Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

We ride hard until dawn, when morning light glides down the yellow hills of Szarvasvár and we and our horses are all too exhausted to take another step. I half topple off my horse and kneel on the soft, cool grass. A stream of silver-blue water threads down the mountainside, and when I can summon the strength I pad over to it and take a long drink. The wind feels fierce on my face, stinging the skin that has been rubbed raw by tears.

Katalin, to her credit, says nothing. She hasn’t spoken a word since we left Király Szek, though I can feel her chagrin mounting with each passing moment, her eyes narrowed as thin as knife slits. She joins me by the water, to drink and wash her hands, which are burned red with bristly rope marks from having her fingers locked so tightly around the reins. Her gaze trains on my missing pinky.

“So that’s what you did,” she says. “Mutilated yourself like some Woodsman.”

I curl my hand into a fist, flushing. “What makes you think I did it to myself?”

“It just seems like something you would do.”

“Well, you gave me plenty of practice in enduring pain,” I say, but I can’t imbue the words with the venom that I want. “Have you known all this time, that this was a way to get magic?”

“I suspected.” Katalin lifts one shoulder under her wolf cloak; her eyes are circled with sleepless bruises. “Our magic always takes something from us, but I see that Ördög’s ways are a bit more extreme.”

I think of Virág thrashing in my lap, of Boróka falling into her long, impermeable slumbers. Of course, Virág would never want to highlight what magic cost us, only what we could gain, how it protected us. She talked around the truth, shrouding it in stories of Vilmötten and his great feats. But thinking of Vilmötten makes me think of Nándor, and my stomach folds over on itself, chest tightening like a vise.

Gáspár hunches beside us and fills one of the calfskin flasks hanging on the horse’s saddle. Katalin draws herself up again, wiping her mouth, and levels him with a baleful stare.

“So, Woodsman,” she says. “What have you been offered in exchange for helping a wolf-girl? I don’t think Évike has much to bargain with, except her body.”

I’m not sure if she’s talking about my pinky or something else, but Gáspár goes red from forehead to chin. Either way, her barbed words make me wish, for a fleeting moment, that I had left her in Király Szek to die.

“He’s not a Woodsman,” I snap. “He’s the prince. Bárány Gáspár. And do you know what his father would have done to you, if he hadn’t helped me save your life? He would have torn off all your fingernails to adorn his crown, then slit your throat on the floor of his feast hall.”

Katalin inhales sharply; she looks not quite mortified, but it’s better than nothing. “Still, what does the prince have to gain from saving a wolf-girl?”

With a roiling belly I tell her everything: about making my vow to the king, about the counts and the Woodsmen, about Nándor. I leave out all the parts about the Yehuli and my father—they are too painful to speak aloud, and it would feel like a betrayal if I did. Those moments are for me alone to hold, precious as the last ember in a bed of ash. And I cannot swallow the shame of leaving them behind. When I speak of Nándor, Katalin’s lips go taut.

“I tried to kill him,” I say, holding up my four-fingered hand. My voice is shaking. “His skin was burned off, right down to the bone. His blood was on the ground. But all he did was pray, and he was new again.”

And he had no scars, no evidence of the sacrifice that had bought him such power. All I can think of are his eyes, the edges of them still iced and white, bright with the memory of his death. Perhaps the black, silent moment when his heart stopped beating, before the Érsek dragged him out of the water, has earned him greater blessings than any spilled blood. Perhaps what he believes about himself is true. When Vilmötten cheated death it made him immortal, too, something close to a god.

“If he’s so powerful, it seems a poor choice to leave the king unguarded in your absence,” says Katalin. “What’s to stop him from taking the throne now?”

“Me,” Gáspár says. “If he takes the throne while I’m still breathing, he’s compromised all that he stands for. Patritian law decrees that it must be the eldest son, the true-born son. But even if he kills me, his reign will be plagued by doubt and uncertainty. What he really wants is for me to step aside willingly, then live the rest of my life in exile or obscurity, until he can have me killed later, when everyone has stopped paying attention.”

