Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

We survived the snowstorm with little harm done to us, but in the three days since then, winter has truly come to Kaleva. The squirrels are bunkering down in their tree holes, bellies round and full. Foxes are shedding their russet summer coats in exchange for an ivory camouflage. The foul-tempered geese have long since gone, leaving the tree branches silent and bare. Beneath our feet, the snow has frozen into a slippery sheet of ice, too perilous to maneuver on horseback. We take our horses by their leads and walk instead, my toes clenched tightly inside my boots.

Half of me hopes to see a flash of flame-bright feathers dart across the gray sky, and the other half hopes that the turul never appears. I often glimpse other birds of prey, hawks and falcons circling the forest, eyes trained on their quarry. When I see them, I raise the bow, tracing their path through the clouds. I can’t shoot, though. The birds are too lovely and noble to die by my hand, and they would make a pitiful meal anyway. I would feel no glory in their deaths.

Gáspár’s eye narrows each time I lower the bow, but he doesn’t say a word. Like me, he must be silently hoping that when the time comes, I find the strength to loose my arrow.

Even without the snow, it’s terribly, unfathomably cold. The sun glowers behind a milky layer of clouds, too surly to show its face. When night comes, the clouds knit together like Isten’s great furrowed brow, ominously swollen, threatening another storm. I’m not sure if we’ll survive the next one, but I don’t voice my fear aloud. We’ve gone too far to turn back now. There are so many miles of snow and forest and prairie flatland between Keszi and me, the interminable distance that makes my eyes water when I think of it. I never imagined I would be this far from home, and with only a Woodsman at my side. Each step forward and our twined fate hardens, as unyielding as steel.

That first night in the tree was a prologue, only I didn’t know it at the time. When our muscles are aching and the night has stitched closed over the wound of livid daylight, we build a fire and lie down several feet apart, our backs to each other. But always in the morning we wake huddled together beside the blackened wood, as if we’ve drifted across the ice in our sleep, bodies rebelling against the wind and the cold. Whoever rouses first quietly disentangles themselves, and then we pretend we haven’t spent the night pressed against each other for warmth. This is something we can agree on without argument, but the silent pact thrums beneath every word we speak, slicker and even more precarious than our first bargain.

Despite the cold we eat remarkably well, mostly because I have no compunctions about plucking squirrels and rabbits from their dens, where they are slumbering fat and defenseless. Gáspár sulks over my barbarity as I skin and gut my kills, but to his credit, he resists the urge to upbraid me.

“What will you eat at the Saint István’s Day feast?” I ask him as I fix the unfortunate squirrel on a spit, dreaming of green sunlight and sour cherry soup. “Chicken stew with egg noodles and warm fried bread . . .”

Across the fire, Gáspár snorts ruefully at me. “That’s peasant fare, wolf-girl. Nothing the king would be seen serving at his feast table. We’ll have visitors from the Volkstadt, and he’ll want to impress them.”

“Why would he want to impress them?”

“The Volkstadt has been a Patritian country for many hundreds of years,” he says. “So the Volken pride themselves on being holier than we are, and their envoys always sit uneasily at Régország’s court. They think we are barbarous, unrefined, and the king too lenient with his pagan subjects. My father is eager to prove them wrong.”

I almost laugh. “Too lenient? Is it not enough that we live in fear of his soldiers knocking down our doors and kidnapping our women?”

“Not for some. Not for Nándor’s followers.”

Hearing his name again chills me. Gáspár stares at the fire, unblinking, flames darting through the cold air like serpent tongues. It’s the first time he has spoken of his brother since that night by the lake, and nothing about the flat tenor of his voice invites further questioning. But I don’t care.

“And what has Nándor done to earn such feverish devotion?” I ask carefully. My squirrel is blackening on its spit.

Gáspár’s breath streams white in the cold. “He is charming and clever and overflowing with empty promises. He tells the desperate peasants everything they want to hear, and whispers to the courtiers and Volken envoys that he will rid Király Szek of its Yehuli scourge and cleanse the country of its pagans for good. The Érsek has claimed he is Saint István’s true heir. And since the peasants and the courtiers and the Volken envoys believe him, it might as well be true.”

