Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

The snowflakes swirl around us, a white eddy in the air. They land in my hair, still patchy with silver dye, and nestle in Gáspár’s dark curls. If I don’t blink often enough, the snowflakes gather on my lashes and melt, icy water stinging my eyes. Beneath our feet, the ground is dusted with a faint layer of early frost, the black earth still bleeding through. It’s as if Isten blew on a great frozen dandelion, and its downy seeds scattered throughout the pine forest of the Far North.

There are only two seasons in Kaleva: winter and not-winter. Not-winter is short and muggy, a time when flies run rampant and plants poke their flower heads cautiously out of the dirt, only to be plucked and shucked and kept for a colder, hungrier day. Calves are born and killed so their meat can be salted and saved. In not-winter, the Kalevans enjoy a few hours of weak sunlight and a brief thawing of their rivers and lakes, revealing water that’s clearer and bluer than the sky itself.

Not-winter is almost over.

I lead the way through the forest, Gáspár’s horse trotting more slowly behind. Since leaving the village two days ago, our conversations have been curt and perfunctory, and on his part, mostly monosyllabic. I apologize tacitly by offering him the meatiest parts of the rabbits I shoot, and by resisting the urge to badger him during his evening prayers. I’m not sure the message reaches him.

There are pinpricks of red on the snow, tracking us like tiny footprints, whispering the story of our time in Kajetán’s village. Gáspár tucks his sleeve under his glove, but the blood trickles out from it anyway, with a soft pattering sound that has followed us for miles. Abruptly, Gáspár brings his horse to a halt and stares up at the sky, letting the flakes land on his face and turn to water.

I circle back to where he stands, my heart fluttering. “You’ve seen snow before, haven’t you?”

“Not for a long time,” he says, without meeting my gaze.

I frown. I always thought it snowed everywhere in Régország, even as far south as the capital. But Gáspár watches the squall of white flakes the way that I marveled at the sunset on the Little Plain, unobstructed by the dovetail of tree branches, drenching the grass in its rosy light. When Gáspár grips the reins again, I see him wince.

A long breath huffs out of my mouth, visible in the cold. “Are you trying to punish me?”

Gáspár looks up, eye flashing. “What are you talking about?”

“If you’re trying to make me feel sorry about what I did, you’ve already succeeded,” I snap. “How like a Woodsman to let himself die of blood poisoning just to prove a point.”

“I’m not going to die,” Gáspár says, but his voice has a bitter edge. “And I have nothing to prove to a thankless wolf-girl.”

His words bank on my shoulders as coldly as the snow. “You’re angry I haven’t thrown myself before you in gratitude? I’m glad to not be Patritian kindling, but Kajetán was a monster. He deserved to die.”

“It’s not for me to decide that a man deserves to die.”

“Who better to decide than you?” Anger is coiling in me, after two long days of silent contrition. “You can conceal yourself in your Woodsman garb, but you’re still a prince.”

“Enough,” Gáspár says. There are fangs in his voice. “Kajetán was right—you’ll be the ruin of us both. You think the Woodsmen are righteous, but you’re the one who tried to cut a man’s throat because his villagers made some callow slights about the pagans and the Yehuli. Do they not teach wolf-girls that sometimes it’s better to sheathe their claws?”

My blood is pulsing, my cheeks so hot I almost forget we’re standing in the snow at all. “That’s all I’ve been taught, Woodsman. My entire life. To endure their slights and swallow my loathing. Did you agree with the count who told you to stay indoors, or the courtiers who turned up their noses at you? If you did—well, you must be the stupidest prince who’s ever lived. All that talk of quiet obedience is for their benefit, not yours. They don’t have to go to the effort of striking you down if you’re already on your knees.”

I can tell right away that I’ve pushed too far. My voice drops off, like a stone kicked down the cliffside. The wind bristles between us, howling. Gáspár’s face is hard, a shard of ossified amber in all the billowing white.

“And what did your clamoring get you?” he asks finally. “Kajetán would have cut out your tongue.”

