Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

I am half-deaf by the time we reach Király Szek six long days and nights later, between the rattle of the cart’s wheels and the thundering of a dozen horses, hurried and whipped so brutally by their Woodsman riders that their rumps are raw and gashed, all the sounds swelling up around me like the press of a hundred people in a crowd. I push myself as far to the corner of the cage as I can, avoiding everyone’s gaze except Gáspár’s, who rides alongside the cart sullen-faced, after initially refusing the dignity of a mount. When I woke again, I gave it my best jabbering effort to convince the Woodsmen that I’d forced Gáspár at sword point to come with me, and that he was innocent of any crimes against the king. The lie tasted like nothing, as slick as swallowed water.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Gáspár had fumed, and of course he wasn’t really angry at me for lying, only angry that I’d somehow cheated him out of his proper atonement. Even stripped of his Woodsman suba, he still clung to his Patritian morals, only now I was the object of his misguided nobility. “I shouldn’t be walking free while you’re in a cage.”

“You’re a prince,” I said dimly. “You shouldn’t be chained up with wolf-girls and Juvvi and a runaway Daughter.” From her side of the cage, Tuula scowled at me.

“What part of being a prince,” he’d said, “means that one should try and shirk the consequences of their mistakes?”

“Ask your father,” I said. “He does it all the time, and he’s the king.”

Gáspár had fallen silent after that.

Now I think I do understand that real, ravaging Patritian guilt. It feels less like a weight and more like an absence. Like the Woodsmen with their missing eyes and their missing ears and their missing noses, something vital has been cut out of me.

There is also the fact that my magic is gone.

I had tried, of course, to kill Lajos when he came around the cart reluctantly to feed me. But I succeeded only in wrapping my sore fingers around his wrist and holding it limply, like a child pestering her mother. No invisible threads laced into my skin, no Under-World power staggered through me. Lajos shook off my grasp and shoved me away from him, and I stared down at my pitiful bound hands in a numb sort of disbelief. Katalin watched with pursed, twitching lips, even her eye looking trapped behind three neat wounds running from her forehead to her jaw.

“Have you lost your magic, then?” she asked briskly, sounding as impatient as Virág when I came to her moping over some small injustice. “I did say the gods would find a way to punish you.”

“What about you?” I bit out. “You haven’t even tried to heal yourself.”

“And I’m not going to, but not because I can’t,” Katalin replied. “I want her to feel guilty every time she looks at me.”

She nodded at Tuula, who made a noise in the back of her throat. “Who says I’m interested in looking at you?” Tuula muttered.

No one in the cart has spoken since then, even though a storm passed during that time, leaving us soaked and shivering and staring stubbornly at the floor, refusing to even huddle together in furious silence. Gáspár passed me a fur through the bars of the cage, and Katalin sparked up a tiny fire in her palm, but I am almost relieved when we reach the gates of Király Szek, if only because the clouds thin and quiet overhead.

As we clatter through the main gates and into the marketplace, Gáspár draws his horse to my side of the cage.

“I won’t let my father hurt you,” he says. “Not again, Évike. I swear.”

“I don’t think you have the power to make that promise,” I say, and it nearly guts me, the way his face falls.

A part of me feels numb even thinking of my fate, that the king might decide to punish me for stealing his seer and trying to take the turul’s magic for myself. My own life seems so pitiful in comparison to the hundreds of others who circle me; I am one small star in a huge and brilliant constellation. All I can hope is that him having the turul will give him enough power to stand against Nándor, to keep the Yehuli and the pagans safe. That our sacrifice will be enough.

People pour past us, stopping to gawk and gape. Király Szek’s peasants look no richer or cleaner for the turul’s death, despite all their railing against the poisonous influence of our pagan magic. Two Woodsmen have to clamber down from their horses to throw more ropes over Bierdna, anticipating the bear’s panic, but she shuffles forward, her eyes black with their animal dullness, and none of Tuula’s fire. Tuula hunches in the cart, avoiding the gazes of the Patritians, and Szabín puts one bracing hand on her shoulder.

