Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

“Évike.”

I wake to the sound of my name and to Gáspár standing outside of my cell. He has my cloak draped over his arm, the wolf looking limp and more dead than usual. I wipe the grime from my face and stand, knees quivering under me.

“I brought this for you,” he says, holding my cloak through the bars.

In the oily gleam of lantern light, his face looks cleaved in two: one half dewed in gold and the other cached in darkness. His good eye is shadow-drenched, so I have to read his expression by the clench of his jaw, the white line of his lips. Torchlight leaps off his ax blade, glinting wetly.

Very slowly, I take my cloak from him. I search its pockets, but my knife is gone.

“I had to take it.” His voice is sharp enough to scythe through the bars. “I can’t worry about you trying anything so abysmally stupid again.”

“How utterly noble of you.”

My words glance off him like arrows off a steel breastplate. He doesn’t shift. My braid and my coin are still inside the pockets, but they feel leached of their warmth. When I run my finger along the grooved edge of the coin, all I can think about is my father’s blank-faced stare and the alien shape of his nose and mouth. We could have passed each other obliviously in a crowd.

“Have you finished with all your snarling outrage, then?” Gáspár asks, and not kindly. “I told you what would happen if you came to the city. If you provoked Nándor.”

“You were planning to bring me anyway!” I burst out. “If your men hadn’t been killed, if you hadn’t figured out I wasn’t a seer, you would have brought me right to your father’s feet and let him do what he wished to me. When did you begin to have compunctions about seizing girls and trussing them up for the king like sheep to the slaughter? Was it after you knew the taste of my mouth, or after you felt the shape of my body under my cloak?”

I expect it to rattle him, and it does, but only for a moment. A grit of his teeth chases the flush from his cheeks.

“If I wanted you to die, I would have let Peti kill you. I would have let you drown under the ice. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you from tearing into Nándor’s false trial,” he says. “I could have left you to Miklós and Ferenc. If they weren’t bound by oath to serve my father, do you know what they would have done to you?”

Hearts and livers on the city gates. I think of the crowd closing in around me, the spittle foaming in their open mouths. My five-fingered hand curls around the iron bars. It doesn’t matter how sharp my claws are; I can’t cut a thousand throats.

“You’ve not an ounce of good sense,” Gáspár goes on, in his pinched-nose prince’s voice. Despite everything, I can tell a part of him relishes the opportunity to castigate me. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? Half of Király Szek has now seen you for a vicious wolf-girl, and Nándor looks more vindicated in his loathings than ever.”

I know there’s truth in his words, but all I can feel is hurt and toothless anger. I might as well be back in Virág’s hut, my thighs stinging with her lashes.

“You could have done something,” I bite out. When I remember his stony silence, the way he watched the Woodsmen drag me away without lifting a hand to stop them, it burns worse than a hundred billows of blue flame. “You didn’t say a word against Nándor once he had me. You told me I’ve ruined you, but you’re clearly still the same selfish princeling you’ve always been, dressed in your delusions of piety. Well, I apologize, my lord. I’d take back every kiss if I could. Lucky for you, once I’m dead, the secret of your broken oath will die with me, and you can go back to pretending you’re the purest, most honorable Woodsman alive.”

I’m not sure how much of what I’ve said is honest and how much of it is my bitter floundering, hoping at least one of my cruel barbs will hit its mark. Gáspár draws in a short breath, throat bobbing, and then steps sideways into the light. His eye is pooling with venom, but it’s a poor guise for grief. Even though I ought to feel satisfied that my thorns have stuck in him, my blood is cold as ice.

“You don’t understand,” he says, each word a labor, as if he truly does think I’m too simple to grasp their meaning. “If Nándor had even the barest suspicion that I might care for you at all, he’d torture you to death or madness, just to feel like he was taking something from me.”

I stare and stare at him, gulping my fury. I think of the way he held me through the long nights in Kaleva, or the way his lips moved so gently against my throat, but it all makes me want to weep again when I see how he’s looking at me now, as if I’m hopeless and doomed.

“You’ve done a good job pretending,” I say. “Even I’m quite convinced.”

His mouth twists wretchedly. “You’ll have a much easier time pleading your case in front of my father. He tolerates pagans, unlike Nándor.”

The word father runs me through like a sword. “Where is Zsigmond?”

Gáspár doesn’t look at me. The flickering torchlight leaps from wall to wall, bounding after shadows. Finally, he says, “Nándor is still having his fun.”

A blind and furious rage comes over me, like a fissure of pale lightning. I lunge toward him, the bars rattling vainly between us, tears beading at the corners of my eyes.

“Why come back at all, just to keep your head down and follow orders like some weak, worthless Woodsman?” I snarl. “What kind of prince bends silently to the wills of his bastard brother? What kind of prince stands idle and dumb as a struck dog while his people—and yes, the Yehuli are your people, no matter what you believe—suffer? You’re no better than any other soldier who tears mothers from their children.”