I part my lips to reply, then press them closed again. I think of the scars striped down the backs of my thighs, and Virág’s reed whip quivering like the plucked string of a lute. I think of Katalin’s blue flame, her white crowing smile. I think of the forest knitting itself shut behind me, and Keszi vanishing from view. I had cried and screamed when the Woodsmen took my mother away, but that hadn’t stopped them either.

Swallowing hard, I reach for my coin and clamp my cold fingers around it. Nothing would have changed if I’d kept my mouth shut and my claws sheathed, except that I would have hated myself all the more. I might have even hated myself enough to take a blade to my skin, trying to buy my salvation with blood.

When I look at Gáspár again, my stomach turns in the silence. “Let me see your cut.”

“No,” he says, but there’s not much fire in it.

“If you die of blood poisoning before we find the turul, I swear to Isten I will kill you.”

Still, he hesitates, the wind beating his suba back and forth like laundry on a line. Then he drops from his mount. I slide off my own saddle and trod toward him in the snow.

The sleeve of his dolman is damp with blood. I roll it up carefully, my fingers trembling. One of my fingernails grazes his skin and Gáspár flinches, drawing in a breath. I try to focus on nothing but my careful ministrations, imagining that this is anyone else’s wound but a Woodsman’s.

The cut is small, but with the friction of his skin against the fabric of the dolman, it hasn’t been given a chance to scab over. I prod at it as gingerly as I can, and it weeps red. The flesh around the wound is raised and warm to the touch, which I know from Virág’s cursory tutelage is a bad sign.

A braid of fury and despair twines in me. “If I were a true wolf-girl, I could fix this.”

“If I were a true Woodsman—” Gáspár begins, but he falls silent before he can finish, his voice breaking like ice over the river. Something shivers in me, not even close to hate or horror. I tamp it down with ferocity.

With a deep sigh, I tear off a clean strip of fabric from my own tunic, then hesitate. I could let him die. I could be free of him without shouldering much of the blame for it, and then I could go home. But I remember the words he spoke to me on the Little Plain: We belong to each other. I can’t rail against this wicked bargain anymore; the animal has already been skinned. And I suspect the king would find a way to punish Keszi anyway.

Worse still is the thought of him slumping over in the snow, veins darkening with poison, all the color bled out of his face. If I imagine him dying here, cold and alone, my throat closes almost painfully.

I wrap his wound.

Still, I’m not sure why I bother with the makeshift bandage. By the look of the snow and the cluster of storm clouds overhead, Kaleva will kill us before anything else can.

With every step we take farther north, the trees grow taller and taller, their trunks as wide as houses. The lowest layer of branches is so far from the sun that most of the wood has turned brittle and dead, desiccated needles heaped on the forest floor. But above, where the trees touch the sky, the needles are a heady green, lush with water and light and vibrant against the pale snow.

Any one of these trees could be the tree of life, and the turul could be hidden among the rimy foliage. But I can’t see anything except the snow falling in dense white sheets. When I glance over my shoulder I can’t see Gáspár either, just the blur of his suba, like a coal-blackened handprint on a windowpane. If he’s still bleeding, the storm has covered any trace of it.

Soon the horses are pawing the ground and whinnying obstinately. We slip off our mounts and lead them through the forest on foot until we come upon a tree as thick around as Virág’s hut, the wood porous and termite-pocked, smelling damply of rot. Fronds of moss dangle from the coiled roots, and lichen crawls up the trunk, the pale color of old lace. We usher our horses into the hollow space where its roots have cleaved apart, and Gáspár ties their reins to a bulbous, sturdy branch.

“We’ve lost so much time already,” he says, frowning.

My voice rises over the baying wind. “You’re welcome to keep going on your own. I’ll return to dig you out come springtime.”

Gáspár makes a face, but he doesn’t protest. We trudge farther into the forest in search of shelter, finally pausing at the base of another tree. Its labyrinth of roots stretches over a hollow between the trunk and the earth, with just enough space for two bodies. I pause before the crevice, pulling my wolf cloak tighter around me.

