Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Near where the Élet River finally snakes through Király Szek, the land smooths and flattens, and green grass turns flaxen where it marks the edge of the Great Plain. The Great Plain swallows up nearly all of Akosvár, and the capital, too, the wide, fertile grassland that the Merzani are currently trying to conquer and burn. But there are no enemy fires burning on the horizon, just the dark swell of our shared silence, almost tangible. Neither of us has spoken in nearly two days.

My anger fizzled early, and in its absence, there came a pall of despair, all my blustery certainty withered like a stalk of wheat. The silence has given my mind the chance to run its worried circuit, returning only a hopeless augury: I have damned myself entirely, having chosen to walk right into the arms of the enemy. And our encounter with the creature has cost me even the meager protection of Gáspár’s proximity. He walks several yards ahead of me, showing me only the back of him, his shoulders stiff under his suba. When we reach the city, I suspect he will leave me for good.

My belly fills with an embarrassed, lurking hurt. I should not be mourning the loss of a Woodsman’s goodwill, or thinking hungrily of his touch. Pagans don’t have a ritual of repentance like the Patritians do, a cheek-to-the-floor confession, but I was always made to pay for my mistakes in other ways. Now I almost wish for lashings, or to be tasked with Virág’s most odious chores. I wonder if there is a Yehuli way of killing your guilt and burying it. Perhaps I will learn soon.

Or perhaps I will be dead first. Gáspár stops suddenly, his horse’s tail bridling. I come to his side slowly, the way one would approach a dog that was keen to snap. Seeing his profile, amber cast in the midday sunlight, makes my stomach clench like a fist. There is still a bruise on his throat in the shape of my mouth, stubbornly violet.

“What is it?” I manage. My voice is hoarse from disuse.

Gáspár’s gaze lifts, but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes. I remember the way my thumb brushed across his cheekbone, my lips against his eyelid. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. His jaw is set hard, and when he speaks, it is with a Woodsman’s steel edge.

“This is your last chance,” he says. “Turn back and spare yourself.”

He has done all he can to keep his words from betraying concern, his eye cold and unflinching. But I have seen enough of his dogged pretense to recognize it, the calculated falsehood of his ambivalence. I know the way his mouth tastes now. I have heard him moan into the shell of my ear.

“I’ll turn back if you will,” I say. “I’ll go back to Keszi and face my lashings if you flee to Rodinya and find some amiable lord to shelter you. How is that for a bargain?”

Gáspár doesn’t reply, and I didn’t expect him to; he turns away from me and spurs his horse onward, following the line of the river. I urge my mare slowly after him, face burning. It is the memory of tenderness that wounds me more than the desire. I have desired many men who had me brusquely and were afterward too ashamed to meet my eyes. But I have never wanted to kiss their wounds, or bare to them any of my own. I had thought myself truest when I was skinning baby rabbits and seething with vicious hatreds, but perhaps that tenderness is true too. I wonder how tender I might have been, if I had not lived cowering under the threat of Virág’s reed whip, forever menaced by Katalin’s blue flame.

But that matters little now. I ought to slough off any tenderness like old dead skin. It will only leave me soft-bellied and spent when we reach Király Szek. The river churns beside me, the foaming crests of the waves iridescent when they catch the sunlight. Gáspár has gone so far ahead that I can scarcely see him now, unless I raise a hand to shield my eyes and squint against the glare.

I have never deserved less to wear the wolf cloak over my shoulders, but a memory rises in me anyway, stinging and sour, like a swallow of saltwater. If Gáspár were speaking to me, I would tell him one last story: Once, Vilmötten did slay a dragon—not the one who loved a human woman, I don’t think. But this dragon was a man with seven heads, too, and he rode into battle with full mail on the back of an eight-legged horse.

Vilmötten was not a warrior. He was only a bard who had been granted the favor of the gods. He wondered how he might slay such a creature, with nothing to his name but a five-stringed kantele, which made music, not war. Isten told him he must forge a sword.

“But how?” Vilmötten asked. “I have no steel to melt, and no skills as a smith. Besides, what kind of blade could slay such a monster?”