An old, familiar anger kindles in me. “So you’d relinquish your claim just like that? Because some stuffy officials and stupid peasants believe Nándor’s fairy tale?”

“I haven’t relinquished anything.” Gáspár’s voice is sharp, hands curling on his lap. “Nándor has power that you can see and touch; it’s not just a fairy tale. Without the turul, neither my father nor I can hope to match it.”

It’s his baldest confession yet. I let my squirrel drop from its spit. My gaze travels from his gloved hands to his face, that prince’s regal profile that I’ve seen close enough to count each of the delicate lashes on his good eye, to wonder about the softness of his lips. For so long his missing eye horrified me—I’d thought it was a testament to his piety and hate. Now I consider perhaps it is a testament only to his desperation. If I’d been a passed-over prince, shackled by the shame of my foreign bloodline, sneered at in the palace halls, forever bathed in the golden light of my perfect brother, wouldn’t I have taken a knife to my own flesh too? For all his grousing about my unabashed barbarity, Gáspár is braver and stronger willed than I have ever been.

The realization makes me regret at least half of my japes and my petulance. Flushing, I pass him the cooked squirrel, and he takes it with a steely nod. Overhead the sky is the color of forged iron, bristling with black clouds.

“We’ll find it,” I tell him, surprised by the certainty in my own voice. “I’ll kill it.”

Gáspár doesn’t reply. His eye is boring into the fire again.

“Are you doubting my aim?”

“No,” he says, lifting his gaze to mine. “I don’t doubt you, wolf-girl.”

My skin prickles, and not with cold. We eat our meal in silence, but I find it difficult to stop from staring at him. I am remembering the line of his body against mine, the sweep of his suba over me, the brace of his arms around my waist. Once I would have flinched at his proximity, or perhaps considered how easy it would be to slide my knife into his throat. Now I have to blink and grit my teeth and wheedle myself into thinking of him as a Woodsman at all.

Gáspár falls asleep first, turning his back to the flame. Even without seeing his face, I cannot stop imagining his sacrifice. The heated blade, the flash of metal, the blister of pain and the flowering of blood. It makes my throat tighten and my stomach roil. And yet for all I blanched at the gore of the Woodsman code, hadn’t I relished the tale of Csilla cutting off her arm and shearing her hair and burning her face to be made into Ördög’s monstrous, powerful consort?

I think about Katalin, too, pressing my face into the mud, telling me I belonged as close to the Under-World as I could get. Later, when the fun of her cruelty had worn thin and she and her friends abandoned me, I crawled into a thicket and let my cheek rest in the dirt. I pretended I could hear Ördög rumbling beneath the earth, like Csilla had. I wanted to hear him calling to me. I wanted to hear him telling me I belonged somewhere, even if it was the cold realm of the dead.

If I cannot be Vilmötten, my belly bright with Isten’s star, perched in the highest tree branch, perhaps I can be something else. Perhaps I can be the favored of another god.

My whole body trembles as I unsheathe my knife. The metal is a lambent mirror that holds the firelight. I grip the hilt in my left hand, angling the blade over my littlest finger. I don’t think I have the strength or the stomach to take my whole hand, and besides, I need both to string my bow. My pinky is what I will miss the least, but then I wonder if that is the right attitude for a sacrifice.

I tear off a scrap of my tunic and ball the fabric in my mouth. Then I raise my hand and bring my knife down with all the force that I can gather.

Before anything else, there is the splinter of bone, the spurt of blood. A wine stain laps at the blackened logs. The pain arrives later, with a bolt that leaves me dizzy and breathless. I bite down on the fabric, muffling a scream. Across the fire, Gáspár shifts, but doesn’t wake. My eyes are stinging hot with tears.

Vision rippling, I lift my hand. There is a knob of bone protruding from my palm, like a smooth white stone. Where my finger was is rimmed red with gore, skin as ragged as the hem of an old skirt. And then there is my pinky, a slip of warm flesh in the snow. It looks so singular and pitiful, something that a hawk might snatch up and pick clean for a scant midwinter meal. That thought alone undoes me. I bend at the waist and retch.