“Enough,” Gáspár spits back. “You would be dead already, wolf-girl, if I hadn’t—”

He stops himself, mouth snapping shut. In the time he has been speaking, I have reached out and grasped his wrist, the space between where his sleeve ends and his glove begins and where his bare skin is latticed white with scars.

“I don’t need a knife to wound you,” I whisper.

Gáspár doesn’t move. His gaze meets mine, through the cell bars, black and steady. I see a glimpse of the man I knew on the ice and in the woods again, that bridled fervor and swallowed pain.

“Do it, then,” he says, without a trace of fear. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed this courage from him since we reached the city.

I have the briefest instinct to reach for his throat, where the violet memory of my kiss is still throbbing, but I’m not sure whether I mean to smother him with my tenderness or with my hate. I let go of his wrist, skin prickling.

“Keep one promise.” My voice is trembling so terribly that I have to swallow hard before going on again. “Tell me what your father does to the wolf-girls that he takes.”

Gáspár’s gaze lowers, torchlight leaving his eye. For a long moment there is only the sound of water dripping from the mold-slick walls, and, more distantly, another prisoner’s chains rattling. Bastioned inside my wolf cloak, I wrap my arms around myself, like there is something that needs to be held from breaking apart, or breaking out.

“I’m sorry,” Gáspár says finally. And it is his refusal, this smallest of betrayals, that hurts worse than anything.

He sweeps out of the dungeon, his suba gathering a patchwork of shadow and light, leaving me alone.

I can’t tell how many hours have passed when another Woodsman comes for me, but I have already resigned myself to dying. He’s the same Woodsman from the courtyard, with a bald head like a bruised peach and a mangled, half-missing nose. Beside him is a slip of a girl, shaking and thin as an icicle, laureled in her homespun servant’s clothes. She stares at me meekly over the rim of a bucket, her halved face like a white moon rising.

“You’re the worst I’ve seen yet,” the Woodsman says.

I don’t know if by worst he means ugliest, or if by worst he means filthiest, or if by worst he means wickedest, or if perhaps it is all three. I scarcely have the energy to curl my lip at him.

“Lajos, don’t rile her,” the serving girl protests. I can tell she is not concerned with wounding my feelings, merely afraid that I will lash out at her in my rage. I can hardly blame her for that: I must look worse than I smell, and I feel like something chained and hunted and hungry.

“Wolf-girls aren’t capable of being hurt, Riika,” chides the Woodsman. “They’re soulless things, no gentler or wiser than the animals they wear.”

But Riika is still staring at me wide-eyed. She has a Northerner’s name and a Northerner’s blanched complexion, as pale as a peeled apple. It’s a long way from here to Kaleva, and I feel sorry for her in spite of myself—mostly sorry that she has been given the unfortunate task of wrangling me.

“It’s a waste of water to wash her,” Lajos says. “But it would be a great insult to the king, to present her to him in such a state.”

I consider wounding him, killing him, but it’s a fleeting thought. It won’t help me escape, and it will only prove how loathsome I am to those who already loathe me. I sit still and silent in my cell as Lajos flings open the door and Riika approaches me with no more bravery than a skittish wood mouse. I can almost see whiskers twitching.

“Please,” she squeaks out. “He’ll be furious if you don’t . . .”

She sets the bucket in front of me and then scuttles behind Lajos’s back. I dip my hands in, watching motes of dirt flake off my fingers and drift through the water like dead flies. The water is cold enough to sting, but I scrub my cheeks and my nose and even the grime caked behind my ears. Why not die with a pink, shining face?

Did my mother have a chance to clean her face before they killed her?

There’s a bone-toothed comb for my tangled hair and a new tunic made of bristly wool that I know will be too small and too tight, so I shake my head. Riika chews her lip and looks like she might weep, so I put it on anyway, blinking numbly as a seam splits up my thigh.

“You don’t looklike a monster,” she whispers, almost to herself.

I think about how many times I woke, sweating and screaming, from nightmares about Woodsmen with gleaming sharp teeth and claws beneath their black gloves, and wonder if good Patritian girls like Riika have dreams about wolf-girls eating them.

“Let’s go,” Lajos says shortly, prodding me with the blunt edge of his ax.

This time, no one pulls a hood over my eyes as Lajos leads me barefooted out of the dungeon. We turn down long hallways that curve as wickedly as viper tongues. Small square windows wink star-glutted light—in the time I’ve spent in the dungeon, evening has withered into night. Finally, an arched doorway opens like a scowling mouth, bearing us into the Great Hall.

