Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

The tundra stretches out before us like a long tract of silvery sky, cloudy mounds of snow banked on its surface. I’ve counted six days since we left Király Szek, and overhead, the real sky is the gray color of water that’s been wrung through someone’s dirty laundry, flat as a mirror without any of a mirror’s luster. Small tufts of brittle grass peek through the frost, but our horses trample them as they pass, or else eat them right down to the roots. The horses are hungrier than we are. I can find the burrows of winter-fat rabbits and slumbering squirrels, but there will be nothing green here again until spring.

I try to mark the places that we have passed before, remembering a rocky overhang where Gáspár and I sheltered one night, wrapped together for warmth, or a small ravine that had once been a river, the old waters etching a permanent groove into the earth. If I stare all the way to the horizon, I can glimpse the dark silhouette of the pine forest, trees bristling against the vicious wind. Gáspár keeps a steady pace beside me, and my eyes dart to his with an animal’s unconscious twitch, just to make sure he’s still there. I would rather be looking at him than thinking of what we left behind in Király Szek, or about Nándor’s men snarling through the snow after us, or about the dangers of the forest ahead. His presence soothes me, though only by a small measure.

Katalin has taken to her role of guiding us with a true táltos’s steely determination, her horse pacing out several yards ahead of ours and her face ever forward, like an arrow aiming true. Once the sparse daylight winnows away, the sky goes dark and the snow starts to fall with such ferocity that it feels as if Isten himself is hurling handfuls of it down upon us. At the very least it covers our tracks, and we ride doggedly through it, but I begin to think that it is some sort of divine punishment. If Isten can read our intent, he must be trying to stop us. Katalin doesn’t do very much to dispel the notion.

“There will be some vengeance for killing it,” Katalin says, as we bed down to steal a few precious hours of slumber before riding on. “There must be. The gods won’t let you have anything for free.”

“Did you see that in your vision?” I ask, half-hopeful and half-despaired.

“No,” she says. “Only the path to the pine forest where the trees grow as wide around as huts, and tall enough to brush the highest clouds.”

“What is the power that’s worth risking your gods’ vengeance?” Gáspár’s voice is level, but I see the flicker in his eye.

“The power to see,” says Katalin. “To see everything. What has happened before and what is happening now in the most far-off places you can imagine and what will happen in a day or a year or even a moment. You could even read the thoughts in men’s minds. That’s the sort of power your father was going to kill me for, even though I don’t have it. No seer does. Only the turul.”

Gáspár leans back against the rock that we’ve sheltered ourselves beneath. I have the urge to bury myself in his chest, but I feel oddly afraid to reveal my affections in front of Katalin. Though she has nothing to gain from hurting me now, I can tell by the cut of her gaze she thinks me a traitor, a slave to the Woodsmen and the Crown. I swallow hard instead.

“It would be like burning your chapel to the ground,” I say. “Or looting Saint István’s corpse. Killing the turul is like defiling something sacred, something we all spin toward like a compass point.”

Katalin makes a derisive sound in the back of her throat; I know she is taking offense at me comparing the turul to any of the Patrifaith’s holy symbols.

Overhead, the sky is turning to a riot of color, ribbons of green and purple light wavering across it. The Juvvi believe that when whales in the Half-Sea breach the surface of the dark water, they’re so elated at the sight of the stars above them that they let out streams of rainbow light through their blowholes, winking radiance into the night. The Juvvi think this a good omen, portending a bountiful fishing season, a glut of silver-backed fish squirming in their twined nets. I don’t know what sort of future this portends for me.

“We can’t rest for very long,” Gáspár says. “Nándor’s men will be close behind.”

I nod, my eyes watering with the sting of the wind. I am about to lie back and rest my head on my arms when I hear Katalin gasp softly. She tips backward into the snow, little more than a heap of wolf fur and thrashing limbs, her pupils gone empty and white.

It is mere instinct that moves me, primed after so many years of watching Virág succumb to her visions. I kneel beside Katalin and roll her head into my lap, even as she flails, her mouth gaping open and then closing again silently, as if she’s gasping for air.

Gáspár draws a short, sharp breath. “Is this what it’s like every time?”

