Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

The street empties within moments of Nándor’s departure. Food is swept off the feast tables. Children are bundled into their houses, hushed with their mothers’ kisses. All that remains is the red spill of wine across the cobblestones and the shattered porcelain of my cup. Dusk has sharpened into night, and the cool air stings my cheeks and nose as I help Batya and Jozefa heft their trays through the threshold, Zsigmond following close behind.

When the door is shut, Batya collapses into a chair. Jozefa wipes her brow mutely. And Zsigmond sits down at the table, hands steepled in front of him, gaze set blankly into the middle distance. The gonged absence of sound is louder than Király Szek’s church bells.

“What will you do?” I ask finally, when I can’t stand the silence any longer. My voice squeaks like a wood mouse.

“What we have always done.” Batya rubs one hand along her chin. “There’s nothing else to do. We have weathered worse threats before. It has been particularly bad these past years, with the war, but once the Merzani are pushed back from the border, Nándor will temper himself again.”

“It’s not only Nándor,” Zsigmond says softly. “There were near a hundred peasants there, and Woodsmen and nobles too. Is Nándor the mouth behind their prayers, or the answer to them?”

I don’t know how to reply. If a fire burns your hut to the ground, do you blame the man who stoked your hearth, or the god who made the winter cold?

“Yes, and still we have endured worse,” Batya says again, but I notice the way her eyes dart between my father and the doorway. “We must keep low until it passes, like we always do.”

Just like King János, I think, who has only tried to patch the holes of an unsound ship. That’s the problem with Patritians—they care about their legacies more than their lives. The king would let Keszi burn, would let my father bleed, would even let himself die if he could still have his statue carved in gold. If he could stay in that courtyard as a slender finger bone or a lock of hair or whitened eye.

Zsigmond nods, and says nothing more. Jozefa brushes a loose braid back from her mother’s face. And then I can feel my chest start to heave, tears pricking hot in the corners of my eyes. Batya draws a sharp breath, and I flush with shame at my weakness, how easily Nándor has moved me to weep, until Zsigmond rises from his chair and puts his arms around me, tucking my head under his chin.

I almost laugh then, in disbelief and despair. All my life I have only wanted my father to hold me, but now when he finally does, it feels as if he is holding me against the wolves at the door. I wipe my tears on the collar of his shirt and say, “Virág would tell you that I was a bad omen.”

Zsigmond laughs; I feel it echo through my cheek. “God has brought my daughter back to me, and whatever else has come with her is dust on the wind. Have I told you the fable of the rabbi and the golem?”

From the other side of the room, Jozefa groans. “Please, my mother has told it a thousand times. I can’t bear to hear it once more.”

Batya silences her with a glare, even as I think of how I’ve echoed her sentiment so many times. The Yehuli, I have learned, have as many stories as Virág. There are ash fables for funerals, wine fables for weddings, moon fables for trying to get your children to go to sleep at night. Thread fables are stories that mothers tell their daughters as they teach them to stitch, but I have no mother, so I’ve never heard a single one.

“It is a salt fable,” Zsigmond says, releasing me. “It’s what you tell on Shabbos when you dip your bread in salt. This story is about a rabbi who lived in a city much like Király Szek, but where the Yehuli were not treated nearly as well. They would close their windows and lock their doors, but still the Patritians would come at night, to burn their houses and loot them. The rabbi lost his own wife that way, and his daughter was taken and raised as a Patritian in the house of a childless lord. He watched her dark head in a crowd of Patritians with flaxen hair, watched her grow taller and lose her baby teeth, never knowing that her real family were living behind the gates of the city’s Yehuli quarter.

“The rabbi prayed to God for an answer, and because the rabbi was a good and loyal man who loved his people, God whispered back. He told the rabbi his true name. The rabbi wrote down God’s true name on a scrap of parchment and tucked it into his sleeve, so that he wouldn’t forget it. And then he left the city and went down to the riverbed, where he began to dig in the mud. With his bare hands, he reached into the earth and shaped a man from the clay—just the rough outline of a man, with two holes for eyes and another hole for its mouth. Inside its mouth, the rabbi put the scroll with the name of God. And then the clay-man sat up.

“The clay-man followed the rabbi back to the city. He was twice the size of a normal man and four times as strong, and being made of clay, he couldn’t be wounded. When the Patritians came that night, with their pitchforks and torches, the clay-man was waiting for them. Their pitchforks bent and broke against his clay body, and he extinguished all their torches with his huge hard fingers.

