Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

When I wake, it’s to the smell of roasting meat. My cheek is pressed to a wooden floor, inches from a hearth. My wolf cloak has been removed, but I am under a heavy pelt of pale gray fur. The fine hairs of the pelt part easily when I run my finger through it, like a raft splitting river water. I don’t know of any animal with fur so soft.

I sit up slowly and find myself staring into the gleaming amber eyes of a bear.

I open my mouth and close it again, but no sound comes out. The bear’s hot breath clouds against my throat. Its eyes are as bright as tiny buttons stitched into the woolly mass of its head. After a moment, it turns slowly and lumbers away, paws thudding softly on the ground.

It pads across the small room to where Gáspár lies, tucked under an identical gray pelt. The bear noses his body lazily, and Gáspár sits up with a start. When he sees the bear, what little color there is drains from his cheeks.

The bear is rousing us. Is this typical bear behavior? I do not know enough about bears to say for sure. For a moment I wonder if the bear pulled us from the ice and brought us here to its hut, which it built with its big clumsy paws, and now it’s cooking meat over the fire to welcome its visitors. If there’s anywhere in the world that such a thing could be true, it’s Kaleva.

But then the door to the hut clatters open. A figure steps through the threshold, hefting a mound of firewood that obscures their face. From where I’m sat on the floor, I can only see the fringe of an embroidered skirt swinging across a pair of furred boots.

Gáspár rises at once, throwing off his pelt. “Who are you? Why did you bring us here?”

The firewood tumbles to the ground. The girl who was carrying it brings up a hand to wipe her brow. She looks my age or even younger, with pretty, shining eyes and pink cheeks.

“I saved your life, Woodsman,” she says coolly. “If you would prefer, I could take you back to where I found you on Lake Taivas and see how well you’d fare.”

Gáspár’s gaze flickers to me, and a deep flush comes over him, from forehead to chin. I am so relieved to see it that I almost sink back down into my pelt. Instead I clamber to my feet, readying myself for a bolt of pain as my left hand knuckles over the wooden floor. Nothing comes. My littlest finger is still gone, but there’s no more phantom ache.

“Who are you?” I press, staring and staring at the absence of my pinky.

The girl pulls off her mittens and runs a hand through her black hair, stiff with cold. She has the olive complexion of a Southerner, nearly like Gáspár’s, which I had thought impossible in a place so bereft of sunlight.

“Tuula,” she says.

A Northern name. But Tuula doesn’t look like a Northerner. In Virág’s stories, the Kalevans all have flaxen hair and ice-chip eyes, and skin as white as the snow under their boots.

“And the bear?” I venture.

Tuula looks around blankly, as though she’s forgotten it’s there.

“Oh,” she says after a moment. “That’s Bierdna. Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you as long as her belly is full and I’m in a pleasant mood.”

Gáspár and I exchange glances.

“Lucky for you, I’m usually in a pleasant mood.” Tuula nudges the bear, splayed out by the fire like an extraordinarily large fur rug.

I am too bewildered and sleep-muddled to think of what to say. My last memory is lying on the ice beside Gáspár, my fingers curled around his wrist. I think of how he dove after me without flinching and something stirs in my belly, a feather rustle like a flock of birds taking flight.

Across the room, I watch Gáspár roll up his sleeve. My throat tightens, anticipating a furrow of black rot, his veins spider-webbed with poison. But there’s only a swath of clear, unblemished skin, edged by the raised white mottle of his older scars. A strangled noise comes out of me.

“How?” I choke. “How did you do it?”

“That wasn’t me,” Tuula says. “And there was nothing to be done about your finger either. One of the sloppiest cuts I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. It looked like it was chewed off by a weasel.”

“Maybe it was,” I say, stomach lurching. I don’t trust this stranger enough to offer her the truth. Ördög’s threads are twitching around my wrist, but I don’t know the margins and limits of my newfound magic, and I’m not sure how well I would fare against a fat, full-grown bear. Gáspár’s ax rests against a woodpile on the other side of the room, over the mound of the bear’s furry back, and my knife is missing from my pocket. I quickly check for my braid and my coin, and find both with a tremor of relief.