“The sword that you make with the blessings of the gods,” Isten replied. And then he clipped off one of his fingernails and let it fall to the Middle-World below. It was thick and heavy as steel, and carved with the magic of the father-god himself. And because the nail had been a sacrifice, death lived inside it also.

Vilmötten had the power to make fire, thanks to the star he had swallowed. While he worked, he sang. He sang a song of battle (the words of which have been forgotten, or maybe just forgotten by Virág). When he finished his forging, the song ended too.

Vilmötten’s sword looked like nothing special. It had a bronze hilt and a silver blade. But when he held it up to the sky, a bright flame burst across the length of it, as if someone had struck the blade with a piece of flint. He slew the dragon with his sword, cutting off all seven of its heads in one swing. The sword was coveted across all of Régország and the lands beyond, but when Vilmötten sailed away to the realm of the gods, the sword was lost.

I have no gleaming sword forged from a sliver of Isten’s nail; I have only my own untested magic, and Király Szek is filled with a thousand dragons, all of them men in disguise. Still, I let the words twine silently through my mind, as if I might make a weapon of them. Virág’s stories never comforted me when I was sitting at her hearth, knees pulled to my chest, aching with the labor of her chores and chafing under Katalin’s cruel stare. Now so many miles from Keszi the familiar words gird me like battle mail, and it seems like a trickster god’s mean joke: that I should yearn for her solace only as soon as I have forsaken it. I reach for my mother’s braid, red as a fox’s pelt and smooth from all my years of stroking. I wonder if Gáspár has kept any relic of his mother. I wonder if I will ever have a chance to ask him.

I draw my hand to my lips, still swollen with the memory of his touch, and then urge my horse forward after him.

Two miles out of the capital, the sky ceases to be blue.

We stand on a small hill outside of Király Szek, wind bristling past us. A mass of seething clouds is gathered over the city, thick and low-hanging, lush with unshed rain. It casts the city in a grayish half-light, almost like the murky reflection of the real Király Szek rippling on the surface of a lake at dusk. It almost comforts me, that black mantle of storm clouds. Maybe a torrent of rain will come down and wash the festival-goers out of the streets.

If Gáspár takes particular notice of the looming clouds, he doesn’t comment on them. I let my gaze sweep across the horizon, ambling over the palace belfry and down again to the sloping roofs of the houses. The city is an earthwork, banked with mounds of soil to fortify it against a siege, but I can see even from a distance the beginnings of a stone wall around the old wooden barricades, higher in some places than others. It looks like a project recently undertaken, perhaps in anticipation of the Merzani army. The Élet River gashes the city in two, a shock of silver-blue cleaving east from west.

The outer layer of the city is a scruff of farmland, squares of yellow wheat alternated with tracts of green and red paprika plants, each pepper gleaming like a ruby scythe. A long black road daggers through the farmland, terminating at the main city gate. And, of course, because it’s festival day, the road is glutted with travelers: devout men and women making their pilgrimage on foot or on horseback, slogging toward Király Szek to pay tribute to the memory of the nation’s first Patritian king.

A braid of fear and anger coils in my chest, burning like an old scar. Gáspár leads me down to the road, where we join the throng of Patritians, all a chaos of protests and muttered prayers. Their eyes glint from their dirty faces like knifepoints, bright and sharp, gazes fixed toward the gate and the palace that knuckles over the old wooden walls. None of them seems to notice that a wolf-girl has entered their procession.

“You have certainly chosen the most treacherous time to arrive in Király Szek,” Gáspár murmurs, and I hear the bridled worry in his voice. “There is no worse day to be a wolf-girl in the capital, when Patritian zeal reaches its fever pitch.”

I only stare at him as our horses jostle through the crowd. A fury deep in my marrow has been pulled to the surface, like an old ship dredged up out of the sea. “There is no day where it is safe to be a wolf-girl in the capital. Don’t forget that you meant to bring me here as a prisoner.Is there still blood on the city walls where your Saint István displayed his trophies?”

Gáspár blinks at me, a pale flush ghosting across his face. “I didn’t know that story had found its way to your village.”

“Of course it did.” My four fingers curl around my horse’s reins, tight enough to turn my knuckles white. “Do you think we just sit around a fire, mindlessly repeating the legends of our great heroes and gods? Every boy and girl in Keszi learns the story before they’re old enough to talk: how King István nailed the hearts and livers of the pagan chieftains to the gates of Király Szek. How he paraded them proudly to his visitors from the west, so they could see how holy Régország had become.”