As we pass through the marketplace, air roiling with smoke and paprika smell, I push myself to my knees and peer through the bars, hoping to catch a glimpse of Yehuli Street. Of Zsigmond’s house. I can’t smell any pig’s blood, and the windows are yellow with light. The relief that goes through me is enough to make my eyes mist. We clatter into the courtyard, right to the mouth of the barbican, where the cart grinds suddenly to a halt.

One by one, the Woodsmen yank us out of the cage, checking to make sure our bindings are still tight. I want to tell them there’s no use binding my hands, because I couldn’t forge a blade or turn their axes to dust even if I thought it would help, or if I were simply feeling rash and vengeful, but I can’t find my voice.

“We’re meant to take the wolf-girls right to the king,” Lajos tells Gáspár. “The others can go to the dungeons.”

“So we can rot there until some tribunal packed with Patritians finds us guilty and the king has our heads off?” Tuula asks. She straightens, and Bierdna gives a low, shackled growl. “Is that your god’s justice?”

“Keep your mouth shut, Juvvi scum,” Lajos snarls, jabbing her with the blunt end of his ax.

“My father could be convinced of your innocence,” Gáspár says evenly, though there’s a pulling between his brows. “Once he has the turul, he—”

Tuula interrupts him with a laugh. “And you, the false prince, Fekete, think you can comfort me? You let them take your power from you, hang you in a Woodsman’s suba, and send you into the bleak wilderness while the king sits in his castle tending to his bastards like pretty sheep? I’d rather die with a blade in my hand, or at least with fire in my heart, than live as the shadow of a shadow.”

Gáspár doesn’t reply, his mouth quivering, but Tuula’s words kindle a simmering anger in my belly.

“Leave him alone,” I snap. “You’ll only shorten your life here in Király Szek if you can’t stop yourself from snarling like an animal.”

The hair on Bierdna’s back is bristling. Tuula’s lips twist with a smile.

“I never thought I’d see you so toothless, wolf-girl,” she says. “Lying with a Woodsman has snuffed all your flame.”

Before I can reply, Lajos jerks his head. The rest of his retinue circle Tuula and Szabín like black birds, crowding them toward the barbican. It takes another four Woodsmen to wrangle the bear, dragging her into the palace hall. Her claws leave long gouges in the stone floor.

We don’t make it very far down the corridor when a figure crosses through the archway. The collar of a blue dolman parts like two strewn tulips over the pale column of his throat. Nándor.

Seeing him stops my heart. He strides toward us, lithe as a mountain cat, parting the gathered Woodsmen. For a single panicked beat I think he’s approaching me, but he pauses before Szabín, instead, clasping his hands over his chest.

“It’s been a long time, sister,” he says. “You look less holy than when I left you.”

Szabín’s lips tremble, but she doesn’t reply, only lifts her chin to meet his eyes.

“Cavorting with Juvvi, I see.” His gaze flickers to the bear, pitifully muzzled. “I thought better of you—you always seemed to have greater devotion than the rest.”

He flicks off her hood and runs his knuckles gently along her cheek, the gesture wavering somewhere between loathing and tenderness. Szabín shivers, and I see Tuula’s chest swell like she wants to speak, but there is still a Woodsman’s ax at her back. Relief pools in me, seeing her submission. Though there is little love between us, I don’t want to watch her die. Bierdna growls, one yellow tooth sliding over her lip.

“And you.” Nándor turns to me. “I don’t know how you managed to survive, but I suspect you had help from my traitor brother. Either way, now that your bargain has been broken, I suspect you’re not much longer for the palace, or this mortal world.”

I have been afraid of Nándor for a long time, but only in a hazy, indistinct way, the same way that I feared the Woodsmen as a child before I knew the fate of the wolf-girls they carried away. Now I cannot look at him without imagining the wound on his chest knitting itself shut again, flaps of skin stitching up the horrible gash that I’d left. The gash that ought to have ended his life. I feel like I have been plunged into Lake Taivas again, this time going stiff in the black water.

