Chapter Six

Chapter Six

By morning, frost lies over the Little Plain, a garland on each blade of grass. The sky is seething and gray, clouds swollen, all of it a bad omen. These are signs that Virág taught me could portend a monster, but Gáspár and I can find no trace of one.

The plain isn’t like the woods—there are no tree holes to hide in, no shadows to conceal the presence of something large with fangs and claws. No prophetic smears of blood or masticated piles of bone. As we trace a two-mile perimeter around the village, tents swaying scantly in the distance, Gáspár’s shoulders coil with frustration.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “People don’t simply disappear.”

“I know,” I say. The forest could swallow things up, but not the plain. “Maybe they’re lying.”

“They have nothing to gain from lying.”

“Maybe they’re not thinking of the proper sort of monster. Virág once lived in a village with a woman who was married to a dragon and didn’t even know it.”

Gáspár thins his mouth. “A dragon is a beast.”

“If girls can be wolves, can’t men be beasts?” I ask. That silences him, so I go on. “A woman was married to a man that she loved very much, even though he was from a different village. Their village was a peaceful one, so it shocked no one more than her when, one day, the village’s children began disappearing. Their parents searched for them desperately, but they could only find the barest traces of hair and bone, and their baby teeth. And then the woman noticed that her husband began to act strangely. And she realized that she could not remember the name of the village he was from, or how she had met him at all.

“Thinking that she might weep, the woman went out to sit under a citrus tree. The leaves began to rustle overhead, and she looked up, her face shifting from sadness to horror. Do you know what she saw there?”

“The bodies of children,” Gáspár says flatly.

“No. She saw her husband’s seven heads, hidden there among the branches, their eyes closed, as if they were sleeping.”

I half expect him to scoff at my pagan nonsense, the way I laughed baldly at his Patritian tales. But his face is open, almost expectant. “And what happened then?”

“The woman rolled all the heads up into her arms and took them to her husband, to confront him. He began to weep at the sight of them, and then he showed her the bodies of the children he had taken, all the meatiest parts picked clean. Still weeping, he said that he had cut off his heads in order to marry her, and that he had only killed and eaten the children so that he might not be tempted to eat her, instead.”

“Did the villagers band together and kill the dragon?”

“How terribly Patritian of you,” I say. “No, the woman kept her husband’s secret, and she fed him the tender hearts of baby lambs.”

I enjoy the scowl on his face, and ignore the homesickness winding in my chest. The memory of Virág’s words is sharp and sweet all at once, like the taste of a sour cherry. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of her hut, my fingers twined with Boróka’s, listening as she filled our heads with stories of man-dragons and trickster gods.

By midday, Gáspár has made no good on his promise to slay the monster. I try not to gloat too much, but our stomachs are growling. Although game is scarce on the Little Plain, most of it chased into early hibernation by the wind and the nascent snow, with Ferkó’s bow I manage to kill a lithe hare with black-tipped ears. I skin and gut it quietly while Gáspár plucks up the bow and quiver himself. If I were more charitable, and Gáspár less stubborn, I would have offered to hunt for him. But my goodwill has evaporated after so many hours of pacing wind-chapped through the plain, and despite our bargain I think he is still loath to accept help from a wolf-girl.

He pulls back the string of the bow against his cheek with great effort and lets it snap forward. The arrow wobbles out of its notch like a bird in drunken flight, and then spirals to an early demise at my feet. I can’t help it—I laugh.

“I hope you make a better prince than you do a Woodsman.”

Flushing, Gáspár snatches up the arrow. He leans close to me, chest swelling, and in the cold daylight I can see pink rivulets of scar tissue furrowing from beneath his eye patch. The dark lashes on his good eye are quivering, like he can scarcely be convinced of his own boldness.

“I am still a prince,” he reminds me, voice low. “And you’re a trifling wolf-girl.”

I can’t find it in me to be ruffled by his bluster; if anything, he’s only proven that even my most artless jibes can rile him.

“Then it must hurt to know how much you need me,” I say. “How you couldn’t survive without me.”

Muscles tensed, I brace myself for his rejoinder. But Gáspár’s eye only narrows further, storm clouds bruising across his face.

“Your life still depends on my survival. If the prince perishes on your watch, you’ll be the one to pay for it. Tell me, wolf-girl, who belongs to whom?”

