Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Amidst the murmurs of approval, the tear-stricken prayers, Nándor turns and fixes his eyes on me. They are terrifying in their two-toned blue, pale and bright as quartz glinting out of a cave mouth, as if the ice has never left him. Lajos gives me a cruel jab with his ax, and I stumble forward in front of the dais, in front of Nándor, on my knees. Voices hum in my periphery, as nasal and oblivious as insect wings. I try to pull out a word, a phrase, something small enough to bite down on. Monster, from one woman in a white box hat. Heathen, from a man in a smoky-gray dolman. From a dozen more: justice, justice, justice. Godfather Death will have me slit open like a crow on an augur’s workbench.

“Your people cry for justice,” Nándor says, looking to his father. “Will you answer them?”

The king stares at him for a moment. But instead of nodding assent, he says, “Come here, my son.”

Shoulders slackened, Nándor returns to his place at the table, but I catch the corner of his mouth puckering, almost turning to a frown. His finger strokes along the edge of his empty plate. I remember that Gáspár said he would make a move against his father at Saint István’s feast, and I find myself measuring the distance between Nándor’s hand and his knife. Not that it matters very much—I will be dead before I witness any monarchs falling.

“Gáspár has brought this wolf-girl on a long journey from Keszi,” says the king. He pauses, wiping his sweat-dewed forehead. “She is not a seer, I am told, but she may prove to have strength in one of the other three skills.”

Some of the nails on the king’s crown are cracking, yellowing. Eventually they will sliver into nothing, and he will need more warm wolf-girl bodies when they do.

“Father—” Nándor begins, but the king holds up his hand.

“Bring me a lump of coal and some kindling,” the king says.

The Woodsman with the missing ear vanishes for a moment, and then comes back laden with coal and wood. I only recognize him now as the same Woodsman from before, the one who spoke with Gáspár: Ferenc. He drops the wood in front of me, scowling, and then grabs my hand and pries it open, pressing the coal into my palm. Disgust carves long furrows into his cheeks and brow.

“Now, then.” King János draws himself up, blinking down at me. “Show me what magic your gods have granted you. Light a fire with this wood.”

The king has brown eyes, not blue, and his face is nearly as ugly and aged as Virág’s, but I could swear in this moment he looks like Katalin, dangling death over my head while demanding the impossible.

I pick up one of the pieces of wood and run my finger down the splintering length of it. I do it twice, three times, until the king makes a disgruntled noise and shakes his head.

“Not a fire-maker, evidently,” he says. “Then take that coal, wolf-girl, and turn it into iron or silver.”

The coal is still clenched in my four-fingered hand, blackening the rivulets of my palm. King János has seen pagan magic before; he has watched a dozen wolf-girls cower before him this way, like cattle on an auction block, squirming to prove the value of their deaths. And so I start to sing, softly, just loud enough for my words to reach the king’s long table.

“First came King István, his cape as white as snow,

Then his son, Tódor, who set the North aglow,

After there was Géza, whose beard was long and gray,

Finally, King János—

And his son, Fekete.”

I watch Gáspár as I sing it, my gaze unflinching, daring him to look away. He has his arm around his younger brother, fist curling into the fabric of the boy’s green dolman. There’s no subterfuge on his face, no pretense of courtly indifference. His eye is gleaming with anguish, but still he doesn’t speak. I wonder if he will think of kissing my throat when I die, remembering how he ran his lips so gently over the same skin that flowers open under his father’s blade.

When I finish the song, the coal is still sooty and black.

“No talent for forging,” the king murmurs. “Well, perhaps you’re a healer, then. Woodsman, come here.”

He beckons to Lajos, who has been pressed against the wall, half a shadow himself. The Woodsman strides forward and gives the king a low, silent bow.

“Your face,” the king says.

I think I might be sick as I press my blackened hand to Lajos’s cheek, to the gory remainder of his nose, the scar that cleaves his brow in two. All the while Lajos is breathing like a riled bull, his throat bobbing and his own hands closed into tight fists, certainly wishing he could wrap them around my throat, instead.