“The Yehuli were so grateful for the clay-man, and grateful to the rabbi for making him. And it is said that when the rabbi wanted the clay-man to be clay again, he reached into the creature’s mouth and took the name of God back out.”

It feels like the story of Esther: I know there’s a lesson in it, but I don’t understand. All I can think of is Nándor rising out of the ice like some pale hallucination, and all the Patritians dropping to their knees in front of him. I think he is both the mouth behind their prayers and the answer to them all at once.

“But there’s no clay-man now,” I say. “There’s no one to protect you against Nándor and the rest.”

“A protector doesn’t always look like a creature made of mud,” Zsigmond says. His dark eyes throw the candlelight like a black pool reflecting the moon at its highest peak. “You could be one of us, if you chose it.”

Jozefa gives a nod, contrite. “Didn’t I say so?”

I think about writing my own name, practicing each letter until the movements became as natural as breathing. The four stark lines of the É, the V a sharp little dagger, then a stiff line for I and more hard, fast strokes for K and E. I held that scrap of parchment with my name written on it so close and tight in my palm that the ink came off in my hand, but it was finally something that belonged to me and me alone.

Nándor would take it from me, and then cleave my head from my body. He wouldn’t even keep my fingernails and the little power he could leach from them—he would kill any memory of me and send all the Yehuli out into the cold.

“I think I do,” I say, even if they feel like the last words I will speak in the world.

Zsigmond smiles at me with such firmness it’s as if he’s gripping a blade. And then he leans over and whispers the name of God in my ear.

When I leave Yehuli Street, the bells are clanging in the castle courtyard. My heart clangs with them, echoing through my rib cage and up my spine. I haven’t left the king alone for too long, but I wonder if Nándor seized the moment of my absence anyway. What if the bells are mourning bells? What if he took the life of his true-born brother after all? The words of his threat are still lacing through my mind.

But the crowd gathered in the courtyard shows no signs of mourning. Many of them are the same peasants who followed Nándor to Yehuli Street, and I wonder if they will recognize me, in my dress of pale-green silk, my face pink with the memory of my weeping. None of them seem to even notice me, though—they are jostling one another and standing on the balls of their feet, craning their necks to see what is taking place at the center of the throng. The gray sky seems equally unsettled, clouds rolling back and forth across it like a prisoner pacing his cell. I push past a merchant in a red dolman and a beggar man holding a silver coin in his mouth and come to the front of the crowd.

My vision blurs, glazing over the chuff of smoke from the marketplace and the sharp smell of spices in the air. I can see the dark shape of a Woodsman’s suba, trotting toward the barbican on his black horse. And then, beside him, impossibly: the white blur of a wolf cloak, and a girl with hair the color of snow.

I blink once, hoping I will wake from a nightmare.

I blink again, praying it’s a mirage, a trick of Király Szek’s pallid sunlight.

I blink a third time, and I know with a sickening crush of dread that it’s real.

Someone’s cart of cabbages overturns, and the cabbages go rolling across the filthy cobblestones. In the ensuing scuffle, I dart forward across the courtyard, toward the Woodsman. I skid to a halt between him and the barbican.

It’s the Woodsman with the horrible mangled nose, Lajos. He looks down his half nose at me and sneers.

“Get out of my way, wolf-girl,” he says. “Nothing you can do or say will save your sister.”

“She is not my sister,” Katalin huffs.

In that moment, I can’t decide whom I would rather kill—her or Lajos. From up on her silvery mare, Katalin’s blue eyes are gleaming with stubborn reproach, but I notice that her hands are bound, and there’s a ghost of a bruise smudged purple on her cheek. It’s not quite enough to make me pity her, but a snarl of fury coils in my gut.

“The king swore,” I say, going on despite the trembling in my voice, “he swore that no harm would come to Keszi!”

“I don’t make bargains with wolf-girls,” says Lajos. He kicks his horse so that it shoulders roughly past me. “I just follow the king’s orders.”

Looking at Katalin now, she hardly seems real. I have been so worried about Nándor’s treachery that I have forgotten that the king is a tyrant in his own way. After so many sleepless nights, my belly churning with fear over what would become of the Yehuli, I have nearly let Keszi slip from my mind. Guilt and horror twine in me at once, a fiery string of pain.

