Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Peti weeps through the night, without ceasing. After Ferkó takes a heated blade to his shoulder, Imre packs his wound with strips of burlap and leather, and fistfuls of dry leaves webbed together by sap. I watch them, huddled by the vanishing fire, my mouth still tasting of bile. The captain stands over Peti’s lost limb and clasps his hands, whispers his deferent prayer. Blue-white flame streaks across the length of his severed arm, bright as the tail of a comet. Peti’s fingers melt like nubs of candle wax. His knucklebones puddle in the dirt, some strange white flora. I think I might be sick again.

A pitiful dawn creeps over the forest, the pinks and golds of sunrise strained through the dark latticework of tree branches and bracken, squeezing out their color. All that reaches me is a bleached yellow light. It falls on my shaking hands, nicked with tiny scratches from palm to fingernail, and the splatter of dried bloodstains on my wolf cloak. It falls on the captain, turning his black suba silvery with dust motes. It falls on Peti, his chest rising in fits and starts, every breath a violence. His white lips part with a guttering moan.

“You’re going to bring every godforsaken monster in Ezer Szem right to us,” Ferkó growls. He nudges Imre’s knife toward Peti with the toe of his boot. “Bite down on this, if you must.”

Peti doesn’t reply. His eyelashes give a limp, moth-wing flutter.

Neither the Woodsmen nor I have slept. The wound on my throat is still wet, and it opens whenever I try to speak, so I keep my lips pressed firm. I am focusing on quelling the roil of my stomach when the captain stalks toward me, dead leaves crunching with every step.

“Stand up,” he says.

My heart stutters as I rise to my feet. Now that I know the king wants me delivered to the capital unharmed, I ought to feel emboldened. But the memory of his blade swinging through Peti’s arm ebbs some of that nascent bluster. A vow to the king still seems a flimsy shield to put between the captain’s ax and me.

“I suppose I should thank you,” I say, throat dry. “For saving my life.”

Without meeting my gaze, the captain says, “I find no glory in saving wolf-girls, and I don’t uphold my oath for your gratitude.”

Anger burns in my chest. The Woodsmen are as pious as they are cruel, and any vengeance they may want to have upon me is tempered by their stupid devotion. “You must regret it, then.”

“I didn’t say that.” He gives me one swift, probing glare. “And you may very well have managed without my help. You bit off Peti’s ear.”

I feel a little flush of shame, only because I have confirmed Woodsman stories about pagan barbarity. But then I remember the arc of the captain’s ax, the patch over his missing eye, and the shame dies as quickly as a snuffed candle.

“I thought that missing body parts make the Woodsmen more powerful,” I say. “Perhaps he should have thanked me.”

“There is no such thing as the power of the Woodsmen,” says the captain. “There is only the power of the Prinkepatrios as it flows through us, and we are His humble servants.”

“We in Keszi don’t fear servants. We fear brutes with axes.”

I wait to see if my needling has stuck him. But the captain just arches a brow. He doesn’t speak like a brute with an ax. His voice is measured, and his words have an easy eloquence. A particularly clever soldier, I decide. But a soldier all the same.

“You must also fear the wrath of your gods,” he says finally, “if you dare to stray from their righteous path.”

“No,” I reply, taken aback. “Our gods don’t ask us for perfection.”

Just as we don’t expect rhyme or reason from our gods. They’re fickle and stubborn and heedless and indulgent, like us. The only difference is that they burn whole forests to the ground in their rage, and drink entire rivers dry in their thirst. In their joy, flowers bloom; in their grief, early winter frost edges in. The gods have gifted us a small fragment of that power, and in turn we inherited their vices.

From what I understand, the Prinkepatrios has no vices, and it would be blasphemy to even suggest such a thing. But how did a perfect being create something as imperfect as humans, so prone to caprice and cruelty? And why does a perfect being demand blood from little boys?

I look at the captain—really look at him—for the first time. He has the olive skin of a Southerner and a long nose with a harsh break at its bridge. But there’s nothing harsh about the rest of his face. It’s shockingly youthful, smooth except for the faint stubble bruising his throat and chin. When he turns and I see only the untarnished half of his face, it’s almost regal, the kind of profile you might find on a minted coin. I imagine that if he lived in Keszi, Írisz or Zsófia might drag him down for some furtive coupling by the riverside, and he’d come back with a sheepish, knowing smile on his swollen lips. But I can’t see the left half of his face without wondering morbidly what lies beneath the black patch, and how he ever summoned the strength to pluck out his own eye like a crow picking over a corpse. Or wondering if that sort of dedication disgusts or impresses me.

