Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

After the first time I spend five straight nights at Zsigmond’s house, tracing letters. It doesn’t seem quite right, to call what I am doing writing, not yet. I can only copy what I see on Zsigmond’s parchments; I can’t conjure any words of my own. Zsigmond watches me over the top of his book, until I am yawning with every other breath and my vision is too glazed to read anything, and then he puts me to sleep in his bed, covering me with a quilt that smells of candle wax and ink and old paper, that smells like him. When pink dawn light filters through the window and lands gridded on my bleary face, I know it is time to return to the castle, to sit dull-eyed at the king’s side like some exceptionally devoted guard dog. Council meetings and banquets and church visits wend past me in an oblivious litany. All day I can think of nothing except returning to Zsigmond that night.

He tells me stories of my mother, only the good ones, when she was rosy-cheeked and alive, still swollen with the distant dream of me. I tell him about Virág and her theatrically grim predictions, careful never to mention anything about lashings, trying to wring the small bits of humor out of a mostly humorless life. Zsigmond is particularly good at that; he has none of Virág’s self-pitying gloom. Even when he speaks of his abuse at Nándor’s hands, he makes me laugh at his depiction of the Woodsmen as sheep newly shorn, embarrassed of their nascent nudity, bleating after their prettier, fluffier master. It is only then that I feel brave enough to recall Count Reményi’s words.

“During the council meeting,” I start, my voice low and uncertain, “there was one count, the count of Akosvár, who said that there was a place for Yehuli where they could have towns and villages of their own. A strip of land in Rodinya that has been set aside for them. He said the other countries in the west are already sending their Yehuli there.”

The lambent humor drains from Zsigmond’s eyes. “They call it the Stake. It is cobbled from the worst bits of land in the Rodinyan empire, scraggly and cold, where not much good can grow. The Yehuli there live in their own towns and villages, it’s true, but there are laws forbidding them from owning land and selling wares, from working on certain days, from sending their children to school. And then Patritians come from the nearby cities, to burn Yehuli houses, to kill. They don’t spare even the women and children.”

A lump rises hard and hot in my throat. “But doesn’t all that happen here? Nándor had you arrested and tortured for working on a Patritian holy day, and now he threatens to visit violence upon the Yehuli . . .”

“My family,” Zsigmond starts, and then clears his throat, amending himself, “our family has lived in Király Szek for six generations. We have served kings and counts. We have done everything from goldsmithing to street sweeping. We watched the city gates fall to King István’s enemies and then be built back up again; we saw his coronation and murmured about it in Old Régyar with the rest of them. This is our home, as much as Keszi is yours.”

“But it’s not my home,” I say, feeling my stomach turn and roil. “Not anymore. They cast me out to die.”

Zsigmond draws a breath. I can tell he regrets his words, but he doesn’t have time to apologize for them before there’s a knock on the door. It’s Batya, hefting two enormously full wicker baskets and a skein of pale silk draped over her arm.

My lips pucker when I see her, like I have bitten into a citrus fruit. By now I have learned enough of the Yehuli tongue to know that the first time we met, she called me chubby.

“Well, I did tell you to invite her, didn’t I?” Batya thrusts the silk at me; as it folds open onto the table, I see that it’s a dress. “And here is your food, as if I don’t cook enough for you all the other days of the year.”

Blinking, I touch the sleeve of the dress, unsure what to say. Zsigmond relieves Batya of the baskets, which are laden with more loaves of sweet bread and sacks of hard biscuits, poppy-speckled.

“Thank you,” he says, kissing her cheek as his own face turns faintly pink. “Have your daughters and their husbands all gone to the temple already?”

“Yes,” she says. “I told them I would make sure you’ve gotten out of bed and dressed yourself, and you did ask me to bring your daughter something to wear.”

“What are the gifts for?” I ask.

Zsigmond opens his mouth, but Batya speaks first. “We’re supposed to give two portions of food to our friends on the holiday, and at least two portions to someone who needs something to fill their bellies. We used to go around to the poorer streets in Király Szek and bring them bread, but they weren’t happy to take charity from Yehuli, and then the king forbid it anyway. Zsigmond, haven’t you told your daughter anything at all? You’re teaching her to read—why don’t you teach her to read the holy book? She looks as baffled as a newborn fawn.”