But no new muscle rises up to make his nose whole again; no new skin stretches over the crags of his wicked scar. Lajos rips away from me, spitting and heaving, and I fall back on my heels, staggering in front of all the Patritian guests.

The king draws in a sharp breath. “What is your magic, wolf-girl?”

“Why does it matter?” My voice is hoarse and useless. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

A hopeful murmur runs through the crowd. They want to see me slaughtered like a deer, a bird, a wolf. A girl.

“I cannot allow pagan deception to go unpunished,” King János says. “Keszi promised me a seer, and they delivered me some barren thing instead. Would you rather I take my vengeance on your village?”

Murmurs of approval again. Nándor leans forward in his seat, eyes shifting like water under ice.

I almost laugh. I remember Gáspár giving me the same threat, on the shores of the Black Lake, both of our masks torn off. If nothing else, I will make him speak before I die.

“Did your son tell you?” I ask. “Is he the one who told you that I couldn’t see?”

“My son . . .” The king’s gaze turns blearily to Gáspár, and then he speaks to me while looking at him. “My son has all of Géza’s wisdom, and none of István’s fire.”

Géza was the king’s own father, who died young and sickly, and is remembered for little more than that. Even now the king’s words still coax an ache into me, like a limbless, phantom pain. Gáspár swallows, and I think he might finally open his mouth, but he only looks down at his plate.

Betrayal lances through the hurt, shattering it like glass. Nándor’s head whirls.

“Father, she is a wolf-girl,” he says, just a thread of petulance in it. “If she refuses to repent to the one true God, and renounce her false ones, slay her here and prove that the people’s clamoring for justice has not gone unheard. It is a great affront to King István’s memory, to shelter a heathen here, in the very palace that he built, on his name day.”

His voice goes high and reedy by the end of it, summoning renewed whispers from the crowd. Justice, justice, justice.

The king gives a feeble twitch, as if he is trying to right something within himself that is in danger of tipping over. “Is it true, wolf-girl, that you have no magic?”

Yes and no will both doom me, so I say nothing.

King János turns back to Gáspár. “Have you ever seen the girl perform an act of magic yourself? You said yourself she cannot see, but is she truly as barren as she appears?”

Gáspár’s jaw clenches. I know this look of his, that miserable effort, like a toothless dog realizing the futility of its own bite. He may sit at the king’s table, but he has scarcely more power here than I do. I think, with a rush of damned, traitorous tenderness so sudden that it frightens me, how steadily he is staring down the man who stabbed out his eye.

“Father,” he says, the word low with its beseeching, “there are other ways—”

“Enough of this,” Nándor cuts in. “My softhearted, weak-willed brother has grown too friendly with the pagans in his time away, and his judgment is therefore compromised. King István’s memory ought to be enough to guide the swing of your blade, not to mention the will of your subjects, your people. The wolf-girl must die.”

The guests purr their approval, and in that moment I hate them so much I can scarcely breathe, more than I ever hated the monstrous Woodsmen. They can see me here, see how pitifully human I am, no less human than they are, and yet they still slaver for my death. I have never wanted more to scream in fury at Gáspár, for all his stupid nobility, his impotent wisdom, his desire to save his people from Nándor. If Nándor is truly the king they yearn for, then he is the king they deserve.

Maybe I am just as much a fool, for wanting to save Keszi. Maybe, even now, I am still eating from the hands that struck me.

King János stares vaguely into the middle distance, eyes glazed. Then he says, “Bring me my sword.”

I lurch to my feet, but Lajos and Ferenc are at my back instantly, axes drawn. It is Nándor who steps down the dais to retrieve the king’s sword, a huge, heavy thing with a pearl-enameled hilt. Its scabbard is carved with an elaborate tracery of leaves and vines that at first I mistake for a coil of a hundred vipers, all of them devouring one another. Thorns snarl around the seal of the king’s great house. Nándor places the blade in his father’s hands.

“Father—” Gáspár starts, rising from his seat. Quick as a whip, Nándor stands, too, one of the king’s forged knives in his grasp. Below the line of the table, where even I can barely see the gleam of it, he presses the blade against the inside of Gáspár’s wrist.

“No true heir of Saint István,” Nándor says softly, “would rise to stop a pagan girl from dying by his holy blade.”