I feel as if I’ve been scraped clean of anger and hate, scraped clean of everything but exhaustion. Fear. “And then he can massacre the pagans as he pleases.”

Gáspár nods. A silence falls over us, the wind bristling through the dead grass. Finally, Katalin says, “It might have been a lot simpler if you’d only left me to die.”

I choke out a laugh. “Are you sincerely saying you’d rather I let the king slit your throat?”

“No,” Katalin says. The bruise on her cheek is throbbing violet. “I’m only saying that you could easily have left me. It’s what Virág would have done.”

My mouth opens mutely, then closes again. Katalin has turned away from me, staring off into the distance, at the clouds gathering like fat white birds on the horizon. I think it is the closest she will ever come to thanking me.

“The king would not have been able to end the war with your magic anyway,” I say. “He didn’t understand that a seer can’t choose her visions.”

Katalin’s lips quiver. “That’s not quite true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sometimes visions will come when we least expect them,” she goes on slowly. “But there are ways to force them. Just like cutting off your pinky—surely you remember how Virág would go down to the river.”

I frown at her, trying to conjure the memory. It comes back to me in jagged pieces, just a flash of Virág’s six fingers, her knees blackened with river mud. Her white hair spidering out through the water. Someone’s hand on the back of her neck.

“Yes,” I say, feeling my stomach fill with a slick nausea.

“So it’s no perfect method, but what about the gods’ magic is perfect, anyway?” Katalin runs a hand through her hair. “You can ask a question, and if you offer enough of yourself, the gods will give you some kind of hazy answer.”

“But it’s not the omniscience that my father imagines,” says Gáspár. His eye shifts uneasily between Katalin and me. “And it’s not enough to stop Nándor either.”

“No,” Katalin says. Her mouth twists, certainly displeased that she has agreed with a Woodsman.

I stare down at the water, the gray sky reflected on its murky surface. The clouds wash downriver. Quietly, I say, “But the turul is.”

I expect Katalin to scowl, to swear. To laugh in derision at my suggestion. But she only arches her eyebrow at me, bemused. “I thought you loathed all of Virág’s stories with every bone in your body.”

“I didn’t loathe her stories. Only that I was made to hear them so many times. And that they were coming from Virág’s wicked mouth.” But I don’t know whether I mean the words or not. I hated Virág’s stories because I never felt like they belonged to me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. The turul will give us enough power to stop Nándor, if we can find it and kill it.”

Gáspár’s breathing quickens. I know he wants to argue with me, to tell me that the Woodsmen have been searching for ages and have never found a trace, to remind me how we already tried to find it and failed. He stays silent, though. Katalin blinks her disbelief.

“Even if that were true, what makes you think you can find the turul?” Her nostrils flare, and for a moment it feels like the old days again: her preening, me scowling, our shared history littered with slurs and bolts of blue flame.

“I can’t find it,” I tell her, drawing a breath. “But you can.”

Confusion creases Katalin’s perfect face. It takes her a moment, gaze traveling over me and down to the water, then back up to me again. Then she hardens, her eyes like bits of ice.

“Don’t let me drown,” she says.

I’m so relieved, I almost laugh. “What if this was my grand plan all along, to save you from the king’s hands so I could kill you myself? I might have the perversity for such a thing, but not the forethought.”

Katalin sniffs. “I could hardly blame you for having your vengeance.”

And this, I suspect, is the closest she will ever come to an apology. Gáspár watches stone-faced as Katalin unpins her wolf cloak, letting it slide to the ground. She bundles her hair up onto her head, baring the pale column of her throat.

“What do you mean to do?” Gáspár asks.

“There is a way to trigger a vision,” I tell him. My hands are trembling as they move toward Katalin’s neck. “I never realized it before, but I know how it’s done. She’ll have to hold the question in her mind.”

