Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six

The mouth of the tunnel opens up under a mounded hillside, cached by bramble and wildflower brush, not far from the Woodsman stables. No sooner have we mowed our path through the coiling bracken than I feel something wet and hot splatter my face. Scarcely more than a yard away, a Woodsman’s limp body slides off its horse, chest gashed open to the red curve of muscle and crumpled white scaffolding of bone. I reach up to touch my face, and when I look down at my fingers again, they’re stained dark with blood.

A girl in a gray wolf cloak stands over him, brandishing a long thin sword. Her black hair waves like a flag of war, braids streaming down her back. Zsófia. I start to move toward her, the first syllable of her name on my lips, but before I can say a word a Woodsman sails by on horseback, his ax cleaving her head from her body.

The seconds seem to pass in sluggish agony, dripping like molten steel. Katalin flies down the hillside, fast as a flung spear, toward the Woodsman. Tuula and Szabín follow, the bear thrashing through the ferns and briar, lips pulled back from her long yellow teeth. Several feet away, where her head landed, Zsófia’s eyes stare up at me still shining, pearly with suspended terror.

Zsófia who tormented me, Zsófia who sang slurs at me, Zsófia who helped dress me in white for the Woodsmen—now dead by the arc of their ax. It feels like I have brought this fate upon her, as if all the hatred that ground my teeth at night somehow transmuted to real power. I open my mouth to whimper, to scream, but someone claps a hand over my face and drags me down into the bushes. Limbs flailing, I claw myself free and crawl away, only to turn around again and see that my attacker is Boróka.

“Évike,” she gasps, and throws her arms around me.

I squeeze her so tight I think my nails might pierce through her tawny wolf cloak, and when we break apart again tears are stinging the corners of my eyes.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers. “When I saw you there, in Katalin’s cloak, your hair dyed white . . . I should have tried to stop them.”

All I can do is shake my head; the memory of it feels long faded, like a scratch that has healed to a small blue scar. The only thing that’s real now is the scything of blades and the flurry of bodies and the iron tang of blood in the air.

“Please,” I say. “Keep your head down until the fighting’s over—”

Boróka gives a breathy laugh. “You can’t ask that of me.”

I knew it would be her answer, but it guts me all the same. I reach up and take her face between my bloodied hands, and she lets me, for a brief and aching moment. But then a Woodsman lunges toward us, hard-eyed with loathing, and she leaps up and draws her sword to cut him down. In another moment, she has vanished into the throng.

A line of wolf-girls rims the top of the hill, fire-makers lobbing their balls of flame. Small fires are burning all over the battlefield, flecks of orange light dappled through the brush. Then there are forgers, wielding their sung blades, sometimes two at once. And laced among the mottle of wolf cloaks are the Woodsmen, their cloaks dark against the winter-bleached grass. Futilely I search for Gáspár among them, though I know he would not cut down a wolf-girl, nor one of his own Woodsman brothers. Still I cannot imagine he would flee from battle like a coward, or look on like a grim-faced tactician, coldly weighing the odds. If he has thrown himself into the morass of the fight, it is only to seek out his brother.

Farther down the hill, I find my mark: a bright pulse of white amidst the churning bodies, a shirt of mail over his dolman and a golden sword in his hand. Nándor. The hilt of his sword is teethed with pearls, his auburn hair blowing back from his face as he plunges through the briar on horseback. Not his horse—mine. The shining pale mare I’d ridden from Keszi, her mane now neatly combed, wearing the gilt saddle of a royal mount.

I clamber to my feet and nock one of my arrows. Woodsmen are darting through my line of sight, black smudges like soot on skin. I loose my arrow and it pierces a Woodsman’s chest, just below the hollow of his throat. He coughs blood, but men don’t die like rabbits and deer. He drops from his horse and lumbers toward me, unsteady on his feet, and doesn’t fall until I put another arrow into him. This time it lands right at the center of his chest, where his heart sits winged by two lungs.

In the madness and the blood steaming in the air, it’s impossible to tell where the scale will tip. Impossible to tell whether pagans or Patritians are winning. All I can see are wolf-girls puddled in their bloody cloaks, and Woodsmen lying limp, run through with swords. Their bodies are near identical, one black suba over another. I drop to my knees again and paw through the nearest pile of corpses, praying and praying to whichever god might answer that I will not find Gáspár among them. These dead Woodsmen are faceless, pockmarked with missing ears and noses and eyes.

