Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

After Lajos escorts my father from the castle, he takes me to one of the small rooms inside the Broken Tower, that long white scar furrowing the charcoal sky. The Broken Tower is the oldest part of the castle, the stones blanched by a hundred years or more of harsh weather, and once it was the fortress of Saint István’s grandfather, the chieftain of Akosvár. Old blood is dried into the floor—I can smell the memory of slain cattle and livers curdling on altars. The Patritians do no such rituals now, of course, but the Broken Tower has been left to crumble under the weight of its shameful, silent archive. The stones in the walls are loose behind the headboard of the bed; I prod one and it clatters to the ground. There’s a cold hearth in one corner, and a single window, the glass marbled with rainwater.

“Am I trapped here?” I ask with a hollow laugh. “Am I allowed to leave?”

“Of course,” Lajos says brusquely, not answering my question at all, and then he lets the door slam shut behind him.

What would be the point of locking me away? The king wants me to serve him. He has enough mute and toothless wolf-girls, fettered by their deaths, watching him narrow-eyed from the Under-World.

I sleep only in short bursts, the night seamed through with dreams. Purple and green miasmas, the chuff of smoke and the jangle of bone chimes. I dream of the turul in a golden cage, its feathers shorn, my arrow lanced into its naked breast. I dream of pine trees in the snow. Gáspár’s face, his lashes daggered with frost, his chest bare under my hands. When I wake, it’s to the clanging of my own heart, and a honeycomb of light on my cheek. The window glass is yellow and bright.

There’s a ringing in my ears, like someone has been striking an anvil inside my skull. With a shake of my head I banish the dreams, but Gáspár’s face lingers a moment longer, conjuring a jolt of want between my legs. I stoke the hearth, fists clenched, and when I manage to catch a spark I sit back on my heels, letting out a breath.

I have survived the worst things I thought possible: being taken by the Woodsmen, cowering in front of the king. Now I must make some shape out of the unimaginable after, measure my new life by its margins and limits. I retrieve Katalin’s wolf cloak, my mother’s braid still tucked safely in the pocket, and stow it inside the trunk at the foot of my bed. Gáspár’s scolding has left its mark on me—I won’t invite more danger by wearing the cloak within Király Szek.

Sometime during the night, a serving girl must have come and left new clothes for me. A simple dress of plum silk, stiflingly tight in the arms and the bust, with sleeves that pool open like two wailing mouths. I make my own adjustments, tearing off the excess fabric with my teeth, and splitting a seam inside the bodice so I can breathe easily while wearing it. As I dress, I imagine Katalin’s delicate sneer, the mocking gleam of her lambent blue eyes. She’s no proper táltos yet, but her prophecy came true all the same: I look every inch a Patritian, a moon-faced servant to the king. I look no fiercer than Riika. I search for my father’s coin, to steel myself, but then I remember that it’s gone, turned to dust by my father’s Yehuli magic. Thinking of Zsigmond soothes me by some small measure anyway.

Before my chagrin settles on me, the door to my room swings open. I am caught between exhilaration and fear, half hoping it’s Gáspár and then chiding myself for such a silly desire, when more likely it’s an assassin or a murderous Woodsman, ready to mutiny over the king’s recent bargain. As it turns out, it’s something worse than either one. Nándor stands in the threshold, wearing a pale-blue dolman and an exceedingly pleasant smile.

“Wolf-girl,” he says. “Will you come with me?”

His tone is cool and polite, his expression open, his eyes glassy and bright. For a beat, I imagine he could be any man, with no ice in his heart and none of my father’s blood on his hands. He’s so lovely I can almost believe it. But Katalin is beautiful, too, and so is the frozen lake before it fissures under you.

“Don’t you knock?” I ask, curling my four fingers into my palm.

“Does a farmer knock on the barn door?” Nándor tips his head. His voice is so light, I hardly register the insult and when I do, my face heats. “Of course not. Now come with me.”

“Why should I?” I bite back. “So you can torture me like you did Zsigmond?”