My heart is pounding, bile rising in my throat. I think of running, but my muscles seize as if I’ve been plunged into the frigid water again, ice closing over my head. I think of screaming, but my lips can only part wordlessly, sweat chilled on my brow. I think of reaching for my magic, but I can hardly feel my own hands, and that phantom ache is gone. I think of at least dying like a true wolf-girl, all vicious snarling and mouth-foaming fury, but there are already blades crowding my back.

“I,” the king begins, and then has to stop and exhale shakily, “King János, of House Bárány, blood chieftain of Akosvár, heir to the throne of Saint István and ruler of the kingdom of Régország, hereby sentence you to die.”

I was not half so terrified when the Woodsmen took me, or when Peti was grimacing over me, or when I watched my mother’s cloak vanish into the mouth of the forest. And then something else knifes through the fear, bright as a beam of sunlight. It is nothing more than animal instinct, the rawest, most feral desire to live. The king’s sword hurtles toward me, and I lift my four-fingered hand, black threads noosing around my wrist.

The blade halts against the tip of my finger, carving the tiniest slit, and a single drop of blood blooms from the cut, red as a summer-flushed rose. As the sword hovers there, in that suspended moment, it begins to rust: the steel loses all its luster and turns a dull, grainy shade of amber before flaking away into nothing.

The blunted hilt of the king’s sword clatters to the ground.

“You, wolf-girl,” he whispers. “What are you?”

“You said it yourself. A wolf-girl.”

I stride forward, too quickly for the awestruck Woodsmen to follow, and before either of them can think of killing me, my hand is locked around the king’s wrist. His flesh is dry and papery, scarless. I let my magic push out from under my skin and scrape against his—only a little wound, but enough to make him cry out.

“You wouldn’t,” the king rasps. “My soldiers will strike you dead, even if you do.”

“I may die, eventually,” I reply, “but I will go chasing you out of this world, because I will kill you first.”

King János swallows. He looks like the profile of my coin if it were tossed into the forge again, the planes of his face rippling, his jaw going slack under the melting heat, his brow folding like a rotted fruit. I imagine what it would feel like to let my magic clamber up his throat, blistering all the skin from his body, to see him puddle limp to the ground just like any of the animals he ordered killed.

The king knows that I could kill him. I know that I will die if I do. A scale tips in these realizations, wobbling between our twin desires: we both want to live.

“Perhaps,” the king says, quietly, holding his hand up to stop the Woodsmen lumbering toward me, “neither of us have to die today.”

Nándor makes a strangled noise, though not a word escapes him.

My grip doesn’t slacken. “What will you offer me, to spare your life?”

“Your village’s safety,” the king says. “No soldiers of mine will move against Keszi.”

“Not enough.” My stomach is roiling, sick with this newfound, unchecked power. I am the warden of Keszi’s destiny, now. “I want Zsigmond released, unharmed.”

“Who?”

“Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say. “A Yehuli man that Nándor dragged to trial and falsely imprisoned. You must set him free and promise that no one will try to harm any Yehuli in your city.”

“I have already issued missives forbidding violence against the Yehuli in Király Szek.”

“They’re obviously not good enough,” I snap, flushing angrily. “Not with your own son undermining them.”

The king closes his eyes briefly. His eyelids are thin as onionskin; I can see his pupils rolling beneath them. Then he opens them again. “I will free this Yehuli man, and to the best of my ability protect the Yehuli of this city. But now you must offer something to me. I don’t suppose I can convince you to give up your fingernails.”

“No,” I say, stomach hitching in revulsion. I think of Nándor, his fingers inching closer and closer to the knife. I think of what Gáspár told me, that very first night by the Black Lake. He craves power more than purity, and he wants a way to win the war. I think of my father, soaked to the knee in pig’s blood. I think, for the briefest moment, about Katalin, her face cast blue in the light of her flame. This will prove her right for good. “But you can have my power. My magic.”

Confusion clusters like dark clouds over the king’s brow, and then realization breaks across it bright as day. “You would swear an oath of fealty to the Crown.”