“Then what an intrepid weasel it must have been.” Tuula’s voice is light, halfway to laughter, but there’s a gleam in her dark eyes, like the reflection of a blade flashing. “But since I did save your lives, I’d like to ask a favor of you. I’ve heard that Woodsmen are very keen on holding to their debts. What’s your name, sir?”

Her sir sounds as bitter as a snakebite. Gáspár glances between Tuula and me, and then between Tuula and the bear, who, even sleeping, provokes some worry.

“Gáspár,” he says finally, a hard edge to his voice. I wonder if he thinks Tuula might recognize him as the prince. I wonder if he wants her to. Kalevans are notoriously tepid toward their Southern rulers, even after nearly a hundred years of vassalage to the Crown.

But there’s no flicker of recognition in Tuula’s gaze. “And you, wolf-girl?”

I meet her eyes steadily. My palms are slick, but I don’t want her to think I’m afraid. “Évike.”

“Well, Gáspár, Évike”—she nods at each of us in turn—“will you help me slaughter Bierdna’s supper?”

Tuula’s hut is raised ten feet off the ground, straddling a quartet of oak trees that look like chicken legs, the way their roots are splayed into the frozen earth. We climb down on a rope ladder, which swings raggedly in the wind. I wonder how Tuula managed to haul the firewood up the ladder, much less our unconscious bodies. She’s as short as I am and far leaner. I don’t even try to contemplate how the bear got up there.

We haven’t gone very far from the hut when something begins to take shape in the distance, two mounds in the snow, like bleary thumbprints. I squint and squint against the snarling wind. As we approach I see a pair of horses, one black and one white, lashing their tails and snorting.

My wolf hood tumbles down my back as I turn to Tuula. “How did you find them?”

“It wasn’t easy,” she says. “Horses tend to resist my charms.”

I hold my peace about her charms.

Letting out a breath, I press my hand against my white mare’s muzzle. She snuffs into my palm, a sound of contrition, as if she’s trying to apologize for abandoning me. It surprises me how grateful I am to see her again, not just a relic from now-distant Keszi, but a means of escape, should I choose it. Tuula doesn’t appear to have a horse of her own. I find myself wondering how fast a bear can run.

Gáspár has his hand braced on his horse’s neck, but he’s watching Tuula with a tight mouth.

We continue across the plain, toward a black mass moving in the snow. We pace closer and I see that it’s not one mass but many, a shifting herd of reindeer with silvery coats. Their heads are bowed, chewing at the sparse tufts of grass that have speared through the frost. As Tuula approaches them their heads lift, limpid eyes following her in a dreamlike stupor. My skin prickles. Beneath his suba, Gáspár’s shoulders tense.

Tuula’s skirt blows out behind her, casting a dark shadow over the ice. She holds out her hand to the closest reindeer, and it saunters dutifully toward her, nosing her palm. Faster than an eyeblink, its legs buckle beneath it. The beast topples to the ground, its great coronet of antlers rolling unceremoniously in the snow.

“He’s asleep now,” Tuula says, still holding her gaze on its steel-gray ruff. “Woodsman, why don’t you make it quick?”

She returned Gáspár’s ax to him inside her hut, handing over the huge blade without a quiver of hesitation. It only made me trust her less. If she didn’t fear an armed Woodsman, she was either marvelously stupid or unfathomably powerful. Staring at the crumpled reindeer makes my mouth go dry.

Gáspár swings his ax with a determination and precision that surprises me. Until now he’s wielded it clumsily, hesitantly. Blood leaks in jagged rivulets down the snow, following the slight decline of the plain and pooling at my feet. It grafts onto the reindeer’s fur, limning each silver fiber, the way Peti’s blood hardened on my wolf cloak. Tuula reaches down to grasp the dead creature’s antlers, and realization floods me like a trough filling with rainwater.

“You’re Juvvi,” I say.

Tuula turns toward me slowly. “And what does it mean to you, wolf-girl?”