“I haven’t tortured anyone. The Yehuli man was guilty. I punished him accordingly.”

“Not guilty by the king’s laws.”

“Guilty by the law of God,” Nándor says. “Without the Prinkepatrios, we would have no kingdom at all, and no earth to walk on, for that matter. The least we can do is abide by His proscriptions.”

It was easy enough to laugh off Gáspár’s pious ramblings when it was only the two of us in the woods, and even easier once I knew the feeling of his body against mine, the sweet taste of his mouth. Now, in the heart of the capital, pressed flush by all these Patritians, his words flood me with cold.

“You can’t hurt me,” I say. “I’m under your father’s protection.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Nándor says. His lip quirks, carving its crooked dimple. “You look as sweet and pretty as any Patritian girl now. I only wished to give you my favorite view of our glorious capital.”

I try to imagine what Nándor’s favorite view could be: Perhaps the place where Saint István nailed his hearts and livers to the gate? The place where he slaughtered the pig before my father? I think of Zsigmond’s boots trampling all that stinking flesh, tangling in the entrails, and draw in a harsh breath.

“I have no interest in anything that interests you,” I tell him.

“But you are interested in protecting the king,” Nándor says keenly. “You swore as much when you made your oath. You could never hope to succeed in your goal if you don’t understand life here in the capital.”

He is most certainly trying to trick me, but he’s also right. I feel like his gaze has swept right through me, swift and clean as a scythe. He has none of Gáspár’s stiff courtly rhetoric, his prince’s dour oration. He sounds more like Katalin, forever devising new ways to beautify her cruelties, to code them for my ears alone, slipping her insults right under Virág’s nose. And, like Katalin, he shows no sign of relenting.

“Fine,” I say. “Whatever awful thing you want me to see, it can’t be worse than what you’ve done to Zsigmond already.”

Nándor beams. A knot of fear and revulsion makes my lip curl as I trail him through the castle’s winding halls, narrow and viperous, until they bear us out into the courtyard. All traces of his demonstration have been erased, buried as if under a layer of clean snow. There’s no blood soaked into the cobblestones, no vapor of rot lingering in the air. All I can think of is the frozen lake, sealing itself so neatly over my head. Nándor leads me farther down the courtyard, his neck as lithe and pale as a swan’s under the feather of his auburn hair.

Finally, he stops. Following the line of the castle is a row of marble statues, surveying the courtyard like cold sentinels. If I caught them out of the corner of my eye, I might really have believed they were human soldiers after all. They are etched in remarkable detail, as if drawn up out of the earth by Isten himself.

“This is Saint István,” Nándor says, gesturing toward the largest. “The first true king of Régország. He united the three tribes and banished paganism to the furthest reaches of the country.”

Saint István’s statue has been carved from marble of purest alabaster. His long cape tumbles to the ground behind him, the folds draping and crinkling like water, frozen in a moment of cold, immaculate suspension. The sword he holds in his hand is real—a simple thing, only a bronze hilt and a silver blade, speckled with rust. It must be King István’s actual sword, or else they would have replaced it with something shining and new.

The old king is holding something else in his left hand, its shape distorted and bulging around his curled fingers. It takes me a moment to recognize that it’s a human heart.

“The heart of the chieftain of the Wolf Tribe,” Nándor says. “He had them dismembered, and their body parts nailed to the gates of the fortress in his newly united city.”

I almost want to laugh at such an artless attempt to frighten me. “I know the story. Every boy or girl in Keszi hears it first at their mother’s breast. You can’t think you can spook me with tales of hundred-year-old atrocities. A wet nurse could tell me worse.”

Nándor doesn’t rise to my challenge, but his eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly, like night edging up onto the horizon. The next statue is carved of darker marble, but it grasps and holds the early-morning sunlight, making the king’s cheekbones gleam like twin knives. This man has no sword, but in his outstretched hand he grasps an iron pendant, identical to the one Gáspár wears, engraved with the Woodsmen’s seal.