It’s a kinder characterization than I expected, and for all her gruffness, Batya doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about inviting me to the temple. I feel a pinprick of guilt for comparing her to Virág.

“Aren’t you afraid?” The question bubbles out of me, almost unbidden. “Nándor wants you gone, the counts want you gone . . . don’t you think it’s dangerous, to celebrate anything?”

I wonder if Batya will find my words impolite; if she were really anything like Virág, I might have been struck or scolded. But Batya only laughs.

“If we only celebrated on the days when there was no danger, we’d never have occasion to celebrate at all,” she says. “Come on now, Zsigmond, and bring your daughter. I think she would like to hear this story.”

The temple is nothing like I expect either. In the Yehuli tongue, Zsigmond tells me, it is called a shul. After seeing the gray-washed houses of Yehuli Street, I anticipated a small building, made of wood or crumbling stone, room enough for only a huddle of standing worshippers. But the temple is larger than even the king’s chapel, with its crags and moss and trickling water, and perhaps even grander. The domed ceiling is painted a bright clear blue, like the sky’s broad cheek, freckled with stars. There are rows and rows of polished wooden benches, leading to an altar of carved marble, but there’s no naked statue there—only a lectern with a book lying open upon it. A dozen chandeliers wheel with gauzy candlelight. Volutes of gold clamber up tall ivory pillars, shooting toward the ceiling like hearty, ancient oaks. Even crowded with bodies the temple seems so vast I know that my voice would echo all the way to the lectern, if I were brave enough to speak.

The dress Batya lent me fits surprisingly well, with enough room in the bodice. It buttons all the way to my throat, which is as chaste as I have likely ever been. Most of the other women my age have covered their hair with kerchiefs, which befuddles me until I see them sit down beside their dour husbands, pulling their wriggling children into their laps. A pang of awful loneliness lances through me, and I wonder if Zsigmond aches with it too. Or if he has inured himself to it after so many years, well accustomed to sitting alone in a sea of families. He leads me toward the bench where Batya sits, her three black-haired daughters beside her like ravens on a perch.

The youngest one glares at me sharp-eyed. “Mama, she’s wearing my dress.”

“Enough, Jozefa,” Batya snaps. “You can consider it your act of charity.”

Jozefa scowls at her mother, but when she turns to me again, there is only a look of curiosity on her face, pink lips bowing. “Are you Zsigmond’s daughter?”

I nod mutely.

“You must have converted then, haven’t you? You aren’t wed.” Her gaze skims me up and down, like a merchant examining a porcelain vase for its cracks. “You look older than I am. If you want to be wed—”

“Jozefa.” Batya’s voice cuts between us. “The rabbi is going to start.”

Jozefa’s lips go taut, and she faces back toward the lectern. My cheeks are hot, but it’s a small flustering. There’s no shame pooling in my belly. I’ve long since learned to tell which questions are meant only to probe and which are meant to wound. Jozefa’s are dull, toothless—Katalin would have scoffed at such mundane impudence. I imagine she might have asked them of any Yehuli girl who was unwed at five and twenty, and the thought fills me with a tight, blooming hope, something like a coin clutched in a closed fist.

I expect the rabbi to be someone like the Érsek, but he is younger, with a dense beard that coils profusely, black as wet bramble. There are two candles on the lectern, and when he traces something into their stands, the wicks both blossom into flame. It makes my breath catch, the same as when Zsigmond did it.