I only know what is threaded into Virág’s stories of heroes and gods, her blinkered histories. I know that when the first Northern scouts rode into Kaleva, they found the Juvvi already there, rows and rows of reindeer at their backs. They said the land was theirs, and that it had been given to them by the gods. As more Northern settlers trickled in, they resented the Juvvi for squandering the land, using it only for hunting and herding and fishing instead of farming. They pushed the Juvvi to the scraggly edges of the Far North, and then the Patrifaith pushed them even farther. Virág says that the Juvvi have a magic of their own, some boon from their gods to help them survive in this barren place, even when a series of Patritian kings tried desperately to snuff them out.

“It means you loathe the Woodsmen,” I say finally, raising my voice over the keening of the wind. “Why did you save us?”

Tuula’s gaze shifts to Gáspár, his gloved fingers curled rigidly around the handle of his ax. I see the familiar gleam of manacled hatred in her eyes, the lip curl of poison swallowed so many times. After a moment, she looks back at me.

“When I found you on the ice, I knew you would survive,” she says. “You were as cold as the Half-Sea in deep winter, but there was still color in your cheeks, and your breath was warm against my hand. He was scarcely breathing at all, and his lips were bone white. He had taken off his cloak and used it to cover you. I knew that if a Woodsman had tried to give his life to save a wolf-girl, he would be willing to make peace with a Juvvi too.”

A murder of crows tracks us from overhead, their cries glancing off the ice and echoing for miles. Tuula hums two lonely notes of a song I don’t know and the crows descend, grasping the fur of the dead reindeer in their grizzled talons. They glide up again, the flutter of their wings like a staggered heartbeat, and lift the reindeer up to the threshold of Tuula’s hut. When the crows depart again, they leave a gift of obsidian feathers, snatched up quickly and swallowed by the wind.

Tuula mounts the rope ladder, then looks back at us expectantly. I stand with my boots planted in the snow, jaw set. I’m not sure how wise it is to follow her back into the bear’s den, but the empty plain spools before me for miles, blisteringly white. I remember closing my eyes against the fist clench of cold and not expecting to open them again. Better to face the bear, I decide, and wrap my hand around the first rung of the rope ladder.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting when we reach the top. Tuula offers us food and she doesn’t try to wheedle the ax from Gáspár’s grasp. She feeds Bierdna hunks of reindeer meat by hand, pink and raw, blood dampening the fur around the bear’s mouth. Its incisors are gleaming like slender arrowheads in the firelight.

Gáspár doesn’t touch his food, and he doesn’t speak either. He stares into the hearth, his good eye angled away from me.

I half expected him to try to refute Tuula’s story. Perhaps he thought we were both doomed and it mattered little whose heartbeat faltered first. I have very nearly convinced myself of this when my traitor body turns toward him and my traitor lips part and whisper, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do it for your gratitude.”

It’s the same thing he told me so many days ago in the woods with Peti, and it makes me twice as angry now. “Is it another black mark on your soul, to save a wolf-girl’s life? If I’m made to stomach any more of your pious glowering, I’ll start to wish you had left me to drown.”

“No,” he says curtly, without meeting my eyes. “Leave it alone, Évike.”

The beats of my name are like three pulses of light: quick, moribund. I blink and they have vanished. For a moment I think I imagined him saying it, imagined him calling me anything but wolf-girl. But I know I didn’t imagine his body pressing along the length of mine, all those nights on the ice, or the heat of him as we slept in the cloister of roots, breathing soil. My only imaginings are what scroll across the insides of my eyelids: my hand on the column of his bare throat, thumb brushing the blade of his collarbone. I only allow my most prudish dreams to surface now. Anything more will make my stomach curl black with shame.

If Ördög were anything like the Prinkepatrios he would rescind my newfound magic, like a hawk snatching up a mouse, for thinking of a Woodsman this way. I look down at my right hand, bereft of its littlest finger, and feel his threads tighten around my wrist.

Gáspár is examining his own wrist, the soft stretch of skin where his cut had been. The memory of his confession makes my heart quicken, even more when I remember the vow I made in return.

“How many days until Saint István’s feast?” I ask, my voice more uncertain than I want it to be.