“Bárány Tódor,” Nándor says. “Conqueror of Kaleva, he founded the Holy Order of Woodsmen. But you’re quite familiar with the Woodsmen already, aren’t you?”

I sense a hidden jest in his voice, something that means to carve a deeper wound. My stomach quivers with uncertain trepidation. Nándor’s face was so close to the bruise on Gáspár’s throat. His hand was on my lips. I wonder if he has managed to trace a line between the two, and what he will do with that realization, if he has. Nándor watches me expectantly, as though he can see me turning the idea over in my mind.

I decide not to give him the satisfaction of a reply. Instead I stare at Tódor’s statue, studying the way his ivory fingers hold the pendant like a hawk’s talon clutched around its unfortunate prey. The carved outline of the turul is hardly visible, obscured by Tódor’s marble thumb.

“He was made a saint too,” Nándor goes on, eyes still narrowed. “In every way, he was his father’s son.”

This time I cannot resist a jape of my own. “Was he a true-born son?”

The lovely pink color drains from Nándor’s face, and it’s his turn to say nothing. For a moment I worry that I have damned myself further, but I don’t think there is much I could do to make Nándor loathe me more. He wanted me dead when I was mute and lowing under his father’s blade, and he still wants me dead now, when I am snarling back at him and showing all my teeth.

He stares at me blackly for a moment, and then moves on without a word.

The next statue is of Tódor’s eldest son, Géza the Gray. Géza’s statue depicts him as an old man, small and stooped, leaning heavily on a cane and half swallowed by his dark robes. But this one is all wrong—Géza was never an old man. He lived only to early middle age before succumbing to the same fever that later killed his son’s Merzani bride, Gáspár’s mother. Virág told us the stories of Régország’s kings with great reluctance, each word a bitter warning.

“Géza was a weak king,” Nándor says quietly. “He forgot the divine mission of his father and grandfather. He let the country make peace with its heathen enemies, and even arranged the marriage of his son to a Merzani apostate. It is a blessing that he died before doing more damage than he did.”

Géza’s statue is a murky gray, precisely the same color of the clouds when they bunch and gather before a storm. The void of his sainthood seems obvious, somehow, like the pall of a sunless day. “If Géza was such a terrible ruler, why mount his statue here, beside your precious heroes?”

“Because it serves as a reminder,” says Nándor, “of what we must not let our nation become. You were there at Saint István’s feast, wolf-girl. Surely you can see that the people of Király Szek want to live in a Patritian kingdom, just like our neighbors east and west.”

“If only the whole kingdom were comprised of just your admirers,” I say.

Nándor’s smile returns, with a sharper edge this time. “There was no kingdom of Régország before the Patrifaith, wolf-girl. You understand that, don’t you? There was only a loose handful of tribes hacking each other to death on the Little Plain, scarcely able to even understand the accents of their enemies. If you and your pagan brothers and sisters even dare to call yourselves Régyar, you must acquiesce to that point, or else you ought to scrub our language out of your mouths and go back to garbling the old tongues of your blood chieftains.”

His argument is laced through with conceits that I hardly understand, words that almost make me feel like a stranger to this language after all. It reminds me that he’s spent years learning at the knee of royal tutors, and I am a wolf-girl from a flyspeck of a village who can’t even spell her own name. A coil of shame rises in my throat. I fight back with the only weapon I have.

“Your mother is a Northerner,” I say, remembering Szabín’s story. “Régyar words must curdle in her Kalevan accent. If I’m a foreigner in this land, then you are half a foreigner as well.”

I expect him to balk, to give me another baleful stare, but Nándor hardly blinks. His smile deepens. It is the smile of an assured victory.

“You think that this is a problem of blood, wolf-girl?” He lifts a brow. “Saint István was born a pagan, as you well know. Some of my compatriots wish to forget that fact, but I see no reason to efface the truth. It was his choice to relinquish the false gods that matters, in the end. And you pagans, the Juvvi, the Yehuli—they all have been given so many chances to do the same.”