He speaks of the prince as if he were someone else, someone he knows but not very well. I wonder again why he seems to despise power as much as I desire it. But it only makes my heart flutter with anger, real anger, more than just preening spite.

“My life is worth much less than yours,” I snap. “If it now belongs to you, then you struck a poor bargain.”

Gáspár draws a breath. “If only it were just your life. I’ll remind you that you staked the future of your whole village on this bargain, trusting me to protect it from my father’s wrath. If you fail, their lives will be forfeit too.”

His words crackle over me like lightning. Once my rage abates, I’m flushed with shame. He’s right—I’ve done a terrible, stupid, selfish thing, binding myself and my people to this prickly Woodsman. My gaze wanders to his ax, and I think how it would look cleaving the soft column of Boróka’s throat. I stare down at his hands, wrapped up in their black gloves, imagining that they were the hands that dragged my mother into the forest’s open maw. Worse, though, is the truth: that I might have summoned Keszi’s death omen myself.

“Fight your own monster, then,” I bite out, tearing away from him. “Hunt your own rabbits, and uphold your own silly oath.”

I don’t care how futile my words are, or how petulant my voice sounds. I trudge back toward the village, dead rabbit swinging from my fist, and don’t look back. If Gáspár calls after me, I don’t hear him.

It takes the better part of an hour to reach the cluster of tents. My mortified anger is welling up in me like a knot of unshed tears. The dog with coiled fur nips at the hem of my cloak, whining. It has so much fur that I can’t find its eyes, just its black twitching nose. A scrawny sheep bleats at me nervously, as if it can’t tell the wolf on my back is dead. The silver-gray cows chew their cud, oblivious.

My hands are meant to be bound, but Kajetán is nowhere in sight, so I impale my rabbit on a stick and hoist it over the fire. I stand several paces back, arm crooked across my brow, and still the light and heat make my eyes water. Such a fire will keep the village warm through a whole winter on the plain, where, at night, it can grow as cold as Kaleva. I feel a prickle of satisfaction when I remember that this is the Prinkepatrios’s holy fire, and now it’s being used to fill a heathen’s belly.

I crouch outside of Hanna’s hut to eat my rabbit, tossing the dog its liver and shriveled purpling heart. I pull apart the greasy dark meat with my hands and swallow the gristle without chewing. I’ve even sucked the marrow out of rabbit bones before, in the middle of one of our leanest winters, but I’m not quite so desperate now.

When I’m finished, I lick my fingers clean and take out my father’s coin. I’ve traced the symbols a hundred times, trying to make meaning out of their etched lines the way a hungry man might try to draw milk from a stone. There’s a profile of King János on one side, with his royal nose and exuberant mustache. I try to find Gáspár’s face in the gilt rendering of his father’s, but I can’t see any resemblance and then I’m vexed with myself for sparing it so much thought.

“Is that a forint?”

I look up with a start. Dorottya is standing over me, at least an arm’s length of careful distance between us. Her hair is tied back under a red kerchief. But she’s eyeing my coin with great interest, and I curl my fingers around it, throat tightening.

“I don’t know,” I say. I’m embarrassed to admit I’m utterly unfamiliar with the units of Régyar coin. Back when the king did collect tax from Keszi, we paid him in forged silver and rabbit furs, bundled onto the back of the Woodsmen’s steeds. “It’s gold.”

“Then it’s an arany,” Dorottya says, craning her neck at the coin. There’s a hopeful glint in her eyes that makes me equal parts suspicious and sad. “It’s worth two dozen pieces of silver, maybe more. I’ve only seen a gold piece once before.”

I glower at her, waiting for some vicious punch line. Waiting for her to accuse me of theft or some other pagan treachery. But she just regards me thoughtfully, cupping her chin in her hand.

“For a long time we had no coins here at all,” she says. “Then, some years ago, merchants from Király Szek came and bought up all our skins and blowing horns and wool. The merchants said they would buy all the wares that we had, but they would pay us in silver. So we had to wait until those merchants came back, because none of the other villages would take the silver, and they charged us more and more for their wares with each passing year.”

A quiet, ugly feeling simmers in my belly. “Were those the king’s merchants?”

Dorottya nods. “I saw a man with a coin like that once, queer script and all, a Yehuli man. He wasn’t a merchant, though—he was a tax collector.”