Gáspár rolls his sleeve back down, still facing away from me. “Too few.”

Tuula is watching us with lidded eyes as the bear licks her hand clean, its shoulder blades as huge as boulders. Its ear twitches, like it’s trying to rid itself of a fly. Seeing the beast cowed like that, demure as a house cat, makes an idea take root in my mind. Tuula splayed a reindeer on its belly with just the touch of her hand, and summoned a murder of crows with two notes of a nameless lullaby. What would it take, I wonder, for her to call down something bigger and more reticent?

Something luminous with the gods’ magic?

I am opening my mouth to speak when the door clatters open, letting in a vicious squall and another girl with it. She is bundled in reindeer fur, hood pulled up over her head.

The bear lurches to its feet, snuffling around the hem of the girl’s cloak. Out of habit, I reach into my pocket for my knife before remembering that it was taken from me. I find my coin instead, and clamp my fingers around it. Beside me, Gáspár stiffens, reaching for his ax.

“Szabín,” Tuula says, rising. “Our guests are awake. Évike and Gáspár—”

The woman—Szabín—flicks off her hood, but she doesn’t stop to greet Tuula. Instead, she crosses the room in one long stride and drops to her knees in front of Gáspár. As she does, her cloak flaps open, revealing a loose brown tunic and the cord of a necklace. Its pendant, a sheet of metal hammered into the shape of a three-pronged spear, gleams with firelight in its grooves and edges.

“What are you doing?” Tuula demands. “Don’t humble yourself to a Woodsman.”

The revulsion in her voice is blatant, unbidden. Gáspár doesn’t flinch.

“He’s no ordinary Woodsman,” Szabín says. Her eyes are wide and beseeching, even as Gáspár looks down at her in his blank bewilderment. “May Godfather Life keep you, my prince.”

From across the room, Tuula makes a choking sound. Realization smooths the furrow in Gáspár’s brow, and he offers Szabín a hand.

“May Godfather Death spare you,” he says. “Do not kneel for me, Daughter.”

Szabín takes his hand and rises to her feet. When he lets go, her sleeve slides down her wrist and nestles in the crook of her elbow, and I can’t help but stare in horror: every inch of her skin is mangled pink and white with scar tissue, a hundred raised marks that make Gáspár’s blemishes look as innocent as a bramble’s needling. Tuula’s face is twisted with sorrow, not shock. Gáspár’s eye hardens.

Szabín quickly rolls down her sleeve to hide the scarred flesh, a blush deepening her exceptionally pale face.

“Forgive me, my prince,” she says to Gáspár. “I saved you, but I cannot serve you. I am no one’s Daughter anymore.”

Szabín sits down by the fire, her shoulders up around her ears and her hands folded in her lap. Unlike Tuula, she looks a true Northerner: her eyes are two pools of ice-melt and her hair is pale as wheat chaff, shorn close to her scalp. It’s almost like a Woodsman’s. There is something harsh and roughhewn about her face, something almost masculine. From behind or in half-light, I might have mistaken her for a boy. The bear rests its black nose on the toe of Szabín’s boot, eyelids drooping.

“I’ve seen you before,” Szabín whispers, staring at Gáspár. She must not have recognized him at first, when she found him on the ice, all pale and no scowl on his face. “You came to visit our monastery in Kuihta with your father. Back then, you had two eyes.”

“Things change,” Gáspár says shortly.

“Yes, they do. That was when I thought I could be a faithful servant to the Prinkepatrios. I prayed every day that I was in Kuihta, every hour. Supplicants came to us for healing—fevers and boils, shattered bones. They needed my blood for it. Eventually I grew weary of bleeding for others. I wanted something for myself.”

I can hardly bear to look at her now, knowing what’s beneath her robes. Gáspár pulls his suba tighter around himself.

“Yet you still wear his symbol.” He gestures to her necklace. “Do you still pray to Godfather Life? Does He still answer?”

“Sometimes.” Szabín runs her thumb down the length of the iron pendant. “But the moment I decided to run, there was a change. He still answers my call, but His voice is distant. It used to feel as though I was whispering in His ear, but now it feels as though I’m shouting to Him across a lake in the snow.”