“Yes,” I say, as Katalin’s phantom hand nicks a chunk of flesh from my cheek, the bloody skin wedged beneath her fingernail. I think about how I held Virág the same way, and then how I held the secret of her writhing weakness close to me, too, so that no one else had to know the truth of what happened behind the walls of her hut in the dark. My fingers close around Katalin’s wrists, pinning her arms to the ground. Gáspár grabs hold of her ankles until the shaking stops and her eyes slide shut.

When she opens them again, her eyes are blue, only wider and colder than before, as if the chill air snuck into her as the vision flooded out.

“Katalin,” I manage. “What did you see?”

She flings herself up and rolls away from me, panting. “A tree, its trunk soaked in blood. And you—Évike, you were the one to kill it. The turul.”

The realization is like a rush of freezing lake water. I want to fight it, to armor myself against its truth, but a seer’s visions have never been wrong before. Gáspár lays a hand on the small of my back.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Katalin’s eyes thin. Her white hair is pasted to her forehead with cold sweat. “What are you apologizing for?”

“Well—” I begin, but then I stop, because I’m not exactly sure either.

“I never apologized to you,” she says.

Stiffening, I say, “I don’t suppose you’ll do it now, though.”

“No,” she concedes. She draws herself into a sitting position, knees against her chest, still managing, somehow, to look down her nose at me. “But I won’t taunt you for making besotted eyes at a Woodsman, or even for lying with one, if that’s as true as I suspect. As it is in the Upper-World, so it is in the Under-World.”

Gáspár’s brow furrows. “What?”

“It’s just a saying,” I explain wearily. “One of Virág’s adages. It means that there is a balance between two things, sort of like a bargain.”

Virág’s name burns a hole in my tongue. On her best days, she held me in her lap and whispered her stories in my ear, and I didn’t hate them so much when they were only for me, only for the two of us, and not a whetted blade that Katalin and the rest could use to wound me. If there are any threads still left to tie me back to her and to Keszi, I can feel them wearing with every passing moment, with every step that I move closer to the pine forest and the turul. Katalin’s vision feels like the swing of a sword.

Gáspár must notice my anguish, because he says, “Sleep now. I’ll take the first watch.”

Numbly, I nod. I sink down, resting my head in his lap and letting my eyes slide shut. Dreams loose through my mind: hunting dogs with snapping jaws, the turul in a golden cage. Nándor’s chest sewing up again, his wound vanishing bloodlessly. The ice ossifying around his pupils. My father embracing me and whispering the true name of God in my ear. The name was him asking me to save them, to be as shrewd as Queen Esther or as strong as the clay-man, and I am neither, just a girl shivering in the dark.

When I wake, the sky is still fuzzy and black and Gáspár’s hand is cupping my cheek. I rouse quickly, shaking off slumber. Katalin has already woken and is guiding her horse toward a small patch of bristly grass, sweeping the frost off it with the toe of her boot. Gáspár stands and saddles his own horse, exhaustion etched in violet circles under his eye. My stomach clenches.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to stay awake so long on my account,” I say, meaning it. “I hope you enjoyed at least one of your sleepless nights.”

I only want to see him flush, and he does, his cheeks and ear tips pinking faintly.

“It’s not just for your sake,” he says. “Nándor wants me dead, too, or at least in chains. It’s hard to sleep knowing I could wake with a knife to my throat.”

I’m glad to hear him say that it’s his fear of Nándor that keeps him from sleeping, and not regret over what we’ve done. Even stripped of his ax and Woodsman suba, there is still a century of gory hatreds stretching long between us, and so many gods darkening the sky with displeasure at our coupling.

“Do you ever think of letting him have it?” I ask. “This whole ugly, bloody country, I mean. Sometimes I think Nándor is what it deserves.”

Gáspár’s lips go taut, considering. “You mean I ought to leave him to the throne and go herd reindeer in the corner of the world?”

“You wouldn’t have to herd reindeer.” I try to imagine what sort of avocation might keep him occupied, him with his clever tongue and sharp mind, his carefully considered principles. “You could write treatises and dabble in poetry from the safety of your Volken hermitage.”

Amusement crinkles his eye. “And what would you do?”