Until now I’ve not touched him except to shake his hand to inaugurate our uneasy bargain, or to examine his wound. The prospect of being so close to him makes my stomach knot—especially because I know he’s still bridling from the indignity of needing me to wrap his cut. I slip through the slender gap in the roots, loosing clods of dirt. I crawl under the tree and pull my knees to my chest. Gáspár stands outside, the wind carding roughly through his suba, unmoving. His lips are thinned and pale. For a brief moment I wonder if he’s stubborn enough to stand out there all night, waiting for the snow to bury him. Then he slides between the roots and crouches in the hollow beside me.

There’s scarcely room to move once we’re both inside. His shoulder is pressed firmly against mine, the heat of his body bleeding through his suba and my wolf cloak. I can feel each tense of his muscles as his fingers curl and uncurl, jaw clenching. Our cold breath mingles in the small, dark space.

Gáspár’s face is drawn, throat bobbing. I wonder for a second time if he’s ever been this close to a woman who wasn’t a wolf-girl, but I decide not to needle him about it, since he is already glowering. Outside, the wind shakes the branches with a ferocious howl.

“Who could live in a place like this?” he murmurs, almost to himself.

I don’t know of anyone who makes their home so far north except the Juvvi, who herd reindeer and build fishing lodges along the ragged Kalevan coastline. But I don’t mention the Juvvi to Gáspár. When his great-grandfather, Bárány Tódor, conquered Kaleva, he made it his mission to subdue the Juvvi. Virág says that he captured one of their tribal leaders, a woman named Rasdi, and confined her in a prison until she ate her own feet. Remembering the story makes my skin prickle with anger.

“You say that Patritians consider killing to be a sin.” I keep my voice even, struggling not to think of his body flush against my own. “But your Patritian kings slaughtered thousands, not caring about their own souls or the souls of their victims.”

Gáspár’s eye narrows. “Those were pagans who refused to bend the knee to the king and swear themselves to the Prinkepatrios. Kajetán was a Patritian. He could have repented.”

“He wasn’t going to repent,” I say, mouth puckering around the word. “And you say that it isn’t your right to choose whether a man deserves to die, but you did choose. You decided that I should live instead of Kajetán.”

“I only did it because I can’t survive the North without you, and my soul will suffer for it,” Gáspár snaps. I can feel his shoulders rising, muscles coiled. “If I die before confessing the sin to the Érsek, I will join Thanatos for an eternity of torment.”

I almost laugh at the gravelly tenor in his voice, his supreme certainty. “How can you be so sure that you won’t join Ördög in the Under-World, instead?”

“Your devil is nothing more than an illusion cast by mine,” Gáspár says, voice smooth now. This is only more of his courtly rhetoric, practiced and repeated. I roll my eyes.

“Ördög isn’t a devil. He even has a human bride.”

He scoffs. “Just like a wolf-girl to want to wed a monster.”

“Csilla wasn’t a wolf-girl at all,” I tell him. “She was like the girls in your Patritian stories, sweet and pretty, but with a cruel mother and father. She lived by a swamp, and her parents sent her out to catch frogs for dinner, even though she didn’t have a net. Csilla hunted the frogs anyway, but her hand got caught in the mud and it hardened. Try as she might, she couldn’t get it free, and she resigned herself to death. Then she heard a voice, low and rumbling, from beneath her.

“‘Whose white hand is reaching into the Under-World?’ Ördög asked.

“Csilla told him her name, and begged him to help her. But Ördög said, ‘Your hand is lovely. You must have a lovely face to match it. If you die here in the marsh, you can come to the Under-World and be my wife.’

“Csilla gripped Ördög’s hand tightly. It was like holding on to a piece of winter birchwood, hard and inhumanly cold.

“‘I may die here in the marsh,’ Csilla said. ‘But before I do, my skin will grow pale and pruned. My lips will turn blue, and my nose will fall off from the cold. I will join you in the Under-World then, but I will no longer be beautiful.’

“‘That is true,’ Ördög said. ‘I can feel your skin beginning to wrinkle already.’

“‘Give me a knife,’ Csilla said. ‘I will slit my throat and die while my face is still lovely and my skin is still smooth.’

“The marsh water bubbled beside her, and a bone-handled knife floated to the surface. Csilla took the knife in her free hand. But rather than slitting her throat, she reached down into the mud and cut off her trapped hand at the wrist. When she was free, Csilla ran from the marsh as fast as her cold legs would carry her. She could still hear Ördög rumbling in protest, holding her severed hand.”

