Page 101 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I squeeze her so tight I think my nails might pierce through her tawny wolf cloak, and when we break apart again tears are stinging the corners of my eyes.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers. “When I saw you there, in Katalin’s cloak, your hair dyed white . . . I should have tried to stop them.”

All I can do is shake my head; the memory of it feels long faded, like a scratch that has healed to a small blue scar. The only thing that’s real now is the scything of blades and the flurry of bodies and the iron tang of blood in the air.

“Please,” I say. “Keep your head down until the fighting’s over—”

Boróka gives a breathy laugh. “You can’t ask that of me.”

I knew it would be her answer, but it guts me all the same. I reach up and take her face between my bloodied hands, and she lets me, for a brief and aching moment. But then a Woodsman lunges toward us, hard-eyed with loathing, and she leaps up and draws her sword to cut him down. In another moment, she has vanished into the throng.

A line of wolf-girls rims the top of the hill, fire-makers lobbing their balls of flame. Small fires are burning all over the battlefield, flecks of orange light dappled through the brush. Then there are forgers, wielding their sung blades, sometimes two at once. And laced among the mottle of wolf cloaks are the Woodsmen, their cloaks dark against the winter-bleached grass. Futilely I search for Gáspár among them, though I know he would not cut down a wolf-girl, nor one of his own Woodsman brothers. Still I cannot imagine he would flee from battle like a coward, or look on like a grim-faced tactician, coldly weighing the odds. If he has thrown himself into the morass of the fight, it is only to seek out his brother.

Farther down the hill, I find my mark: a bright pulse of white amidst the churning bodies, a shirt of mail over his dolman and a golden sword in his hand. Nándor. The hilt of his sword is teethed with pearls, his auburn hair blowing back from his face as he plunges through the briar on horseback. Not his horse—mine. The shining pale mare I’d ridden from Keszi, her mane now neatly combed, wearing the gilt saddle of a royal mount.

I clamber to my feet and nock one of my arrows. Woodsmen are darting through my line of sight, black smudges like soot on skin. I loose my arrow and it pierces a Woodsman’s chest, just below the hollow of his throat. He coughs blood, but men don’t die like rabbits and deer. He drops from his horse and lumbers toward me, unsteady on his feet, and doesn’t fall until I put another arrow into him. This time it lands right at the center of his chest, where his heart sits winged by two lungs.

In the madness and the blood steaming in the air, it’s impossible to tell where the scale will tip. Impossible to tell whether pagans or Patritians are winning. All I can see are wolf-girls puddled in their bloody cloaks, and Woodsmen lying limp, run through with swords. Their bodies are near identical, one black suba over another. I drop to my knees again and paw through the nearest pile of corpses, praying and praying to whichever god might answer that I will not find Gáspár among them. These dead Woodsmen are faceless, pockmarked with missing ears and noses and eyes.

When I look up again, I spot her, sailing down the hillside in her white wolf cloak, hair the color of snow. I’ve never seen Virág move this way, with the agility of a fox, or at least a woman less than half her age. Her forehead has more lines than I remember, like the hard mud in a dried-up riverbed, and yet there is youthful vigor in her movements. The last time I saw her, she was handing me off to the Woodsmen, a perfectly serene cant to her chin. But now my mind crowds with other memories: Virág pulling me onto her lap, her stories wafting through her hut like wisps of smoke, Virág braiding my hair and covering my ears with her six-fingered hands when the thunder was too loud and too close for me to sleep.

It is a mangle of what I feel for Gáspár, like a Woodsman’s severed nose or my lopped finger, small and ugly by comparison. But love, I think, all the same. It’s that ugly and awful love that sends me skidding down the hill after her, just as Nándor jerks his horse’s reins and turns her way.

Their blades meet, but there’s power behind Nándor’s swing that she hasn’t yet seen, that she doesn’t understand. With the force of the impact Virág topples off her horse, sliding to the ground with a guttering thud.

I scream her name, but either Virág doesn’t hear or she doesn’t care enough to turn. Nándor’s lovely face is blood-flecked, and there’s a sheen to his gaze that looks half-mad. His eyes are nearly as white as Virág’s hair, the pupils shrunken and colorless. He seems to scarcely even see Virág as he leaps from his mount, sword smiling down at her. He will kill her the way the Woodsmen have killed all the other wolf-girls, without ever knowing their names. He will never know the stories that live in her marrow and blood, will never know how once, when I was bitten by a snake in the woods, Virág sucked the venom out of the wound herself, extra eyeteeth gritted against the skin of my wrist.

She’ll die the way the turul did, as if it were just any bird to be eaten. That’s all I can think of as I throw myself between her and Nándor’s sword, its blade burying itself deep through the muscle of my left shoulder.

Nándor blinks as he pulls the sword from me, as if he has just woken from a deep slumber.

“Oh, wolf-girl,” he says, almost wistfully. “You must have learned this sort of stupid nobility from my brother.”

And then he’s gone again, swallowed up by the fray. The pain is like the lick of a thousand heated blades, and my heart gives a stubborn, feeble quiver. My vision tunnels, plunging me into darkness and back out again. Through the feather of my lashes, Virág’s face is hovering over me.

“Why did you do that, you fool of a girl?”

Blood burns in my throat. “Why did you save me, way back then?”

“Perhaps I saw that one day you would save me,” she says. Her face ripples like a reflection on water.

My vision is narrowing again. “So then you know why I did it.”

She always knew everything before I did. As she mutters something unintelligible, Virág’s hand is on my wound. The pressure is unbearable at first, another fiery ribbon of pain. Then it begins to recede, in throbbing increments, the blackness clearing from my gaze. I think I hear the whisper of a song on her lips, but when I pick my head up again and the world comes roaring back, I realize it’s not a song at all.

“Honorable girl, foolish girl,” she’s murmuring, almost with the rhythm of a prayer. “Both of us will live to see another winter.”

There’s an odd tightness in my shoulder as Isten’s invisible needle works through my wound, guided by Virág’s hand. I try to stutter out a thank-you, but Virág’s mouth only twists into its familiar scowl, the same face she made at me whenever I cursed or lied or burned her broth.

“There,” she says. “What you have given won’t be forgotten.”

A tremor goes through me, and I shudder with the pain’s vicious ebbing. “Won’t it all be forgotten, if we die here today?”

“We won’t die,” she says. “Isten won’t allow it.”

I wonder if her vision showed her that too: the Woodsmen spent, the pagans victorious. It seems too much to hope for, too simple and neat. The hillside is littered with bodies in wolf cloaks. But by my hasty count, there seem to still be more of us standing, and fewer Woodsmen.

A gleam of white catches the corner of my eye. Nándor is stumbling up the hill, swordless and blood-drenched, his dolman hanging half open. He reaches the mouth of the tunnel and lets the darkness swallow him. Wounded, but alive. And seeing how wounds mean very little to him, I know he’ll only return to fight again unless something is done. I rise to my knees, shocked by how light I feel, how strong. I give Virág a hasty kiss on the cheek before scrambling up the hillside after him.