It takes a moment for the weight of her words to settle on me. “You met a man with a coin like mine?”

“Yes,” Dorottya says, forehead creasing.

I can’t help the eagerness in my voice when I lean forward. “Did you learn his name?”

“No. He was a tax collector from the capital, that’s all I know. When he came, he took half our silver, and even a calfskin rug. The king keeps these Yehuli men like vipers in a sack, and then looses them all on us once a year.”

My hand closes in a fist around my coin. Her words have dredged up some strange hurt in me, but I don’t know if I have the right to feel wounded by slights against the Yehuli. “It seems like you should blame the king, for foisting his coins on you in the first place.”

“The merchants said that all of Régország’s neighbors are using gold and silver for their buying and selling now,” Dorottya says. “King János wants to follow their example and mint his own royal coins.”

I have never thought much of Régország’s neighbors, the Volkstadt to the west and Rodinya to the east. They are only more Patritians, with peculiar accents but the same pious loathings. While I am puzzling over what she has said, Dorottya takes her leave. She slips silently into a small throng of villagers who have gathered around the fire to warm their hands. Kajetán is not among them. I wonder what kind of headman stays inside his tent all day, swaddled in calfskins, while his villagers till the fields and tend to their anxious sheep. Likely the same kind who refuses the aid of a Woodsman.

Gáspár emerges from behind the pen of gray cattle, bow strung over his shoulder and his hands empty. His failure at hunting should bring me some sort of perverse joy, but my lips only purse as he approaches, like I’ve bitten into something curdled with rot.

“Did you cook the rabbit?” Gáspár asks, toeing the heap of tiny bones at my feet.

“Yes. It was good practice for my stint in the kitchens of Count Korhonen’s keep.”

“You are terribly stubborn,” he says.

“You aren’t much better.”

Gáspár inclines his chin. “Either way, it’s no good arguing with every breath. The nature of a bargain, regrettably, is that we belong to each other.”

He flushes a little as he says it, and inside my boots, my toes curl. Gáspár chooses his words carefully and crossly, the way I would comb the trees outside Keszi for the largest and least-bruised apple. I wonder why he has chosen these words now. Perhaps he is only being as wretchedly reasonable as ever, but still my mind stammers around the thought of us being bound together.

I sigh heavily, mouth quivering as I try to keep it from forming a scowl. “I suppose you’ll want me to feed you, then.”

I think he almost smiles, but he catches himself. A smile would look odd and terrifying on his face, like a wolf trying to dance, or a bear plucking the strings of a kantele.

“Was Dorottya berating you?” he asks.

There’s a note of concern in his voice, or maybe it’s only my imagining. “No, though she did have some venomous words about the Yehuli.”

Gáspár tilts his head. “I can’t see how she managed to guess at your bloodline. You don’t have much of the Yehuli look.”

“She didn’t. She recognized my father’s coin.” I stare up at him, remembering King János’s engraved profile, all dull-eyed and weak-chinned. Gáspár’s eye is bright and keen, his jaw as sharp as the edge of a blade. He must have more of his mother in him. “Is there a Yehuli look?”

“Many people say there is.” He lifts one shoulder, his gaze still on me. “Something in the nose, or the brow, perhaps. There were several Yehuli men at court, tax collectors and moneylenders. None of them had your nose or your brow, and certainly not your eyes.”

I blink at him. “My eyes?”

“Yes,” he says, curtly and with a hint of embarrassment. “They’re very green.”

My stomach quivers with the pulse of a thousand tiny wings. It’s an odd feeling, not unpleasant. “Is there a Merzani look, then?”

Gáspár goes silent. I wonder if I’ve pushed him too far, if this brief moment of peace will snap beneath us like a rope bridge over churning waters. After a moment, he says, “I don’t know. My mother was the only other Merzani I’ve ever met.”

“And do you take after her?” For some reason I feel the need to pretend that I haven’t studied his father’s gilded image with Gáspár’s face in mind, making a catalogue of their many differences.

“So they say.” His voice is perfectly flat, as if the answer is a groove well worn. “I have the wrong complexion for my father’s tastes. One of the counts proposed that I spend a year indoors to see if that improved my prospects.”

