Epilogue

Epilogue

The woods are restless today, with the snickering of elms, the low, mournful murmur of the willow trees, and of course the anxious whispers of our cowardly poplars. I pick my way through the copse, taking great care not to trip over the lumpy fretwork of their roots, and I rest my hand against the trunk of an oak to feel its timbered heartbeat. My own heart is quivering, like something ready to leap.

As I tread back to Keszi, I see the long tables dragged out and dressed in red cloth, piled high with root vegetables, potatoes the size of a fist. There’s an edible garland of rawboned carrots and pearl onions, and the smell of gulyás rises like plumes of smoke. I lean over a pot bubbling with sorrel leaves and boiled eggs and listen to the sizzle of hot dough. The vinegar smell of pickled cabbage leads me to Virág’s hut, where she is holding court around her hearth, most of the village’s small children in attendance.

Her six-fingered hands are animated, alive, tracing the contours of a story I’ve heard half a hundred times before. The children are chewing plates of cabbage and summer’s last plums, mouths stained purple. I recognize one girl among them: no more than seven years old, with a snarl of dark hair, an orphan. Her mother was struck down by some ghoulish sickness that resisted even Boróka’s efforts.

I crouch beside her on the dirt floor. Her face is pinched in the firelight, a furrow deepening between her brows as Virág speaks. With the story of Csilla and Ördög, Virág has perfected her theatre—she knows precisely when to pause for the whispers and gasps, and what parts will make her audience fall silent, shuddering in fear. The little girl is staring intently at the banked fire, watching embers eat away at the wood.

“You don’t have to listen, you know,” I say to her softly.

My own hand is splayed on the ground beside her, missing its fifth finger. Her eyes go to it, tracing the absence. She looks between my hand and Virág’s.

“What happened?” she asks in a whisper.

“I’ll tell you, if you like,” I say, and she nods, so I do. Virág frowns from the other side of the fire; I can hear the echo of her scolding looped through my mind. She thinks I am raising a generation of happy masochists, scarcely better than the Woodsmen. I reply that when summers are long and food is plentiful and mothers stay alive until their daughters are grown, no one will be desperate enough to lop off their fingers or their little toes. Besides, she is happy to try to argue her end; I will not stop speaking mine.

By the time I’ve finished talking, the little girl’s eyelids are heavy. I hand her to Virág, who tucks her into bed, my old bed, for a nap. She kisses me briskly on the forehead, a swallowed rebuke on her tongue, then chases me out of her hut.

Villagers have begun to gather around the long tables. Katalin is bent over a pot of sour-cherry soup, precisely the color of a midsummer sunrise. When she sees me approaching, she looks up, lifting the corner of her mouth that’s stippled with scar tissue.

“They’re almost here,” she says. “I’ve seen it.”

I can hear the thundering of footsteps before I see them, like some giant heart is beating under the forest floor. The trees heave themselves up out of the ground, with the groaning sound of a thousand limbs being wrenched, scattering dead leaves and seed hulls and small sour green apples. When they bed down again, there’s a narrow path snaking between their huge trunks, just wide enough for a man on horseback to walk through.

A moment later, the first Woodsman emerges from the tunnel. His horse’s dark coat is marbled with the late-afternoon sunlight. He pauses at the mouth of the woods, and behind me the throng of villagers presses in, waiting and watching as another Woodsman breaks through the tree line.

The wind whispers through the leaves, and the last horse trots through. On its back Gáspár sits slightly taller than his men, dressed in a black dolman with a fine embroidery of gold. A matching crown rests on his head, hammered thin into a circlet of gilded branches. He meets my gaze and I stare back, holding him there for a moment before letting him go.

“The king is here,” Boróka whispers, leading two young boys to the front of the crowd. “Do you remember all the stories?”

I must have told dozens of them, to anyone who would listen, feeling sometimes every bit as stubborn and ornery as Virág, miffed when my audience’s attention drifted or when their eyes glazed over important details. If I live to even half her age, I worry that I will eventually inherit her temperament.

