips to his.

Even still, I half expect him to lurch away from me. I feel the moment of his shock, the shiver of hesitation, and then he answers my kiss with such ferocity that I’m the one shaken. I taste the juice in his mouth, again sweet and sharp at once, and when a drop runs down his chin I catch it, smirking when he quivers under the sweep of my tongue.

Gáspár raises his hands from his side and circles them around my waist, pulling me flush against him. My body remembers the shape of his, from so many nights curled together on the ice, and it responds with fevered instinct, pushing him until he stumbles back against the trunk of the closest willow tree.

I break the kiss only to catch my breath, hands still clutching at his face. He looks particularly beautiful like this: newly kissed, his lips swollen and his cheeks flushed, Régország’s true-born prince profaned under my touch. I let my fingers skate across his cheekbone, hesitantly, until my thumb brushes the leather patch that covers his missing left eye.

“I want to see,” I whisper.

“No,” he says, face hardening. But he doesn’t jerk back or push away my hand.

Light as a moth’s wing, I lift the patch from his eye and slide it back over his head. A web of scar tissue spreads over the skin below his empty eye socket. But there’s no horror, aside from the stomach-drop moment of searching for something and finding it isn’t there. It’s nothing like seeing the ravaged skin of his wrist, or the way I used to feel, sick and uneasy, when I wondered what lurked beneath the patch. Gáspár loosens his grip on my waist, lifting his arm so he can cover the hole with the heel of his hand. It’s quick as a reflex, like the action has been ground into him.

I move his arm away. Then I kiss him, right on the place where his eye should be.

“Stop it,” he says, body tensing around mine.

“You’ll have to find some other way to occupy my mouth then,” I say, smiling as lasciviously as I can, and still tasting red juice between my teeth. My vision has funneled to just his face and body, the forest shuddering away in my periphery.

Gáspár slides his hands around my neck, under my hair, careful not to brush over my weeping bite. He presses his mouth to mine again, our teeth knocking together as my lips part, and his tongue slipping between them.

I grasp the back of his head, and his mouth lifts from mine for a moment, to trail across my jawline, his stubble prickling my chin. I make a small, clipped noise of protest as his lips trace the faded scar on my throat, so gently it’s almost like an apology. Briefly I remember him pulling Peti off me, his voice cold and furious, the swing of his ax, and then that shudders away too. I can only feel his lips on my throat, and my stammered protest turns to a moan.

His certainty shocks and thrills me, especially as he parts my thighs with his knee. I run my hand along the hem of his dolman, fingers tracing over the coiled lines of the scar on his abdomen. Under my hands his muscles flex, hips rolling, and then he tenses again, like he’s embarrassed of his own eagerness. When I shift I feel him more urgently against me, and I’m overcome with wanting more.

It’s nothing like my awkward fumbling with village boys that left my knees raw and my lips bruised. All his desire is knitted through with tenderness, and for a moment I wonder if he did manage to have much practice, before his father cut out his eye and put the Woodsman cloak on his back.

“Am I the first woman you’ve touched, pious Woodsman?” I ask, more curious than mocking, my fingers working against the waistband of his trousers.

He doesn’t reply, but his face darkens, and then he kisses me again, both our mouths sweet with red juice. All this time I’d wondered if his holy order had stripped from him the lusts and passions of manhood, and now I can feel the proof of his desire stiff between my thighs. I draw his hand up over my breasts and he groans, so visceral and unbidden that it makes my own desire throb in response, guiding his hand under my tunic, over my bare, prickling skin.

And then, suddenly, he stops.

I hardly have time to react before he pushes me away. I stumble backward, his name hanging off my stupid, gaping lips, while Gáspár puts his hand over his mouth, shoulders rising and falling in heated silence.

Just like that, the fog lifts. My vision swells and I can see the grid of trees behind him, the lacy veil of willow branches and their faint susurration. Moonlight beams down through the canopy, washing the whole clearing cold and white. The edges of everything are sharp again, and my blood is ice.