I remember the way Gáspár’s spoken prayers failed him when he tried to light the fire on the Little Plain. Perhaps each step he took farther north with a wolf-girl at his side made the threads noosing him to the Prinkepatrios weather and snap too. The thought drops in my stomach, heavy with unexpected guilt.

“Kuihta.” Gáspár says the Northern word carefully in his Southerner’s accent, as if it’s an ember on his tongue. “That’s the monastery where my brother was fostered. Nándor.”

A shadow falls over Szabín’s face. “Yes. I knew him well.”

The air in the room shimmers, the way it does in the languid summer heat. There is a swell of silence that it seems no one wants to fill until Gáspár says, “You must have seen the moment that he began to make himself a saint.”

Szabín’s fingers curl around the prongs of her pendant with such rapid certainty that I can tell it’s an old habit, not quite shaken. “Every Son and Daughter in Kuihta witnessed it.”

“Then it’s true?” Gáspár’s voice is flat, but his throat bobs. “I always thought it was a story invented for the Érsek’s pleasure.”

“No,” says Szabín. “I was there, that day on the ice.”

I look between the two of them, stippled with their Patritian scars. Tuula places her hand on the flat of the bear’s head, eyes narrow and sharp. “Just because we’re godless heathens doesn’t mean you can speak as if we’re not here.”

In another circumstance her remark might have made me laugh. Szabín smiles thinly. “You’ve heard this story before.”

“Yes, but not the wolf-girl. Tell it again, for her sake. She has more to fear from Nándor than any of us.”

My heart skips. Unlike these Patritians, Tuula doesn’t seem one for grim theatrics. I trust the bleak tenor of her words. “Tell me.”

Szabín draws a breath. “Nándor was a monstrous child, indulged in his every whim by the Érsek and his mother, Marjatta. He tormented the other children while their backs were turned, and when they came to him again, he was smiling and sweet as a lamb.”

Gáspár huffs a sound that’s almost a laugh. Even without looking at him, I can hear the change in his breathing, feel the stiffening of his muscles as his weight shifts on the floorboards. The keen awareness of him is both comfort and curse. I close my four fingers into a fist.

“He was fussed over,” Szabín goes on. “There was scarcely a moment he didn’t spend cradled at his mother’s breast, or balanced on the Érsek’s knee. But he was just as keen to buck their warnings. During the bitterest months of winter, we were all shut inside the monastery, for day after cold, dreary day. So Nándor roused his little rebellion, leading the other young Sons and Daughters outside and onto the frozen lake to play. No matter his moments of cruelty, we all were desperate for his favor—he had the oddest way of doing that. Marjatta said he could make a chicken bat its lashes at him while he carved it up for supper.”

“Chickens are hardly the best judge of character,” I say, but the words come out bloodless, no humor in them.

Szabín scarcely flinches at my interjection. “So we all played on the ice, our breath white, laughing. We didn’t notice how it was groaning under us. And then when it split, it seemed impossible—Nándor dragged down beneath the surface, so quick he didn’t even scream.

“We were all frozen with terror. It felt an eternity, but it could only have been a few moments before one of us ran back to the monastery for help. I remember watching the little dagger of dark water, the tiniest slit where Nándor had fallen through, waiting to see his body float up to the top. I was certain he was dead. We were all certain of it, by the time the Érsek and Marjatta came. It must have been the Érsek who fished him out, blue-white and cold as the ice itself. His lashes were frozen together, his eyes stuck shut. I was so scared that I wept.

“The other children were weeping, too, but Marjatta was screaming. She was cursing God in the Northern tongue and in Régyar and even in Old Régyar. The Érsek had Nándor in his lap, and he was praying. The ice was still creaking under our feet. And then Nándor opened his eyes. I thought for a moment I had imagined it; his heartbeat had faltered, there was no pulse in his throat. But he opened his eyes and then he pushed himself up and the Érsek took him by the hand and led him off the ice, with Marjatta following them. And the next day during our morning prayers, the Érsek said that Nándor had been made a saint.”