“Yes.” The roar of blood in my ears is so loud I can hardly hear myself speak the word. “My power is yours, as long as you uphold your end of our bargain.”

“I swear by the Prinkepatrios, the one true and almighty God, that as long as you are in my service, no harm will come to Keszi or to the Yehuli man, Zsigmond.” King János’s arm shudders under my grasp. “What is your name, wolf-girl?”

I remember Gáspár asking me the same thing, lake water lapping at our boots. Saying it to the king now feels as if I am handing him something fragile and precious, like my own cut tongue.

“Évike,” I say. “My name is Évike.”

The king dips his head, swallowing my name whole. “Do you, Évike of Keszi, swear to protect the crown of Régország? To be my sword where I have none, and to speak with my voice when I cannot?”

“Yes.” I am surprised by how lightly the vow leaves my lips, like an ember drifting out of a hearth. “I swear it.”

“To make this a true Patritian oath, you must kneel.”

I cast a glance at Lajos, whose gaze is burning holes in my back. “Call off your dogs first.”

“Stand down,” the king tells the Woodsmen.

Very slowly, Lajos lowers his blade. Beside him, Ferenc does the same, but I can hear him mutter something that sounds like a curse, close to treachery.

I relax my grasp on the king’s wrist, Ördög’s threads loosing. His skin is slick and red where I have grasped him, etched with four burn marks the length and breadth of my fingers. Keeping one eye on the king and another on the Woodsmen behind me, I lower myself to the ground.

“Father, this is madness,” comes Nándor’s voice, words slipped through the white grit of his teeth. There are murmurs of agreement from the guests, those who aren’t too slack-jawed to speak.

The king bends to pick up the pearled hilt of his blade, long sleeves pooling on the stone floor. He closes his eyes and another blade shimmers to life, shooting out of the hilt like a tree streaming up toward the sun. I wonder what Virág would think, if she saw it, the loathsome king suffused with pagan magic. I wonder what she would think if she saw me, shoulders bent under his blade. It shouldn’t rattle her at all. If she has taught me anything, it has been how to kneel.

King János lays his sword on each of my shoulders, one after the other. I can scarcely feel the press of it. All I can feel is the steadying of my heartbeat, like a wheel falling into a groove. I was cast out to the Woodsmen, but I have survived. I have come to the capital, but I have not met my mother’s fate. I am alive despite so many wishing me dead, pagan and Patritian alike. I feel as if I have crawled up from some black abyss, eyes flashing and wild as light fills them for the first time. The weight of their loathing lifts from me like a loosed cloak. Here in the capital, their words and their lashes cannot reach me, and I am the one who keeps the wolves from Keszi’s door. Even with my oath tethering me to the king, my life feels more like my own than it ever has before. Mine to spend as I see fit, and mine to lose foolishly, if that’s what I wish.

Gáspár is staring at me with a pale, stricken face, but he no longer gets to care what I do. Nándor pushes out of his seat and stalks from the room, footsteps brisk against the cold stone. When I rise again, I can scarcely hear the Patritians weeping.

Lajos takes me down to the dungeon again, where they are keeping my father.

I retrieve my wolf cloak from my old cell—it’s damp and filthy, the wolf’s teeth blackened, as if by soot—but I don’t put it on. It feels wrong to wear it, after what I’ve done, like a dress or a doll that’s been outgrown. I drape it over my arm, instead, the wolf’s head hanging limp and its eyes particularly glassy. No one stops me as I move in and out of the cells. Lajos doesn’t lift a hand. My oath to the king has armored me, but even better than that, my display of magic has clearly cowed him. I could turn his ax to nothing in my hand. He watches me like a carp at the end of a fisherman’s line, openmouthed, and flinches whenever I make an abrupt move. He looks the way I have always wanted the Woodsmen to look: afraid. Lajos seems nearly old enough to have taken my mother.

My father is in the very last cell, a great distance from my own. Maybe he was there all night, same as I was, the two of us curled like mollusks against the wet, dirty floor, oblivious symmetries of each other. The thought chills and heartens me in equal measure. A bad memory shared between two people carries with it only half the pain. Now my father is drawn up neatly on the far left side of his cell, legs crossed at the ankle, face angled toward the dank ceiling. When Lajos unlatches the door, he doesn’t leap to his feet. He only looks at me oddly and blinks.