I bite my lip on a derisive laugh. “I saw what you did to Zsigmond. You wouldn’t welcome a Yehuli with open arms even if he swore his undying devotion to the Prinkepatrios.”

It is the same logic I have been made to swallow my whole life, the same way Boróka tried to wheedle me into keeping my head down and my eyes trained on the ground, into evading Katalin’s stare and mumbling my soft-bellied deference. But I had tried kindness. I had tried sheathing my claws. It only made it easier for her to strike me down again.

“Certainly I would,” says Nándor, “if his soul was truly repentant. I would even welcome you with open arms, wolf-girl—you look almost like a true Patritian already. If you stay in this city long enough, perhaps I can get you on your knees.”

His casual remark blinkers me for a moment, like a trick of light. Nándor is beautiful enough that I think even Katalin would go dry-mouthed at the veiled proposal. I, too, might have been tempted by his entreaty if I hadn’t just watched him drench my father in pig’s blood, if all the words bracketing his guileful suggestion weren’t so ugly. I wonder how many girls in Király Szek have fallen to their knees in front of him, babbling in reverence, pleasuring him with their promises. I will not allow myself to think of it further, and banish all the lurid fantasies from my mind. Nándor’s smile is all too innocent, both of us keenly aware of the flush painting my cheeks.

Now desperate to change the subject, I turn to the final statue. It is hewn roughly in the shape of a man, but his face is featureless, his robes carved only in the vaguest lines. “Is this meant to be King János?”

“Yes,” Nándor says, sounding supremely pleased with himself, and certainly noting the tremor in my voice. “His legacy is yet to be written. The statue will only be completed after he dies, when we can judge properly what sort of kingdom he has left behind. Surely you can see as well that the people of Régország want a king who will move their country further toward its Patritian ideal, rather than mingling with pagans and Yehuli, and suffusing himself with pagan magic.”

His words are close to treasonous. I try to remember them very precisely, and their exact cadence, so I can tell János when I see him, but the plan dies before I even finish making it. I think of the king’s rheumy eyes, trained vaguely in the middle distance. He won’t see his son’s sedition until Nándor’s knife is in his throat.

For now, the threat is only for my ears. I clench and unclench my fingers, considering the same dismal possibilities. I could grasp his wrist and see what my magic would do to him, but Gáspár is right—I would never leave Király Szek alive, and Nándor’s followers would find a way to avenge him, likely fixing their gaze upon Yehuli Street. A wind picks up, raising gooseflesh on my bare forearms. Standing perfectly still in the wash of cold sunlight, Nándor looks half like a statue himself, carved by the hand of some lonely, salacious woman, a marble cast of her most torrid fantasies. I blink, and for a moment I can see him as Vilmötten after all, golden-haired and sapphire-eyed, with long fingers made for plucking lute strings. I imagine he could sing his way out of the Under-World too.

I blink again, and the illusion fractures like glass. Nándor is no more my hero than Saint István.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Nándor wanders back across the courtyard, toward his great-great-grandfather’s statue, and lets his fingertips drift across the dead king’s holy cheekbone.

“They’re more than just statues,” Nándor says, turning to me. “A piece of the stone has been hollowed out, and the remains of our kings are kept inside. We have King Géza’s finger bones, and a lock of King Tódor’s hair. We even have King István’s right eye. The blessing of the Prinkepatrios keeps them from decaying, and our prayers are channeled through these vessels, their power multiplied a thousandfold.”

I don’t know how he can believe such a thing—that there’s power in the hair and bones of some long-dead saints. But King János has proven that magic thrums in the veins of every wolf-girl, diffused down to even her fingernails. Perhaps their saints are no different, though Nándor is the first to call it power.

“You ought to make a crown out of your old kings’ fingernails,” I say, “since you Patritians are so keen on worshipping dead things.”