When I have finished, I wipe the bile from my chin and straighten my back. The pain has started to ebb, leaving me raw with curiosity and desire. I expected to feel the sacrifice in my throat and my belly, like a swallow of good wine, but I only feel woozy, sick. Csilla didn’t retch, or at least that wasn’t part of Virág’s story. Who knows if she did or didn’t. I clench the remaining fingers of my left hand, knuckles cracking.

In Virág’s story, she plunged her face into the flames without a beat of hesitation. I reach forward, letting the fire nip at my fingertips. It hurts, but not enough to make me pause. And my skin doesn’t smolder or burn.

Now a more palpable curiosity is unfolding inside of me. I stretch my hand again, and the flames leap back as I do. I reach until I’m touching the ash-eaten logs at the base of the fire, and then it goes out, so quickly and suddenly that I gasp, as if it’s been doused with water.

My skin prickles like a thousand bee stings, but there are no raised bumps of blistered flesh. The pain only exists somewhere unreachable inside me. And all that’s left of the fire is the acrid curl of smoke.

It’s a swoop in my stomach, a terror I can feel in the soles of my feet, like standing at the craggy edge of a cliffside. The other girls’ magic doesn’t work like this. They forge metal in just their empty hands; they make fire without wood or flint. They stitch new skin over old wounds. But they are touched by Isten, the creator, who never once answered my prayers. Perhaps all this time I should have been praying to a different god, the one that smothers green spring under winter snow, the one that bleaches black hair white and carves deep wrinkles into skin. The god that demands human flesh, not spilled goose blood or silver laurel crowns, for sacrifice.

Maybe it was only a matter of believing, like Virág said, and I had believed in the wrong thing. I can almost feel dark thread lacing up my wrists, pressing deep into my skin, like scars thin and dark with blood.

I hear Gáspár turn over and blink himself awake. After a moment of bleary fumbling, he murmurs a quiet prayer, and a ball of blue flame quivers into his cupped hand. He holds the fire so close that his face is soaked in sapphire light. It clings to the curve of his nose and his stubbled jaw. It pools on his lips, pressed with bewildered concern.

“What happened?” he asks, voice thick.

Very slowly, I arch my hand, slick with gore, above the coil of flame. Gáspár’s eye widens, taking in what’s gone from me, but before he can speak I let my hand drop on top of the fire, curling my four fingers over his, plunging us both into darkness.

A word hangs in the air between us, battered back and forth in the frigid wind. It remains unspoken, unacknowledged, and yet it’s as visible and tangible as the ice beneath our feet.

Boszorkány.Witch.

The wolf-girls of Keszi are sometimes called witches, but it is not what the word really means. Real witches are not human: their bodies are made of sculpted red clay; their bones are twigs and bog wood. They have wreaths of swamp grass for hair and sea-smoothed pebbles for eyes. They are as old as the land itself, and they answer to no gods.

We both know I’m not a witch. Gáspár has seen me bleed, felt my skin beneath his gloved hand, the way my flesh gave against his touch. But this is a different kind of magic, one that is not for survival, like the magic of the other wolf-girls. With their magic they can outlast the monsters of Ezer Szem, endure the harsh forest winters, stay guarded against the Woodsmen who want them dead. Their magic built Keszi. Mine would see it crumble.

Some other girl might have despised it. I can almost see Katalin’s delicate little nose wrinkling in disgust. But then I imagine closing my hand over her blue flame, the look of wonder and terror in her eyes before my fingers moved to her throat. My skin itches, black threads tightening.

Gáspár scowled and worried over my wound with as much prickly concern as Virág on her darkest days, every word laced through with grim judgment. When I fumbled with the bandage, he let out a deep, put-upon sigh and took the wrappings from me, winding them carefully around the gash where my finger had been.

“I’ll not hear another word about the Woodsmen and our masochism,” he said, brow furrowing.

I laughed at him weakly. “That seems fair enough.”

He hasn’t spoken since. As we press on against the wind, Gáspár watches me carefully, from a few paces away. Beneath his guarded gaze is obvious displeasure, but I can’t puzzle out its source. Perhaps he is horrified by my newfound magic. Perhaps it has reminded him of the intractable distance between Woodsman and wolf-girl.