“The black king,” says one of the boys. “Fekete.”

“He fought his usurper brother with a flaming sword,” says the other boy, and they both stare up at Gáspár, slack-jawed.

“It’s about time,” Virág grouses. “The stew is nearly cold.”

It’s no easy thing, Woodsmen and pagans sharing a feast table, the precarious inauguration of a new tradition. We have already killed three sheep in a sacrifice to Isten, and the Woodsmen clasp their hands to thank the Prinkepatrios for his bounty before picking up their knives to eat. It helps that they have brought carafes of wine in their saddlebags, and sachets of spices, and even skeins of dyed wool for weaving. Virág leads Gáspár to the head of the feast table and then sits at his elbow. We eat and drink until our lips are wine-stained and our bellies are too full under our tunics.

When evening lies over Keszi, the deep velvet blue of a rich man’s dolman, we push back the tables and one of our men starts plucking his kantele. It’s easier now that everyone is pink-cheeked, a little unsteady on their feet. We all know the same dances, even these city men and their king, the way that we all can recite the same nursery rhymes in Old Régyar.

I take Boróka’s hand and we spin together, laughing and dizzy, watching Gáspár turn to a dark blur in my periphery. He stands stiffly outside the dancing circle, speaking in hushed tones to Virág. When the song has quavered to its end, kantele strings twanging, I make my way over to him. My vision is still gleefully muddled.

“Won’t you join us?” I ask. “Or is there some grim prohibition on kings dancing?”

“There’s no time for dancing in Király Szek,” says Virág, only the faintest lick of true bitterness in her voice.

We get our news third- or fourth-hand in Keszi, from messenger hawks whose wings don’t tire on their long journeys from the capital, or from runners who can gulp enough courage to brave the dark tangle of the woods, but still I know there’s much work to be done. Király Szek has been flooded with war refugees from Akosvár, and the Merzani are still hungering along the border. But the surviving counts have been convinced to try for peace, and there are Merzani envoys in the palace now, hesitantly beginning armistice talks. The bey has warmed considerably to the idea, now that Régország has a king who is of Merzani blood. Gáspár has started to make arrangements to settle the refugees around the country, and new villages have sprouted up in all four regions. Some have even taken up residence just outside Ezer Szem, and there’s a Woodsman guard stationed there permanently, to make sure the forest creatures don’t do them any harm. Once, when there was a particularly bad attack, Virág even sent a few wolf-girls through the woods with their forged blades and healing magic, to keep the new villagers safe.

“We can find time,” Gáspár says, lips twitching. “Particularly if my new council wills it.”

In the full-moon light, the trees cast a cobweb of shadows over Keszi. Virág leaves us, padding over toward the hearth. She circles the fire and takes one last sip of wine. Gáspár’s face is limned with silver, same as it was any night we spent on the ice or in the woods together, our bodies curled in twin crescents under the white eye of the moon.

“And tell me,” I say, feeling something hot rise in my throat, “how is the new council faring?”

This king’s council is not like the last. There are still the four counts, one from each region (though Gáspár has replaced poor dead Korhonen, and exiled scheming Reményi) and a recently appointed Érsek, who is young and vital and sharp-eyed, with none of his predecessor’s cloaked wickedness. But now there are other members, too, chosen to represent Régország’s smaller factions. Factions that live in the icy fringes of the Far North, or in the dark belly of the woods.

“Well, Tuula and Szabín have started their journey toward the capital,” he says. “And we’ve fished half the river clean in preparation for hosting the bear. The Yehuli have held their own debates for weeks, finishing in a small election, to choose their representative. It should please you to know that Zsigmond’s arguments won out.”

The thought floods me with such joy that I laugh, heady with relief. In my absence, my father will have a new way to fill his days, sitting on the council of the king, and perhaps even a woman to come home to at night. “Batya will be pleased.”

“She’s already sent a basket of bread to the palace, in gratitude.” Gáspár’s smile is gentle, eye pooling with moonlight. “Now we’re only waiting for our last.”