Gáspár moves to my side, but before either of us can reply Nándor is gone again, his footsteps vanishing down the corridor. My breath shudders out of me. Before, when I had my magic, I could have at least tried to fight him. Now I can do nothing while the ice closes over my head.

The Woodsmen lead Tuula, Szabín, and the bear to the dungeons, and Lajos nudges Gáspár, Katalin, and me toward the Great Hall. I can scarcely feel the floor under my boots. If Nándor is right, I may not leave this chamber alive, even with Gáspár at my side. What can he do to halt the swing of his father’s blade?

King János sits on the dais, crown of fingernails resting on his head like a stag’s weathered antlers. My eyes go at once to the smears of blood dried into its ridges and grooves, small details that I have come to recognize, though I don’t wonder about them anymore. My mother’s fingernails are there among them, but she’s gone now, just like my magic.

The king’s beard has been braided, almost lovingly, and I can’t imagine who has done such a thing. Certainly not Nándor, who spoke so openly of his attempt to kill me in front of Lajos and the other Woodsmen. It frightens me to think that there are only King János’s weak chin and dull-eyed rambling between Nándor and the throne.

There’s a wet gasp from the corner of the room and I twist my head to see the Érsek, puddled in the shadows to the left of the dais, nearly invisible until he patters forward into the light. In the mound of his brown robes, he looks like a sleepy-eyed animal peering out from its burrow, head bobbing on his wattled neck. He blinks at the king, and then at Gáspár, and then at me.

“I saw a bear in the courtyard, my lord,” he says.

“A bear?” the king echoes.

“Do not concern yourself with the bear,” says Lajos. “My lord, we found it. We have the turul.”

He reaches into the cloth bag he has slung over his shoulders and pulls the turul from it. Its amber feathers are matted from the long journey, drained of all their previous luster, stiff and cold after six long days being dead. Lajos bows, then lays the turul at the king’s feet.

King János has the look of a half-starved man at the feast table. The eyes of a besotted man at the bedside of his lover. Very gently, he reaches down and lifts the turul, holding it up to the scant candlelight.

“Finally,” he whispers, and then even more quietly, as if he doesn’t expect anyone to hear: “To Kuhaleand back.”

He uses the Old Régyar word for the Under-World. Old Régyar is the tongue that was once shared between Southerners and Northerners, before the Southern tongue split off, a branch fallen from a mighty oak. We all still know the language, or at least a few adages and rhymes, but Old Régyar is on its way to extinction: by the time Virág is dead, it will be all but forgotten. The king is not nearly as old as Virág, but I wonder if his wet nurse sang to him in Old Régyar. He is old enough for that.

“Will you have a feast tonight, my lord?” the Érsek asks. “To celebrate this boon?”

“Yes,” the king breathes. “Yes, a great power is nearly upon me.”

He passes the turul off to a serving girl, who scurries quickly out of the hall with it. The rheum in the king’s eyes seems to lift. His gaze is clearer and sharper than I have ever seen it when he turns to me.

“Wolf-girl,” he says. “My Woodsmen tell me you were the one to find the turul.”

I glance toward Lajos, who is glowering at me. There’s no use in lying. “Yes.”

“And you stole my seer, and my son, in order to do it.”

Gáspár opens his mouth to argue, but I speak first. “Yes.”

The king draws a breath. He rises from his seat, stepping off the dais, and comes to stand before me. I watch his hands, waiting for him to forge a blade and put it to my throat. Waiting for him to use his stolen magic to kill me.

“Father, please—” Gáspár starts.

“Quiet,” the king says. “You do not need to beg for the wolf-girl’s life; I don’t intend to end it.”

I ought to feel relief, but I can only manage a short, bitter laugh, remembering how I stood in this same hall before, the king’s sword angled over my head. Remembering how it rusted away to nothing in my hand. I’d felt suffused with power then, manic with it, freer than I’d ever imagined I could be. The girl in my memory is a miserable fool for not seeing all the sheathed daggers, for not knowing how to maneuver around the pits in the floor.