“Spare me your pagan myths,” Gáspár says, but his eye is alight with reluctant, half-damned interest.

“Ördög didn’t give up so easily,” I go on. “He came to Csilla two more times after that, first as a fly, and then as a black goat. Both times she tricked him again. First, she used her own golden hair to trap him in a spider web. Then, she burned half her face with hot coals, so that she would no longer be beautiful, thinking that Ördög would leave her be.”

“And did he?” Gáspár asks, quietly.

“No,” I say. “You said yourself he was a monster. And a monster needs a monstrous bride.”

The story of Csilla and Ördög is one of Virág’s favorites, but I always hated when she told it, because the other girls would take the opportunity to pelt me with sticks and mud and try to tear out my hair, telling me I was no better than Ördög’s hideous consort and that I might as well join him in the Under-World. It’s different to be the one to tell the story, and I find it fills me with an unexpected warmth, like a hot coal in my cupped hand. Through the knife-thin slits between the tree roots, I can only see narrow diamonds of white.

“Are those the sorts of tales that pagan mothers tell their children to lull them to sleep?” Although Gáspár’s voice is only lightly scathing, hearing the word mother come out of his mouth makes me go stiff with fury.

“I told you—my mother was taken by the Woodsmen when I was ten,” I say coldly. “Virág was the only one telling them. Besides, I thought you might enjoy this one. Since you Woodsmen are so fond of severing limbs.”

Gáspár’s breath catches. I know it’s especially cruel of me to bring up Peti, but speaking of mothers opens up my oldest wound, making me as vicious as wolf with a thorn in its paw.

“I lost my own mother when I was eight, wolf-girl,” he says. There is the whetted edge to his voice again, wielding the revelation as meanly as a blade. “You don’t need to enlighten me about that particular pain.”

It was stupid of me to speak without remembering: Gáspár is the son of King János’s Merzani queen, the foreign bride he wed to stave off a war with our southern rival, much to the distaste of his courtiers. She died almost two decades ago of some ghoulish fever, and war between the two nations began with the first toll of Király Szek’s mourning bells. Of course, no one thought too kindly of the heir she left behind, his blood blackened with the lineage of the enemy.

I feel such a sharp, sudden sadness it’s as if someone has stuck a knife between my ribs. With some difficulty, I shift to feel the braid in my pocket. When at last I do speak, my voice sounds odd, distant. “Do you remember her at all?”

“Not very much.” Each word is a huff of white. His shoulders slacken against me. “She couldn’t speak Régyar well. She spoke Merzani to me, but only when no one else was around to hear.”

“Every day I think I’m remembering less of my mother than the day before.”

The confession is out of me before I can even think to muzzle myself. Before I can think of how this Woodsman might turn it into a weapon.

“So do I,” Gáspár says, after a long moment. “Olacakla çare bulunmaz.”

I furrow my brow. The words are similar in their cadence to Régyar, but for all their unexpected familiarity, I can’t understand them. “Is that Merzani? What does it mean?”

“‘There is no remedy for what will be.’”

The adage hangs in the air, a sibilant constellation. My chest aches. I wonder what kind of Under-World life he had in Király Szek while Katalin and her friends were rubbing dirt in my face and burning off my hair.

Blue light trickles in from the narrow spaces, a silken evening streaming through the roots and the storm. “It’s not the same. You have a father still.”

Gáspár tilts his head. “So do you.”

I have to wriggle my hands into my wolf cloak to find my coin, caught between our adjacent bodies. When I do, I grip it tightly despite my trembling fingers. “Maybe.”

“More so than the other wolf-girls, I hear.”

The girls in Keszi do have fathers, of course, but only in the way that flowers have seeds which sprouted them. Faceless village men who might briefly catch their eye and then look away, flushing and guilty. Courtship is limited to furtive romps in the woods or private dalliances by the riverside. Mothers raise their children alone.