Once I would have been eager to abandon Régország entirely, if I’d ever had the chance and the will to leave it. But those kinds of bitter perversities seem behind me now. I have felt my father’s arms circle me and heard the temple filling with Yehuli prayer; I have had a man hold me through the cold and promise to follow me wherever I go. It weighs me down, that love, fettering me to this terrible destiny. Katalin’s prophecy floats through my mind.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll have me as your scullery maid after all.”

Gáspár scoffs, but there is laughter under it. “I’d rather have you as my wife.”

We let it linger there in the cold, in the silence, that beautiful and impossible dream. We will always be foiled by history, manacled by blood. I know how well it turned out, his father marrying a nonbeliever, and though I feel I know myself very little now, I don’t think I would relish spending my days bastioned behind castle walls. Yet Gáspár is not the frivolous type. This moment is as much a surrender as him kneeling. I want to kiss him again, my own knees weakening with another lovely capitulation.

Katalin’s voice cuts through the air. “We’ll have to keep moving. We’re very close now, but so are Nándor’s men, certainly.”

A part of me wonders how they haven’t caught up to us already. Perhaps they were stalled by the snow and the cold, or some other unforeseeable disaster, but it seems too much to hope for. I clamber onto my own horse and we spur on, kicking up white in our wake.

It’s quiet in the forest. There are no animals scurrying in the underbrush or in the branches overhead. There are only the wind that makes the trees creak and moan like the wood-rotted roof of an old house, and the snow that falls softly through the empty spaces in the canopy, the cracked-glass splits that expose flashes of gray and white. The hair on the back of my neck is raised, and my horse’s ears are pressed flat to her skull.

“Slow down,” Katalin says, and I nudge my horse to a trot. “We’re so close—look for a trunk soaked in blood.”

Gáspár’s head jerks left and right, and then his eye angles up again, toward the sky. I can tell by the girth of the trees and the impossible silence in the air that we’re close to the same forest that our hunt for the turul led us to before, where the trees uprooted themselves and chased us to the lake.

My gaze fixes on something shiny in the distance. The lake is glimmering there beyond the lattice of pines, rimy with ice, like a huge pupilless eye.

I turn to Katalin, my heart in my throat. “Is this the way?”

“Yes,” she says. Her knuckles are white on the reins. “Toward the water.”

Deftly, we maneuver our horses through the maze of trees, stopping only when we’ve reached the frost-hardened bank. The lake is perfectly slick—a true mirror, false clouds gathering in white fists on its surface.

Gáspár brings his horse to my side. I can see the tension in his shoulders as he holds the memory of the ice and the cold water seething beneath it. And then I remember, too, that Tuula told us the name of the lake.

“What does Taivasmean,” I ask him, “in the Northern tongue?”

“‘Sky,’” he replies. “But what does it matter?”

“This is it,” Katalin says. “It must be, but—”

I slide down from my horse, chest tight. I am thinking about Isten finding Ördög in the Under-World. I am thinking about the rabbi digging into the dirt and mud of the riverbank to create life.

“Stop!”

The word rings out, arching over the lake, but it’s not Gáspár’s voice. I turn around, the soles of my boots sliding perilously on the bank, to see Tuula and Szabín racing through the woods toward us. Bierdna is at their backs, her huge tongue lolling as she runs. Ice sprays up from their feet.

“Tuula,” Gáspár says, when they skid to a halt in front of him. “Why are you here?”

“Me?” Her voice is thick with poison. “This is my home. I know why you’re here, like all the Woodsmen before, and I can’t let you do this.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “The turul’s powers—they’re the only way we can stop Nándor. And if we don’t stop Nándor, he will come for the pagans—including the Juvvi eventually. What other choice do we have?”

My words are dulled arrows; they bounce off her and land in the snow. Tuula’s dark eyes narrow and flash.

“Find another way,” she says. “The turul belongs to all of us. You cannot have it for your own.”

“This isfor all of us. Maybe the gods are willing us here.” I say the words without really believing them, imagining a long red thread unspooling from here to Keszi, thin and close to snapping.

“And maybe the gods have willed me here to stay your hand.”

I wonder if Tuula’s mother told her the stories of Vilmötten, too, weaving them into her long dark braid. If even when the Patritians tore her mother’s hand from hers, she kept the story of the turul clutched against her chest, bright and hot as a small flame. The thought nearly undoes me. I want to tell her that if there were any other way, I would do it—but Katalin’s vision can’t be changed and Yehuli Street might already be looted and empty.