At the very least, I will leave this room with my life. That was all I wanted when the Woodsmen took me—to survive—but somewhere in the time since I left Keszi, I have begun to wish for more. For the gentle embrace of my father, for a quill and ink I could use to write out my own name, for stories that didn’t make me flush with apology for daring to speak them. For a man who kneels with my name on his lips. I think that I sealed the turul’s fate the moment I started wanting any of it. I would have done whatever it took to keep it all from falling out of my hands like leaves.

“Perhaps it was not your intent.” The king’s voice jerks me back to the half-lit room. “But you have helped to deliver me the greatest prize. And for your aid, my son, I will reward you—a place in my hall permanently, and no more Woodsman errands.”

A swallow bobs in Gáspár’s throat. King János leaves me, and puts both hands around Gáspár’s face, cupping his cheeks. Almost imperceptibly, Gáspár flinches. I wonder if he is remembering his father’s heated blade swinging down at him. I wonder if it is possible, to be comforted by the same hand that struck you. Certainly I craved Virág’s gentleness as much as I loathed her cruelty. Nose to nose like this, Gáspár several inches taller than the king, I can see no mirror between them. Gáspár must take after his mother alone.

It is another moment before Gáspár speaks. “Thank you, Father.”

His words, low and deferent, are more than King János deserves. An old bitter part of me wants to hurl the king to the floor and see how it looks when he’s the one kneeling, at the mercy of his ill-treated son and two wolf-girls. But Gáspár has no appetite for vengeance, none of my own perverse spite. He stays still and silent until his father’s hands slip off his face.

“Is that it, then?” I ask. “Now that you have the turul, will you let the seer go, and stop taking wolf-girls?”

The king’s gaze drifts over Katalin, landing on me. Something kindles in his eyes, like a match being struck.

“Leave us,” he says. “I will speak to Évike alone.”

“My lord,” the Érsek protests, but the king silences him with a glare. Lajos prods Katalin from the room, and Gáspár follows, brow furrowing with concern. I suspect he will wait nervously on the other side of the door. Only when the chamber has been emptied does King János speak.

“I did not intend to be a cruel king,” he says.

This nearly sends me to hysterics. “No? What was your intention, when you cut out your son’s eye? When you had twelve wolf-girls killed so you could steal their magic?”

“Careful, wolf-girl. I can still take your head too.”

“If it weren’t for me, you’d never have gotten the turul,” I say. What’s the use in being docile now? Smiling pliantly and serving him dutifully didn’t stop the king from betraying me. No bargain can last between a hawk and a mouse. “Now that you have the power you wanted so desperately, will you finally leave Keszi be?”

“There is nothing more your village can offer me,” says King János.

“Except the legitimacy that our pagan myths and pagan ways grant you.” My voice is sour, like I have tasted a peach with a blackened pit. “And, of course, our magic. Once you’ve ended the war with Merzan, you believe the peasants and the counts will rally back to your side?”

“They will,” he says. “I’m certain of it. And I know you worry over the fate of the Yehuli, too, but I have no desire to see them banished. They provide important services to the city, and they have lived in Király Szek for a very long time.”

Just like Jozefa said. I think of the star-dappled temple ceiling and the gold-wreathed columns. I think of Zsigmond. If keeping the king on the throne is what will ensure his safety, and the safety of everyone on Yehuli Street, then my magic is a very small sacrifice to make. If killing the turul is what keeps Keszi safe, how can the gods fault me for what I’ve done? Better King János than Nándor. Better to kneel than to die.

Even as I think it, I know it is a Yehuli thought. One that Virág would try and scrub from me like she would a stain on her skirt.

I don’t speak. There is nothing else to say. Finally, King János steps back up onto the dais and returns to his seat.

“I would like it very much if you attended my feast tonight, wolf-girl,” he says. “After that, I’ll no longer have any need of your services. You’ll be free to go.”

I don’t swallow my laughter; the king can punish me for it if he likes. I have been in Király Szek long enough to know when a trap has been laid at my feet.