Nándor gives an airy laugh that makes my stomach turn. “You must accustom yourself to worshipping them, too, now that you’ve knelt for my father.”

“I’d sooner swallow your dead saint’s knucklebone,” I say, giving a laugh of my own, but really I am thinking of Peti. I am thinking of királyésszentség, the words stitching themselves into the fabric of mind. The memory of Zsigmond’s magic surges up in reply, as if hastily summoned. What would happen if I learned to write those words on parchment, and then blotted them out with my thumb? Would that erase the truth of them too?

“How very ferocious of you,” Nándor says loftily. His eyes, in this moment, are perfect mirrors of Katalin’s: gleaming, gloating. “You may be oath-bound to my father, but I’d caution you against forgetting what you are. A pagan girl, a long way from home, alone in a city of Patritian peasants and soldiers, with Woodsmen around every corner and down every long hall at night. The Patrifaith has lived here long before you, and it will live here long after. You are nothing, wolf-girl, scarcely even worth the mess of killing.”

He wants to frighten me, but he doesn’t know that I’ve spent all my life under threat of cold blue fire.

“I don’t believe you,” I say, meeting his gaze. “You say that I’m nothing, but you’ve already gone to the effort of trying to make me fear for my life. Did the Érsek put these words in your mouth, too, or did you contrive them all on your own? Either way, you could have left me to my own quiet demise, to flounder and fail, but you’ve chosen to try and terrify me instead, the way you tortured my father—”

I stop abruptly, my chest seizing. I have made a terrible mistake. Confusion clouds over Nándor’s face, and then clears with triumphant revelation.

“Your father,” he echoes, clucking his tongue. “I did wonder why you seemed to care so much about the fate of that Yehuli man.”

It is the closest I have come to killing him, the possibility so clear and bright in my mind, like staring wide-eyed at a cloudless sun. I know I’ll only damn the Yehuli, and Zsigmond, further if I do, but I can scarcely believe the stupid looseness of my tongue. I have handed Nándor a polished, whetted blade. Ördög’s threads twitch, my fingers aching to wrap themselves around his delicate wrist. I know he can see the stricken look on my face, the way I have stilled like a prey animal.

Before I can reply, the sound of wood meeting metal reverberates through the courtyard. I hurry toward the noise, Nándor at my heels, and we turn around the barbican into another, smaller courtyard, closed on three sides by the castle walls. Archery targets are so stuck full of arrows, they look like wounded martyrs. Gáspár stands in the center of the square, clutching a wooden sword. His younger half-brother, the one with beechwood hair, holds his own play sword loosely in one hand.

“Use your right hand, Matyi,” Gáspár says. “And lead with your right foot.”

The boy switches his sword to the other hand, brow furrowing. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I think it will be quite a long time before you’re capable of that,” Gáspár says. An easy smile comes across his face, cheek feathering with a small dimple. The gentleness of it roots me to the ground, my stomach turning over on itself. I left any trace of that gentleness on the ice, back in Kaleva, or in the woods of Szarvasvár girded by a copse of willow trees. A pulse of anger returns in its place: Gáspár was ready to watch me die.

But I have survived, and now when Gáspár sees me, his smile vanishes as if it’s been swept away by the wind. His eye runs up and down me, taking in my dress with its torn sleeves and too-tight bodice. I wonder if he will react to the visceral wrongness of it, the way I would shudder at seeing him in a wolf cloak, but he only goes red and turns his face away, and I try to convince myself that I am better off without him and his flustered, prayerful blushing. If my bruise still lingers on his throat, I can’t see it—he has buttoned his dolman all the way up to his chin.

Matyi is staring openly at me, mouth slightly ajar. When he catches me looking back, he inches closer to Gáspár and whispers, “The wolf-girl is watching.”

“I know,” Gáspár says, and then adds quickly, “Her name is Évike. She’s no danger to you.”