“It was an illusion.” Gáspár’s hand drops from his mouth, revealing the stain of juice on his chin, drying dark in the cool moonlight. “Some enchantment of that creature.”

My mind tries to close around the possibility, memories fluttering like the wind among dead leaves. I remember my fear turning to want as quickly as the sweet juice pooled in my mouth, like a sickly poison that fevered my blood. Perhaps it was the echo of the creature’s enchantment, lingering after her death like some scent on the air, before the breeze carried it away. My gaze travels to where her body had been. There’s nothing left but a desiccated jawbone, porous with accelerated time.

But it had only loosened me, like good wine. My brain and body had been my own, my recklessly roaming hands and the traitorous pulling between my thighs. Senseless and shameful, but I can’t shake the ebbing of my desire even now, the juice still stinging my lips.

“Do you think some dead creature has the power to move your mouth and tongue?” I ask, choking on a laugh. “Perhaps her poison put the thought in your mind, but you were hardly some limp little puppet. In fact, limp might be the very last word I’d use—”

“Quiet,” he snarls, his face as red as I’ve ever seen it, eye narrowed and coal black. He fishes his patch off the ground and fixes it around his head again. “If you speak of this to anyone, they’ll only call you mad.”

The ice-edged cruelty to his words makes my breath catch. I watch as he pins his suba back on and picks up his ax. With his jaw clenched and his eye angled away from me, he looks every inch a Woodsman again, the same dark shape that once appeared only in my most terrible dreams, and certainly never in my lustful imaginings.

“And how does this add to the tally of your sins?” My voice is shaking, tunic still slung low across my collarbone, baring one of my breasts. I pull it up again, flushing, as the sting of his rejection begins to settle. “When you bow at the feet of the Érsek, will you ask Godfather Life to forgive you for kissing a wolf-girl? What about all those nights you spent holding her against the cold? There was no dead creature to move your limbs then.”

His fingers curl around the handle of his ax. For a moment I think he will raise it against me, even after all of this, the miles we’ve put behind us, our frigid days in Kaleva, after he blackened his soul to save my life. But Gáspár only looks at the ground and then shakes his head.

“It was enchantment,” he says again. “Why are you clamoring to convince me otherwise? You’re a wolf-girl; I’m a Woodsman. You said before that I was no more than a monster to you. This is a shame for us both to share.”

What little reason his words have is lost in the boil of my rage. Hearing him speak like the silver-tongued prince again, with his rigid courtly eloquence, sends me to the bitterest, meanest place I know. I scarcely hesitate before opening up my most ancient wound again, so I can make him share in its hurt. “I’m no true wolf-girl. You’ve known it since that night on the Black Lake. I’ve already turned my back on my village—I’m not some dumb, struck dog who runs back to its vicious master for another lashing. And you’re no true Woodsman, either, except for your blushing piety and your slavish dog’s devotion to the father who only ever showed you the end of his blade.”

Gáspár flinches, but it is not enough to make me regret the cruelty of my words. I rub the red juice from my lips and try to will down the hot coil of tears in my throat. Perhaps I wanted to kiss him to prove how little I cared for my people, for my mother’s braid in my pocket, her life ended by some Woodsman at the behest of his father. Perhaps I wanted to forget that between here and Király Szek I am not pagan, not Yehuli, only some stupid girl with her hand in both pockets, finding comfort in cold, dead things. Maybe I wanted his touch to erase me.

Or perhaps I wanted the opposite: maybe I wanted his kiss to give me shape, to see how my body transfigured under his hands. I don’t know who I have been with him these past weeks, indulging every perverse instinct, killing fat, slumbering rabbits and openly professing to loathe my own people. My most spiteful self, and perhaps my truest.

Gáspár meets my gaze, his black eye pooling with moonlight. He runs a hand through his dark hair, the same hand that grasped my hip like he could not bring me close enough. His face is so hard that, for a moment, I am almost ready to believe it was nothing but enchantment after all, just the red juice in our mouths. But when he speaks, his voice is thin with anguish.

“What would you have me do?” he asks. “You have already ruined me.”