What would I have plucked out, to be able to call fire?

“That’s just as well.” The captain seems to notice how intently I am staring at him, and he lowers his gaze. There’s even the barest flush on his cheeks. “Your gods may be mere illusions crafted by the demon Thanatos, but they do grant you potent magic. Why didn’t you use your magic against Peti?”

I detect no trace of suspicion in his voice, but my skin prickles all the same. “I—my hands were bound. I couldn’t summon it.”

The captain nods slowly, lips pressed together. For a moment I can’t tell whether he believes me or not. And then he says, “Give me your hands.”

Instinctively, my fingers curl into my palms. The rope is still chafing against the tender skin on the insides of my wrists, leaving a rash of red.

Behind us, Peti moans. Very carefully, the captain looses the rope, giving it just enough slack for me to wriggle my hands free. Before the prospect of escape even flits through my mind, the captain’s fingers close around my wrist. The pressure of his grip fills me with a mute, terrible fear, freezing me in place.

He turns to Ferkó and Imre. “Get him up.”

The two Woodsmen bend over Peti, hefting him to his feet. Peti gives a gurgling cry, spittle foaming in his open mouth. Through the skeins of leather and the mesh of dead leaves, there is a slow seep of blood flowering from his shoulder, like the beginnings of a spring ice melt. Clearly the captain’s attempt to cauterize the wound went poorly. My stomach dips.

Ferkó and Imre shuffle Peti toward me, and the captain takes his good arm. I realize what’s happening only a heartbeat before the captain loops the other end of my rope around Peti’s hand, joining us at the wrist.

A stammer of revulsion tips past my lips. “You can’t—”

“I can’t have you trying to escape again,” says the captain. I don’t think I’m imagining the note of regret in his voice, nor the dark pall that casts over his face, but it does nothing to calm the fury and horror boiling in my belly. What little gratitude I had toward him for saving my life slivers away, like a crescent moon turning new. His dainty flushes and proud nose, the pliant tenor of his voice—all of it is a veneer for his barbarity. I would rather Peti, with his frothing hatred, his openly bared teeth. With my free hand, I touch the wound circling my neck, blood pooled in the hollow of my collarbone. I’ve already seen the worst of what he can do.

The captain turns away from us and stalks toward his horse. I watch the bulk of his retreating back, measuring my breaths. With my gashed throat, my loathing aches even more to swallow.

I feel a tug on my rope. Peti has bent at the waist, coughing blood.

I took for granted the life of the forest, unsettling as it was, all those mightily twisting oaks and globular gray fruits. Now all the color has been drained from Ezer Szem. The bark on the trees is dull pewter, and all the foliage has fallen away, leaving the branches gnarled and bare. Even the ground beneath our feet feels firmer, colder, as if the horses are walking on stone instead of dirt. There’s no tree cover, but I still can’t see the sky—a frigid mist has stolen over us, blanketing our convoy in a nearly impermeable haze.

Peti rocks against my chest, groaning. We have both been propped on the back of my white mare, Peti in front of me, his knees braced around my horse’s neck. His hand fists her mane, knuckles pale. Where our wrists are joined, I can feel the cold slickness of his skin, as if he’s been doused in filmy pond water.

All around us, the forest has gone silent. Where there was once the crackle of dead leaves or the faint patter of footsteps, now there’s nothing, not even the whispering of wind. My heart is a riot, but my stomach is pure ice. I think that perhaps the forest is showing me what a fool I am, to forget my fear of it in favor of the Woodsmen.

“Wolf-girl,” Peti whispers. His head rolls backward, onto my shoulder.

“Don’t,” I bite out. “Don’t speak.”

“Do you know what will be done with you?” Peti presses on. I can’t see his eyes, but the back of his neck, the skin of his jaw—it’s all a marbled gray, the color of lichen on a log. “When you reach the capital. The king, the weak heathen of a king . . . no, not him, his son . . .”

I straighten my back, trying to shift his weight off me. “Do you mean the prince?”

The king has a bevy of bastards, but only one true-born son. The black prince, we call him, an epithet that’s more like an elision, a beat of silence between breaths. We in Keszi know so little of him, only that he’s the offspring of Régország’s long-dead and much-loathed foreigner queen, a footnote in the folk tune that we call the Song of the Five Kings.