Feasting tables have already been laid out with cooked swans, their necks curling like white-gloved hands and their beaks still intact; a whole roast boar gumming a green apple, its side split open to reveal a stuffing of dried cherries and link sausages; two enormous pies molded to resemble twin crowns; bowls of red-currant soup the color of a lake at sunrise. Gáspár was right—there’s no peasant fare here.

The Patritian guests rise as I enter, whispering like a sibilant tide. The women all have their hair covered, in headscarves or rheumy veils or silly boxed hats, and each man wears a silk dolman, cinched at the waist with a woven belt of red. The men in Keszi wear the same embroidered belts to ward off demons from the forest, who confuse the red with blood and think their would-be victims already dead, and I want to laugh seeing these pious Patritian men wearing them, too, until I realize I am the evil thing they are trying to keep at bay.

My gait must have faltered, because Lajos gives me another vicious shove.

Iron chandeliers wheel overhead, candle flames blinking at me like the thousand eyes of Ezer Szem in the dark. My heart is a riot as I fix my gaze on the dais ahead, where a long table has been set out and laid with white cloth. There are six chairs girding the table, and at the very center, knuckling out of the white like a tree in the snow, is a carved wooden throne.

For now, the throne is empty. But in the threshold behind the dais, a cluster of figures emerges. Three boys at first, the youngest no older than twelve, each dressed in a dolman of emerald green. One has a Northerner’s frosted hair, nervous as an albino fawn, skittering-bright under a hunter’s stare. One has chestnut hair like mine, curling maniacally around his overlarge ears. The last has hair the color of beechwood, shot through with streaks of darker brown. The king’s young bastard sons, all born of different mothers.

Nándor strides in behind them, and the guests all leap to their feet so quickly they trip and scuffle, like a flock of bejeweled birds, squawking out their blessings and prayers. He wears a dolman of ivory and gold, and I wonder if he put it on after he wrung my father’s blood from his hands.

I didn’t let myself think of seeing Gáspár here, but he comes last through the archway, head bowed, eye following some invisible path toward the dais. His black dolman is buttoned all the way to the line of his jaw, obscuring the bruise I left on his throat. He takes a seat at the very last chair, farthest from the throne, beside the boy with beechwood hair, and gives his younger brother a gentle smile that steals the breath from my lungs.

I want him to lift his gaze and find me in the crowd, Lajos’s ax in my back. I don’t dare make a sound, but I stare at him as if I can will him to stare back, to see what his cowardice has done.

Lajos prods me to the corner of the chamber, where I am half-hidden behind a wrought-iron candle holder. I wonder again if my mother stood in this very spot in the king’s Great Hall, knees trembling as she waited to die. The thought passes through my mind like wind thrashing open the flap of a tent, leaving me ragged and ruined. I blink furiously, wishing that I could cry and be comforted—I would take even Virág’s perfunctory comfort, her six fingers stroking roughly through my hair—but I won’t let these Patritians see me weeping.

Nándor rises to his feet, and the tittering guests fall silent at once, like a candle being snuffed.

“Now arrives your king,” he says. “Heir to the throne of Ave István, blood chieftain of the White Falcon Tribe and all its lands, and blessed by the gentle hand of the Prinkepatrios. Kneel for him and for your god. Király és szentség.”

“Király és szentség,” the guests murmur, and then fold to their knees.

I have spent all my life hating the king so fiercely, so blindly, that when I finally see him, I don’t know what to think or how to feel. He could not have been as monstrous as my imaginings, because even the worst monsters, like dragons, look only like men. King János is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He has the look of a man who grew his beard long and gray for the precise purpose of hiding a weak chin. He wears a dolman of exquisite gold, and over it a velvet mente with a furred collar and sleeves that drape all the way down to the stone floor.

I almost don’t notice his crown. It’s a funny thing, oddly skewed, a bleached color somewhere between yellow and white. It’s not the grand coronet I envisioned, knobbed with precious stones. It’s made up of a thousand tiny pieces tacked together, and I can’t tell what they are until I look down at my own hand, feverishly clutching the hem of my too-small tunic.

King János wears a crown of fingernails.

In the gauze of candlelight, I stare at the nails on the king’s crown. There are infinitesimal slivers of blood between each one, where bone was peeled away from skin. I try to find my mother’s fingernails among them, but it’s too dark and I’ve forgotten what her hands looked like, much less her nails. Were they long and elegant, like Katalin’s? Short and bitten to nubs, like mine? Did they wait to take her fingernails until after they killed her, or did they flay them off while she was still alive, shucking them like insect shells, so they could hear her whimper?

King János lifts his hand, his own fingers gnarled with golden rings. The cold candles lining the feast tables blossom with flame, wicks cringing black. A murmur rises from the guests, something appreciative but guarded, the way a warrior might admire a compatriot’s particularly gruesome kill. The king brings his hands together, rings clattering, and knives and forks and spoons glimmer onto the tables in front of us, silver dinnerware shining bright as blades.

