Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Five

I wake sometime in the morning, when the sky is as pink as the shell of an ear, delicate and raw. The stretch of bed next to me is cold, the sheets streaked with old blood, and Gáspár is gone. Futile panic rises in me. I throw off the covers and run between the window, still gridded with its iron bars, and the door, sealed as tightly as before. As the last bit of moribund hope leaves me, I stand in the center of the empty room and wish I could make all the stone crumble, the floor collapse, and the roof cave. I would bury myself in the ruin, if only I could bring the Broken Tower down with me.

The door opens with a shuddering metallic sound, the scraping of its iron grate against the stone floor. I see Lajos’s wreck of a nose before I see Katalin’s face—her wounds, now black and scabbing, her eyes furiously blue. He shoves her through the threshold, and she stumbles forward into my arms.

“The king wants both of your hair braided,” Lajos says shortly. He jerks his chin between the two of us; it’s mounded white with scar tissue.

“Why?” I ask. My voice is hoarse with all the hours of whispering.

“In the pagan way,” he says, and closes the door behind him.

“And why should we?” asks Katalin, once she has righted herself, even though Lajos is long gone. “If they’re going to slit my throat, I don’t much care whether there are pretty ribbons in my hair.”

I think of Gáspár’s back, latticed with its gruesome lash wounds. “They’ll find some way to punish you for your refusal, you know. The best you can hope for is a sweet, easy death.”

Katalin’s jaw unlatches. “What have they done to make you so meek? If I knew, I would have done it long ago.”

That kindles an old flame in me, and my face grows warm. “And for what? Why did you hate me so much? Was it because I didn’t stay down when you shoved me, or because I didn’t swallow every insult you hurled at me? Did you sleep more soundly at night when you knew that I was weeping in my bed, three huts away?”

For a long moment, Katalin says nothing. There is a faint rosiness to her cheeks, and this, I realize with a morose satisfaction, is more than I have ever managed to fluster her before. I am ready to consider it a perverse victory in the hours before my death, but then Katalin turns me around and starts running her fingers through my hair.

I’m afraid to speak, afraid to imperil this precarious moment that seems hesitantly to approach camaraderie. I think of Virág’s hands, supremely agile with their six fingers, threading my hair into dozens of intricate braids as thin as fishbones. I think of Zsófia shrouding me with her silver dye. I think of the way that they trussed me for the Woodsmen like a prized pig, fat under the farmer’s blade.

“Your hair is impossible,” Katalin huffs, but she finishes my last braid and ties it off with a strip of brown leather.

“It’s finally done now,” I say, my gaze fixed dully in the middle distance. “I’ll die in Király Szek like I was supposed to.”

Katalin makes a halting sound, and her fingers tense against my scalp. “I never wanted you to die for me, idiot.”

“It certainly seemed like you did,” I say, “given how much you tormented me.”

“I wasn’t the best—”

“You were terrible,” I cut in.

Katalin gives her head a dignified shake. “Do you know what Virág always told me, when we were alone? A seer never trembles, she said. Stupid old bat. She was always kind to me, but that’s because she had to be; I was the next táltos, and I was supposed to take her place. She forced meto swallow every vision like it was sweet wine instead of poison, and said that it was kindness. She had no reason to be kind to you, with you being barren and all, but she was, anyway—between the lashings, at least. I hated you for that.”

I manage a short, humorless laugh. “So you were cruel to me because she was kind?”

“Silly, isn’t it? Virág told me I should be ready to do anything for Keszi, to die for my tribe. You were part of my tribe. A wolf-sister.” She tries out the word, chewing on her lip. “I should have tried to protect you too.”

Something unravels in me, like thread. I press my face to her shoulder, to the soft white fur of her wolf cloak, just below the curve of its frozen jaw.

“I could burn this whole tower down, you know,” she says. “And both of us inside it.”

I think of my own fleeting desire to see the Broken Tower crumble. But it would be a weightless gesture, a shout without an echo. They would only build it up again, or fashion something new from its ashes. Even smashing Saint István’s statue or snapping his saintly finger bones would be like kicking a lone rock down a dark abyss. Just the way that killing the turul hadn’t killed us, hadn’t killed everyone in Keszi, the Patrifaith would survive some shattered marble and ruined stone.

“I would rather die by steel, I think,” I tell her. “It’s quicker and cleaner, and I won’t have to smell my own burning skin.”

“I suppose that’s fair enough,” Katalin says. Without forcing me from her shoulder, she starts to sing. A low song, sweet and brief, one that Virág often used for a lullaby. For a moment I think she’s forging a blade, but it would be as useless as a fire; we might kill one or two or three Woodsmen, but it would never be enough for all of them.