“That’s impossible,” I say, too quickly, before silence is allowed to settle. I want to say that there’s only one man who went to the Under-World and returned, and Nándor is no Vilmötten. But I don’t think they will appreciate my pagan fairy tales.

“I saw it,” says Szabín, without lifting her gaze. “We all did.”

“Nándor is in the capital now,” Gáspár says. “He’s been there for years, gathering his support. With the Érsek’s help he’s turned half our father’s council to his side, and a cabal of Woodsmen on top of it. I suspect that he plans to try and steal the crown during Saint István’s feast.”

I can hear Tuula shift in her chair, letting out one close breath. Szabín stares at him, slack-jawed. “Saint István’s feast is eight days from now.”

“I know.”

My heart has started a feverish drumbeat. “That’s not nearly enough time—”

“I know,” Gáspár says again, sharply, and glares at me. I fall silent, face heating. Though I can’t quite articulate why, I have a bone-deep feeling that it would be unwise to reveal our plan to Tuula and Szabín, to tell them about the turul.

“Yet here we sit with the true-born prince, who we fished off the ice alongside his wolf-girl consort.” Tuula leans forward, eyes narrowing to slits. “You must forgive me for asking why you haven’t ridden back to the capital to take your usurper brother’s head off.”

My flush deepens at the word consort. Gáspár’s ear tips redden in turn.

“If only court politics were so simple,” he says. “Nándor has drawn half the population of Király Szek to his side, not to mention the Woodsmen and counts. If their imagined savior is killed, there will be riots in the square. And the first place the mob will turn is Yehuli Street.”

“What?” I wheel toward him, shock and fear like a sharp arrow in my chest. “You never said anything about that.”

Gáspár inclines his head, as if holding himself against my sudden fury. “I warned you that Nándor has roused more loathing toward the Yehuli, and he will do worse if he manages to take the throne.”

“Worse,” I repeat slowly. My throat is terrifically dry. “Tell me what that means.”

“The Patritian countries in the west have already begun to expel their Yehuli to Rodinya. I suspect that Nándor will want to follow suit—it would please the Volken envoys, certainly, to see a caravan of Yehuli trailing out of the city, and all their houses turned to ash.”

A fire heats my blood and rises into my cheeks, and then I am pushing myself to my feet and shoving through the door into the cold. The rope ladder sways beneath me in the dark, and I nearly trip off the narrow ledge trying to clamber onto it. Tuula calls after me, but the wind muffles her words. My boots crunch the frost below and I curl my fingers around the bristling rope, feeling it chafe against my palm. I exhale, my breath misting in front of me, some poor effort to keep my tears at bay.

My heart is thrumming so loudly in my ears that I don’t hear Gáspár coming down the ladder until he is already at my side. For one long moment, the wind unfurls across the empty plain and we both stare straight ahead in silence.

“I thought you understood,” he says at last. “Nándor and his followers want to purge the country of everything that is not Patritian, everything that is not Régyar.”

I had understood, but only in the vague way of what-ifs and maybes, like squinting at a blurry shadow-shape in the dark. I had made peace, as best I could, with what it meant to be a wolf-girl, to always fear that the Woodsmen might knock down your door and steal away your mother or your sister or your daughter. But I had not allowed myself to consider the other half of what I was: it hurt to hold, like an iron poker left to bathe too long in the hearth. I find the coin in my pocket and press my thumb along its grooved edge.

The wind brushes past us, blowing back my hood. I turn to gauge the look on his face: no furrowed brow, no narrowed eye, no hard, haughty mouth. His head is tilted, lips parted slightly. In the silvery moonlight, I can see the sweep of his dark lashes against his cheek. It is easy to imagine, in this suspended, silent moment, that all the Woodsman has leached out of him. He is only the man who held me in the husk of that huge tree. The man who dove into the frigid water to save me.

“If your mother were alive,” I ask, pausing to draw a shallow breath, “out there somewhere, would you ever stop looking for her?”

Gáspár blinks. After another beat of silence, he says, “No. But I would hope that she was out there looking for me too.”