First came King István, his cape as white as snow,

Then his son, Tódor, who set the North aglow,

After there was Géza, whose beard was long and gray,

Finally, King János—

And his son, Fekete.

“Not the prince,” murmurs Peti. His breath curls, white with cold. “His other son. His true son. Nándor.”

My shoulders rise. It’s the second time I’ve heard that name. I remember the shadow that fell over the captain’s face when Peti invoked Nándor before, and I glance toward him now. His horse is several paces ahead, wreathed in mist, just a black smear in the haze of gray.

“Nándor,” I repeat, skin prickling. “What does he mean to do with me, then?”

Peti’s mouth opens and closes mutely, like a carp washed up on the riverbank. He leans over the side of the horse and retches, blood and bile splattering the path.

My vision ripples. The smell of him is worse than anything, worse than his clammy touch, the rimy gleam of his skin, worse even than the black stain soaking through the tangle of dead leaves and burlap on his shoulder, his makeshift bandages. Worse than the stomach-clenching sensation of looking for his arm and realizing with a start that it’s not there, the morbid blank space of it. Peti smells like the green rot of damp wood, mold-slicked, dying. I try to hold my breath.

He mumbles something in Old Régyar, raising his good hand, and mine along with it, to wipe the sick from his chin.

Revulsion snares in me like a fishhook, twining with something lower, worse. I remember one of Katalin’s cruelest and cleverest tricks. We were both girls then, not long after my mother had been taken, and she asked me to play a game. My heart had leapt at her invitation, eager for even the unlikely prospect of friendship. She told me to go hide somewhere in the woods, and she would look for me. I bedded down in a snarl of bracken and dug a small hole for my chin in the dirt. I waited and waited, until the patches of sky visible between the fingers of briar and the swaying willow fronds turned a deep, glossy blue. The chill of dusk lay over me like a second cloak, and all of a sudden the shadows of the trees looked like gaping mouths and the bramble holding me was not a cradle but a cage. I fled from my hiding place, thorns snatching at my clothes, and stumbled weeping into Keszi.

Virág was baffled by my tears. “Why didn’t you just come out?”

I blinked helplessly at Katalin, too shaken to speak.

She blinked back at me, cunningly guileless. “I looked for you everywhere. I couldn’t find you.”

I only understood later why it was such a flawless ruse. She’d left no evidence of her wicked intent, no wound I could point to and say, See, she hurt me. When I tried to articulate my pain, I’d only seemed like a jabbering child. Why hadn’t I just come out, after all? Everyone knows the forest is dangerous at night.

Watching Peti die against me feels like waiting for Katalin in the woods. It’s my own revulsion and terror, my own misplaced pity and guilt that’s wounding me, nothing more. I hate the captain for binding me to my own helplessness. I hate him so much that it’s a heat unfolding in my chest, livid and breathless.

All of a sudden, my horse stops. She presses close to Imre’s black steed, ears pulled flat against her ivory head.

“Do you hear that?” Imre asks. His pale lashes are clumped with tiny pearls of ice. In the distance, almost too far away to notice, there is a slow, measured rustling.

“It’s Peti,” Ferkó says, bringing his horse to my other side. “The monsters in the wood can hear him moaning from miles away. It’s drawing them out of their dens and—”

The captain circles back toward us, hand on his ax. There’s a sprinkling of white in his dark curls, a coronet of frost.

“Keep quiet,” he snaps, but his throat is pulsing.

Peti stills against me. We say nothing as the rustling grows louder. Closer. I can feel my mare’s chest heaving between my thighs. Imre draws his ax and Ferkó draws his bow and we all push together, a single mass of huge human prey.

The fog spits something onto the path in front of us. All four horses rear, whinnying madly, and Peti slides off my mare, pulling me down with him. I land on my back against the hard, cold earth, too shocked to even scream.

“Stop!” the captain cries.

“It’s a chicken,” Imre says.

A solitary hen is pecking its way across the path, oblivious to the chaos it has created. Its feathers are as shiny as polished obsidian. Even its beak and comb are black.

I can’t help myself. I start to laugh. I laugh so hard that my eyes water, even as my mare trots anxious circles in the path, snorting in reproach. Imre is laughing, too, and the sound chases the remnants of fear from my heart and melts the ice in my belly. The captain looks at me as if I’ve grown seven heads.

“Is that the worst you have to offer?” Imre asks the woods, once his hysteria has subsided. “A black hen?”