When Katalin’s song is done, there’s a small silver disk cupped in her palm, slick enough to be a mirror. Holding it up, I see that inside is the wavering reflection of a perfect pagan girl, myths and stories and magic braided into her hair, history in the flash of her eyes and the set of her jaw. For better or worse, no one would guess at the taint of my father’s blood.

The door opens again, Lajos and the two other Woodsmen behind it. There is rope for our hands, pulled tight enough to burn the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. The Woodsmen take us down the castle’s serpentine hallways for the last time, through the smolder of half-lit torches, and out into the courtyard.

There’s no stale air from the marketplace drifting over the palace gates; the stalls have all been shuttered for Nándor’s coronation. The foul cobblestones have been scrubbed of their muck and laid over with lush woven rugs, in wine-dark violet and evergreen and gold. Garlands of white and purple flowers trim a makeshift dais, their delicate petals curling up in search of a cloud-wreathed sun. They are early crocuses, which bloom only on the southern slope of a single hill in Szarvasvár.

The dais has been built to hold a new throne, one of freshly burnished gold. I wonder if Nándor had my father make it, too, standing over him with a lash in hand. The back has been wrought into the shape of a three-pronged spear, each prong sharpened to a glistening point, like a jagged golden tooth. It has been draped with a great tapestry that bears the seal of House Bárány. So that Nándor can claim the throne under the Bárány name, even though he is a bastard by Patritian law. Seeing it fills me with a turbid, manacled fury, but it’s nothing compared to seeing Nándor himself.

He ascends the dais in all the heat and clamor of the crowd, his admirers with their faces shining as bright as coins newly minted. They pelt him with woven laurel crowns and bouquets of tulips that they must have paid for in blood, because the Merzani are burning all the flower fields on the Great Plain. His dolman is pure white, like the sky in deep winter, and over it is a red-and-gold mente, with furred sleeves that hang nearly to the ground. They sweep through tulip petals, which are strewn over the dais like pale-bellied carps beached on the shoreline.

A coterie of Woodsmen rings the dais in a black collar, pushing back against the teeming of the crowd. On the dais is another man, wearing a dark-blue mente, a lone feather pinned to his chest.

Count Reményi holds the crown on a red satin pillow. I scan the crowd in a blind panic, searching for my father’s face among the shining hundreds, and find him flanked by two Woodsmen. I cannot imagine why Nándor hasn’t killed him already—perhaps he wants Zsigmond to see what it looks like, when a Patritian king wears his crown. A beat of relief goes through me before I remember that it’s all for nothing. Nándor will slit his throat as soon as the crowd disperses; maybe before, if he wants to make a show of it. I expect there will be a thousand eyes on me when I die.

At last I see him. Gáspár ascends the dais in his black dolman and suba, looking every inch a Woodsman again. All he’s missing is the ax at his hip. His movements are stiff and considered; I can see him wince when he lifts his arms to take the crown from Count Reményi. I feel a twinge of phantom pain go down the backs of my thighs, where my scars are a pale mirror of his fresh and lurid wounds. It is so achingly, viscerally wrong to watch him stand there beside Nándor in his brilliant red and gold, like seeing both the sun and the moon in the sky at once—Isten drawing up the dawn with one hand and painting midnight with the other.

Lajos maneuvers Katalin and me through the crowd, toward the very base of the dais, so close that I can taste the pollen-sweet scent of the spring crocuses on my tongue. I meet Gáspár’s eye, glittering wet in the meager sunlight, and I can see all my painful, ruinous love reflected back. There is another world in which we might have stayed in the cradle of tree roots forever, our words rising in cold whispers but our hands and mouths warm.

“Good people of Régország!” Count Reményi cries out—once, twice, until the sound of the crowd simmers low and then goes silent. “We are gathered here to crown our country’s next king. He is heir to the throne of Ave István, blood chieftain of the White Falcon Tribe and all its lands, and blessed by the gentle hand of the Prinkepatrios. Kneel for him and for your god.”

I recognize the words from the Saint István’s Day feast—it was how Nándor introduced his own father. As he speaks, Count Reményi unfurls his white-feathered cloak, the cloak of Akosvár and the White Falcon Tribe, the same one that Reményi himself wore that very night. Now he drapes it over Nándor’s back, and I inhale a sharp breath. Even after all his heated ramblings about the perversion of our pagan ways, he will take his throne by Isten’s rite.

Count Reményi gives Gáspár a vicious nudge, leaning close to whisper words that I can barely hear: “Say it.”

Gáspár steps forward. His face is hard, but his gloved hands are trembling.

And then Katalin screams.

She slithers boneless to the ground, thrashing and wailing. Suddenly oblivious to the threat of Lajos’s ax, I kneel down beside her, trying to turn her over clumsily with my bound hands. Her eyes have gone blank and white.