“What if she didn’t know?” I press on. “What if she thought that you were dead?”

“This is sounding less hypothetical by the second,” Gáspár says, but his tone is gentle.

Hands shaking, I pull the coin from my pocket and hold it out to him.

“Can you read it?” My voice sounds thin, almost unintelligible in the wind. “There’s Régyar on it.”

Gáspár takes the coin and turns it over. I realize for the first time that his hand is ungloved, bare. “It only says the king’s name. Bárány János. I can’t read the Yehuli.”

“I could,” I whisper. “Once.”

I hear the shift in Gáspár’s breathing. “I thought you said you never knew your father.”

It was just a small lie, and I’m surprised he even remembered. I shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut as if I can will all of it back to me, half-forgotten memories pulsing like distant torchlight.

“He came every year when I was young. Virág and the other women didn’t like it, but he stayed with my mother and me in our hut. He brought us trinkets from Király Szek, and books. Long scrolls. When he unraveled them, they stretched all the way from the door of our hut to the hearth in the corner. He started teaching me the letters, alefand bet and gimel . . .” The memory winks away from me, but I swear I can hear old parchment crinkling. “There was a story of a clever trickster queen and a wicked minister, and when he told it he gave the minister a silly, pinched voice, so he sounded like an old woman with a stuffed nose.”

I let out a short laugh, and when I look at Gáspár he’s smiling faintly too. But there’s something stiff and guarded in it, like a rabbit sensing a snare.

“He wasn’t there, when my mother was taken.” My voice grows smaller with every word. “The Woodsmen came for her, and the other men and women burned everything that he’d given us, all the scrolls and stories. I buried the coin in the woods and dug it up later.”

“What about your father?” Gáspár prompts, gentle still. “Why wouldn’t he come back for you?”

“Because he thought I was dead,” I say. I feel the oddest flood of relief as I say it, like the power I thought the words might have is nothing but ash on the wind. “And he had every right to think it, in truth. When a woman with a young child, a boy, is taken, it’s custom to leave the child out in the woods and let the cold and the wolves at him. There’s hardly enough food to go around as it is, but when the child is a girl, they find enough to spare until she grows into her magic. Everyone in Keszi already knew that I had none, and wasn’t worth a bit of bread from their table.”

Something snaps, lightning in the air. I double over, gasping for breath, as the power of the story is dredged out of me like a clump of dead leaves, trapped so long beneath the rushing water. Bent at the waist, I cough and splutter, and then Gáspár lays his hand on my back. I can feel his fingers tensing through my wolf cloak, like he can’t decide whether to snatch it away or let it stay.

“Virág saved me,” I manage. “Even though I was a terrible, sullen, mean child who always had a red nose and skinned knees.” Gáspár opens his mouth, but I go on fiercely before he can get in a word, “And don’t tell me I haven’t changed a bit.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

Stomach unsettled, I reach for the coin in my pocket before remembering that he still has it, bright as a pooling of sunlight in his cupped palm. He holds it gingerly, like it’s something extraordinarily precious, even though one piece of gold can’t be worth very much to a prince, disinherited or not.

“You know that my father is in Király Szek,” I say. The wind has lulled to only the feeblest wailing, and it sounds like an animal orphaned on the ice. “Nándor will drive him out, won’t he? Given the first chance? And now no one will be there to stop it.”

Gáspár hesitates. I hear his teeth come together, his jaw shifting to its familiar clench. Then he nods.

I look down at my own hands. In the moonlight, they are pale as lamb tallow, knuckles nicked with tiny scars. There is the absence of my pinky, the black space where it once was suffused with a power I still don’t understand. And then there is Gáspár, tall and silent as a sentinel beside me. If the moon slivers away and the wind picks up again with enough force to blister skin, I wonder if it will be dark and cold enough for him to want to hold me again, and for us both to promise ourselves we will break apart at the first rosy band of dawn.

“Don’t be rash, Évike,” he says softly, and then he drops the coin into my hand. I squeeze it so tightly that its scored edges press feathered imprints across my palm, and when I finally tuck it back in my pocket, I can still feel the heat his skin has left on it.