I don’t like thinking of it. It reminds me that our lives in Keszi are structured around survival, and extraneous things—love—are to be cut off like a fetid limb. The way Csilla left her arm behind in Ördög’s marsh, or how I was carved out of Keszi too. All the village men feared that I would pass my barren bloodline on to a child, and so they were careful, when we coupled, to never risk making me a mother.

It makes me flush to think of coupling when I am pressed so close to Gáspár. But now I can only see the whorls of his dark hair, his long and regal nose, and the delicate curve of his jaw, shadowed with stubble. Once I coupled with a boy from Keszi, and his bristled face left a rash of red along my throat and chin. Sourly, I remember the girl from Kajetán’s village, stroking Gáspár’s cheek. I wonder if he imagined kissing her. I suspect he is far too grim and pious to think of me the way I have been thinking of him. He smells of pine and salt, not so terribly different from the men I’ve lain beside. I wonder if he is as ticklish behind the ear, or if his hair is as downy on the nape of his neck.

The snow piles over our tangle of roots, soft as distant footfalls. The blue evening has winnowed away, leaving only the slenderest planks of moonlight to illuminate our small hollow. That pale light lacquers to Gáspár’s profile, making him look softer and younger than his twenty-five years, and hardly like a Woodsman at all.

I lean back against the weave of roots, damp with snowmelt, my hair tangling in garlands of moss. My head is so close to Gáspár’s that I think our cheeks might touch and I wonder how I will sleep at all. I needn’t have worried too much about it. As soon as I close my eyes, the world shudders away.

It’s still dark when I open my eyes, in that bleary place between sleeping and waking. I’ve shifted in the night, my cheek pressed to the mangle of wood and moss. Gáspár’s body is a warm crescent around mine, my back against his chest. I half convince myself I must be dreaming: clutched in this cradle of roots, Gáspár’s arms braced over me like a reed roof, everything seems hazy and unreal.

Even more so when I feel his breath on my cheek. “Why do you still wear the wolf cloaks?”

“When the first Woodsmen chased the Wolf Tribe into the forest, most of them died,” I reply. My voice is thick with sleep, each word a labor. “The men were warriors, so the king’s soldiers killed them. It was only the women and children left. The soldiers thought that they would be eaten, or die of hunger and cold, but they didn’t. Their wolf cloaks kept them warm, and they built their villages in the safety of the forest.”

“That’s why . . .” Gáspár murmurs.

“That’s why it’s the women who have magic,” I finish, blinking into the filmy dark. “That’s why we pray for nothing so much as we pray for more baby girls to be born.”

Gáspár is silent for so long that I wonder if he’s fallen back to sleep. When he does speak at last, his words shiver along my throat. “You are an oddity, then.”

“That’s an awfully kind way of putting it.”

“Maybe it means you can be closer to our god,” he says, “because you’re further away from your own.”

“You mean I could cut out my eye or my tongue and have power just like you?” I reply, though in this half-dreaming state, I can’t truly be cross with him.

“If you really believed it. Saint István was born a pagan too.”

“That’s the problem,” I tell him. “I never really believed I belonged in Keszi either.”

Or perhaps no one in Keszi had let me believe it. Katalin with her merciless gaze and her mocking chants, the other villagers too terrified or scornful to meet my eyes, and even Virág, who saved me out of pity but never loved me—how could I hope to perform their magic when they all thought I was better off dead? Isten guided their hands as they forged or healed or made fire, but the threads of his magic that laced their wrists would never move my own. Every mean word or blistering stare, every time Virág’s reed whip licked the back of my thighs, made my threads fray and fray until one day they snapped.

“You do,” Gáspár whispers. His voice ghosts softly over my skin, breath dampening my hair. “At least, you seem as true a wolf-girl as I am a Woodsman.”

The tree roots hold us in perfect suspension, like a body in a bog, untouched by the erosion of time. I open my mouth to reply, tasting soil and moss, but my eyelids are heavy and sleep snarls me back down into oblivion. When I wake for good the next morning, in the quiet aftermath of the snowstorm, I decide I must have dreamed it all: his gentle words, the warmth of his body around mine. But more than once, I catch Gáspár looking at me in a funny way, as if he has some sort of secret I don’t know.