“What is the meaning of this?” Nándor cries out. The crowd lurches toward her and then shudders away again, craning their necks to view the commotion, and then leaping back in revulsion when they do.

“She’s having a vision,” I grit out between my teeth. “It will be over in a moment.”

There is the barest sheen of sweat on Nándor’s forehead; I have never seen him look so close to alarm. He turns to the crowd again, their fear swelling like a pulse of torchlight, almost visible.

“Don’t you see?” he crows. “Pagan madness and pagan magic! Once I am king, there will be no more dark horrors making their home in our Patritian land, no more cloaked servants of Thanatos leading us down to our doom.”

The veil of white vanishes from Katalin’s eyes. She sits up, straightening herself, and amidst all the tremulous rumbling of the crowd, sets her lambent blue gaze on Nándor.

“They’re coming,” she says. “The pagans. All of them, from all the villages. They’re going to storm the capital.”

The only word for it is chaos. Nándor rallies the Woodsmen to him at once, and they ascend the dais, making a bulwark around their almost-king. Gáspár hurls the crown away from him and it clatters onto the cobblestones; a bald man in stained linens leaps upon it, covering the crown with his body while a dozen more haggard and desperate peasants claw their way toward it, just for the chance to touch something made of gold.

I’ve lost sight of Gáspár behind the bastion of Woodsmen, and I nearly lose Katalin to the furious roil of the crowd. I cling to her as best I can with bound hands, huddling under a fretwork of flailing limbs, occasionally catching an elbow or the toe of a leather boot. My stomach turns over on itself, a mirrored churning of the throng.

I wonder what kind of future Virág has seen: Woodsmen thundering through Ezer Szem, axes slicing through fern and bramble and then through human flesh, before they can sing a blade or an arrowhead to life, or light one hopeless fire. Nándor at the helm, like a ship’s figurehead carved in ivory and gold, his pale hand closing around her throat. I know what choice she has made. She wants to die fighting.

Deaf to everything but the torrent of blood in my ears, I lurch to my feet, hauling Katalin up with me. I shove my way through the crowd with half the savageness of a real wolf, trying to find my father. When I do, it’s because I slam hard into his back, and nearly topple both of us to the ground.

“Évike,” he gasps, gripping my bound hands. “We have to flee this city at once.”

I shake my head mutely, thinking of that star-dappled temple ceiling, heavy with all its histories. I think of the white columns like cracked ribs, and all the pale rubbed spots on the benches where so many men and women and children have sat, generations wearing through the wood varnish.

“There’s no shame in fleeing, when it’s a choice between that and death. More than anything, God wants his children to live. To be good, and to survive.”

His words make my throat close, something raspy and hot rising in it. I remember that he whispered the true name of God in my ear, like it was the best and truest story he ever told, and only a secret because you had to be sure you were ready to handle it gently, the way a doe noses its newborn fawn toward the softest grasses.

“You go,” I whisper. “I have to stay.”

“Where you go, I go,” my father says.

“Please,” I say. “Take Batya and Jozefa and the rest and leave Király Szek as quickly as you can.”

Zsigmond doesn’t reply. He begins to undo the bindings on my hands. I remember the pressure of his fingers from when he taught me to hold a quill. Then he reaches up to cup my face.

“My daughter,” he says. “Do you remember the true name of God?”

I roll its syllables under my tongue, tasting them like I would a bite of bread or a sip of wine, measuring their heft. “I do.”

“Then you have the strength that you need.”

He kisses me once on the forehead, and then lets go. I watch him vanish through the crowd, eyes blurring over the shape of his retreating back. I reach up to wipe my tears, still tasting God’s name on my tongue. In the story, Esther went to the king, even though she knew she risked her own life, and the rabbi made his clay-man even though he knew he might be punished for it. Whatever strength and shrewdness they had, I have, too, as long as I can remember how to make the letters.

When Zsigmond has gone, I lift my chin and try to peer over the city gates, to the crest of the tallest hill beyond. There is a line of pale wolf cloaks glimmering along the horizon.

It must have taken them seven days, all the warriors in all the villages of Ezer Szem, riding as straight as a dagger toward the capital. Easy once they made it out of the woods, gliding through the yellow grass of the Little Plain, past villages that shuttered their doors and hid their children’s faces as the convoy went by. Hair braided with bramble and eyes gleaming with singular, ill-omened purpose.

I can’t hear it, but I know that they are singing as they descend, singing their way into oblivion.

Katalin is still beside me, her head ducked low under the lattice of reaching arms. I loosen her bindings and drag her through the crowd, cutting a narrow path to the barbican.

“Are you mad?” she spits. “We’re going the wrong way!”

“I’m not leaving them,” I say, though my words are nearly swallowed by the din.