Gáspár looks pointedly away, but his hands, too, tighten on their reins. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

I don’t argue with him. My head is a snarl of storm clouds, mirroring the sky above. Perhaps that is all it means to be pagan: to fear having your heart or liver cut out. In that way I am no different from the other wolf-girls with their easy magic and their mean smiles, no matter what Katalin or the gods might say.

The roiling of the crowd carries us through the gate. Király Szek stinks badly enough to make my eyes burn: smoke chuffs from every open window and door, from all the wooden houses that topple over and run into each other, like clumsily felled trees. The streets are made of hard, dry earth, and they cough up yellow dust with every footfall. All my life I had imagined the city would be clean and bright like a forest in the snow, and its people as fat and sated as bears in their winter dens. But Király Szek is blatantly ugly and so are its citizens. Their gums are crammed with teeth as rotted as the crumbling belfries, their jowls sagging like their own wind-beaten roofs. From somewhere farther away I hear the sound of a bell tolling, and a blacksmith’s bellows, and a torrent of curses piping from some merchant’s grizzled mouth. The procession flows left, in the direction of the palace, but I draw my horse to a halt, bewildered and breathless and my ears ringing.

Gáspár pauses, too, and raises his voice over the din. “If you want to find your father, you’ll have to go to Yehuli Street. It’s—”

But I don’t hear the rest of his words. All I can see are twin smudges of black in the distance, two figures on obsidian mounts barreling through the crowd. Woodsmen.

Beside me, Gáspár stiffens. The Woodsmen are angling toward us, their eyes pinning me in place like thrown darts. Gáspár leans toward me, and in a fierce whisper says, “Don’t utter a word.”

I choke out a laugh, lunatic with terror. “Do you really think I have plans to reveal our tryst, you fool? As much as it brings me pleasure to know that I’ve imperiled your purity, I’m more concerned with keeping Woodsman axes out of my back.”

Gáspár presses his lips together, looking mortified.

“Besides,” I bite out, “if you want to convince them you’ve kept your oath of chastity, you might consider covering the bruise on your throat first.”

He flushes the shade of a sour cherry and tugs at the collar of his suba. In another two beats, the Woodsmen reach us, the rough wind flinging their cloaks this way and that. They are both freshly shorn, with lean faces like foxes at midwinter. One of them is missing his left ear.

Gáspár nods at each of them in turn, hand still braced on the nape of his neck. “Ferenc. Miklós.”

The one with the missing ear, Ferenc, narrows his eyes. “Bárány. You’ve been gone too long. The king has been asking after his wolf-girl for more than a fortnight, and your brother is nearly done biding his time.”

It shocks me how casually they address him, Régország’s true-born prince, but I try to keep from making my dismay plain.

“I know,” Gáspár says. “I have the wolf-girl now, and I’ll take her to the palace as soon as the feast is done.”

The other Woodsman, Miklós, glances between Gáspár and me. I can feel the coldness of his gaze leaching through my wolf cloak, like a beam of icy moonlight. “Where are the other men? Peti and Ferkó, Imre . . .”

Abruptly, Gáspár’s face shutters. His shoulders rise around his ears, swelling as if with guilt. For a mute, shameful moment I almost want to heft the burden from his back to mine, take the blame for their deaths, even if it will damn me further in front of these Woodsmen. But Gáspár speaks first.

“Dead.” His voice is flat. “Ambushed by monsters as we journeyed from Ezer Szem. The wolf-girl and I barely survived.”

All at once, as though moved by invisible threads, both Woodsmen press two fingers to their chests. Their eyes close penitently. When they open them again, Ferenc says, “Three good Patritian men dead, and for what? So the king can have his—”

“Careful,” Gáspár says shortly, and Ferenc falls silent at once. “Your blades are still sworn to my father as long as he sits the throne.”

“Yes, and we’d prefer he stay there, despite his affinity for pagan magic,” Miklós says, cutting another glare toward me. “Nándor has only grown more insufferable in your absence, Bárány. He’s like a child, and this city is a toy he doesn’t want to share. He’ll be loath to see you again, but I think the shock of it will be enough to shake him loose—for now. You ought to get to the palace as quickly as you can.”