When I look up again, I spot her, sailing down the hillside in her white wolf cloak, hair the color of snow. I’ve never seen Virág move this way, with the agility of a fox, or at least a woman less than half her age. Her forehead has more lines than I remember, like the hard mud in a dried-up riverbed, and yet there is youthful vigor in her movements. The last time I saw her, she was handing me off to the Woodsmen, a perfectly serene cant to her chin. But now my mind crowds with other memories: Virág pulling me onto her lap, her stories wafting through her hut like wisps of smoke, Virág braiding my hair and covering my ears with her six-fingered hands when the thunder was too loud and too close for me to sleep.

It is a mangle of what I feel for Gáspár, like a Woodsman’s severed nose or my lopped finger, small and ugly by comparison. But love, I think, all the same. It’s that ugly and awful love that sends me skidding down the hill after her, just as Nándor jerks his horse’s reins and turns her way.

Their blades meet, but there’s power behind Nándor’s swing that she hasn’t yet seen, that she doesn’t understand. With the force of the impact Virág topples off her horse, sliding to the ground with a guttering thud.

I scream her name, but either Virág doesn’t hear or she doesn’t care enough to turn. Nándor’s lovely face is blood-flecked, and there’s a sheen to his gaze that looks half-mad. His eyes are nearly as white as Virág’s hair, the pupils shrunken and colorless. He seems to scarcely even see Virág as he leaps from his mount, sword smiling down at her. He will kill her the way the Woodsmen have killed all the other wolf-girls, without ever knowing their names. He will never know the stories that live in her marrow and blood, will never know how once, when I was bitten by a snake in the woods, Virág sucked the venom out of the wound herself, extra eyeteeth gritted against the skin of my wrist.

She’ll die the way the turul did, as if it were just any bird to be eaten. That’s all I can think of as I throw myself between her and Nándor’s sword, its blade burying itself deep through the muscle of my left shoulder.

Nándor blinks as he pulls the sword from me, as if he has just woken from a deep slumber.

“Oh, wolf-girl,” he says, almost wistfully. “You must have learned this sort of stupid nobility from my brother.”

And then he’s gone again, swallowed up by the fray. The pain is like the lick of a thousand heated blades, and my heart gives a stubborn, feeble quiver. My vision tunnels, plunging me into darkness and back out again. Through the feather of my lashes, Virág’s face is hovering over me.

“Why did you do that, you fool of a girl?”

Blood burns in my throat. “Why did you save me, way back then?”

“Perhaps I saw that one day you would save me,” she says. Her face ripples like a reflection on water.

My vision is narrowing again. “So then you know why I did it.”

She always knew everything before I did. As she mutters something unintelligible, Virág’s hand is on my wound. The pressure is unbearable at first, another fiery ribbon of pain. Then it begins to recede, in throbbing increments, the blackness clearing from my gaze. I think I hear the whisper of a song on her lips, but when I pick my head up again and the world comes roaring back, I realize it’s not a song at all.

“Honorable girl, foolish girl,” she’s murmuring, almost with the rhythm of a prayer. “Both of us will live to see another winter.”

There’s an odd tightness in my shoulder as Isten’s invisible needle works through my wound, guided by Virág’s hand. I try to stutter out a thank-you, but Virág’s mouth only twists into its familiar scowl, the same face she made at me whenever I cursed or lied or burned her broth.

“There,” she says. “What you have given won’t be forgotten.”

A tremor goes through me, and I shudder with the pain’s vicious ebbing. “Won’t it all be forgotten, if we die here today?”

“We won’t die,” she says. “Isten won’t allow it.”

I wonder if her vision showed her that too: the Woodsmen spent, the pagans victorious. It seems too much to hope for, too simple and neat. The hillside is littered with bodies in wolf cloaks. But by my hasty count, there seem to still be more of us standing, and fewer Woodsmen.

A gleam of white catches the corner of my eye. Nándor is stumbling up the hill, swordless and blood-drenched, his dolman hanging half open. He reaches the mouth of the tunnel and lets the darkness swallow him. Wounded, but alive. And seeing how wounds mean very little to him, I know he’ll only return to fight again unless something is done. I rise to my knees, shocked by how light I feel, how strong. I give Virág a hasty kiss on the cheek before scrambling up the hillside after him.