His words almost provoke a huff of laughter, but I swallow it down. I’m not sure he would believe it was a laugh of exasperation and solidarity, and not a mockery of his pain. Gáspár looks away at last, over his shoulder at the villagers gathered around the fire. There are more now than before, their backs arched with their long day in the field, a thread of exhaustion running under all their mumbled words.

The sky has washed itself a dusky violet, the color of a bruise still aching. Bands of pink and gold stripe along the horizon, neat as the lashes down the back of my thighs. The violence of the sunset shocks me—in Keszi we only saw pieces of purple light the size of glass shards, sieved through the fretwork of tree branches. A thrill of cold air brushes up my spine. I marvel and marvel, not caring that I must look as dumb and wide-eyed as a child, and then I hear the sound of music.

The villagers’ clothes look richer and finer in the firelight, as if imbued with the glossiness of woven silk. Someone’s kantele starts to play, and I remember Virág’s story about Vilmötten, who was wandering in the forest when he heard a lovely sound, only to find the intestines of a squirrel strung up between two trees, which he took and fashioned into a lute that sang more beautifully than any nightingale or wood thrush. Even the coil-furred dog has added its howling to the harmony.

Gáspár and I watch as the villagers form two long lines, men on one side and women on the other. I recognize the steps at once: it’s the same frantic couple’s dance we do in Keszi, only when we need a particular distraction from the cold or the emptiness in our bellies. The men and women swap partners, tapping the ground and leaping in time with the kantele’s strumming, laughing when one girl’s skirt nearly catches the fire.

Looking at them fills me with the worst type of loathing: envy. If not for the sweep of grass on all sides and the black diamond shadows that their tents cast on the earth, I might have believed I was back in Keszi now, sulking ostentatiously as the other girls claimed their dance partners. Only, these villagers don’t live in fear of the Woodsmen or the many horrors of Ezer Szem.

But now they have a monster of their own, I remind myself. No matter how attentively they stoke their divine flame.

One girl breaks off from the circle. She’s pretty and soft-looking, with Boróka’s flaxen hair and the eyes of a doe oblivious to the arc of a hunter’s arrow. She approaches Gáspár shyly, and holds out her hand. There’s a smear of soot on her cheek, but even so there’s something endearing about it.

Gáspár shakes his head politely, and the girl shrinks back, crestfallen and flushing. I catch myself wondering if he’s ever touched a woman who wasn’t a wolf-girl. The Woodsmen are a holy order, after all.

I lean toward him, my voice a whisper. “You didn’t need to turn her down on my behalf.”

“I didn’t,” Gáspár says, mouth thinning.

“Then why? She seemed your type.”

Gáspár stiffens, and his shoulders rise around his ears. I can tell I have landed on an area of particular sensitivity. “And what type is that?”

I glance over at the girl, folded neatly back into the dancing circle, arm-in-arm with another flaxen-haired man who looks to be her brother. I think of my own fumbling trysts by the riverside, of the men and boys who slipped their hands between my thighs and then begged me not to tell anyone, please, after we were both sweat-slick and panting. In turn they told me that I was pretty, which perhaps was true, and that I was sweet, which certainly was not, but only when we were in the dark, alone.

“Innocent,” I say.

Gáspár scoffs at me, suba shifting as he angles his body away. His face is lucent in the firelight, like a bit of amber knuckling out of black pine. I consider that I might be the victim of some trickster god’s cruel prank, cursed to keep thinking of the way his skin looks burnished in the glow of the flame, or the way his jaw tenses when my taunts have hit their mark. I tell myself to stop noticing any of it.

There is a lull in the music, and one voice rises above the rest. “Where is Kajetán?”

“He must be hiding away in his tent,” says Dorottya. She knifes her narrow body through the crowd. “Someone go fetch him.”

“I’ll go,” Gáspár offers, stepping forward with altogether too much eagerness. I can tell he is desperate to leave our conversation behind. “I must tell him that I failed to find the monster.”

He dips his head shamefully, and I feel a tug of guilt, regretting my own petulance, my needling. He might have found the monster after all, if I hadn’t laughed at his hunting and pestered him with my stories.

Gáspár doesn’t invite me along with him, but I don’t want to be left alone with these Patritians, so I follow anyway. Their eyes are bright as embers in the dark, reflecting the fiery light, and their gazes trail me in a line of heat. I touch the braid in my right pocket, then the coin in my left, squeezing what little comfort I can from the ritual.