In the dim corridor that leads to the king’s Great Hall, Katalin stands straight and tall, like a winter bird on its branch. The drench of candlelight makes the wounds on her face look wet and lush, but her silvery hair has been braided back so that not even a strand obscures them. Her finely shaped chin is raised haughty, high. Her straight-backed certainty ought to be a comfort to me, but I have only recently begun to think of her as an ally, not an enemy, and in comparison I feel as whimpering-weak as a struck dog. If she can walk into the king’s feast with scars on her face and still manage to look down her nose at everyone, I’m a coward for wanting to hide in my wolf cloak. When Katalin sees me putting my hood up, she marches over to me and locks her hand around my wrist.

“Stop it,” she snaps. “You’re acting like a child.”

“How else should I act, now that my magic is gone?” I have no words to explain the emptiness that I feel, now that Ördög’s threads have shriveled up like flowers in the frost, leaving me bereft. I’m just as weak as the day I left Keszi.

Katalin fixes me with an icy stare. One of the cuts has dragged down the corner of her left eye and dyed the white of it with a needle-prick of blood.

“So you don’t have your magic,” she says. “That never stopped you from being wicked and spiteful before.”

I give the scar on my eyebrow a pointed rub. “You made me that way, by tormenting me every chance you got.”

“Fine—are you asking me to torment you again?”

“No.”

“Well, then, stop looking like Virág has just given you a lashing,” she says. “There’s no reason to feel guilt over what you’ve done. I would’ve done the same.”

“And what if Isten punished you for it?”

She snorts. “You are starting to sound like a Patritian.”

Face flushing, I begin to formulate a reply, but Katalin pushes through the doors to the Great Hall before I can say another word. Mute and cowed, I follow her.

The feast is nothing like I expect. There’s no gouged pig, no plucked swans, no red-currant soup with clouds of sweet cream. No carafes of coveted Ionik wine. There is only one silver dish and a single goblet, and they are both set out in front of the king. His guests are strewn like precious stones around the empty tables, jeweled silks gleaming. Their eyes dart up to the dais, then back to their neighbors, sharp and bright as blade points. I catch whispers of their conversation as I walk.

“. . . don’t approve of it, not one bit . . .”

“. . . cavorting with pagans, for saints’ sake . . .”

“. . . rather the Érsek, if anything . . .”

A pang of worry makes my footsteps falter, but only for a moment. King János was certain he could silence his detractors once he had the turul’s power. But until he makes a demonstration of its magic, their whispers will go on unstemmed.

The king’s dais has been set with a long table, and Nándor is seated beside him. Gáspár sits to his father’s left, and when he sees me starts to rise, but I give my head a quick shake and he sinks down again. I don’t want more gazes drawn my way. The king’s younger sons, Matyi among them, line the table to its end. A group of Woodsmen press along the far wall, and beside them, the Érsek, as squint-eyed and blank-faced as ever. A thrill of loathing goes through me, something old and perfunctory, scarcely less rote than the instinct to breathe. Nothing will ever stop these Patritians from bristling at me, from wrapping their red belts tight to keep me away.

The wooden doors push open. A small, pale-haired serving girl carries a silver tray, her arms trembling under the weight of it. She lays it in front of the king and removes the lid. Inside, garnished with sprigs of elderflower and fleshy red slices of pomegranate is the turul.

It’s been perfumed with herbs to mask the faintly rotting smell, and its feathers seem to have a renewed, if artificial, glow. A fine layer of gold leaf is plastered to its wings and breast, not quite the right shade for its amber plumage. It lies flat on its back, wings stretched to their downy tips, as if it’s just been shot out of the sky.

Seeing the turul like this makes my stomach turn as hard and tight as a stone. Virág would weep, I think. She would throw herself in front of the king and beg to be taken instead. For all that I railed against her, she loved us all more than she loved any one of us, and much more than she loved herself.

I do none of it, but I move closer to Katalin, the fur of our wolf cloaks brushing.

The king raises his knife and fork. I see the gleam of the silverware, the gleam of his hungry gaze, and I realize what he means to do. Bringing a hand to my mouth, I lean over, gagging.

“Quiet,” Katalin whispers, but in a way that’s more comforting than chiding, and nothing I would have ever expected from her. I stand up again, my vision starry at its edges.