He begins to speak, and I am deeply relieved to hear Régyar and not Yehuli. My skin prickles with the memory of Count Reményi’s words, how easily he imagined the Yehuli could give up their homes and their histories in Régország, how I had even briefly entertained the same fantasy. Now it seems impossible to imagine: Régyar words spill from the rabbi’s mouth as easily as water from a mountain spring. The story he tells is familiar, names and places lighting up in my mind like signal fires. There is the orphaned Yehuli girl, Esther, who was wed to a king. The king didn’t know that his new wife was Yehuli, and neither did his wicked minister, who plotted to kill all the Yehuli in the kingdom. When Zsigmond told me the story, decades ago, he gave the minister a pinched voice that made me laugh and laugh. Now, every time the rabbi starts to speak the minister’s name, the temple fills with shouting and crowing, sounds that blot the minister from the tale like a thumb smudging ink. I think of Zsigmond obscuring the first letter of emet, turning truth into death.

“Esther knew that she had been made queen so that she could help her people, but approaching the king about such things was against the law, and would lead to her death,” the rabbi says. “So for three days Esther prayed and fasted and sharpened her mind, and then she went to the king anyway.”

I already know that the story ends with Esther triumphant, the Yehuli safe, and the wicked minister killed. I know, too, that there is a lesson in it, like all of Virág’s dire tales, but I can’t tell what it is. Was Esther brave, or was she shrewd? Was the king cruel, or was he only stupid? I think Virág would say that Esther was a coward for marrying the king at all, or for not first slitting his throat while he slept soundly in their marriage bed.

A bit of grief leaches into me, like rainwater through roots. All around me the Yehuli sit with their families, shoulders brushing, hands linked together, and then there is Zsigmond and me, our thighs barely touching. Yehuli words float through the air in whispers, thin and pale as dust motes, still mostly foreign to me. I can sit in their temple and wear their clothes and even try to garble their tongue, but I am still not really one of them.

And then, extraordinarily, Zsigmond lays his hand over mine. I feel the quiver of hesitation run through his palm, and then he threads his fingers with my own. Warmth envelops me. Jozefa reaches across her mother’s lap and smooths one of the pleats of my dress, of her dress, almost absently, like she has noticed one of her own hairs out of place. Zsigmond is still staring straight ahead, watching the rabbi, but when his eye flickers to me briefly, I see in it a look of exquisite peace.

After the reading, bodies flood from the temple into the street. Feast tables are laid with huge platters of triangular-shaped dumplings, thin pancakes rolled with sweet cheese and topped with the last blackberries of summer, carafes of wine, and the same hard biscuits that Batya brought my father in his gift basket, thumbprints of sour-cherry jam at their centers. Zsigmond told me this was a minor holiday, but it looks as big as any feast we have ever had in Keszi. Farther down the road, there is a man performing a bawdy shadow-puppet play, telling the story of Esther with some embellishments not fit for children’s ears. The children are not listening anyway: they run through their mothers’ skirts, mouths stained purple with berry juice. The girls wear paper crowns, imagining themselves Queen Esther. The dusky evening sky is banded with orange and gold.

I linger by the feast table, scarcely able to restrain myself from clinging to Zsigmond’s side like a child myself. He speaks mostly to Batya in soft tones, clutching a cup of wine. I can see how each Yehuli family is like a constellation, and Zsigmond is his own unclustered star, winking its singular light. Just like how I was in Keszi, a daughter without her mother, nothing to give me shape except my braid in one pocket and my coin in the other. I fill a cup of wine for myself and swallow it down in one gulp.

“My mother will take offense if you don’t try her dumplings,” Jozefa says.

I put down my glass. “Your mother called me chubby.”

Jozefa regards me with a furrowed brow, as if she is trying to judge the veracity of her mother’s claim. “She’ll take offense anyway. And if you’re chubby, then so am I. We fit into the same dress.”

She takes a biscuit and eats it in two bites, smiling wolfishly. I watch her, uneasy. Batya’s other daughters are older, married, with the exhaustion of three children each gleaming dully behind their eyes. Jozefa has her mother’s bright, clear eyes and a face full of freckles that look scattered by an indolent hand. She is pretty in a razor-edged way; after spending so many years tormented by Katalin and the other girls in Keszi, it’s hard for me to look at pretty girls and not think of the blades behind their smiles. If we were in Keszi, Jozefa seems the type who would pull my hair and sneer at me. But now she only fills my glass with wine again, and then tops off her own.

“Thank you,” I say.