I turn to Katalin. “Get down from the horse.”

Katalin’s gaze shifts uncertainly between Lajos and me. She’s not worried about provoking Lajos, of course—she’s more concerned with snubbing me and making sure I know it. But she puts one leg over her horse’s saddle and then slides off it, boots hitting the ground with a muted thud.

“You don’t give anyone orders, wolf-girl,” Lajos spits, leaping from his mount in one furious motion, his hand on his ax. “I don’t care what sort of bargain you have with the king—you can serve him just as well when I’ve cut your demon tongue out of your mouth.”

But the bargain is broken already and the air is cold and clear. All my fear shudders out of me, leaving only anger in its place. “I welcome you to try.”

And then Lajos swings. It’s a warning strike, halfhearted, but I reach out for his blade with my right hand, as soon as its movement slows enough that I won’t lose the rest of my fingers doing it. In my grasp the metal peels with rust, flaking away in long strips like iron tongues, until the whole blade has crumbled right down to its shiny hilt. Lajos takes a step back, eyes widening.

“How did you do that?” Katalin demands.

“The king will punish you!” Lajos cries out as the crowd startles like spooked chickens. “You’ve attacked one of his loyal Woodsmen!”

“You attacked me,” I remind him hotly. Perhaps I have lost all my good sense, broken the promises I made to myself to stay quiet and cowed. But the king broke his end of our oath first.

I jump as the gate of the barbican grinds open, expecting Nándor or worse. But it’s Gáspár. I hate how relief stills in me when I see him, the way the warmth of a fire can make you feel sated and sleepy as it settles into your marrow. There are two Woodsmen with him, Miklós and Ferenc, but my gaze trains on him and him alone, remembering how he looked in the chapel’s puddled candlelight. Remembering how he told me he kneeled.

Gáspár takes in the scene and my trembling hands and draws a breath. “What are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” I look between him and Lajos, gaping. “Your father broke his bargain. He promised that if I served him, Keszi would be safe from harm, and now he’s brought another wolf-girl anyway!”

I see a shadow go across his face, but I can’t guess at its meaning. Gáspár turns to Lajos. “When did the king order you to go to Keszi?”

“Just after Saint István’s feast,” he mumbles. “After the wolf-girl—”

I don’t hear the rest of it. Blood pulses in my ears, loud as nearing thunder. The king didn’t even blink before turning on me. He must have known all his promises were lies even as they left his lips, and I am the guileless idiot who believed them. I had felt giddy with power after bargaining for my life, not realizing that as I preened and gloated, the king was fitting me with chains.

While I am marveling at my own miserable stupidity, Lajos grabs Katalin by the arm. In my meanest, most secret imaginings, I sometimes dreamed that she would be taken by the Woodsmen and torn apart by monsters on her way through Ezer Szem, or even better, falling under the king’s sword. Now my head whirls as I watch Lajos drag her away, sick with horror. I imagine the king tearing off her fingernails, one by one, like plucking the white feathers from a swan.

“Évike.” Gáspár’s voice knifes through the haze. “Don’t do anything reckless.”

I meet his eye, hands shaking. “I want to speak with the king.”

I have no plan as I march to the king’s chambers; it’s only anger buoying me. Gáspár is a pace behind, and his words chase after me like loosed arrows.

“Consider what you want to achieve before you walk into the room,” he says, an edge of pleading to his voice. “There’s no use confronting him with venom and fury—you’ll only get yourself thrown into the dungeons again.”

I whirl on him. “And should I just be like you, instead? Swallowing every cruel word, bowing to the same man who tore your eye out? Letting your bastard brother stomp all over your birthright?”

I’m so enraged that I don’t care how much I hurt him. But Gáspár only looks at me steadily, black eye unflinching.

“You swore an oath to my father too,” he says.

“Yes, and it’s my greatest shame,” I snap, cheeks flushing.

“And don’t you think it shames me equally?” I see his chest swell; for a moment I think he will close the space between us. “But you understood, as I do, that survival is not a battle that you win only once. You must fight it again every day. And so you take your small losses so that you can live to fight tomorrow. You know that my father is a slower, gentler poison.”

His words bite at me like a splinter under my nail. I slow my pace, fury ebbing, despair rising up in its place. “But what should I do, then? Should I keep letting your father slip through my fingers again and again, reassuring myself that at least he is better than his bastard, until one day, without my knowing it, every single girl in Keszi is dead?”