A knot of fear curls in my throat, but Gáspár doesn’t flinch at his words. “I’ll go as soon as I’ve dealt with the wolf-girl. If you can find Count Korhonen, you may be able to stall Nándor.”

Ferenc dips his head in assent. He and Miklós draw back their horses, and the crowd sweeps them away like driftwood on a river, streaming toward the palace. As soon as they’re gone, Gáspár turns to me, his face hardening all over again.

“I’ll take you to Yehuli Street,” he says—perfectly smooth, save for the flicker in his eye, like a candle flame seizing in the wind. “I’ll leave you there once you find your father.”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak without weeping, or else saying something damningly stupid. The same bell tolls again, a gonging that echoes through the ground and vibrates through my fingers and toes. The wind carries the smell of ash and smoke toward us, and I loop the reins twice around my hand, driving my horse against the current of the crowd.

Yehuli Street is as silent as a winter morning in the woods, before even the foxes rouse white-coated from their dens. Wool stockings and muslin dresses hang out on lines that stretch from window to window, fluttering emptily, like clothespinned ghosts. I had expected to feel some bolt of recognition, the illumination of instinct long-buried, my memory struck up like a match. But I feel nothing. Yehuli Street spools out before me, each squat gray house the same as the last, like pale fingerprints against the darkening sky.

“Where is everyone?” I whisper. The silence feels precarious, and I don’t want to be responsible for breaking it.

He frowns at me, jaw set sharply. I am keeping him from his task, but I can’t bring myself to care, not when my mouth has gone dry and my heart has stirred to a manic beat.

“It’s a Yehuli holy day,” he says. “On this day their god forbids them from working.”

“And are all these houses . . .” I trail off, gaze running down the length of the street, edged by hovel after hovel.

“Yehuli houses. They are forbidden from occupying any other part of the city that the king himself has not ordained.”

The wind snarls through my hair and blows the fur of my wolf cloak flat. I feel unspeakably cold. One of Katalin’s chants burrows its way into my mind: Yehuli slave, Yehuli scum, Yehuli bow to anyone.

“Do you know where my father lives?” I ask, voice small.

I see the moment that Gáspár’s face softens, his jaw losing its whetted edge, and then the instant when it goes hard again, like he has only just remembered that he is supposed to loathe me.

“No,” he says. “You’ll have to knock and see.”

This is where he would take his leave, disappear down Yehuli Street and let fate decide what will become of me. But Gáspár only sits stiffly on his mount, back straight as a blade. A swell of fierce gratitude and painful affection rises in my chest, but I swallow it back down.

I leap off my horse, blood roaring hot in my ears. The direness of the situation occurs to me all over again, my mind racing with thoughts of disembodied livers and hearts, Virág’s desperate warnings. Here in Király Szek my wolf cloak may as well be a death shroud. Every moment that I am without my father is an opportunity for a Patritian to take my head off.

All furious panic, I hurl myself to the nearest door and pound on it rudely, then stand back, chest heaving. After a few moments, the door lurches open, ancient springs squealing. A squat woman blinks at me from the threshold, a gilt-edged book shoved under her arm.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she demands—angrily, and I don’t blame her. I must look half-mad in my wolf cloak, tunic still stained with red juice. I force my numb lips to move.

“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say. “Is this his house? Do you know—”

The woman lets out a chortling laugh and slams the door in my face.

It all happens too fast for me to feel any way about it. My mind hardly registers her rebuff before my legs are carrying me to the next house. I hear Gáspár slide off his horse, and by the time the second door clatters open, he is right behind me.

“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say, before the man can speak. “Is this his house? Do you know where he lives?”

The man has long curling black hair, laced through with threads of gray. When he opens his mouth I see that one of his teeth has been set in silver. I reach for the coin in my pocket, ready to hold it up like some mute, useless offering.

“We are all Zsidóhere, girl,” he scoffs. “Zsidóis the name the Patritians gave us, so they wouldn’t sully their Patritian mouths by speaking in our tongue.”