My voice is laced with suspicion, and she can tell. Jozefa’s lips purse. “My mother says you come from the pagan villages in Farkasvár, and that your mother was a pagan. Why are you in Király Szek?”

I swallow my wine. “It’s a long story.”

“We Yehuli like stories, in case you couldn’t tell.” Her eyes are light and laughing. “You ought to get used to telling them, if you want to be one of us.”

I almost say that I have plenty of practice listening, but I have done little telling of my own. “But I can’t be one of you, can I? I hardly know your language or your prayers or . . .”

“You can learn,” Jozefa says with a shrug. “You’re not simple, are you? Even my little cousin can read the holy book, and he still thinks that black hens lay black eggs. And even though your mother wasn’t Yehuli, you can do a conversion.”

“Does that happen very often?” I ask keenly. “Conversions.”

“Not very much anymore. But a long time ago, before the Patrifaith came to Régország, there were plenty of Yehuli men and women who married outsiders. Then they converted and raised their children here and no one could even know they were different at all. Of course, that was when we were allowed to live where we liked, and there was no Yehuli Street.”

“Before the Patrifaith?” Though Virág claims to remember a time when there were no three-pronged spears or Woodsman axes flashing, it is impossible for me to conceive.

“Of course,” Jozefa says. “The Yehuli lived in this city when King István wasn’t even a dream in his mother’s mind. Why else do you think our temple is so grand even when we can only work the days and the jobs that the Patritians allow us? Our temple was here before the Broken Tower, and long before the king carved his chapel into the hillside.”

The revelation of it shocks me. All I know of Régyar history is what I learned at Virág’s feet, and of course there was never any mention of the Yehuli. Jozefa watches my face flush first with bewilderment, and then with anger, thinking of the Patrifaith like a wave eating away at some pale and ancient stone.

“Why have you been so kind to me?” The question is not the one I intended to ask, but it rises up without me realizing it.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Jozefa counters, brow lowering. “Zsigmond has been alone nearly all his life; it was difficult to watch. Now he’s learned the daughter he thought was dead is alive after all—why should we take offense that her mother was some pagan woman?”

“Because I’m only half—” I start, and then stop abruptly, because Jozefa is looking at me as if I really am simple.

“Some on this street might not like it,” she says. “But I think it’s Patritians who care more about measuring blood.”

Not just Patritians. My thoughts go to Katalin, her face cast blue in the light of her flame. For all her eloquent assurance, Jozefa might be as sheltered as a fox pup in its den. Blood has power. I’ve seen it streaked across Gáspár’s wrist, felt it drying on the backs of my thighs. I’ve been eating the truth of it all my life, even before I knew you could cut your arm to kindle a fire, or lop off your pinky to invite Ördög’s magic inside you.

Several feet away, Batya throws her head back and laughs at something my father has said. Her eyes are gleaming. I remember how she sat with her daughters in the temple, the absence of a husband obvious to me only now.

“What about your father?” I ask keenly, no longer caring to be tactful. “Where is he?”

“He died when I was a child.” Jozefa blinks, untroubled. “I don’t remember him at all. But I do know what it’s like to be without one.”

The baldness of her answer almost makes me feel embarrassed for asking, and doubly ashamed for thinking that she was as soft as a kit, oblivious to any suffering. I see a different cant to Batya’s smile now, and a new meaning to the way Zsigmond has laid his hand on her arm.

I open my mouth to reply, but the wind picks up then, ferrying the sound of voices down Yehuli Street. Firelight dances on the facades of the houses, and moving shadows fall upon the cobblestones. Now all my blood turns cold.

My mind conjures images of stakes and torches, bodies in the street. But I can’t see any blades glinting, only a crowd gathering at the very end of the road, mostly peasants in their homespun clothes. They are murmuring, their heads bobbing like prairie mice, but there is one voice, dulcet and familiar, that rises above the rest.

“See how they celebrate while our soldiers are struck down by Merzani steel,” Nándor says. “See how heartily they eat while the bey’s army burns our crops in Akosvár. If you believe, as I do, that the Prinkepatrios rewards staunch faith and punishes apostasy, then how can you believe that we are not being punished for sheltering heathens in our city?”