Katalin nods. Her fingers have dug into the riverbed. “I’m ready.”

I nod back at her, steeling myself. Something passes between us then, lacing out between her chest and mine, a thread of tenuous trust.

And then I clasp my hand around her throat and force her head underwater.

Katalin submerges without struggle, her hair spilling from her head in pale rivulets. Bubbles foam around her. I hold her there for so long that even my arm starts to ache, and I feel the tense of her throat under my hand, and then finally, finally, I yank her up again.

She gasps and splutters, coughing up river water. Her eyes are misted, still half-white, and her body shudders violently with the ebbing of her vision. There is a reed pasted to her cheek and I have the urge to wipe it away, but I quash whatever gentle instinct has risen in me unbidden.

Wet-faced, Katalin groans. Gáspár watches in bridled panic, eye too bright. After another few beats, Katalin’s shaking ceases.

“I saw it,” she rasps. “The turul. Flying between the black pines, against a pure-white sky.”

My heart quickens. “Are you certain? Do you know where to go?”

“Of course I’m certain,” Katalin snaps. “You’re not a seer, so you wouldn’t understand, but a vision isn’t something you can forget. Every single vision I’ve ever had plays on the insides of my eyelids when I try to sleep at night.”

Despite the sharpness of her voice, for once I truly pity her. Katalin wrings water from her hair, fingers still quivering between the white strands. Gáspár rises to his feet, flask in hand.

“You lead the way, then,” he says. “But we’ll need to hurry. Nándor’s men won’t be very far behind.”

Slowly, Katalin stands too. I take another moment before I follow them, staring up at the sky. The sun’s red eye is like a drop of blood in the river, the clouds streaming sickly pink around it. My mind goes back to Zsigmond’s house, and I imagine that I am sitting there with him practicing my letters, Régyar and Yehuli both. I let the image fill me up and then I let it go, scattering it like flower petals into the wind.

The snow starts falling later that day, the sky going sleek and gray. The ground mottles with new frost, crunching under our horses’ hooves. The hills have begun to flatten, racing toward a distant white horizon. Somewhere farther north, the Kalevans have hunkered down for true winter, Tuula and Szabín among them. I imagine that Bierdna is running out in front of us, flicking snowflakes off her ears. I follow the dark shape of her, invisible to anyone but me, with a fierce, unblinking determination.

I worry over the prospect of a storm, but snowfall lightens and then shivers away. Gauzy ribbons of cloud wrap around the sun, and light comes straining through like milk through cheesecloth. Katalin brings her horse to my side and then nudges me, pointing wordlessly over her shoulder. I turn around. Our footsteps have frozen in the snow, leaving a miles-long trail behind us. A wave of despair runs over me.

Gáspár must see it written on my face, because he says, “Let’s stop for now.”

There’s no way to erase the trail that we have left, and it’s not snowing hard enough to cover our tracks in time, which means that Nándor’s men will have a path guiding them right to us. I feel a hopeless anguish unspooling in me. I clamber down off my horse and tie her to a nearby tree with numbing fingers.

I think it might be a relief to cry, but all my tears have been spent in silence during the ride, my hood pulled up over my face so neither Gáspár nor Katalin could see. Instead, I reach for the bow strapped to my horse’s back. The familiar tensing of my muscles and the twang of the bow string in my ear will comfort me better than anything else now.

“I’ll hunt,” I say.

Gáspár and Katalin nod their agreement, both pink-faced and grim. I move through the copse of bare, frost-dewed trees, listening for sounds of scuffling in the snow, watching for bright, blinking eyes. I catch two gamy rabbits, their patchy fur coming off in my hands. By the time I return, the sun is a band of gold along the horizon and Katalin has kindled a fire. Gáspár is whispering something to her, his mouth not far from her ear. She has a hardened look on her face, a tiny furrow between her brow.

I drop the dead rabbits by the fire and warm my hands. Katalin comes over to me, her borrowed wolf cloak sweeping up small flurries of new snow.