His reproach bruises me more than I thought it would. After days of huddling together on the ice, after I searched the skies for the turul until my eyes burned and my feet throbbed, he is looking at me like I am nothing more than a pagan barbarian again, something unknown and unknowable, something feral and loathsome.

I skid across the ice until we’re side by side, matching my pace to his.

“You don’t understand,” I say. I’m not sure when I started caring whether he understands me or not. “Being barren in Keszi—it’s worse than being dead. They called me a Yehuli slave to the Patritian king. They told me to lick the Woodsmen’s boots. They wanted to get rid of me just as much as they—”

I manage to cut myself off before I reveal the truth, reveal Virág and wicked Katalin. I’m shouting to be heard over the wind, my eyes damp and tear-pricked.

Gáspár stops. He turns toward me in slow, careful increments, teeth gritted so tightly I can see the pulse of muscle along his jaw. He doesn’t speak.

“Maybe you think me more of a wolf than before,” I press on, heart pounding, “and less a girl. But you can’t look at me with your one eye as if I’m a monster for doing something terrible so I could finally have something of my own. You know what the price of power is. You know better than anyone. We’re the same now.”

The wind gives a blood-chilling widow’s wail. Gáspár stares and stares, black hair feathering across his forehead. Then he starts to laugh.

I stare back, blinking in bewilderment. If he was trying to diffuse my rage, it worked—I’m too baffled to be angry.

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand, wolf-girl,” he says, once his laughter has died.

Wounded by his mirth, a sickly cruelty comes over me. “So you do believe you have something in common with me after all. A trifling wolf-girl and the Régyar prince—”

“That’s enough,” he growls.

I haven’t seen this much fire in him since we confronted Kajetán in his tent. Gáspár’s black eye is cold again, pitiless, and seeing it makes me put on my own armor in return. Spitefully, I reach for the one thing I had sworn to myself I wouldn’t use against him, because it would damn me too. “For such a pious Woodsman you were certainly eager to bed down with me—the cold was as good an excuse as any. It must be quite difficult to be five and twenty and have never come so close to a woman before. I’ll tell you that I look just the same as any blushing Patritian girl under my cloak.”

“Can you never keep your mouth shut?” Gáspár snarls, but there’s a thread of misery running under his rage. His cheeks are tinged pink, and not just from the bite of the wind.

“Only if you admit that you’re wrong. Admit that, in some way, we’re the same.” The words come rushing out with such breathless vigor that I have to stop walking and put my hand on a nearby tree to steady myself.

“Do you want us to be the same?” he asks, eye narrowed. “Is that the great hypocrisy the pagans want us to confess to?”

I don’t know what the other pagans want. I don’t know what I want. All I know is that, for the first time, I feel like I might finally crack the shiny, stubborn facade of him. Gáspár stares down at me, squinting against the wind. My eyes trace the lines of his face, the hills and valleys of muscle and bone. In the past days I have come to recognize the haughty way he draws his breaths and the stubborn clenching of his jaw, and I think of him so often I would recognize even his silhouette if he were only a painted shadow on the wall. For the briefest moment I want to run my finger down his cheek the way that village girl did, only to see how he would respond. I want to do something lewder and worse.

When I finally speak, my voice is hoarse, my throat aching. “Just tell me the truth.”

Gáspár only shakes his head. He cannot guess what sort of lascivious things have been blooming red and hot in my mind. “The truth is so much less than you imagine it to be.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I am so much less than you imagine me to be,” he says. “An honorable Woodsman, a noble prince. You think I plucked out my own eye to have power, when in truth it was taken by force to strip me of it.”

“I don’t have the patience for riddles,” I say, scowling.

“My father cut out my eye, wolf-girl. He cauterized the wound himself before placing the ax in my hand. His way of saying I was better off as a Woodsman than I was as his heir.”

I dig my fingers into the tree bark, wincing as the wood splinters under my nail. “But you’re his only true-born son.”

“And what does that matter, when the enemy’s blood flows through my veins?” He gives a hollow laugh. “The peasants cried out for my father to disinherit me, and Nándor and the Érsek whispered in his ear until one day he finally picked up the knife and took my eye. Only one of the counts, the Kalevan count, ever raised his hand to try and stop it. But the rest would rather see a bastard take the throne than a prince with sullied blood. The king has four other sons, and they are all pure Régyar.”