I follow a trail of blood through the empty Woodsman barracks, down the corridors of the palace, and out into the courtyard, still arranged for Nándor’s coronation. Pale flower petals have peeled off the dais, floating through the air like listless snow. The tapestry is still draped over the burnished throne, its tassels fluttering in the wind, and the cape of white feathers is abandoned on the cobblestones, as sleek and flat as a spill of water frozen over. Nándor is limping down the makeshift aisle, blood splattering with each heavy-footed step. I hear him whisper something to himself, too low to make out, and then his back straightens, as if his spine has been fused with steel. His gait grows steadier as Godfather Life heals him.

Breath held, I nock my arrow and draw the bow string. I have to land a killing blow.

Before I can loose my arrow, Nándor turns. His face is cracked like a porcelain bowl, torn up by a terrible snarl.

“I thought I killed you, wolf-girl,” he says.

I am standing precisely where my father stood that first day in Király Szek, boots slippery with pig’s blood. “I thought I killed you once too. You aren’t the only one who can survive certain death. I suppose I am as blessed as you are.”

His eyes have turned that eerie sheen of white again, and for a moment it stuns me. I don’t think he ever managed to exorcise his death. Ever since that day on the ice, I think he has grown up beside his own ghost. Why would he need to bleed like Gáspár when he has already made the greatest sacrifice of all?

Nándor gives a laugh, but it comes out short and choked. “You can’t really think you can kill me now. Whatever gods or demons that answer your prayers—well, they are no match for mine.”

I don’t know if he means the Yehuli god or Isten or both. I swallow around the name of God in my mouth, tasting its syllables like sweet juice on my tongue.

“No,” I say. “I think I can kill you without their help.”

In the instant that I let my arrow fly, Nándor whispers another prayer, and I’m blasted back across the courtyard. My head hits the stone so hard that I feel my molars loosen and taste blood along the line of my gum. My arrow spirals off somewhere in the distance, and my bow clatters to the ground, far out of reach.

Nándor kneels over me, straddling my chest. I reach up with one hand but he’s faster and stronger and his hand closes over my throat first. I gasp, lips parting as I strain for breath, and then he sticks his hand into my open mouth, tugging one of my loose molars free with two fingers.

I scream, the sound muffled by his tight grip on my throat. His hand is bloody up to the wrist. He examines my tooth, pearl-bright between his finger and thumb, with an almost innocent curiosity. Maybe he’s thinking precisely what his own father thought—that there’s power in that tooth, like the power the king sought in every wolf-girl’s fingernails. For a moment I remember my mother, fox-red hair flashing as the Woodsmen crowded her into the mouth of the forest. Even after everything, I will die here in the capital just like she did, torn to tiny pieces. Nándor tosses the tooth away, and it skitters across the cobblestones.

“I will enjoy killing you, wolf-girl,” he says. “This time, I’ll make sure it sticks.”

He reaches into my mouth to pull another tooth. The pain comes in one sharp burst, blooming like a rose. Blood streams from my mouth, dark spots clustering in the center of my vision. I can still feel the name of God there, bearing down against my tongue. Nándor might be stronger than me, purer than me, but that’s something he can’t ever know.

Nándor holds another one of my teeth up to the light, smiling and smiling. He doesn’t notice that my right hand with its four fingers has started inching across the cobblestones, toward where his palm is pressed flat to the ground. He doesn’t notice my slow, tremulous movements, doesn’t notice my finger tracing the Yehuli word for dead on the back of his hand in blood.

A shimmering heat branches from my fingertips and crawls up his wrist, through his arm, over the curve of his shoulder. It sears right through the white silk of his dolman, and peels back his skin as if it were pale fruit. Nándor screams and topples off me, clutching his arm to his chest. The whole length of it is black with burned flesh, flaking like the curled edges of parchment set alight.

“Witch!” he gasps, staggering back. Whole hunks of muscle and sinew are falling away, leaving open long stretches of charred bone.

I can’t move from the ground, and I can hardly breathe for the blood in my mouth. Even the Yehuli magic, with all its knowledge and certainty that cleared a swath through the blackness of my mind, seems unreachable and distant now. Winking away like a dying star. Before Nándor can lurch toward me again, his name rings out through the air.

“Nándor!”

He turns, swaying on his feet. Gáspár strides across the courtyard, still in his Woodsman garb. Relief floods me like a rush of clear spring water, and I nearly surrender to the darkness entirely, so woozy with the joy of seeing him alive. He’s unhurt—but unarmed. There’s no ax glinting at his hip.

“Brother,” says Nándor. A half-smile quakes onto his face, eyes too bright again. “If you’re here to rescue your pagan concubine, I’m afraid you’ve come wholly unprepared for this battle.”