“What sort of leader leaves his people to worry like this?” Gáspár mutters as we make our way to Kajetán’s tent. “The least he could do is show his face in a time of strife.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t want to be a leader at all. Kajetán seems terribly young to be the headman of a village, even a small one.”

“But he is their leader,” Gáspár says. “And so he should act with honor.”

I roll my eyes at the simple Patritian line: right and wrong, and the intractable divide between them. I can’t deny there’s something appealing about its directness. If only it weren’t so difficult to be right in the eyes of a Patritian, and so very easy to be wrong.

Gáspár opens the tent flap, and we both step through. Kajetán’s hearth is silent, his bed cold. As Gáspár murmurs a small fire to life, I walk over to the wooden table, where the bucket of water sits beside his tin cup. The bucket is nearly full, but it has a strange look to it, a thickness that water shouldn’t have.

As I lean over to examine the water, the table wobbles. I frown and peer down. There’s a small hole in the dirt floor of Kajetán’s hut, and one of the table legs has lodged there.

“What are you doing?” Gáspár demands. “Don’t rifle through a man’s things like a common thief.”

I ignore him. The hole is small, and black as the inside of a well. I stick my hand inside, up to the wrist, and wriggle my fingers until they catch hold of something. When I pull my hand out, what I see turns my veins to ice.

Abandoning his principles, Gáspár peers over my shoulder. “What is that?”

“It’s a doll,” I say.

A little girl’s stick-and-mud doll, with a scrap of wool for a skirt and yellow plain grass for hair. The doll has no eyes or mouth, just a mute, unseeing mud face.

“Why would he have a doll?” Gáspár says. “Why would he hide it?”

I reach back into the hole. This time, my fingers close around something smaller, with more give. A handful of dark berries. Their violet juice colors the creases of my palm.

There’s another color with it—a deep glossy red, almost black.

I drop the berries to the ground. They leave a streak of blood across the dirt. I look up at Gáspár, and when I see the horror that’s come over his face, I know he understands too.

“What do you think you’re doing, wolf-girl?”

Gáspár and I turn in perfect synchrony. Kajetán is standing at the opening of his tent, his face more flushed than before, freckled with broken blood vessels. His eyes have a wicked, colorless gleam.

“It’s you,” I whisper. “You killed the little girl. Eszti.”

“Yes,” he says.

“And Hanna. And Balász.”

Gáspár reaches for his ax. “Then you’re not only a weak man. You’re a monstrous one.”

“Why did you do it?” My voice is hoarse, my throat burning. “Why did you kill your own people?”

“I don’t have to answer to pagan scum,” he says, but there’s none of the same spite in his voice—just a low, resigned loathing.

“Then answer to a Woodsman,” Gáspár spits. “Answer to your god.”

“You should know better than anyone that our god demands sacrifice, Woodsman. You might as well be asking after your missing eye.” Kajetán gives a short, bitter laugh. “Winters on the plain are barren and long. Many would have perished anyway. It’s true, we have little dry wood to keep the fire going, but flesh and bone do just as well.”

I’ve seen monsters claw the faces from Ferkó and Imre and feast on their mangled bodies. I watched Peti die slowly beside me, breathing in the green rot of his awful wound. This is more horrible than either—I put my hand to my mouth, afraid I might be sick.

Gáspár does not look sick. Rather, he’s trembling as he raises his ax. He presses the blade to Kajetán’s chest, seething with gentleness, right below his collar and the pale hollow of his throat. Careful not to cut.

“Repent,” he says. “Or I will render you deaf and blind as punishment for your crimes.”

Kajetán only laughs again, his eyes holding the firelight. “Repent for what, Woodsman? For serving the Prinkepatrios the way He demands to be served? Better to die swiftly under a knife than watch your fingers and toes rot away with the cold, or feel your belly eating itself until there’s nothing left but bone.”

Gáspár’s grip tightens on his ax, throat bobbing. “You are still a killer in the eyes of the Prinkepatrios. Repent to me, or you will look like the most pious Woodsman in all of Régország when I am finished with you.”

“You must be mad,” I burst out. “He’s not sorry at all.”