And then he closes the door without another word. Knees quaking, I turn slowly toward Gáspár. A flush of red goes through my face, my throat tightening with a coil of shame and anger.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand. “Did you want me to look a blundering simpleton, some insipid wolf-girl you dragged out of the woods to civilize?”

For a moment, Gáspár doesn’t reply, only stares at me with a tight mouth. There’s a familiar glint of misery in his eye.

“I thought you knew,” he says finally. “I didn’t realize how little you’d been told about the Yehuli and how they live here.”

I don’t want to hear any more. I turn on my heel, cheeks still burning, and march up to the next house. Paint is peeling off the wood in long tongues of red, and something that looks like a silver scroll is hammered to the door. It’s stamped with more Yehuli letters that make my eyes water and my mind glaze over, like staring at a bleary shape on the horizon.

Another woman opens the door. She has chestnut hair braided neatly as a string of garlic, her eyes wavering between green and hazel. I can see rough, vague mirrors of my own features in hers—the reddish tint to her hair, the pointed nose, the small, worrying mouth—and in that suspended instant I manage to convince myself that I have found my father’s house, and that she is an aunt or a cousin or maybe even a sister.

“Is this Zsigmond’s house?” I ask, voice squeezed tight with hope.

The woman shakes her head, sadly.

“Not on Shabbos,” she whispers, and then closes the door.

Her rebuff needles through my numb resolve. I have to draw in another quick breath to keep from whimpering, though I know Gáspár sees the anguish on my face. He reaches toward me, gloved hand open, and then abruptly draws back. The clear retraction of his kindness nearly unravels me. I held him so fast and so close and with such desperate fervor that he will never touch me again, like when you pluck an apple too soon and it rots before you can eat it.

When I reach the next threshold, I no longer hear Gáspár’s footsteps behind me.

The man who answers the door is young enough to be my brother, but I can find none of my features in his. He wears an odd white hat, almost like a woman’s bonnet, and it skews sideways, the string come loose behind one of his ears. He gawks at me for several beats before relenting to my reedy voice and wide, desperate eyes.

“Please,” I say. “Do you know where I can find Zsigmond?”

The boy’s face goes wan. “Didn’t you hear? Zsigmond was taken to trial outside of the king’s palace. Nándor had him arrested, for working on the Patritian holy day.”

I charge back into the procession of festival-goers as the storm clouds churn and roil overhead. Once there, I am swept up in a current of pedestrians, shouldering from market stall to market stall. Saint István’s feast must be the biggest market day of the year. People stream around me, coins clenched in dirty fists, arms curling around loaves of bread and long coils of smoked sausage. My poor, jostled mare kicks out her hind legs and topples a stinking bucket of trout heads to the ground, eliciting a curse from the fishmonger. Someone is selling fat sacks of red paprika, and the smell of it cuts through everything else, stinging like salt in a wound.

Gáspár shoves through the crowd and manages to catch one corner of my wolf cloak, yanking it right off my back.

“Have you gone absolutely mad?” he snarls. “The people in this city are God-fearing Patritians, and on this, the holiest day, they are riled to the peak of their zealotry. They would line up at the gates for a chance to prove their faith by killing you, especially the men—to them you are a pagan before you are a woman.”

Even without my cloak I am an oddity in the crowd, among the dour Patritian women with their covered hair and downcast eyes. I can scarcely hear my own voice over the ragged, vicious pounding of my heart.

“What else would you have me do?” I bite back. “Nándor has my father.”

“I would have you not be a fool,” Gáspár says—harshly, but there’s a desperate, pleading look in his eye that makes me pause, drawing in a furious breath. “If you charge into the palace like this, you’ll damn both of us and your father.”

Both of us. He’s afraid that I’ll reveal him, as a failure who brought back the wrong wolf-girl, or worse, as a failure who kissed that wolf-girl and bared his throat for her to latch her teeth into. My fear and hurt hardens into fury, and I no longer care about my dignity or his.

“Is there really nothing more precious to you than your purity?” I spit. “You’ve spent too many nights lying beside a wolf-girl to flush and fret over it now. I don’t have any plans to reveal you, so save your miserable spluttering. If you’re right, one of your prized, pious killers will put a blade through my back first, and your secret will die when I do.”