Katalin slides down from her horse, fingers curled around the hilt of her blade. “I don’t think you can stop us.”

“You don’t know anything, wolf-girl,” Tuula says, the wind tangling with her words. “You’re just like any other hungry Southerner, thinking you can tear the North apart and eat its most tender bits. You can’t eat a thing that’s still alive.”

The bear growls, plumes of pale air rising from her nostrils.

“And what about you?” Gáspár asks, turning to Szabín. She’s staring down at her ice-caulked boots, hood over her face. “Am I not still your prince? Will you betray the Crown?”

“I am already hell-bound.” Szabín shakes off her hood. “No wisdom or reason will save me now. So I will go with my heart.”

Bierdna rears on her hind legs, giving a roar that ripples in the wind. It echoes in the emptiness a thousand times over, like a scrap of silk folded into itself again and again. Gáspár draws his sword.

The bear’s giant paw slams into him and sends Gáspár rolling across the snow. He picks himself up, frost clinging to the black wool of his cloak, but Katalin’s blade is quick, slashing across Bierdna’s shoulder. The bear hardly reacts at all. There’s a mean glint in her watery eyes, but it’s human and familiar, somehow. It’s Tuula’s rage I’m seeing in her gaze, fierce but calculated.

I fumble for my hunting bow, even though it won’t do me much good at such close range. Katalin moves toward Bierdna again, but the bear’s claws are faster. She swipes three red lines across the left side of Katalin’s face, narrowly missing her eye. Her scream is bitten back, swallowed up by the wind. Gáspár lands a wet, sickening blow in the bear’s side, and Tuula screams too.

I hardly notice Szabín, standing at the edge of the brawl, has taken a knife from her cloak.

“No,” I gasp out, but she doesn’t hear. Szabín pushes up her sleeve and cuts right over the white mangle of scars, a wellspring of blood brimming up over the ragged flaps of skin. Then she smears the blood on Tuula’s cheek.

The other girl doesn’t react. Her forehead is pearling with beads of sweat, eyes as hard as flint. Bierdna’s wound begins to close, slowly, blood misting into the air. I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing, Patritian power and Juvvi magic working as one. The shock of it sends Gáspár stumbling back, red blooming beneath the ruined fabric of his dolman.

Bierdna gives a throaty roar. Blood bubbles in the black pits of her nose. The cold air has turned thick and hot with the smell of it, and I turn briefly back toward the forest to see blood—Gáspár’s this time—splatter across the trunk of the nearest tree. The wood soaks it in, breathing it, suffusing the blood all the way down to its gnarled roots.

Fear opens a chasm inside of me. Gáspár spits blood from his mouth. And then, like the nocking of an arrow, something fits together perfectly inside my mind.

I don’t turn back again until I’ve taken two strides onto the frozen water. I can scarcely stand to look at Gáspár, his dolman shredded, his chest weeping red. He strains under the bear’s heavy paw, searching for me. His eye widens when he sees me moving, with slow, deliberate certainty, toward the center of the lake.

“Évike, stop!” he cries. The sound shatters me like glass, but I can’t turn back now. I keep going until I can feel the ice thinning. Until I can see the solid opalescence transform into watery translucence.

I take another step.

The ice gives a lurching, seismic shift under my feet, and as I am plunged into the dark water once more, all I can think is: As it is in the Upper-World, so it is in the Under-World.

This time, I bury all my desperate, flailing instinct and let my limbs slacken. Every inch of my body is daggered with cold, like a thousand tiny, sharp teeth gnawing at my skin. For a moment I am perfectly still, held in an icy suspension, even the sound of rushing water gone silent. I wonder if this is how Nándor felt when the black water swallowed him. If this is how Katalin felt as I held her head under the river. I wonder if I can possibly be the same, if I survive this.

There will be some vengeance for killing it,Katalin said. There must be. The gods won’t let you have anything for free.

Maybe I’m wrong—maybe I’ve misinterpreted Tuula’s words, or missed all the meaning in Virág’s stories. Maybe, when the breath burns out of my throat and the cold grows over my limbs like white moss, I will simply die. And then where will I go? Ördög gave me his magic, but will he welcome me into his kingdom? Or have I betrayed him already with my treasonous yearnings, my love for a Woodsman, my knowledge of Yehuli prayers?