Gáspár draws a breath. “Can Keszi not survive the loss of one girl every few years, as it has for all my father’s reign?”

I consider it, even as my stomach roils. Virág will live another decade at least—she is as hearty as an old tree, which only grows stronger with its years. Another seer would likely be born in the meantime, her white hair a happy omen. And until she grew into her magic Keszi could learn to live without one, even if it meant not knowing when the frost came to kill our crops or when the Woodsmen would arrive at our door.

As if by instinct, I reach into my pocket for my mother’s braid, but I remember that I am wearing Jozefa’s dress, and not my wolf cloak.

“I was only one girl,” I whisper. “And so was my mother.”

Gáspár opens his mouth to reply, then closes it again. Guilt flits across his face, though I hadn’t really meant for my words to wound him. I know that he is remembering the first time he saw me across the clearing, a bound and quaking sacrifice. Before the memory can make me falter, I turn on my heel and shove into the king’s chamber.

King János is kneeling at his bed, hands clasped. When he sees me, he leaps to his feet, reaching up to steady the fingernail crown on his head. He blinks at me mutely; there is something crusted into the corners of his lips.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I say, “but it would be only fair if I did, since you broke our bargain.”

The king lifts his chin, indignant. “I’ve broken nothing. Your village is unharmed, if not for the loss of one girl.”

“That’s all our village is!” I burst out. “Girls and women, boys and men. People. Would you say I left you unharmed if I cut off your arm or your leg?”

King János takes a step away from me, one hand still on his crown. “You wouldn’t dare, wolf-girl. My blood would spill under the door and reveal you. You would never leave the palace alive.”

But that has always been true. The moment that I entered Király Szek with a wolf cloak on my back I knew I was more likely to die than to ever step beyond its gates again. I think of how Esther spoke to the king so shrewdly, how she handled him so gingerly, the way you might eat around the spot of black in your apple. I can only try and do the same now.

“You’ll kill her, then.” My voice is soft, careful. Gáspár would commend me for speaking with such little venom. “Just like you did all the others. Add her fingernails to your crown.”

“She is not like the others,” says the king. “She’s a seer.”

“And what sort of power do you think her death will grant you?” My mind conjures images of Virág, writhing in the dirt. “A seer’s magic isn’t what you think. Their visions come at random, and what they see is never what you really want. You think her power will put you inside the mind of the bey, will anticipate his moves before he makes them, but it won’t. It wouldn’t be like—”

I almost mention the turul. My jaw snaps shut.

King János’s eyes film over. He wanders toward the long window, his face turning gray-washed in the gridded squares of rheumy light. I can’t help but think of his father’s statue in the courtyard, hunched by the legacy of his failures.

“If I can end the war,” he says, “then I can end what ails us here too. When food is scarce and sons are dying, the people always look for someone to blame. Nándor has pointed toward the Yehuli, the pagans. Now I am blamed for protecting them.” His gaze shifts to me, a turbid look in it, like the pond water made murky by the thrashing of some fish. “Truly, wolf-girl, what would you have me do? Tell me—your counsel can be no less useful than that of my insipid advisers, who have only their own hoards behind their eyes.”

His words stun me, not to mention the beseeching tenor of his voice. He is not nearly as much a buffoon as I have thought, sipping his wine, oblivious to the knives being drawn at his back. I remember Count Reményi’s face in the crowd, and all those Woodsmen, black as shadows. Perhaps the king is as fettered as I am, as fettered as Gáspár, surviving in whatever shameful way he can. The truth of what the king is brings me no comfort. I almost wish I could still imagine him a monster, some seven-headed beast with lashing tongues, swallowing up wolf-girls for his supper. Now I see only a skinny dog gnawing on an old bone, already stripped of all its lustiest bits.

“Why protect them, then?” I ask, when I can manage to speak again. “Why not finish what Saint István started?”

“You already know,” the king says.

And it strikes me then that I do. I have known ever since I first saw his gruesome crown, since I saw the counts in their pagan garb, trussed with feathers and draped in bear cloaks. They cannot kill the old ways entirely, or else they will lose their power. They will only take and take the parts that they like, the fingernails and the titles that their pagan blood right grants them, one girl every few years, not the whole village. Nándor told me that the Patrifaith was what made Régország, but that’s not true. It is made of a thousand different threads twining together like tree roots, shooting up tall and thick, aching toward some impossible whole. Mithros and Vilmötten are like a two-headed statue, or a coin with a different face on either side.