Staring at him now, even in the grizzled torchlight, I can see his features better than I did in the courtyard. His eyes are a warm brown, keen and bright, drawing what little light there is and holding it. His nose is proud and almost regal; I think he would make a fine profile for a minted coin, between that and the stubborn triangle of his chin. His lips are thin and terse. His hair is thoroughly grayed, which disappoints me—I wish I could see whether it was the same chestnut hue as my own. Zsigmond seems to chafe under my probing stare, his shoulders rising around his ears.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Suddenly my mouth goes as dry as cotton. I can’t think of how to answer him, so I reach into the pocket of my wolf cloak, fumbling for my coin, and hold it out to him, fingers quivering.

Zsigmond rises to his feet, unsteadily. When he reaches me, he takes the coin with such delicacy that not even the pads of our thumbs touch. I try not to feel deflated by his balking gingerness. He watches me with one eye, and with the other, examines the coin in the scant torchlight.

Finally, he says, “Where did you get this?”

“You gave it to me.” My voice doesn’t have half the certainty I want it to. I wonder if he’ll believe me at all. “Well, you gave it to my mother, and then she gave it to me.”

“Are you Rákhel’s daughter?”

Some name I don’t recognize, a woman I don’t know. My stomach hollows.

“No,” I say, “I’m yours.”

Zsigmond looks at me, long and hard. He is not much taller than I am and I can see one blue vein on his temple throbbing as he stares, reminding me, with a bitter start, of Virág. I chase the thought from my mind. His bushy brows draw together.

“It’s not possible,” he says. “I had a daughter once, true, but . . .”

“She’s not dead,” I whisper. “The Woodsmen came to Magda and they took her, but Virág—she saved me.”

“Virág?”

I blink, baffled that he has caught onto her name, that this is the part of my story he has picked out. “Yes, the seer. She has white hair and twelve fingers.”

When I was twelve or thirteen, I decided I hated him, my faceless father, who had cursed me with his alien bloodline, and I made up some story in my head that he hadn’t tried to stop the Woodsmen, being a Yehuli slave to the king and all. If Virág had been able to press me with more of her superstitions, I might have believed that a trickster god has decided to punish me for my perverse thoughts, and now Zsigmond will only see me as a faceless girl, never his daughter. That sneering sort of justice is seamed through all of Virág’s stories. Even still I feel wretched with guilt, especially when Zsigmond’s face crumples like someone’s used-up handkerchief.

“Évike,” he says. “I remember now. We named you Évike.”

I want him to say something like I told your mother once that I loved that name and all three of its rough sounds, but he doesn’t. He only frowns, his chin quivering.

I should ask him about my mother. I want to know if our memories will mirror each other’s, like the real moon and its reflection on the dark surface of a lake, but I don’t. A more selfish question rises to my lips.

“Why didn’t you come back?”

Zsigmond gives me a level look, but his fingers clench white-knuckled around the coin. “I thought that you were dead. Taken with Magda, or . . .”

He can’t even say it. Hasn’t he turned the words over in his head enough to know how to speak them aloud, hasn’t the scene of my supposed death played on the insides of his eyelids for years and years whenever he lay down to sleep? My throat burns.

“No,” I say. “I’m here.” My gaze flickers to his closed fist. “My mother always said that you minted the coin yourself. Did you?”

“I did,” says Zsigmond. Something almost like relief darts across his face. “My father was a goldsmith and taught me the art. I worked for the king’s treasury council to create a new design for the coins made in János’s image. This coin was an early model, but it was never circulated. They didn’t like that it had Yehuli script, of course, even though I slaved away on the bench for hours. This must be the only one left in existence. The rest were melted down and recast in the mold of the king’s proper arany coin.”

That thread of bitterness in his voice soothes me more than anything else. I am almost willing to forget our mismatched features, the way he hasn’t reached out to embrace me. He speaks with the same indignation that I would, the same acrimony, and with no cowing deference. Katalin was wrong about the Yehuli, I think.