“What did he say to you?” I ask.

“He said he was sorry,” she replies.

“For what?”

“For terrifying us all our lives,” Katalin says. “I suppose he ought to apologize for it, being the prince. I could have done without his mooning eyes, though. Well, eye.”

Something like a laugh coils in my belly, but I am too exhausted to loose it past my lips. Besides, I don’t want Katalin to think that I will forgive her so easily, or that saving her life means I have any interest in being friends.

My gaze wanders to Gáspár, still standing beside the horses. We are not very far now from the woods where we encountered the beautiful girl who was a monster. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. My arm still throbs with an irregular, phantom pain, soothed by the memory of his hands pressing gently over the wound.

Katalin and I skin and gut the rabbits in silence, and Gáspár keeps his distance. Perhaps he has regretted agreeing to this plan; maybe he doubts Katalin’s vision. I can’t let myself think of what will happen if we fail, but my stomach churns like white water and I only manage a few bites of rabbit. Zsigmond’s face keeps drifting across my mind.

Night comes over our scrubby patch of forest with a vengeance, blanketing us in a swift and total blackness. Once the sun is down, we warm ourselves for a few more heady, stolen moments before we have to stamp out the fire again. Nándor’s men would see the light of it from miles away. Katalin offers to take the first watch, so I pad down beside a mangled midwinter tree, my back against the frozen bark. Sleep seems both inescapably tempting and utterly impossible.

I don’t know how long it is before Gáspár joins me. His boots tread through the frost. There is only the jeweled scattering of starlight, and the pallid horn of the moon. His face holds what light it can, silver on his cheeks and the curve of his nose, the rigid line of his jaw. He stands before me and doesn’t speak, so I push myself to my feet, brushing snow from my skirts.

I have so much to say to him and also nothing at all. Our breaths cloud with cold. Words constellate in my mind, sibilant and bright.

“Would you like to hear a story?”

The stories always began in the dark. Virág’s six-fingered hands could make shadow puppets that the rest of us could not: turul hawks, racka sheep, stags with their huge coronets of bone. We watched their silhouettes dance across the thatched roof of her hut, fire warming our cheeks, wild-haired and wild-eyed, our noses running from the cold. The memory cows me for a moment, making something deep in my belly twist with pain.

Gáspár blinks slowly. “All right.”

“I’ll tell you about Vilmötten and his flaming sword.” Even the name Vilmöttentastes sour on my tongue as I think of Nándor’s body floating up from the ice, just the way the bard crawled out of the Under-World.

“I think I already know it,” he says. “My wet nurse had an endless number of stories, and that was one of her favorites.”

“Was your wet nurse a pagan?”

“Certainly not,” he says. “The way she told it, Vilmötten prayed to the Prinkepatrios for a weapon with which to defeat Régország’s pagan enemies, and all the world’s nonbelievers, and so Godfather Life granted him a blade that was unbreakable, and could catch fire when he held it up to the light of the sun.”

For a moment I want to tell him that it’s not right, that Vilmötten was our hero, not theirs. But I think of the counts in their bear cloaks and feathered mantles, and of the king in his fingernail crown. You can’t hoard stories the way you hoard gold, despite what Virág would say. There’s nothing to stop anyone from taking the bits they like, and changing or erasing the rest, like a finger smudging over ink. Like shouts drowning out the sound of a vicious minister’s name.

I ought to ask him whether he thinks we can find the turul, if we will succeed now where we failed before. But there’s another question burning in my throat like a held breath.

“Do you remember those nights on the ice?” I ask. “When we almost froze to death under a pitch-black sky like this one? Did you love me then, or hate me?”

Gáspár’s throat bobs in the dark.

“I hated you then,” he says. “For being the only warm, bright thing for miles.”

“What about on the Little Plain?” I ask. “When you killed Kajetán to save me?”

“I must have hated you then too,” he says. “For making me trade my soul for your life.”