“Leave her be,” Gáspár says. His gaze flickers to me briefly, just one caught-breath moment that loops between us like black thread. “You’re going to lose, Nándor. Most of your Woodsmen have already been slain, and it will take weeks for the rest of the army to make its way here from Akosvár. If you surrender now, and call off the rest of your Woodsmen, I will spare your life.”

Nándor laughs and it’s an awful sound, like water breaking over rocks. “I don’t need your mercy, brother. You’re unarmed.”

Gáspár doesn’t reply. Instead, he walks over to the statue of Saint István, with its blank marble stare, still wreathed in white flowers. Gáspár draws the sword out of Saint István’s hand—the real sword, rust-flecked—and holds it up, a silvery bolt against the cloud-dark sky.

“Megvilágit,” he says, his voice as clear as a bell. And then a flame bursts across the blade.

“You dare wield the sword of a saint?” Nándor snarls.

“I wield the sword of a king—my sword by right,” Gáspár says. “I am the only true-born son of Bárány János and heir to the throne of Régország.”

Nándor’s colorless lips curl. “You’ve never managed to best me before.”

“I’ve never really tried,” says Gáspár, and for the briefest moment I see his lips twitch too. “This time, I won’t show you any restraint.”

Nándor growls out a prayer, and a sword glimmers to life in his good hand, coin-shiny and as bright as gold. When their blades meet, flame against steel, it is with a gonging sound that echoes somewhere deep in my chest. Their battle dance is almost too fast for my eyes to follow, and nothing like their previous dalliance, with wooden swords. All the playful cunning has drained from Nándor’s gaze.

“And why do you think the people of Régország will ever welcome you as their king?” Nándor spits as his blade darts toward Gáspár’s left shoulder. “A mutilated half-breed, tainted by his mother’s foreign blood and poisoned by his love for a wolf-girl. Is it any wonder why Father balked at handing you the crown?”

I don’t expect Gáspár to rise to his taunting, but a volley of fury goes through me, and I push myself up onto my knees.

“The crown was always mine,” says Gáspár evenly, between breaths. “I only lacked the strength to claim it.”

“Strength?” Nándor crows a laugh. “You had the kingdom’s finest tutors, and all of Father’s kindnesses—”

“Kindness until he cut out my eye,” Gáspár breaks in, but his voice is measured in a way that Nándor’s is not, matching his pace and his blade’s steady scything. “Kindness until he banished me to the Woodsmen.”

“The day he cut out your eye was the happiest of my life,” Nándor says, face shining with a jeweled dampness. “I remember it well. I had come from the chapel with the Érsek, and I still had a child’s mindless zeal, eager to show Father some new trick of swordplay. But when I came to him in the hallway, he brushed right past me and took you inside. I was weak enough that I sat there outside the hall and wept at his rebuff, until I saw them drag you out with blood running down your face. And then I was the most elated I’ve ever been.”

Nándor’s recounting of it makes me bristle with rage. I can see the blood soaking through the back of Gáspár’s dolman now, his lash wounds opened over and over again with every roll of his shoulder, every leap and lunge. Slowly, my mouth still aching, I get to my feet and limp toward my abandoned bow and quiver. My bloody fingers close around the bow’s grip.

“You’ve been lied to all your life.” Gáspár advances on Nándor with a series of quick jabs, sending him stumbling back several paces. Nándor’s left arm, ruined by my magic, flaps between them like a flag of surrender. “Made to fit some false sainthood—”

“False?” In the lick of orange light cast by Gáspár’s sword, his eyes look like they are pooling with fire. “You’ve seen what power I have. Real power, by which I have claimed the crown. By what right do you claim the throne of Régország?”

“Birthright,” Gáspár answers. “Blood.”

And then he cuts his flaming sword across the flat of Nándor’s blade with such force that he knocks it from his hand. It sails across the courtyard and clatters onto the cobblestones at the foot of Saint István’s statue.

The shock creeps onto Nándor’s face in slow, bitter increments, like the trickle of snowmelt. What little color there was vanishes from his cheeks, and his jaw goes slack. For a moment it seems impossible that I ever thought he was beautiful. He looks like a river carp, pale and belly-slit.

“Meghal,” Gáspár says, and the flame of his blade snuffs out. He lowers his sword as he paces toward Nándor, who has backed nearly to the barbican.