King János doesn’t slice into the bird like a piece of roast pork. Instead, he takes the delicate tines of his fork and plucks out the turul’s eyes, one by one, rolling them onto his plate. The eyes are iridescent in the candlelight, like two shelled insects. He spears one and holts it aloft, throat bobbing under his gray beard.

And somehow this is worse than watching the shorn wolf howl out its death, worse than watching the deer go limp under a Woodsman’s knife. I have delivered the king this feast. I feel as if I have offered my own arm to King János and told him to begin cutting wherever he liked.

The room is silent, like a long-held breath. Suddenly, Katalin reaches out and grabs my hand, fingernails carving tiny sickles into my skin. I tamp down my surprise and cling back. We hold on to each other as the king puts one of the turul’s eyes into his mouth, chokes, and then swallows. I don’t see whether he chews.

“Are you all right, my lord?” the Érsek asks in his reedy voice as the king’s face turns violet.

“I can feel it,” he rasps. “The power of it, running through me.”

He spears the second eye with his fork and puts it in his mouth. This time, he swallows it whole.

The king’s own eyes are moon-wide and just as bright. He pushes up from the table with such force that he flips it over and sends it tumbling down the dais, the tray and turul clattering to the ground with it. Guests flutter and start. King János stumbles forward, his head twisting madly, his gaze following the path of a ghost that no one else can see.

My legs are trembling with such ferocity that I think they might give way beneath me. Katalin sucks in a sharp breath, her grip on my hand tightening. The king is thrashing about the Great Hall, spittle foaming on his lips.

“I can see it,” he whispers, eyes flashing. “I can see it all. What will be. What might have been—”

He stops, a cough shuddering out of him, and a stream of rosy blood dribbles down his chin.

“Father,” Nándor says. He is standing now, too, behind the mess that King János made of the table. “What do you see?”

“Too much,” the king says. And then he screams so loudly and terribly that it cuts the air like a blade gashing through silk, and it’s all I can do not to press my hands to my ears to blot out the sound, because the least I can offer the dead turul is to hear it. He drops to the ground on his knees, screams ebbing to whimpers.

How long have I wanted to see King János kneel? Now it feels like a trickster god’s perverse joke, that I can’t watch it without wanting to retch. Gáspár moves to his father’s side, but even he can’t disguise the look of revulsion on his face. Tears have dried in salt streaks on the king’s face, and there is spittle crusted in his beard. He wails and weeps, and I can only wonder whether this happened to Vilmötten, too, when the turul gave him the gift of sight. This was never in any of Virág’s stories.

Suddenly, the clamor of the king’s sobs is knifed through with a laugh. A high-pitched, pealing laugh that I would know anywhere, for how often it rang in my ears while I snarled and thrashed. Katalin’s whole body is shaking with that laughter, and her mouth is wide open enough to show the pearls of her perfect teeth.

“How dare you—” one of the Woodsmen begins, but Katalin pays him no mind. She lets go of my hand and picks her way across the room, a streak of pure white among all the wood and silk and stone. There’s a smile gracing her scarred and lovely face. When she reaches the king, she lowers herself beside his crumpled form.

“You’re weak,” she says. There’s a vicious, satisfied gleam in her eyes that I would have thought reserved only for me. “You don’t deserve this power, because you’re too feeble to survive it. Could you stand it, a new vision every night? Never knowing what kind of horror it would bring?” She laughs again, as bright and clear as a bell. “You’re weaker than every wolf-girl you ever brought back to Király Szek, and you’re far, far weaker than me.”

“Please,” the king bawls. “Please . . . I just want it to end.”

In spite of all the pagan blood he’s spilled and even my mother’s fingernails on his crown, I feel a prickling of pity. King János is still a man, after all, guilelessly mortal, and in the end less a tyrant than a fool. The king reaches up with feebly spasming hands and starts to claw at his own eyes, fingers slipping into the sockets and then pulling. Someone in the crowd shrieks like a sparrow hawk. I search for Gáspár and see the horror flashing in the one eye he has left, almost as if he’s having a vision of his own.

And then the king sprawls forward, Nándor’s knife in his back.