Gáspár holds my wolf cloak limply, the wind ruffling his hair across his face. Unlike the other occasions when I have spoken of our tryst or his compromised chastity, no color rises to his cheeks, and his eye is narrowed thin as an arrow slit.

“Do you really think that’s all I care about?” he demands. “If you’re really so keen to damn us both—”

“No,” I cut in, thinking of cut hearts and my mother’s braid in my pocket. “Not both of us. You are still a Woodsman, a prince. His son. The worst thing your father took from you is an eye.”

With difficulty, I turn my horse and maneuver her through the crowd. In the distance, the castle looms like a great dark bird, but it casts no shadow because there is no sun. The crumbling stone of the Broken Tower is a pale gash against the charcoal sky.

The narrow street opens to a courtyard, penned by a gate of black wood. Here the festival-goers are packed so close, straining over one another’s heads, that I can’t inch my horse any farther. I slip off her back and shoulder through the crowd, past good Patritian women with white bonnets and Patritian men with grim, sweat-stained faces. The smell of fried bread drifts past me, mingling with something fouler and worse.

I elbow past a weaver woman with six teeth, who scowls at me and claws at my arm in retaliation. I scarcely feel the swipe of her nails. I push and push until I reach the very front of the crowd, staring out at the square courtyard with its filthy gray stones. In the center is a huddle of Woodsmen, and a Yehuli man between them, and he is standing on the corpse of a killed pig.

My stomach lurches at the sight and smell of it. I raise a hand to my mouth, bile crawling up my throat.

The man’s arms are bound behind his back with a long, frayed rope, taut with his pulling. He wears the same odd white hat as the boy I saw on Yehuli Street. From where I stand all I can see is a slivered fraction of his face, pale as a waning moon. He has a long nose and woolly gray brows, and his chin is raised defiantly, as if he can’t even see the gore on the ground beneath him.

There are two more men in the courtyard. One is hunched with age, swaddled in the dull tawny robes of a Patritian holy man. He blinks his small, bright eyes like a little brown mole, fingers curling around the iron pendant at his throat.

The other man is far too young to be king, but that is not the thought that dominates me in the moment. All I can think is that he is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He is no older than Gáspár, sweet-faced and almost boyish, wearing a dolman dyed the color of a velvet-dark evening. His auburn hair curls loosely to the nape of his neck, luxuriant, as if it’s mocking the shorn heads of the Woodsmen beside him. He has the dewy complexion of an opal newly polished, and blue eyes that gleam beneath feathered golden lashes. When he smiles, it etches crooked dimples into his cheeks, the kind of small flaw that throws the rest of his face into breathless relief, every other feature made lovelier by comparison.

The man circles my father with the lithe grace of a hawk just before it snatches its prey.

“What do you say, Zsidó Zsigmond, to these charges?” he asks, sounding terribly pleasant, as though he were inquiring to a merchant about the price of some coveted ware. “Do you confess that you were indeed working on the last Lord’s Day?”

“I am paid to work on the Lord’s Day,” Zsigmond says. “Commissioned by your own father to—”

I don’t hear the rest. Gáspár has shoved his way to my side, his hand closing around my wrist.

“You need to leave,” he rasps. “If you only heed my warning once in your life, wolf-girl, please sheathe your claws now.”

My four fingers curl into a fist at my side. Ördög’s magic is there, coiled like a snake ready to strike, but the ragged desperation in Gáspár’s voice stills me, just for a moment, as the crowd pushes around us.

“These sorts of trials aren’t unusual,” he goes on, quickly, now that he’s gotten me to falter, “but they make a mockery of the very notion of justice. Yehuli men and women are charged with a number of invented, flimsy accusations, and then paraded around in chains for the crowd to gnash their teeth at. It’s an easy way to win the favor of peasants who loathe the Yehuli.”

Ice edges into my veins. “And the pig . . . ?”

Gáspár lets out a breath. “Yehuli scripture forbids them from eating or touching pig.”

And then I think I really will be sick, with the smell of the pig’s blood and viscera stiff and heavy in the air, and Nándor’s gloating voice running over me like water in a stream bed, and I grab hold of Gáspár’s arm to steady myself. He tenses under my touch but doesn’t jerk away.

“He can’t,” I manage. “Please—you have to say something. You have to stop him.”