He’s forging.

I’ve never seen a Woodsman do it before, and not even a whisper of a prayer has left the king’s lips. The guests are flashing their eyes now, like prey animals at the mouths of their burrows.

The room starts to shrink away, candlelight pinwheeling through my darkening vision. My heart thrums like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. I try to count how many wolf-girls have been taken from Keszi. One every two or three years, for all the years that János has been king. It tallies to twelve girls, not including me.

Twelve girls. Ten fingernails each. Is it enough to cobble together into King János’s bone crown? Enough to leach the magic from his victims’ cold skin and give the king the power that he craves?

The king takes a seat and coughs into the luxurious sleeve of his mente.

“Now,” he says in a phlegmy voice, once he has finished, “bring in the counts.”

I push myself onto my toes, still feeling the thrust of Lajos’s ax between my shoulder blades, and wait to see more men come swathed in silk and velvet. But the first man who enters is dressed plainly, in a pagan’s brown tunic and woolen cloak. The recognition gives way to terrible grief, like the first bite of an apple before you taste the curdle of its rot. He is wearing a grand headdress of antlers, and two men beside him are leading a massive buck, its own antlers sawed to sad nubs. The deer strains and strains against its bounds, fur matted with blood where the rope has cut in.

My stomach floods with ice. Szarvasvár was once the land of the Deer Tribe, and its count is the great-grand-nephew of a tribal chieftain. He is dressed precisely like a tribal chieftain now, even though so many laws have been passed since, to forbid the worship of our gods.

The deer is brought in front of the dais, before the king. Its eyes are twin pools that hold the candlelight, black as a new-moon night. A Woodsman with a missing ear steps away from the wall, ax held aloft.

Blood arcs over the white tablecloth, narrowly missing the king himself. It kisses the sleeve of Nándor’s dolman, like a napkin dipped in wine. As the deer slumps over, the guests come alive again, a scale toppled over and then righted again with the weight of a second, identical stone. Their approval whisks through the air.

The Woodsman drags the deer away. My eyes are burning, my throat is burning, and then the next man comes in, the count of Kaleva, dressed in a black bear cloak, escorted by some pitiful shaved mongrel that could be Bierdna’s brother or sister. The bear makes its frantic, desperate honking sounds, fighting until the Woodsman’s ax comes down and even after, against the choke of blood and the quivering splay of its limbs.

The count of Farkasvár is next. I know his face without ever having seen him before, and he is draped in a russet wolf cloak. I can barely look at the shorn, whimpering dog that the soldiers drag in after him, the thing that no man with eyes could call a wolf. Its bald tail lashes, teeth grinding against the leather muzzle.

I have seen things die before. I have killed them myself, birds and rabbits and mean, hissing badgers with their white-planked faces that had the audacity to steal from our winter vegetable stores. I have even seen a man killed and watched the light drain from his mad, manic eyes. I can’t watch this. I squeeze my eyes shut, but when I do, Lajos prods me sharply in the back, and then grips my head with his gloved hand, turning my face toward the dais.

The wolf dies howling. By this time, blood has soaked the stone floor so thoroughly I know it will take some serving girl a day and a half to clean, scrubbing on her hands and knees until her own palms are soaked too. I try to meet Gáspár’s gaze, but he is looking down at his goblet, his empty plate. He has one hand over his younger brother’s eyes.

Even though I know what’s coming next I have to raise my hand and bite down on my straining knuckles to keep from crying out. The count of Akosvár sweeps in wearing a cloak of white feathers, candlelight streaming off each one. He carries the golden cage himself, and inside it is the plucked falcon, shuddering and scrawny, looking like someone’s supper. I sob against my palm, tasting my own salt-damp skin.

The count of Akosvár is not the true heir of the White Falcon Tribe. Hardly anyone remembers that Saint István was born with a pagan name (which has now been struck from any record books and almanacs, and is forbidden by Régyar law to be uttered aloud), because his grandfather, a pagan, was the blood chieftain.

The king clears his throat, but he doesn’t speak, only nods.

Nándor is looking on with bright, glassy eyes. They are blue rimmed with an even paler blue, like frost ossifying around a window frame. He plucks a knife from the table, forged by the king only moments ago, and steps lightly off the dais. The falcon beats its bald wings, shrieking hoarsely. Nándor wedges the knife through the bars of the cage and twists it into the bird’s naked breast.

The falcon dies slowly, pooling pink at the floor of its cage like a baby bird in its nest, made small again in its death. Tears come streaming down my cheeks. Nándor tosses the knife to the floor, where it clatters against the blood-slick stone. He lifts his chin to the heavens and to the Upper-World.

“Let the old ways die,” he says, “and the false gods with them.”