A chorus of approval lifts from the crowd. Jozefa has gone stiff beside me, one hand gripping the edge of the feast table. Her knuckles are white. Behind me, Zsigmond’s gaze passes between Nándor and me, the wine-flush draining from his cheeks.

“All this time the king has been searching for the power to defeat the Merzani and to end the war,” Nándor goes on. He paces to the front of the crowd, his boot steps feather-light. “Stealing magic from pagan girls’ fingernails, like some sort of impious grave robber. Perhaps the solution has been before us all this time: send the Yehuli from this city, and wipe the pagans from this Earth.”

His words are openly mutinous. I scan the crowd, searching for Gáspár, for anyone who might bear witness to Nándor’s treason. My heart leaps when I see a black suba, but it’s not Gáspár—it’s only a nameless Woodsman whose face is unfamiliar to me. My gaze lands on another Woodsman, and then another, their axes at their hips and their eyes following Nándor reverently. My vision falters, and I feel sick enough to retch.

The crowd presses around Nándor, pushing farther down the road. All the sounds of our feast have gone silent. Children are clinging to their fathers’ legs, the feathers from their masks snatched up in the wind. The rabbi is mutely cradling his cup of wine in one hand and a half-eaten biscuit in the other. We are all, in this moment, part of the same constellation: dozens of stars clustered in identical terror.

Nándor breaks from the crowd. In the evening light, his face is incandescent, torchlight flickering on the shining planes of his cheeks. He comes toward me, and Jozefa gives a tiny gasp of fear, stumbling back. I hold myself still. My heart is all roaring clamor. When Nándor finally stops, our noses are a hair’s breadth apart. I can see a small, imperfect birthmark under his left eyebrow.

“Évike,” he says. “What a terrible disappointment. There’s hardly any trace of pagan left in you. Pity for my father—he wanted a vicious wolf-girl, and he got a slavering Yehuli dog.”

He wants his words to draw deep gouges in me, deep enough to make me cower, or else rise to violence like a wolf with an arrow in its hind. Pain makes animals mean, but I must be more than just an animal now. The crowd thrums in bridled fury behind him, so many faces blank with their loathing. Ashen-faced peasants mostly, along with a handful of Woodsmen and even a few nobles in their jewel-bright dolmans. Something familiar sharpens out of the throng: Count Reményi, his weasel eyes narrowed like knife points.

“Wolf-girl or Yehuli, I know what to do with seditious bastards,” I say, though my voice is more uncertain than I would like. “And I know what shackles you now, Nándor. You want to be a Patritian king of a Patritian country, but it’s Patritian law that the crown goes to the firstborn son. The true-born son.”

I expect Nándor to flinch, if only briefly, but he scarcely even blinks at me. His gaze wanders over my shoulder, landing on Zsigmond. My heart stutters.

“So it is,” Nándor says, shifting his gaze back to me. “As long as the firstborn son lives. And you and your people may have my father’s protection for now, but one man’s word, even the word of a king, cannot hold against the tide of an entire city.”

It’s another moment before I can untangle the threefold braid of his threat, my stomach curdling with terror. Is it Gáspár’s life, not his father’s, that he aims to take? Does he plan to banish the Yehuli on his own, with his faction of disloyal Woodsmen? And then will he march them to Keszi too?

My four fingers curl into a fist. I’ve been told of Nándor’s power, but I have never seen it. I have heard him entrance a crowd with his voice, but voices can be silenced. Hateful instinct laces through me, and I very nearly wrap my hand around his throat.

I stop before I even lift my arm. It will only bring violence upon Zsigmond, upon Jozefa and Batya and all the Yehuli behind me. For all that I lambasted Gáspár over his cringing silence, for all that I fought Katalin’s cruelty, I don’t rise against Nándor now. I let his words land on my shoulders like brittle winter leaves. He plucks the wine cup from my hand and drains it, a stain of scarlet tinging the corners of his lips. Then he smashes the glass onto the cobblestones, turns, and leads his crowd away with him.