I cut off my finger so that I could survive. Gáspár let his father take his eye so he would not cut his throat. And now Katalin must die, so that the rest of Keszi can live.

“So it is, then,” I say, my voice thick with pain. “Another girl dead to keep the wolves from the door.”

The king lifts one shoulder, gaze steady. For a moment, I can see a bit of Gáspár in him, like a trick of the light.

“I know you must hate me, wolf-girl,” he says. “But I am certain you hate my son more.”

There is nowhere else for me to go, so I return to my chamber. My mind and body feel heavy, weighed down with a thousand unmade decisions. By now the sky is black, depthless and starless. It has been mere hours since my father held me in Batya’s house, but the memory seems irretrievably distant, and even though I try to summon it, I can recapture none of its warmth. All I can see is Katalin vanishing down the hall, like a white stone tossed into a well. All I can see is Nándor’s face, livid gold in the torchlight.

The collar of Jozefa’s dress feels stifling now, the starched wool painting a rash of red across my throat. As if moved by some invisible hand, I go toward the trunk at the foot of my bed and retrieve my wolf cloak. Katalin’s wolf cloak. The wolf’s teeth look yellower than I remembered. When I touch one, a tiny shard of bone comes away in my fingers. I search the pockets and find my mother’s braid, coiled around itself like a cold snake. I squeeze it tight in my fist.

I remember how much I railed against Virág’s decision to send me to the Woodsmen, how much her betrayal tormented me. It felt every day like a different wound, my mind forever conjuring some new way for it to ache. Watching Virág paint my hair silver in her hut, Katalin had finally gone quiet. Even she had been cowed by Virág’s unimaginable coldness, a hurt worse than any she could ever cause.

If I let Katalin die now, I might as well admit that Virág was right to cast me away. That the life of one wolf-girl is no more than a brittle shield to throw up at the slightest threat or provocation. That we all have been reared only for the Woodsmen’s axes.

A soft knock on the door makes me jump. But it’s only the shivering servant girl, Riika, holding out a bolt of deep plum silk. When she unfurls it, I see that it’s a dress, with long pooling sleeves and gold stitched up the bodice.

“The king had this sewn for you,” she says. “So that you could attend feasts without attracting so much attention as a—”

The word wolf-girl dies in her throat. Anger steals over me, and I snatch the dress out of her hands. I toss it in the vague direction of the hearth, even though it’s not lit. It flutters emptily to the floor instead, bodiless as a ghost.

“Tell him I have no use for his dresses,” I spit. “If he thinks I’ll uphold my end of our bargain if he doesn’t care to—”

A sudden, taut cord of pain laces through my arm, splitting the gristle of my shoulder. I turn around slowly, the room tilting on an uneven axis. Riika lets a small dagger drop from her hand, the blade of it thick with my blood.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “He didn’t want me to have to do it.”

I sway on my feet, the ground lurching toward me and then shuddering away again. I don’t need to ask to know that she doesn’t mean the king.

“What did he offer you?” I bite out as my vision starts to ripple and fray.

Riika’s eyes mist. Her lower lip trembles, jutting out beneath the icicle edge of her teeth.

“Nothing,” she replies softly, voice tipping up so that the word is almost a question. “He just said it would make him very happy, if I were to help him, and that Godfather Life would reward me too.”

I hear the sweet melody of her voice that half sings the words, and I see the flush in her cheeks, and I know that she is in love with him. I want to scream and shake her and tell her what a fool she is, this pitiable Northern girl, for thinking that Nándor might love her back. But I am too dizzy to speak.

Pressing down on the wound with my right hand, I push past her. The pressure of my fingers only makes it worse, so I tear a scrap of fabric from Jozefa’s dress and knot it over the wound, fingers slick and trembling. I should kill her, I think, but I can’t bring myself to. I am as stupid as she is, for coming to the capital at all, for believing that I was strong or clever enough to survive here.

A million thoughts gutter through my mind, each more terrible than the last. I drop to my knees and scramble to find the dagger before Riika can get to it again. I curl my bloody fingers around its hilt just as the door swings open, Nándor’s boot steps calm and soft upon the floor.