I know the way to the dungeon well enough to walk it blindfolded, and even now the castle is empty, its hallways hushed like a cold hearth, until we turn the corner. The next corridor is painted in blood. It’s caulked onto the walls and smeared into the stone floor, in a gruesome trail that leads to a heap of bodies beneath a carved archway. Blood crusts on the black wool of their cloaks, bruises fresh on the skin of their shaven heads. Woodsmen.

Ice in my veins, I kneel beside the nearest one and examine his wounds. He’s been cut several times in the torso, clear through the fabric of his dolman. Broad, deep slashes that cleaved off whole hunks of flesh—cuts made by an ax, not a sword. Tiny grains of dark metal are flecked all over the ruptured skin. They must be the loyalist Woodsmen, the ones who refused to yield to Nándor, though I don’t know if he only lied about imprisoning them, or if his rebel Woodsmen just had them killed anyway, against his orders.

One of the men still has a bow strapped to his back, and I find a quiver of arrows nearby. I pick up both and hold them to my chest with shaking hands.

We descend the stairs by muted torchlight. Tuula and Szabín are huddled in their cell, and Bierdna is an unmoving mass of matted fur, looking already half-killed. When Tuula sees me she stands slowly, rousing the bear too.

“Are you here to execute us, wolf-girl? Has the king finally given the order?”

“The king is dead,” I say.

Tuula draws in a quick breath, eyes wavering uncertainly.

“The pagans are coming,” I tell her. “Everyone from Keszi, and all the other villages. It’s madness. You have to leave.”

“Will they win?” Szabín asks.

I’m so taken aback by her question that it takes me a moment to answer, and with a snarling anguish I reply, “I don’t know.” I look to Katalin.

She shakes her head. The vision must not have gone that far.

Tuula’s expression is unreadable. “So are you here to free us, wolf-girl?”

“Yes,” I reply, swallowing around the hard thing in my throat. “Katalin . . .”

I turn to her expectantly, but all she does is scowl. “I still haven’t gotten an apology from the Juvvi girl, for setting that feral beast of hers on me.”

“Please,” I bite out. “Katalin, please.”

I don’t care how pitiful my wheedling is; desperation has chilled me like a fever, a cold sweat thickening on my brow. If I cannot save my father, if I cannot save Virág or Boróka or Gáspár, wherever he is now, at least I can do this.

Muttering unintelligibly, Katalin pushes past me and bends at the door of the cell, examining the lock. Her singing comes in stops and starts and grudging half-whispers, but when she finishes, she’s holding a small brass key in her hand.

“There,” she huffs, pressing it into my palm. “Now I won’t hear any more recriminations about my cruelty.”

My relief is fleetingly sweet. I turn the key in the lock and swing the cell door wide open, and then the door to Bierdna’s cell too. With a tightness in my chest I watch Tuula stroke the bear’s furry head, carefully loosening her chains and removing her muzzle, while Bierdna twitches her wet nose with contentment.

“Thank you, Évike,” Szabín says quietly. I think of how I hated her then, those days in Kaleva. My mind filled with mean thoughts about what an imbecile she was to think she could live peacefully with a Juvvi girl, when there were a hundred years of ugly history between them, and plenty of fresh blood besides. Perhaps I was only castigating myself, miserably aware that I was falling in love with a Woodsman.

“There’s an easy path out of the city,” I tell them, shaking my head. “Through the Woodsman barracks.”

“No path will be easy,” Katalin says. “The pagans have surrounded the city from the north. If you want to leave, you’ll need to go through it.”

I look down at the bow I snatched from the Woodsmen, knuckles whitening. “I suppose you aren’t leaving, then.”

“No,” she says. “There will be nowhere to go back to unless we win, just a blood-soaked clearing in the forest and a cluster of burning huts.”

I’m not clever enough, not well-versed enough in battle tactics to have a good sense of the odds. I only know there are so many wolf-girls who will die, no matter how the sword of fate swings, in the end. I know that Gáspár is still here—I must believe he’s alive, until the moment that I see light drain from his eye—and if I leave him I will be as unmoored as a ship set loose with no captain, a compass point spinning on and on and never finding its true north. And I know that Régország will not be safe for anyone I love unless Nándor is dead, and his memory drowned out by the sounds of a hundred voices shouting.

God’s name tastes sweet on my tongue. I lead the way out of the dungeon, down the labyrinth of hallways, to the door that leads to the Woodsman barracks. Tuula and Szabín and Katalin take swords from the weapons rack, blades flashing silver as fish tails. I add as many arrows as I can find to my quiver, breath clouding in the damp air. There is a pale light at the end of the tunnel, like an unblinking eye, and once we’re all girded in our iron we follow it, toward the roaring and snarling of battle ahead.