There’s a pressure in my chest like something trying to gash right through me, and I almost let instinct take over, that snarling animal’s desire to live. My legs twitch faintly, shackled with cold. And then, with a flood of warmth, I think of Gáspár. If I’m to save him and everyone else, this is the only way.

Something tugs on me from below, just the faintest pull, like a thread lacing around my ankle. The cool suspension of the water is gone. For a moment, relief tastes as heady as swallowed wine—and then I’m hurtling downward, like a lobbed knife, still wrapped in skeins of velvet darkness.

Light rushes back at me. The force of it peels back my eyelids, and I see only the blur of white sky, smudged with gathering storm clouds. A coil of pine fronds flashes across my vision, and finally I land with an agonizing thud against something quite solid, my arms and legs tangled in the needly branches of a very, very tall tree.

I don’t have time to feel relief. I sway precariously with each howl of wind, demanding that I straighten my legs and crawl to safety, or else plummet to the ground in a twisted heap. I am still drenched, cold water crystalizing on my hair and cloak. As I brush needles from my face, I see that the tips of my fingers are already swollen and blue. My heart stammers, skipping its beats.

Move, I tell myself, forcing my numbing fingers to flex and grasp. Move or die.

With great care, I crawl from the web of branches that cradle me toward the fat bulwark of the trunk. When I reach it, I wrap my arms around its girth and cling to it fiercely, wind stinging my eyes.

As I hold to the trunk, the wind battering me from all sides, the cold water hardening on my skin, I think that I have made a terrible mistake. The turul isn’t for me to find—me with my half-tainted blood, with my malice for my own people. How many times did I rail against Virág’s stories, only to ask them to save me now? I feel as hollow as a gutted animal, nothing left in me but fear and regret over my own reckless bluster.

But Katalin’s vision can’t be wrong. I brace myself with the thought, downing it like a sip of wine I want to swallow over and over. The wind bristles over me, carding its fingers through my stiff, freezing hair.

I dig my fingernails into the bark, scrabbling for purchase. And then I see it: an amber tail feather, the sharp crescent of a beak that gleams like molten gold.

All my breath rushes out of me, and then it’s only adrenaline that moves my limbs. I heave and strain and shimmy my way up the trunk, my vision surging away and then billowing back dizzyingly. I don’t know how high I am, just that the white clouds are so dense I could believe them to be the snow-packed earth, and that the tree is spiraling up into them, cutting through them as if with a knife.

With every move, I remind myself what I have to lose if I fail. I imagine Yehuli Street littered with tiny fires, the doors flung open to reveal black and empty houses. A caravan of Yehuli winding toward the Stake. Boróka’s wolf cloak matted with gore. Virág folded in on herself like a conch shell, pitiful and tiny in death. Even Katalin a bluish corpse, blood drying in ten perfect daubs at the ends of her bare fingers.

And worst of all, Gáspár: his throat open under Nándor’s knife, eye like an empty inkwell, vacantly black. The thought maddens me with grief and I jerk myself up onto the next branch, ignoring the blood crusting on my lips and the twanging pain in my muscles.

When I do, I am eye-to-eye with the turul.

I half expect it to flutter away, or screech in protest at my intrusion. I feel stupid and clumsily human, an unmoored trespasser in this celestial world. But instead it perches on a thin branch, its head cocked to one side so it can look at me. Its eye is black and shiny enough that I can see myself in it, warped and small, like something trapped at the bottom of a well. I wonder if it looked at Vilmötten the same way.

Nothing survived the journey with me, not the hunting bow or even my dagger. This is Isten’s very cruelest joke, certainly: that I will have to use my magic to kill the turul. I raise my hand, and I feel Ördög’s threads give a twitch of resistance. My determination puddles out of me. I can’t do it.

Stories are supposed to live longer than people, and the turul is the most ancient story of them all. Tears go running hotly down my face. Maybe killing it will save this generation of pagans, but what about the next? When the fabric of our stories thins and wears, the people will be alive, but they won’t be pagans anymore. And that, I realize, is what Virág always feared the most. Not our deaths, or even her death. She was afraid of our lives becoming our own. She was afraid of our threads snapping, of us becoming just girls, and not wolf-girls.