“Your father is in no real danger, at least not yet,” Gáspár replies, but a swallow ticks in his throat. “Our protestations are better spent at the king’s feet, or later, when there’s no audience to preen for. Nándor won’t abandon his fun while there are half a hundred peasants looking on, cheering for a Yehuli man’s debasement.”

The evenness of his voice, the pinched-nose rationality of his proposal, makes my vision glaze with fury. Nándor might as well be Virág, standing over me with her reed whip, or Katalin—they have the same gleeful venom in their eyes. I let go of Gáspár’s arm as brusquely as I can, hoping to leave marks.

“Will you only move to prevent injustice when no one is watching?” I ask, with as much meanness as I can muster. “It’s no wonder the people prefer Nándor—at least he’s not a coward.”

“I suppose a coward is anyone who acts with forethought, who doesn’t hurl themselves into the jaws of the beast only to prove their own heroism?” Gáspár’s eye is as black as pitch. “Surviving in Király Szek is a test of shrewdness, not of bravery. You will not last long here unless you understand that.”

There is an undercurrent of desperation to his words, even concern, but I am too angry to be moved. I have done plenty of kneeling. It has never earned me any mercy. The crowd’s chanting rises, louder, like a flock of birds taking flight into the gray sky, and Nándor smiles and smiles as pig’s blood soaks my father’s boots.

“Stop!”

The word shudders out of me, unbidden, before I can think to prevent it. And because I’ve already started, I say again, “Stop, let him go!”

The onlookers go quiet. Nándor’s eyes lift, scanning the crowd until they find me—his lambent, laughing eyes. He considers me for a moment, blinking once, and then his gaze shifts, landing on Gáspár.

“Is this an illusion of Thanatos?” he asks, and then pauses, although it is not a question anyone is supposed to answer. “Or is it my brother back again, with a wolf-girl by his side?”

Nándor leaves my father and strides toward us. Instinctively, my hand goes for my knife, but then I remember that it’s gone, along with my braid and my coin.

My four fingers open, unfurling like a flower, as Nándor nears. If he reaches for me I will grasp him first and see what Ördög’s power can do, but here before all these Patritians, and four Woodsmen guards, I realize with a slippery feeling in my stomach that it will not be enough. It can’t be. The beautiful man stalks toward me, his eyes searing right through my skin, and I think I finally understand Gáspár’s dire warnings.

Yet, when Nándor does pause in front of us, he scarcely seems to glance my way at all. Instead, he wraps his arms around Gáspár.

“Welcome home,” he says, voice muffled against the fur of Gáspár’s suba.

Gáspár says nothing. He is rigid inside Nándor’s embrace, his brother’s mouth hovering far too close to the bruise on his throat. A weight settles on my chest, my breathing short and quick. Gáspár disentangles himself as soon as he’s able.

“This must be the wolf-girl Father wanted,” says Nándor. He clasps his hand under my chin, his long fingers stroking down my cheek. “She’s rough-looking, like all wolf-girls, and a bit plain-faced besides.”

His thumb curls over my lip. I cannot look anywhere else, trapped in his bewitching viper’s stare. I think of biting off his thumb, like I did Peti’s ear. I imagine watching him scream and fumble for his missing finger amidst the spray of blood and the stuttering pain. But it is precisely that stupid, vicious instinct that will get me killed faster.

Still, I jerk my chin away, my four fingers clenching.

“You know that Father wants his wolf-girls unharmed,” Gáspár says, smooth-voiced and princely again, the same tenor to his words that always made me bristle and scowl. His eye reveals only a quick glimmer of unease.

“I also know that Father wants his wolf-girls silent and cowed,” says Nándor. He blinks toward me. “You’ve charged into the palace courtyard in the midst of our Saint István’s Day celebration, looking every inch a barbarian, more wolf than girl. Tell me, what do you care about the fate of this Yehuli man?”

I could kill him. Or, at least, I could try. Ördög’s threads twitch around my wrist. But even if I succeeded, if he burned up like a lightning-struck tree under my touch, I would not escape the city alive. And what then? Keszi would be punished for my crime, and so would the Yehuli as soon as the king figured out I was one of them.