I resist the urge to bare my teeth and snarl, just because I want to prove him wrong. I’ve grown so weary of meager Patritian kindnesses with their ugly underbellies, like a gleaming handful of holly berries: they look sweet, but it will kill you to swallow them. If I am no danger to Matyi, it’s because I am a good wolf-girl, unlike the rest, or I am not a wolf-girl at all, and therefore nothing: just a ghost of a girl in a too-small silk gown.

Nándor strides toward them, an exuberant smile on his face. “Are you teaching Matyi the ways of the sword? Surely there’s a better tutor in all of Király Szek.”

Gáspár’s hand goes tense around his sword, creasing the black leather of his gloves. “I can teach a young boy with no prior training.”

“Do you really think you’re better with one eye than most men are with two?”

Even though I haven’t forgiven Gáspár, my throat still burns for him.

“I don’t know,” Gáspár says. I am surprised at the lightness in his voice, the almost playful quirk of his brow. “Why don’t we find out?”

And then he tosses his sword to Nándor, who catches it one-handed, arm arcing up over his head. He looks expectantly at Matyi, and the boy passes his sword over, face contorting with a bewildered, weary concern that seems better suited to someone three times his age. It’s hardly a surprise that Gáspár would best love a brother with the same scowling, humorless temper.

“Well, brother,” Nándor says, blinking giddily, “I am not most men.”

Their blades meet with a sound that reminds me of ice cracking under my feet. Nándor lunges forward, his sword wheeling wildly, as if he’s hoping to get in a jab on chance alone. Gáspár falls back, blocking each blow as they come, steady. All his clumsiness with the ax seems hazy and distant, and my face heats remembering the way that I mocked him for it. He fights like a real soldier now, steel-boned and iron-blooded, only leaning heavily to the right, his head turning back and forth to cover his blind side.

Nándor retreats, the sword whirling blindly at his hip. He leads with his right foot and leaps out again, aiming his blow at Gáspár’s left, where he struggles to see. Gáspár would call it a dirty trick, the low tactic of a man without honor. But I suspect Nándor would not think his honor imperiled by something as trivial as a play fight with a blunted practice sword.

Especially not if he won. Matyi has come to stand beside me, a safe distance from the scything of his brothers’ blades. His gaze travels anxiously between the fight and me, as if he’s trying to gauge which is the greater danger.

“You should take your brother at his word,” I say, trying to smooth the rough edges of my voice, trying to wring some kindness out of me, some deep-buried instinct for mothering. But when I look at Matyi I can’t see anything but a boy who will grow into a man, or worse, a Woodsman. “It’s your father who hurts wolf-girls, not the other way around.”

“Gáspár says you would have killed him.” Matyi regards me soberly.

It feels churlish and silly to argue with a child, but anger blackens in me anyway. “Your father would have killed me. And then Nándor would have taken his crown, and—”

“No,” Matyi cuts in, with a rigid certainty that makes him sound very much like Gáspár indeed. “That’s the pagan way, to have a king choose his successor, the way the tribal chieftains chose which son they wanted to rule when they were dead. I have a tutor from the Volkstadt who told me so. In all the other Patritian kingdoms, it’s the eldest son, the true-born son, who must rule by the law of God.”

My eyes dart back toward Nándor and Gáspár, the air gashed by their blades. I understand now why Nándor recoiled at once when he saw Gáspár in the crowd, why his presence alone seemed to make Nándor falter in his plans.

“So he’s a hypocrite,” I say, pleased by my own conclusion. “If he wants to claim the throne, he’ll have to acknowledge that there’s something right about our pagan ways, and wrong about his Patritian ones.”

Matyi lifts a shoulder, taking a slight step to the left. Perhaps my enthusiasm has made me seem more frightening, my smile showing the edges of my teeth.

“Some people say that my father’s marriage was never legitimate,” Matyi mumbles, cowed by my smirk. “Because Elif Hatun never made her proper conversion.”

“Gáspár’s mother?”

He nods.