While he speaks, I notice that he rubs his left shoulder, wincing. A purple bruise fingers out from beneath the collar of his shirt, and my heart plummets into my stomach.

“What did Nándor do to you?”

“Nothing worse than what he’s done to others,” Zsigmond answers quickly, though his eyes narrow. “He likes to do his work on Shabbos, or on our other holy days.”

I almost want to laugh at the way he calls what Nándor has done work; it’s so dry and self-effacing, nothing like Virág’s theatric portents, her gloomy augury. I want to imagine that he would shake his head and roll his eyes at her dramatics, just like I always did.

“I hope you didn’t have to do anything too awful to win my freedom,” Zsigmond goes on, meeting my eyes.

“Only swear my fealty to the king,” I say, and offer a weak smile. Katalin would smirk endlessly if she heard me say it, knowing that I proved her right; Virág would glower and raise her lash, dismayed that I have proven her wrong. Zsigmond gives a bracing nod, neither disappointed nor shocked, and then lays a hand hesitantly on my arm.

His touch eats away at some of my oldest fears, narrowing the space between his features and mine. For so long I wanted our imagined resemblance to be the reason that I looked the way I do: short and solidly built, with hair that snarled around the teeth of Virág’s bone-handled comb, with small squinting eyes that watered in any weather, and a nose that always itched. I was embarrassed by the low sway of my breasts, the breadth of my shoulders. I wanted to throw my father up against their ugly words, his existence and our shared blood a justification, a shield. Now none of it matters anyway. I am miles from Keszi, and my father’s hand is braced around my elbow.

Silence begins to slip between us. Zsigmond lets go of my arm. Desperate to fill the silence, to hold him here, I ask, “What does the coin say?”

Zsigmond furrows his brow. “You don’t know how to read?”

He says it casually, curiously, and I can tell he doesn’t mean it to hurt me, but it does anyway, because it is proof that he doesn’t know me well enough to know what I do or do not know. What will hurt me and what won’t. I swallow hard and try not to reveal that it has wounded me at all.

“No,” I tell him, shaking my head. “No one in Keszi can read.”

“Not even Régyar, or Old Régyar?”

I shake my head once more.

“Well,” he says after a moment, “Király Szek will not be an easy place for you.”

I haven’t allowed myself to think that far, so preoccupied with my sudden freedom that I hadn’t yet imagined its consequences. Suddenly I can see my life stretching out before me like a road in the dark, limned with thousands of black trees and between them, so many seething yellow eyes. Király Szek is full of monsters, too, and they all look like men. I won’t be able to recognize them until their hands are at my throat.

“The Yehuli symbols . . .” I start.

“Yes, it’s in our alphabet,” he says, rescuing me from my incoherence. His eyes are gentle, his voice low, and I allow myself to believe in that moment that by our he only means the two of us, here in the dungeon, together. He turns the coin over to where the Yehuli letters show: three of them. “This is the word for truth, emet. What a thing is, the existence of it. And this”—he presses the coin into my palm, and then puts his thumb over one of the letters, obscuring it—“is met. Dead.”

The letters vanish, as if with his finger he erased them, and then the coin does, too—fading to silver and then rusting into nothing. Just like the blade of the king’s sword, becoming dust in my hand. I look up at him, palm now empty, gaping.

“How did you do that?”

“When something is no longer true, it is no longer real,” Zsigmond says. “When we write something in our letters, it’s a way of making it true, and therefore making it real. When we erase it—well, you saw what happened. If you learned our letters, you could do it too.”

Virág, I think, would call it magic. Gáspár and the Patritians would call it power. I close my fingers over my empty palm, no longer feeling the coin’s absence. There’s only the phantom feeling of Zsigmond’s hand on my arm, its steadying pressure. The memory of his coin and the king’s sword, both splintering—our abilities twinned, if not our faces. Hope fills me soundly, like something bright beaming at the end of a dark road, washing all the shadows.

“If I knocked on your door,” I ask slowly, “would you answer?”

Zsigmond meets my gaze. The purple bruise throbs on his shoulder, and my wolf cloak suddenly feels heavy draped over my arm, but in that moment all I can see is him nodding at me, him saying, “Yes.”