The dead trees whisper an unintelligible reply. The captain leaps down from his horse, boots thudding. I push myself onto my elbows, a knot of panic rising in my throat once more.

But the captain doesn’t approach me. He kneels beside Peti and removes one glove, pressing two fingers against the column of his throat. The gentleness of it knocks the breath from me, and I have to remind myself what it is that I’ve seen: the gleam of his ax in the dark, the swift certainty of his fingers as he yoked my wrist to Peti’s.

The captain lifts his head. There’s a wet sheen over his black eye, like the pond on a starless night. “He’s dead.”

There’s no more laughter.

We see three more chickens on our route, while the fog begins to thin and the forest grows sparser around us. As we press on, the trees give way to grassy flatlands, and black pieces of night sky dagger through the mist. The glaze of frost melts from our hands and faces. When I get my first glimpse of the lake, it’s all I can do to stop myself from leaping off my horse and bounding toward it, so grateful to be out of the woods.

The Black Lake stretches all the way to the horizon, wisps of fog hovering over its surface like steam hissing out of a pot. Beneath the mist, it glitters darkly under a white sliver of moon, the reflection of the stars speckling its surface. It looks like a pool of night, and I almost believe I could dip my hand into the water and pluck out a jewel-bright star for myself.

“It’s beautiful,” Imre whispers. Ferkó sinks to his knees, whispering prayers in the Old Tongue, eyes closed as the wind sweeps across his reverent face.

“It should be a safe place to camp,” the captain says, unmoved.

I don’t expect such exuberance from him regardless, but I can tell Peti’s fate is tempering his relief. After Peti died, the captain laid one hand over his face, brushing his eyes gently shut. He pulled his legs straight, ankles touching, and placed his good arm over his chest, in some awkward approximation of slumber. It was too stiff to be real sleep, too self-consciously pious, just like the captain himself. Seeing it filled me with my own awful grief, knowing I would have no such ceremony of my own. There would be no one to close my sightless eyes or worry over the position of my limbs. If my body even survived my death, that is—no one in Keszi knows what the king does with his wolf-girls. Only that they never come back.

Then the captain clasped his hands, whispered his prayer, and Peti’s body went up in flame and smoke.

Now I watch the captain climb down from his mount and kneel before the Black Lake. He removes his gloves and dips his bare hands in the water. His penitence pricks me like a thorn. Will the captain grow somber and grim after my death too? I doubt it very much. Among the Woodsmen, I imagine a wolf-girl being killed is cause for great cheer.

Imre tugs the end of the rope snarled around my wrists, leading me toward the beginnings of their campsite. There is already a bed of cold wood, and a cast-iron kettle, rusted around its edges. We will have to boil the water before we can drink it. The Black Lake is touched with salt, as if Isten carved out a hole in the earth and then poured the ocean into it to make Régország its own tiny, landlocked sea. Beyond it is the Little Plain, a scraggly prairie flecked with salt flats and occasional stretches of marshland, spilling out beside the tributaries that carve the land like a cracked mirror. It marks the western edge of Farkasvár, the region containing Keszi, which King István made when he diced up old tribal territories into tidy new districts and installed a preening count to rule over each one.

The captain lights a fire on the bank and Imre sets his kettle over it. He boils tough game and vegetables for stew, the onion stinging my eyes but making my belly whine. With the captain’s brutal pace, I haven’t eaten at all since leaving Keszi.

It should be unthinkable to share a meal with the Woodsmen. I don’t want to acknowledge that we have anything in common—even something as small and silly as liking this stew. It’s the same kind of lean meal we would eat in Keszi, scrounged together in the dead of winter when our stores have nearly been emptied. It reminds me of home, and I don’t want the Woodsmen poisoning my memories. Along with my coin and my braid, and Katalin’s wolf cloak, they’re all that I have left.

But I’m hungry. Every bite of the stew feels treacherous, and I think, suddenly and viciously, of Katalin. My people, she said. Virág had stopped her before she finished, but I know what she would have said. That I don’t belong in Keszi. That half my blood is tainted, and I’ll never really be one of them.

A true wolf-girl would have refused the stew. She would let herself starve rather than making nice with Woodsmen.

My relief at making it out of the woods is corroded by the knowledge that we are growing closer to Király Szek. Closer to my end. I only have the vague shape of it in my mind, the icy claw of fear around my heart, the taste of blood on my tongue. I would rather know how I will die than spend the journey wondering whether it will be by blade or by fire.