I think of what Gáspár told me about his mother, a crumbling pillar in her palace quarters, eroded day after day by the tide of a thousand foreign tongues. Had she held on to her faith in mute stubbornness? Or had the Régyar words tumbled right out of her when she tried to take her vows, like a mouthful of rotted teeth? I wonder if that’s what has cursed Gáspár more than anything: the legacy of his mother’s quiet rebellion.

The rasping of wood goes silent for a moment, and I turn my gaze back toward their fight. Their swords are pressed together, faces close as they push and push, each trying to make the other crumble. It is Gáspár, finally, who falters. He lets Nándor’s blade slide off his, and though he steps backward, clearly yielding, his brother doesn’t hesitate. He strikes a blow to Gáspár’s blind left side that sends him stumbling back across the courtyard. Nándor’s sword waves like a war banner.

“A well-fought battle,” Nándor says, letting his blade clatter to the ground. His auburn hair is exquisitely tousled, as if the wind took to it with gentle fingers. “But I can hardly feign surprise at the outcome. Monsters are one thing, Gáspár, but men are a far greater challenge. You’ll need both eyes to fight your mortal enemies and win.”

“You’ve made your point,” Gáspár says sharply. Under his black dolman, his chest is heaving, and I feel a traitorous tug of affection. “At least Matyi saw a demonstration of proper swordsmanship.”

At the sound of his name, Matyi dashes toward his brothers, casting me one last, glowering look of deep mistrust. I watch the three of them in tense silence, the wind carrying the smell of ash from someone’s hearth and hot paprika from the marketplace, wondering if it’s possible that no one else saw what I did: that Gáspár let his brother win.

It’s late by the time I finally return to my room, the sky as glossy as black silk. I have endured a dinner with the king, a small feast, during which he hosted two emissaries from the Volkstadt, both wearing brilliantly colored satins with ruffled collars that looked like the plumages of exotic birds. The king tried desperately to ply them with wine and food and flattery, while they appeared mostly bored for the duration of it, and spoke brazenly to one another in their own language. The Volken tongue sounded lyrical by turns, as if they were reciting riddles and rhymes, and then became abruptly harsh, too strange and guttural to imitate. But by the end they still offered the king a thousand men each to help fight the Merzani invaders, and the king smiled and smiled even though he had a red-currant seed stuck in his teeth. Nándor looked disappointed by the outcome, and I couldn’t see why. Perhaps he had hoped for more men, or for a better deal that didn’t see us losing gold and silver, because the king had then quickly agreed to lease them some of the mines in Szarvasvár, which is on the border with the Volkstadt anyway.

My mind wandered, and I stole far too many glances at Gáspár, trying vainly to draw his gaze toward me. Our weeks together taught me to read his scowls and frowns, how to tell real anger from flushing pretense, how to coax gentleness from him as if with a needle, his smiles as rare and precious as blood drops. Now his expressions are more indecipherable to me than the words of the Volken men preening at my elbow. But Gáspár scarcely even looked up from his plate, lips purpling with the stain of wine.

When the Volken men pulled out a contract for the king to sign, I glanced over at it, but it was only ink splashed on a page. The king might have been signing the whole country into bondage or selling me off to the Volken emissaries, and I wouldn’t have known until they were fitting me with chains.

And then, after all of that, I find a note tucked under my door.

It’s a short message, and the ink is wet, fresh. It blackens the pad of my thumb when I unfold it. I can’t even read who has signed it, if anyone at all. My mind tries desperately to constellate the loops and lines, but staring at it makes me want to cry like a child.

It must be Nándor, I decide. His earlier warning in the courtyard hadn’t stuck, and he wanted to intimidate me further, or perhaps only punish me for daring to hold my ground against him, for smiling blithely at his barbed words. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes and then fall onto the page in hot splashes, thinning the black ink to a rheumy gray.

I will die here, I think, just like Elif Hatun, deaf to the threats whispered in her ear. Something in me hardens at the thought, all my fear and humiliation congealing into blustery courage. I crumple the note in my fist and hurry down the halls, through the barbican, and out toward Yehuli Street.