My shoulders rise and I shut my eyes, as if I can armor myself against the revelation. I wonder if when I open them I will see a Woodsman standing before me, and my fear and loathing will graft onto me like a steel breastplate. But in the darkness behind my eyelids, I can only see Gáspár kneeling, and a blade flashing, and his father blood-drenched and laughing.

“So you do the king’s bidding,” I whisper, “even though he doesn’t think you’re a contender for the crown.”

Gáspár inclines his head, not quite a nod. “He doesn’t think I’m his son, not anymore. He tore out my eye, which meant I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I would never have a chance to earn the blessing of Godfather Life on my own, for a sacrifice given freely. It’s not a sacrifice when you’re chained to the floor, screaming.”

I think of his wrist, latticed with all its little wounds. I think of the way he scorned his title whenever he could and how he swallowed the name Bárány while Kajetán berated him. A breathtaking pain licks through me, worse than any of Virág’s lashings, worse than Kajetán’s thumb against my throat or even the severing of my finger.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though it scarcely seems enough. “For all my stupid slights. You only deserved half of them.”

Gáspár doesn’t laugh or smile, and I didn’t expect him to, but his jaw unclenches, just a little bit. “I understand why you won’t spurn your newfound power, whatever it is. Witch or wolf-girl, I am with you. There’s scarcely more than a week until Saint István’s festival, and we can’t turn back now.”

He sets his gaze upon me, and for the first time, I see only the eye that is, black and blazing, and don’t wonder about the grisly scar where the other one was. Tiny tremors of pain are ribboning from my absent finger, down my hand and up my arm, odd and phantasmal. I open my mouth to reply, but then I look up.

Without noticing, we have walked into a different kind of forest. A forest like Ezer Szem, where every rustle of leaves sounds like whispered words and every footfall on the ground might be the circling of a monster. My hand is on the trunk of a tree as broad as a merchant’s cart, and when I narrow my eyes to try to glimpse the top, my head spins and I stumble back, dry-mouthed.

“This is it,” I whisper. “The turul—it’s here.”

“How do you know?”

But I can’t explain it. Perhaps I am a witch after all. Gáspár presses the flat of his gloved hand to the trunk, like he’s feeling for a coded message on the bark, something etched and eternal.

The ground trembles under our feet. The tree starts to shake, too, scattering dead needles into the snow. Our horses rear, whinnying, and the reins of my white mare slip from my fingers.

As our horses gallop away, the trees around us stir like restless giants, uprooting themselves from the earth. With each tree that twists itself free, the ice splits open, revealing dirt beneath, the bruised memory of spring. The wrenching sound is so terrible that it drowns out the wind, and as the trees move, the lattice of their branches obscures even the slenderest piece of dusky sky.

A fat pine tree lumbers toward us, gruesome with knots and lichen. I leap out of the way, skidding on my knees in the snow. When I look up, Gáspár is holding out his hand. I take it, and he hauls me to my feet. The moment I’m upright, he lets my fingers fall from his grasp and without another breath we start to run.

I sprint as fast as I can, my hair and my white cloak streaming out behind me. Through the tangle of branches, I can just barely see the blur of Gáspár’s black suba. As I run, I look back over my shoulders, trying to dodge the trees that hurtle past, or risk being crushed in a snarl of roots and filthy snow.

We burst through the tree line, my heart clanging like a blacksmith’s anvil. The pine forest gives way to an open plain, miles of icy flatland skimming all the way to the horizon. I realize only then that the ground is no longer trembling; there’s no whip of branches around my face or roots flinging out to snatch at my ankles. The trees have stopped at the edge of the valley, needles rustling as they hunker down again, planting themselves back into the earth.

I turn to Gáspár, clutching the stitch in my side. “Why did they stop?”

“I don’t know.” His chest is heaving beneath his dolman.“They were chasing us.”