In a way it was like being cast out again, when all of Keszi voted for me to be their voice on the king’s council. Perhaps still some of them only relished the idea of me spending so many weeks gone in the capital. But most, I think, have given up their old cruelties, as I have abandoned my perverse grudges. Some of the girls who tormented me are mothers now, and when I pass by them running after their daughters or showing their sons how to weave, I see that they don’t pull their children away from me. I see that they are teaching their children to be kinder, even if sometimes their lips still twitch with the beginnings of a slur, or the scarcely fettered desire to scowl.

“Did you worry I might not come,” I ask, “if you didn’t bring me?”

“Of course not,” he says. “I didn’t want you to go through the woods alone.”

We have crossed so many miles together, only to end up back here. When our eyes first met at the edge of Keszi, me costumed in my lying wolf cloak, and him burdened by his Woodsman’s suba, I could not have guessed that our journeys would bring us to this place again, the very same spot in the clearing, with so many new words blooming inside us.

“One day when I come for our council meetings,” I begin carefully, “you will have a new bride. You must.”

A shadow casts across his face. There is that blade sharpening over our heads, counting down the moments to its fall. I have tried not to think of it, during the days that I waited for him here, my skin singing with anticipation. I will try not to think of it during the nights we spend together in my new hut, or on our journey back to Király Szek. But I think I must say it now, or else choke on the swallowed pain.

To my surprise, Gáspár only lifts a shoulder. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. If the king has no true-born son, the crown will fall to a brother, a cousin, an uncle. The line of succession is more like a long thread that spirals across our family tree. I can always name another heir.”

It is enough for me to hold on to, hope as thin as the knife’s edge hanging above us. I will grasp it even if it cuts me; I will keep it from falling. When winter is one long haze of white, snow weighing down your roof and the cold lining your marrow, it is the dream of a green, bright spring that keeps you from despair. I kiss him just once, on the left side of his faintly smiling mouth.

“There’s one more thing,” he says, and reaches into the folds of his cloak. “From Zsigmond.”

He hands me a package wrapped in brown muslin and looped with twine. I loosen the bindings and peel back the cloth to see a thick scroll of parchment, a large inkwell, and two fine feather quills. The sight of them makes my chest swell and, unbidden, tears leap to my eyes.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I only brought them,” Gáspár says. “When we get to Király Szek, you can thank Zsigmond yourself.”

I grip the quill tightly in my fingers, still warm with the heat of Gáspár’s hand. Virág has gathered another audience by the fire, all the men and women who haven’t retired already to their huts. The Woodsmen stand by their horses, faces grim with uncertainty.

“Well, now you’ll have to stay for the story,” I tell him, arching my brow. “Once Virág has started, she doesn’t take kindly to interruptions.” Gáspár looks like he might protest, so quickly I go on, “I’ve spent quite enough time in your world. You can linger for a bit longer in mine.”

His eye widens; for a moment I can see the early traces of a flush along his cheekbones and the tips of his ears. But he follows me across the clearing, toward the bright whorl of flame and Virág sitting before it. We pad down beside Katalin, who is seated shoulder to shoulder with Boróka. The fur of their wolf cloaks bristles, white stroking tawny. On the ground, their fingers are a whisker’s breadth apart.

“I will tell the story of Vilmötten and his journey to the Under-World,” Virág says. “How he met Ördög and his half-mortal wife, and came back to the Middle-World with both a blessing and a curse.”

Katalin groans softly, but Virág quiets her with a glare. Gáspár’s face is hesitantly open, like the very first crocus to bloom. I unfurl one of Zsigmond’s long scrolls and dip my quill into the fresh ink. There are Yehuli letters stamped onto the side of the inkwell, and I can read them all. Long fingers of flame reach for the sickled moon. Sparks wink against the night sky. Virág starts to speak, weaving the story of Vilmötten into the air like two dovetailing tree roots, or like a river carving through the land, and I put my quill to the page and write it down.