But I have never been one of them, not wholly. It’s this thought that guides my hand to the turul’s breast. It gives a trill, a peculiarly small sound, and its chest swells, feathers shifting like a quiver of dancing flames. If anyone is to kill the turul, perhaps it ought to be me, because of my tainted blood and my treacheries, not in spite of them.

Blood leaks down my fingers, sudden as spring. The turul wilts into my outstretched arms. From far, far below, someone screams.

I want to cling to the tree until my body freezes there, like a gruesome mortal lichen. Something in me has snapped; I can feel it. In my mind I can see Virág’s hut, where I first heard the story of the turul, just the smudged shape of it. And then the image curdles and blackens, as if someone has taken a match to parchment.

But my journey isn’t over. With trembling fingers, I pry loose a thread from my dress and use it to wrap the turul’s claws—scrolled tightly, stiffening in death—and then string it around my neck. It hangs down my chest like a gory talisman.

I can’t see the ground from here, only the fretwork of branches, needles bristling in the wind. Tears rim my lashes, blurring my vision. Saltwater tracks across my cheeks. All I can do is take one trembling step at a time, bracing my boot against the frost-limned branches. Another gust of wind howls past me, nearly snatching the turul away and up into the sky. I clutch it to my breast, a sob coiling in my throat.

Down, down, down. The moments trickle past me like water. Even my journey through Ezer Szem didn’t feel so long, my shoulders tensed with the knowledge of my destiny, with the knowledge that each step brought me nearer to death. Now my fate stretches out in front of me like a road in the dark, no pools of torchlight, no signal fires. I don’t know what waits for me at the end of this climb, if what I have done is enough.

Pine needles plaster to the blood on my face. The ground and the sky are both the same color, pure white, and I can’t tell if I’m getting nearer. I can feel the trunk begin to thicken, its knots growing fat with moss. My feet make their landing on a thin, willowy branch and it snaps, sending me careening through the fronds of pine, my vision smearing brown and green and white, until I manage to catch myself again. My heart is pounding a ragged melody.

And then, finally, black shapes in the distance. The silvery veil of Katalin’s hair, the brown hood of Szabín’s cloak. Tuula’s skirts pooling around her, a bright spot in the snow. The bear. I can just glimpse Gáspár, standing, shifting, and my whole body slackens with relief. Seeing him sharpens my focus, whetting my intent. I hold tight to the trunk and lower myself to the next tier of branches, snow shaking out under my feet.

Something else: more black smudges ghosting over the lake. I hear the heavy galloping of their horses, the rattling of chains, and my boots slide off the branch beneath me. Pine needles snatch at me as I fall, swiping across my cheek, catching on the fur wolf cloak. I scarcely have time to panic before the ground flies up at me.

When I land, pain echoing through my elbows and knees, I am staring at the black suba of a Woodsman.

There are twelve of them and twelve horses, and ropes and chains and a team of oxen dragging a wooden cart with a cage. The Woodsman before me bends down, and I recognize the mangle of his nose. Lajos. He takes the turul, where it is half-crushed under my chest, easily snapping the thread that tethers it to me. I make a low sound of protest, but the words get caught in my throat, blood pooling under my tongue.

Bierdna honks pitifully as the Woodsmen throw chains over her huge shoulders. Two of them close on Katalin, axes drawn. I search for Gáspár, stomach reeling with horror, and find him being ushered toward the cart, wrists bound behind his back.

Just like that, our days of searching, our nights spent huddled in the cold, Zsigmond and Yehuli Street vanishing behind me—it all turns to ash in my mouth. Lajos dusts the snow off the turul’s red feathers, then wraps it in burlap and stows it away.

Blood is dripping into my eyes. Some branch must have thrashed my forehead on the way down. Another Woodsman lifts me from the ground and coils rope around my wrists, my whole body throbbing with the ache of the climb and the fall.

“What does Nándor want with the turul?” I manage, blood slurring the words.

“Nándor?” Lajos gives a gruff shake of his head. “We’re here on the king’s orders, wolf-girl.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or to weep. Through the bars of the cage, I see Gáspár lurch to his feet, reaching for me. And then the edges of my vision swell with blackness, and in another moment, I can see nothing more.