“What do you expect is waiting for you when we reach Király Szek?” I ask carefully. “A personal commendation from the king? A festival in your honor?”

Imre snorts. “I’m just hoping one of the other soldiers hasn’t stolen my cot.”

“Is this your first mission, as a Woodsman?”

“My first into Ezer Szem. We go all over Régország, many places other than the woods. I suppose the name Woodsman is a bit misleading.”

I want to ask what they do when they’re not fighting monsters or abducting wolf-girls, but I’m not sure I will like the answer. So instead I say, “I thought that’s what the king’s army is for.”

“The king’s army has been tied up on the border for twelve years. There are scarcely enough soldiers left to guard the capital.”

I draw an uneasy breath. I don’t like thinking of the Woodsmen doing the work of regular soldiers. It’s more difficult to loathe them if I imagine they are fighting only for gold, hoping to one day go home to their families.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Imre says, noticing my startled expression. “Most of us are still God-fearing men. Some more than others.”

“Like Peti.”

Imre gives an embattled sigh. “Peti was not a particularly pious man; he was only a wide-eyed simpleton, an easy mark for those with cunning tongues. He believed, as many other desperate peasants have been led to, that the presence of pagans in Régország is the cause of all our kingdom’s ills.”

This startles me too. We have the occasional bad harvest in Keszi, or the especially bitter winter, but we can only blame ourselves for that, or our fickle gods. Some years, Ördög is stronger, and sickness claims more of our people. When Isten manages to wrest back control, however—like the sun rising after a long night—we have bountiful, verdant springs, and a glut of new baby girls.

Of course, some years the Woodsmen come, and that is far worse than a bad harvest, or even the wiles of Ördög.

“What sort of ills?” I ask.

“Mostly the war,” says Imre. “I’ve heard the front line is soaked with Régyar blood. Merzan seems to grow stronger every day.”

News of the war rarely makes its way to Keszi. I know only the barest facts: three decades ago, King Bárány János married a Merzani princess in an effort to forge an alliance with our powerful neighbors to the south. It worked, for a time. She even bore him a son. But Merzan was too ambitious and Régország too stubborn. When the queen died, any hope of peace perished with her.

“It’s better not to agonize over such things,” Imre says finally. “The war is going badly. The winter will be long. If Godfather Life wills it so, He must have a reason. We are trained to serve, not to ask questions.”

I remember how the fire roared to life in front of the captain, so sudden and sure. Any wolf-girl would have marveled at such a fire, easily as impressive as the work of our best fire-makers. We would have called it power, magic. They called it piety. But what is the difference, if both fires burn just as bright?

The wind sings through the cattails, blowing fog from the lake. The false stars dotting the surface of the water wink like celestial eyes. Ferkó has already bedded down for the night, and soon Imre rolls over to join him. The captain, whom I did not see eat a bite of stew or swallow a sip of water, folds his arms in front of the fire. With the smear of the woods at our backs and only the pale, empty stretch of the Little Plain before us, it is finally safe for our whole convoy to sleep at once. But I stay awake, warming my sinful pagan body by the light of Godfather Life’s flames, battling the heaviness of my eyelids.

The captain’s knife is glinting on his boot. Perhaps I can still be a true wolf-girl tonight.

By the time the Woodsmen have fallen asleep, I can barely shake off oblivion myself. Exhaustion has crowded my head like a flock of screeching birds. My vision is blurring and sharpening by turns, making me dizzy. When I hear a rustling in the bramble to my right, I scarcely even jump.

It’s the same hen from the woods, feathers black as a slick of lake water, pecking its way toward me. Fear has turned my throat raw, so I swallow hard and mutter, “Stop scaring me.”

The hen cocks its head.

Then it explodes.

At least, that’s what it seems to do. There’s a flurry of feathers, a puff of smoke that reeks worse than the rot of Peti’s wound. And when the air clears, something that is not a chicken stands before me.

The creature looks almost human—just human enough to make my breath catch. Its gray-green skin is pulled taut over its spine and rib cage, the bones close to breaking through. Its head dangles perilously on a scrawny neck, black tongue unfurling over a row of blade-sharp teeth. Its tongue lolls on the ground as the creature crawls toward me on all fours, hissing and groaning. Its eyes are not eyes at all. They are twin clusters of flies gathered on its gaunt face.

I scramble back toward the fire, a scream rattling in my chest. Three more creatures are creeping through the brush, the hairs on their ridged backs bristling in the cold air. They crawl towards Ferkó and Imre, nosing the wet earth blindly, steered by scent alone.