There’s no contrition on Kajetán’s bright, ruddy face or in the glassy sweep of his gaze. He looks between Gáspár and me, sneering, shoulders tremulous with silent laughter. I remember the way he ordered me bound, the way he wrestled me to the floor and put his knee in my back so he could tie me, how I felt his hot breath against my ear. I remember how his villagers cringed away from me like I was something that would eat them in their sleep, all the while their monster was wearing a white suba and living in the headman’s tent. I remember the way Dorottya spoke of the king’s sack of Yehuli vipers.

There are monsters, and then there are wolf-girls, and then there are wolf-girls with Yehuli blood. Now I understand: even bound and toothless, I am more odious to them than any Patritian killer.

I unsheathe my knife and lunge at Kajetán, hurling him against the wall of the tent. He stumbles but catches himself, then thrusts an elbow into my chest. Before my knife can hit its mark, all my breath floods out of me.

“Évike!” Gáspár shouts, but his voice is distant, like something I’m hearing from underwater.

Kajetán grabs me by the shoulders with such force that my knife flies from my grasp. He twists my arm and I shriek, my vision going starry with pain. There’s a whirl of fabric, flashes of skin, and then I am pinned to Kajetán’s chest, my own blade held against my throat.

“You ought to keep your wolf-girl chained and muzzled,” Kajetán says, panting. “She’ll be the ruin of you both. How long will the fire burn when her body is added to the pyre? What is the worth of one feral wolf-girl, a heathen of the highest order, to the Prinkepatrios?”

He presses his finger to the wound on my throat, opening it again under his thumbnail. I choke on another scream, tears burning across my gaze. When Kajetán takes his hand away, it’s florid with the mingling of new blood and old.

“Let her go,” Gáspár says. He lowers his ax, letting the blade of it thud into the dirt.

I can almost hear the cleave of Kajetán’s smile, like metal rasping over metal. “What is the worth of one feral wolf-girl to you, Sir Woodsman? Surely the men of your order would drink a toast to her death.”

“Please.” Gáspár raises his hand, weaponless. “I can bring gold to your village, food—”

“No, no,” Kajetán says, shaking his head. “There is nothing you can offer me that is of greater value to the Prinkepatrios than a wolf-girl’s death.”

And then his fingers close around my throat, forcing me down, my body bent at the waist. The blade draws to the corner of my mouth, right over my tongue, and I realize with a start what he means to do: pick off little pieces of me to burn one at a time, stretching my sacrifice for as long as it will go.

I close my eyes, but I don’t feel the bite of the blade. There is only the crush of bone, the wet sound of flesh giving way. When I open my eyes, I can see rivulets of blood in the dirt, and Kajetán’s fingers have loosed from my throat.

The inertia sends me toppling to the ground, and I land on my knees, gasping. There’s blood in my mouth, but my tongue is intact. Kajetán’s body lands beside me like a great felled oak, Gáspár’s ax wedged in his chest.

I watch as his body gives its last spasms, limbs jerking and then going still. His head lolls to the side, eyes open and terribly blank, like two pale shards of glazed pottery. His beard is flecked with blood, black maggoty clumps of it, what he coughed up as he died.

Hands shaking, I push myself to my feet. Though the wound on my throat is leaking, I can hardly feel it now. Everything is blunted, numb as a whetstone.

“Gáspár,” I start, but then I can’t think of what to say. His face is drawn, his chest heaving. Kajetán’s blood is a wine stain across his dolman, dyeing the leather something darker than black. I can only watch as he drops to his knees and lays a hand over Kajetán’s forehead, brushing his eyelids shut.

In the end, the villagers make Gáspár their hero. They stitch together their own story when they see blood splashed against the calfskin wall of the tent, Gáspár’s ax in Kajetán’s chest, and the doll and the berries on the ground. Eszti’s mother, a young woman with a snarly dark braid hanging to her waist, holds her daughter’s stick-and-mud toy to her chest and weeps. The other villagers gather around Kajetán’s stiffening body.

“We must bury him,” Dorottya proclaims. “And we must elect a new headman.”

Naïvely I assume the villagers will vote for her. But then I remember that, bereft of magic, these Patritian women are only meant to carry children on their hip and darn their husbands’ tunics. The villagers huddle together, speaking in hushed tones. When they finally break apart, it’s a man named Antal who has been chosen.

His first order of business as headman is to dispose of Kajetán’s corpse.

“No ceremony,” Antal proclaims. “No grave.”

Outside, the coil-furred dog whines hungrily.