My throat is too tight to reply. I know now, without a prickle of doubt, that when King Tódor conquered the Far North he only managed to restrain its ancient magic, not snuff it out entirely. The Holy Order of Woodsmen will have many more years of bitter work to do, if they aim to erase Kaleva’s magic for good.

“At least we haven’t been trampled to death,” I say when I find my voice again, letting out a tremulous laugh. “I was hoping for a nobler demise.”

As soon as the words fall from my lips, the ice splits with a sound like nearing thunder.

I stare down in horror at the seismic crack, stretching perfectly from one toe of my boot to the other. We’re not standing on solid, snow-dusted earth at all. We’re standing on a frozen lake, blue-black water seething beneath the cloudy mantle of ice.

Slowly, I raise my head to look up at Gáspár. I manage to meet his gaze, as horrified as mine, for only half a second before I am plunged into the freezing water.

Without a beat, the ice closes over my head, knitting itself back together and sealing me under. I’m too shocked to move, too shocked to even feel the cold. Gáspár pounds on the other side, his fists cracking tiny fissures into the ice, but it’s not nearly enough.

Then my lungs begin to strain. The shock that kept the cold at bay is gone, leaving only frigid terror in its wake. I kick wildly to keep myself afloat while I beat my hands against the ice, each impact blunted by the torpid water.

I hear Gáspár screaming, mutedly, from above.

I am going to die, I think, surprised by how calm the thought is when it comes over me. Without noticing, I have stopped my pounding and flailing. My body sinks deeper into the black oblivion, the weight of my sodden clothes pulling me down. Hazily I consider trying to slip off the wolf cloak, but then I think to myself that I’ll want it, wherever it is I am going. As I descend, I am faintly aware of the ice shattering overhead. Light bursts through the fractured surface in bright clear shafts before being obscured again as Gáspár dives into the water.

Roused from my bleary stupor I kick toward him, and his arm loops around my waist. My vision explodes with stars, a thousand hot, painful pinpricks, as he drags me back up to the surface. He grabs the handle of his ax, the blade firmly planted farther down the ice, and uses it as leverage to hurl me out of the water. He pulls himself up after me, and we crawl away from the hole. We don’t get far. After no more than a few moments we both collapse onto our bellies, panting, gasping. Every breath feels like I am swallowing nettles.

It’s a long time before I can speak again, and even after that, I can’t think of what I want to say. The water is freezing onto my skin, my hair, the fibers of my wolf cloak, like dewdrops on grass. I turn over to face Gáspár, my cheek against the ice.

“You only saved me because you couldn’t survive without me,” I choke out, thinking of his clumsiness with the bow and arrow. The humor of it seems so distant now.

Gáspár coughs up water and blinks. “Yes,” he says simply, as if he wants to scowl at me but can’t quite manage it now.

The sun is dipping low on the horizon, light dripping off the edge of the world. I try to keep myself wrapped in my cloak, but it’s soaking wet and colder than my skin itself. The chill has snuck into my marrow, settling against the hollows of my rib cage, too deep to exorcise.

“I want to go home,” I whisper. “To Keszi.”

There’s very little waiting for me in the village, save for Boróka and prickly Virág. But in Keszi there’s a warm bed by the fire, and now it’s so bitterly cold.

“I know,” Gáspár says. His hand slides across the ice and buries itself in my cloak. For a moment I think he’s searching for me, but then he pulls out my knife. His fingers tremble as he rolls down his sleeve, blade glinting against his bronze skin.

“No.” I reach out and grasp his wrist, feeling the raised grid of scars there. “Please . . . don’t.”

I can’t bear to watch him do it, even if it means there’s no guttering warmth. I grip his wrist tightly. It’s like holding on to a rigid piece of winter birchwood, impossibly cold.

“I’m sorry.” Gáspár’s voice drifts toward me, soft as an echo. “If I were a true Woodsman, or a true prince, I could—”

I can’t catch the rest of what he says. Through half-shuttered lashes, I stare at his face, his broken nose and dark eye, the frost pearling in his hair. He’s so beautiful, I realize, and if I had the strength I might have laughed at my belated revelation. I feel oddly peaceful when I look at him, and very tired.

If Gáspár speaks another word, I don’t hear it. A black tide rises and falls, pulling me quietly under.