In this moment I am nothing at all to this brilliant would-be prince, worth less than the muck on his boots—and yet whatever I do next will decide the fate of two peoples, a whole village and every house on that long gray street.

My mouth opens mutely, then closes again. After all the weeks I spent upbraiding Gáspár for his deference, the easy way his knees buckle and his head bows, I realize that he is, in fact, cleverer than me. What kind of idiot bird pecks at its master between the bars of its cage?

A terrible fear settles over me, heavy as my missing wolf cloak.

“Very well then,” Nándor says. “We deal with wolf-girls the same way we deal with Yehuli merchant scum.”

And then the crowd is chanting, screaming, spittle foaming in their open mouths. I am reminded of the black snapping jaws of the wolves that skulk around Keszi, on the deepest, coldest winter days, watching and growling and waiting for someone to wander too far into the woods.

I waver between shrinking back and leaping forward, and in that manic, seizing moment of indecision, I manage to meet my father’s eyes over the broad sweep of Nándor’s shoulder. They are as blank as two tide pools at midnight, no starry pinprick of recognition in them. I am staring at a stranger. I am going to die for a man who doesn’t even know me.

Gáspár’s voice arcs over the din. “The wolf-girl is Father’s prize. He’ll be the one to decide what to do with her.”

But Nándor only raises a beckoning hand. The Woodsmen descend, all at once, like a murder of crows coming down on a corpse. Everything that follows, I see only in flashes: a billowing black suba—not Gáspár’s—and the metal glint of an ax. Nándor’s incandescent smile. My spooked mare charging the crowd, sides heaving, whinnying through her flared nostrils. A Woodsman’s gloved hand jams against the back of my throat, forcing me to the ground, my hair grazing over the filthy cobblestones.

I look up again, with difficulty. Nándor is pacing toward my mare, making hushing sounds. She stills, letting him place one hand on her muzzle, and the other on her broad neck.

“What a lovely beast,” he murmurs. “Her coat is pure white. There are no other horses in our stables with such a coat. I do appreciate a unique, unblemished beauty.”

A Woodsman’s ax slides between my shoulder blades. “Where shall we take her, my lord?”

If they call him lord, I wonder, what do they call the king?

“Where we take all the wolf-girls,” Nándor says, his voice hitching with impatience.

The crowd is still chanting, the words all running together, until I can’t hear anything but dull, oblivious noise. I stare through the matted tangle of my hair at Nándor, watching as he takes my horse by the reins and leads her toward the palace door. The storm clouds seethe overhead, glowering as if they were Isten’s great black brow. A strain of murky light beams through, catching on Nándor’s hair, on the sweet curve of his jaw, whiter than my mare’s pelt. I remember what Szabín said, about him floundering up out of the ice and then standing again as if his pulse had never stopped its pounding.

I am almost ready to believe it now. There is ice in his eyes still, like his death has lived with him all the years since.

I cannot twist my neck far enough to see Gáspár’s face, but he is by my side, unmoving and silent. From the waist down he looks like any other Woodsman, dressed finely in his black suba and his embroidered leather boots. There are flies hovering over the pig’s carcass, circling the bloody gouges where someone has stabbed out its eyes. And then I hear my father’s footsteps, fading, as someone leads him away too.

The Woodsman throws a hood over my eyes and takes me on a dizzying journey through the dungeons. I almost want to laugh when he peels back my blinds: they are dark and damp, the ceilings slick with sour water and the walls clotted blue-white with mold, but they are nothing worse than that. I have been imagining some peculiar torture, designed specifically for wolf-girls.

He thrusts me into the cell and shuts me behind the rust-gritted bars. I hear his suba ghosting through the foul puddles as he goes, ascending a flight of crooked stairs and leaving me alone in the greasy smear of dimming torchlight.

I slide to my knees in the mud and grime, my cheek against the mold-speckled wall. Even after everything, I am surprised by how easy it is to cry. I cry so hard I’m certain someone will come slit my throat to shut me up, and by the time I finish I’m half praying that they do, as I’m imagining my mother in this same cell. My mind conjures its vague memories of her body, contorting them into a shape that matches my own. Small, cowed, kneeling. I almost think I will find a clump of her soft red hair buried in the muck, or a white clavicle bone.

I fall asleep that way, curled around my mother’s ghost.