I nod, but there’s a burning in my chest. I’m not sure how much longer I can play this game, even if I want to know the truth more than anything. In the stories, there are always three tasks, three questions, three chances to damn yourself or to cheat death, or to win a bargain with a trickster god.

“And what about when you pulled me out of the water?” I ask. “After I fell through the frozen lake?”

Gáspár grips his own wrist, palm covering the pale tracery of scars. Silence swans over us. For a moment I wonder if he won’t answer me at all.

“I think I loved you then,” he says. “And I hated myself for it.”

His voice flickers like a flame in the wind, sparking up and then blowing flat again. I remember precisely when I realized how beautiful he was, both of us shivering wet and drenched in cold white light. Now I feel the darkness bending and folding around us, black as a Woodsman’s suba.

“But you followed me here.” My own voice is a whisper. “What a foolish thing for a pious prince to do.”

A breath comes out of him. “You’ve made me a fool many times over.”

My instinct is to laugh; all of his foolishness is couched in loyalty and humility, his stubborn virtues and steadfast, noble promises. I wish I could say the same of myself. I take a step toward him, my nose level with his chin. Since we have kissed before, I know exactly how much closer I would have to move in order to meet his mouth, and how his lips would part if I did, and the low sound that I might draw out of him as he braced his arms around my waist.

Instead, I speak. “Do you love me now?”

“Yes,” he says. There is some of his prince’s petulance to the word, like he has to stop himself from scowling at me as he says it. Below it, a gentleness, like the way his mouth ran over the scar on my throat.

“Do you desire me?”

Before we went to the dungeons, I returned to my chamber to reclaim my wolf cloak, and to change from Jozefa’s ruined dress to the new one the king had sewn for me. Gáspár had turned his back as I stripped off the pale silk, baring my skin and breasts to the stone wall, but when he turned again I saw him flushed all the way to his ear tips, his lower lip bitten and bloody.

“Yes,” he says.

I swallow. “And will you follow me further into the cold?”

Gáspár’s chin lifts, eye going to the star-wild sky and then back to me again. He swallows, the bronze skin of his throat shuddering in the frosted light.

“Yes,” he says finally.

Something warm spreads itself through my body, deeper in my marrow and blood. It is not as quick and bright as joy, the sudden burst of flint touching tinder; it is more like an old tree set alight in the summer, fire crawling through the gnarls and whorls of all that black wood. A bit of my own petulance flowers up.

“I won’t believe you,” I say, “unless you kneel.”

Very slowly, Gáspár lowers himself to the ground. His boots leave long tracks in the snow. He looks up at me, shoulders rising and falling, waiting.

I take another step toward him, close enough that the silk of my dress feathers against his cheek. I cup my hands around his face, my thumb grazing the edge of his eye patch. Gáspár flinches once, almost imperceptibly, but he doesn’t pull away.

Gáspár’s hands wander too. They go under my skirt, running up the backs of my thighs, his fingers tracing the grid of scars there. I tense, and he feels it, stilling himself against my skin.

“Where did you get these?” he asks quietly.

“I was punished often,” I say. “For talking back, for running away. I was terrible and rude and you would probably think I deserved most of them.”

He manages a laugh that looks like pale smoke in the frigid air. “That sounds like the sort of punishment a Patritian would dream up.”

I close my eyes. Gáspár lifts my dress up around my hips, and I gasp as his mouth skims the inside of my thigh. A thrill of pleasure rolls through me, his mouth going higher, finding its place between my legs. I let out a soft moan, a whimper. His tongue trails hotly through me. And then I drop to my knees beside him, hands clutching at his face, and kiss him fiercely on the lips.

Without breaking our kiss, I bear him down into the snow, his cloak fanning out over the frozen earth. I can only think of how much I want to be closer to him, to have him hold me against the cold like he did so many nights in Kaleva. He kisses my jaw and my throat. I wonder if he thinks of his Woodsman oath as I straddle him, his hands moving under my dress and over my breasts. His thumb brushes my nipple and I make a stammering noise against his mouth, needy and breathless.