I do scream, finally, when one of the creatures takes a bite out of Ferkó’s skull.

The creature swallows a hunk of flesh and muscle, blood streaming onto the grass. Ferkó’s skin flaps in the wind like a blown dress, exposing the plank of bone beneath it, right below his eye socket.

Imre jerks up with a start, but he doesn’t have time to shake off the bleariness of sleep. Another creature lunges at him, its teeth in his throat. The gurgling sound he makes as he chokes on his own blood is worse than the sight of it, worse than watching the creature chew his red muscle and swallow.

My own creature circles me in a lazy, curious way, as if trying to decide whether I’m worth the effort of eating.

The rope on my wrists has loosened enough that I can slip it off with my teeth, but it doesn’t do me much good. I have no weapon, only the blackened logs of the fire to my rear and the useless wet grass beneath me; Ferkó’s bow is blood-drenched and much too far away. The monster knuckles another step forward. It has human hands with ragged yellow fingernails.

“Please,” I gasp. “Isten . . .”

But it’s been so long since I’ve prayed that I can’t remember what I’m meant to say. Let me light one fire, I think desperately. Let me forge one blade, and I’ll never feel sorry for myself ever again.

None of that happens, though. Instead, the air whistles as the captain brings his ax down on the creature’s back. There’s a crunch of bone and the monster drops to the ground, crumpling like a poorly pitched tent.

Fear and panic roar in me as loudly as river water in a rainstorm. Amidst the churning of it, the chaos, I can only remember one thing—my hatred for the Woodsmen. I lurch to my feet, half-stumbling, and snatch the captain’s knife from his boot. I lift it over my head, angling for a killing blow.

“Are you mad?” the captain bellows. He dodges my knife easily, then whirls and cuts down another creature, its face caving in beneath the blade of his ax.

The other two creatures abandon Ferkó and Imre and pace a tightening circle, herding us toward the lake. I step down into the cold water, my arm shooting out to keep my balance, and find myself back-to-back with the captain. We move farther in until I am drowned up to my waist, and the beasts are paddling toward us, the flies that are their eyes buzzing plaintively. Their teeth are red with Woodsman blood.

One of them springs toward me, out of the water, and I duck down, letting it land thrashing on top of me. I bite back a scream as its mouth closes over my shoulder blade. As quickly as a braid of pain laces down my arm, a sudden flood of anger edges it out. I’m infuriated that I might die so banally, not by the swing of King János’s blade, but snapped up in the jaws of some nameless monster. From this vantage point, I stick my knife between its protruding ribs and give it a vicious twist. The monster falls back with a squeal, wound leaking.

The captain is wrestling his own creature, which is still fighting even with its left arm nearly cleaved from its body. The arm hangs on with only thin strands of muscle and sinew. The captain swings at the beast but misses. His movements are clumsy; the ax seems too heavy in his hands, and for a moment I’m stunned by his fumbling ineptitude. The creature manages to tear a chunk of fabric from the captain’s dolman, leaving a swath of his bronze skin exposed.

The Woodsman spins wildly in the water, his head moving rapidly from left to right, trying to make up for his blind spot. Acting on instinct, I shift to guard the captain’s left side, and when the monster lunges again, both of our weapons meet in the very center of its chest, metal rasping against metal. With a shriek, the creature falls back into the lake.

For one long moment, its body is wracked with terrible spasms. Blood pools in the water around it, dark and sickly, reeking like the green rot of Ezer Szem. Then, abruptly, the splashing stops. The flies cease their buzzing. There is only the sound of the captain breathing raggedly, and the crooked beat of my own heart.

We crawl back to the shore, the stars still winking with their wretched cheer. I collapse onto the bank, my cheek pressed to the cool grass, watching the captain through half-shut eyes as he falls beside me. Damp from the water, my hair drapes over my wolf cloak and onto the ground, patches of brown streaked through the vanishing silver dye. The captain rolls over to meet my gaze, chest heaving.

“Te nem vagy táltos,” he manages, eye wide as he takes in the sight of me, chestnut-haired, unmasked. You are not a seer.

“Te nem vagy harcos,” I shoot back between ragged breaths. You are not a warrior.

“No,” he agrees, cheeks flushing faintly. “I’m not.” With great difficulty, he pushes himself to a sitting position and holds out a gloved hand. “Bárány Gáspár.”