The villagers push through the flap of the tent, but before I emerge, there’s a cry so loud that it twists in my belly like a knife. Gáspár hurries forward, shoving through the crowd, and halts in front of the hearth.

The fire has gone out. Perhaps it died with Kajetán, smoldering to its ashen end as he lay bleeding on the floor of his tent. There’s only blackened stone and the stick sculpture of the Prinkepatrios’s three-pronged spear. All around me, the villagers are falling to their knees, sobbing and whispering prayers. Under the white sickle of the moon, their faces look pale as bone.

I wait, but Godfather Life does not deem the villagers worthy of his mercy. The hearth stays silent, cold.

“We must have fire!” someone wails. “We’ll freeze without it!”

Gáspár shifts suddenly. From my vantage point, I can see only a sliver of his face, but I know from the slope of his shoulders and the slowness of his pace that Kajetán’s death is weighing upon him already, another black mark on his soul. I am too ashamed to meet his eye, to face the anguish I have caused him with my temerity.

He kneels beside the bed of burnt logs and clasps his hands together. “Megvilágit.”

A small fire blooms in the hearth, its flames murmuring, low. Not nearly enough to keep the whole village warm through the winter. I shoulder through the crowd until I am standing as near to him as I dare.

Gáspár clasps his hands again, brow furrowed. “Megvilágit.”

The flames crest higher, waving and blue now, like waterweed as it ripples along the lakebed. It’s only a bruised shadow of the bonfire that crawled over the logs before, hurling its light for miles.

Gáspár turns to me. “Évike, give me your knife.”

I’m too dumbstruck to refuse. My knife—his knife—which I snatched back from Kajetán’s cold fingers before the villagers thundered into the tent, is still befouled with blood. I hold it out to Gáspár and he takes it, blade first. All around the villagers have hushed, lips pursed, waiting.

Staring down with consummate focus, Gáspár finally removes his gloves. He rolls up the sleeve of his dolman to reveal a raised grid of scars along his wrist, ribbons of white against his bronze skin. My breath catches in my throat. It takes him a moment to find a clear spot. When he finally does, he draws my blade across his arm with a gasp, his blood splattering onto the stone.

Fingers shaking, Gáspár lets the knife fall into the grass. He clasps his hands together once more. “Megvilágit.”

The fire bursts into the air with such ferocity that Gáspár leaps back as fingers of flame snatch at his suba. Sparks dapple the immense blackness of the sky. The sound of the villagers’ relief is as loud as the prairie wind.

“Thank you, Sir Woodsman!” they cry. “You’ve saved us!”

They flood around him, reaching out to flatten their palms against his chest, to run their fingers through the fur of his suba. None of them mentions the knife, the wound. Gáspár rolls his sleeve back down to cover the blood and puts on his gloves. The flaxen-haired girl brushes her thumb along his jawline and murmurs something that I’m too far away to hear. My stomach knots with nausea.

It seems like hours before the crowd thins and the villagers filter back into their tents. Each blade of grass is a slender mirror for the firelight, making it look like I’m standing in a field of quivering flames. Gáspár kneels to pick up the knife, then walks toward me.

He stares at me without blinking, eye half-lidded. For once his jaw is slack, lips slightly parted, like all the strength has gone out of him. I can’t even bear to look down at his wrist.

“Can I trust you not to be such an imprudent fool?” he asks.

I almost wish for his bristling reproach, his self-righteous sulking. Anything is better than this, the unfathomable weariness on his face. I consider telling him that I don’t need a knife to be an imprudent fool, but I don’t think it will earn me one of his flushing grimaces, not this time. I only nod, and he hands the knife back to me, hilt first.

My fingers curl around the cold metal, and then the wretched question bubbles out of me. “An eye wasn’t enough?”

“What?”

“You already gave him your eye.” My chest tightens. “Are all Woodsmen scarred like you?”

“Every one of them worth mentioning.”

“Why?” I manage. “Why do you do it?”

“The Prinkepatrios rewards sacrifice,” he replies. “Sometimes sacrifice comes in the form of flesh.”

I choke out a laugh. The memory of my blade against his wrist is blinkering across my vision, and it makes me want to retch. “So is it justice or mercy that you should bleed for your salvation?”

“Mercy,” Gáspár says. His eye is black, holding none of the flame. “In all this time, He has never asked me for my life.”