“Will you disavow me this time?” I ask him, my hair branching over both of us, like the soft limbs of a willow tree. “Will you push me away and tell me never to speak of it again, and prattle on and on about how touching my body blackened your soul?”

I hadn’t expected that old hurt to flare in me, or the way my voice shakes with each word. Gáspár’s face creases.

“You’ve killed any part of me that was a devout and loyal Woodsman,” he says. There is pain threaded through his voice; I imagine the Prinkepatrios fading from his mind, like a moon paring away in the black sky. His hand shifts from my breast, closing into a fist over my heart. “This is all that’s left now.”

No one since my mother has spoken to me so sweetly, not even Virág on her warmest days, and certainly none of the men I’ve lain with by the riverside, who only whispered their rote flattery in the dark. Somehow it makes me want to weep. I touch my forehead to his, fingers sliding under the band of his trousers.

“Do you still pray?”

He shudders as I grasp him, eye flashing. “Sometimes.”

“Pray for me, then,” I say, my chest tightening, “and for my father and everyone on Yehuli Street, and for all of Keszi too.”

It is treachery to ask it, to suggest that his god is as real as mine, but since leaving Keszi I have seen so many kinds of power and magic that I never could have dreamed before. I have even learned to shape the letters of my name. Besides, the worse treachery is kissing a Woodsman, and I have already done that and more.

“I will,” he says. His lips graze my temple, and I hear his huff of breath as I sink myself onto him. He knots his fingers into my hair. “I will.”

When morning comes, my wet lashes are clumped with frost and Gáspár is gone. I sit up with a terrible start, fear pooling in my belly before I see him hunched over the fire, several yards away. A fine layer of snow has gathered on the stubbled grass, glittering like a Patritian woman’s jeweled veil. I hope that the second flurry was enough to cover our tracks.

Katalin is perched on a sharp gray rock, frost growing over it like pale lichen. In one hand, she holds a long, shining sword, its silver blade a blinding mirror for all the snow. She must have forged it last night, wrapping it in the steady rhythm of her song.

“What?” she says when she sees me looking. “I’m not going to leave the task of killing the turul up to you.”

I roll my eyes and turn away.

“Because the gods will certainly be furious with whoever does it,” Katalin goes on. “I can endure some of Isten’s fury, but you are already half-cursed and I wouldn’t wish a greater burden on you.”

My body tenses, but I don’t spit back at her or scowl. As far as I can tell, this is Katalin’s version of kindness.

While Gáspár waters and saddles the horses, I drag a big stick down from the mangled tree and whet one of its ends to a point. Then I find a clear patch of snow and begin to etch my letters into it. I start with my name, and the easy familiarity of it settles into my bones like good wine. Then I try more Régyar. I’ve never seen most of the words before, but I can match the sounds to letters. Katalin watches me with a cool, guarded interest, but Gáspár strides over and looks at the words from over my shoulder.

“Did your father teach you that?” he asks.

I nod. I concentrate and etch his name into the snow. G-Á-S-P-Á-R. I think I have spelled it right.

Gáspár smiles when he sees it, chewing the inner corner of his mouth. “You write nearly as well as my littlest brother.”

I elbow him fiercely in the side. “If you teach me how to spell, I’ll teach you how to shoot an arrow as well as any clumsy, one-armed child in Király Szek, which is probably the best you can hope for.”

Gáspár laughs then, and Katalin laughs, too, like a preening white bird on her perch.

We pack up our campsite, burying the ashy remains of our fire and heaping snow over the dark patches that our sleeping bodies have made. But I hesitate before scrubbing away the words I have scratched into the frost. I stand there for one long cold moment, the wind sweeping ice and sharp pine smell from the north, staring at our names written there beside each other, as clear and bright as anything.