“Brother—” Nándor starts. He splays his palms, raising his arms over his head. By the time Gáspár reaches him, his hands are up, and he is cowering. “I ask you now to show mercy . . .”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Gáspár says. His face is hard, his heated sword point mere inches from the curve of Nándor’s throat. “It’s not worth blackening souls for—mine or yours. If you surrender, call off your Woodsmen, and repent for your sins of violence and patricide, then I will make you the same offer that you made me: live in exile, in the Volkstadt, and never again take up arms against Régország.”

As silence swans over the courtyard, a memory prickles at me. We are standing in Kajetán’s tent, the headman’s knife cold against my tongue. Gáspár had been keen to spare him then, too, despite all his gruesome treachery. I realize now that it was more than the Woodsman oath that stilled Gáspár’s blade. It was his own private vow, a constellation hung with a hundred starry virtues and lessons, and he followed it like a ship’s captain charting a course across the wine-black sea. Its stars had been gleaned from old tomes in the palace archives, from the stories of his wet nurse, from the Merzani proverbs that his mother whispered into his hair. From the lectures of the Érsek and his battalion of tutors, even from his cruel and inconstant father.

How had he managed to swallow it all and not die of poison? When Merzani words clashed with their Régyar cousins inside him, how was he not cut up by their sibilant swordplay? For so long I’d thought my mixed blood a curse, blamed it for the absence of Isten’s magic. Watching Gáspár now, offering his traitor brother mercy, I think that blood cannot be either blessing or curse. It can only be.

Wind sweeps white petals into the air. In the distance, there is the sound of blades singing, metal rasping. Gáspár holds his sword without trembling as a swallow ticks in Nándor’s throat. For a moment I think he will acquiesce.

And then his lips part with the utterance of a prayer.

Gáspár’s sword, Saint István’s sword, shatters like window glass. In the same instant, a small dagger gleams into Nándor’s hand. The panicked, animal part of me, that pure race of adrenaline, is what nocks my arrow and draws back my bow string, but before I can shoot, Nándor has his good arm wrenched around Gáspár. His dagger is at his throat.

“I warned you, wolf-girl,” Nándor says. Each word is a plume of frosted breath against his brother’s cheek. “I warned you that it would not be so easy to kill me.”

Bow string taut, I meet Gáspár’s eye. Where my love immobilized me before, making me flounder with hopeless weakness, now it coats me all over with iron. Nándor draws a line of blood along his brother’s neck, tongue curling in the nascent shape of another prayer.

This is a power I’ve always had, one that I’ve earned, one that can’t be taken from me by some capricious god. The wood rough against my palm, the tail of the arrow brushing my cheek. It does not matter whose histories sing in my blood.

I let my fingers slide off the bow string. My arrow looses through the air, quick as a wing beat, and buries itself in Nándor’s throat.

He coughs. He chokes. Blood wells in his mouth, bubbling over his lips in place of a prayer. He lets go of Gáspár and falls to his knees, grasping at his own neck as blood gathers at the site of the wound. Gáspár stumbles toward me, and we both watch as Nándor splutters out his last, wordless breaths. Ruby-bright droplets limn his collarbone, like icicles on eaves. I think of the shorn falcon, screeching and flapping its wings as it died inside its gilded cage, and it pleases me that Nándor will not have the dignity of last words.

When Nándor finally does topple over, his eyes are as clouded as two bits of sea glass, and his mouth and chin are a glut of red-black blood.

Gáspár’s shoulders rise and fall in the silence, and I let my bow drop to the ground. He starts to speak, but I grasp the collar of his suba and it hushes him.

“Don’t,” I say. “A king shouldn’t begin his rule with a blackened conscience. My soul is perfectly content to bear the burden of it instead.”

He lets out a breath that is half a laugh, though there is a peculiar grief threaded under the sound. It swells in me, too, the acknowledgment of something lost. The hazy, half-dreamed future where he writes poems from the cloistered safety of his Volken hermitage, and I am either his scullery maid or his bride.

“If there is anyone I would damn my soul for,” Gáspár says, “it would be you.”

I echo his laugh then, and he kisses me gently on the mouth. In another moment, the courtyard will flood with survivors, limping Woodsmen and wounded wolf-girls, and curious peasants who dare to pick their way through the wreckage. Someday an archivist will shelve a book about the siege of Király Szek in the palace library, and it will document the lives lost, the ground gained, the treaties signed, and the maps redrawn. But it will not say anything about this: a wolf-girl and a Woodsman holding each other in the blood-drenched aftermath, and the clouds cleaving open above them, letting out a gutted light.