Page 103 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“And why do you think the people of Régország will ever welcome you as their king?” Nándor spits as his blade darts toward Gáspár’s left shoulder. “A mutilated half-breed, tainted by his mother’s foreign blood and poisoned by his love for a wolf-girl. Is it any wonder why Father balked at handing you the crown?”

I don’t expect Gáspár to rise to his taunting, but a volley of fury goes through me, and I push myself up onto my knees.

“The crown was always mine,” says Gáspár evenly, between breaths. “I only lacked the strength to claim it.”

“Strength?” Nándor crows a laugh. “You had the kingdom’s finest tutors, and all of Father’s kindnesses—”

“Kindness until he cut out my eye,” Gáspár breaks in, but his voice is measured in a way that Nándor’s is not, matching his pace and his blade’s steady scything. “Kindness until he banished me to the Woodsmen.”

“The day he cut out your eye was the happiest of my life,” Nándor says, face shining with a jeweled dampness. “I remember it well. I had come from the chapel with the Érsek, and I still had a child’s mindless zeal, eager to show Father some new trick of swordplay. But when I came to him in the hallway, he brushed right past me and took you inside. I was weak enough that I sat there outside the hall and wept at his rebuff, until I saw them drag you out with blood running down your face. And then I was the most elated I’ve ever been.”

Nándor’s recounting of it makes me bristle with rage. I can see the blood soaking through the back of Gáspár’s dolman now, his lash wounds opened over and over again with every roll of his shoulder, every leap and lunge. Slowly, my mouth still aching, I get to my feet and limp toward my abandoned bow and quiver. My bloody fingers close around the bow’s grip.

“You’ve been lied to all your life.” Gáspár advances on Nándor with a series of quick jabs, sending him stumbling back several paces. Nándor’s left arm, ruined by my magic, flaps between them like a flag of surrender. “Made to fit some false sainthood—”

“False?” In the lick of orange light cast by Gáspár’s sword, his eyes look like they are pooling with fire. “You’ve seen what power I have. Real power, by which I have claimed the crown. By what right do you claim the throne of Régország?”

“Birthright,” Gáspár answers. “Blood.”

And then he cuts his flaming sword across the flat of Nándor’s blade with such force that he knocks it from his hand. It sails across the courtyard and clatters onto the cobblestones at the foot of Saint István’s statue.

The shock creeps onto Nándor’s face in slow, bitter increments, like the trickle of snowmelt. What little color there was vanishes from his cheeks, and his jaw goes slack. For a moment it seems impossible that I ever thought he was beautiful. He looks like a river carp, pale and belly-slit.

“Meghal,” Gáspár says, and the flame of his blade snuffs out. He lowers his sword as he paces toward Nándor, who has backed nearly to the barbican.

“Brother—” Nándor starts. He splays his palms, raising his arms over his head. By the time Gáspár reaches him, his hands are up, and he is cowering. “I ask you now to show mercy . . .”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Gáspár says. His face is hard, his heated sword point mere inches from the curve of Nándor’s throat. “It’s not worth blackening souls for—mine or yours. If you surrender, call off your Woodsmen, and repent for your sins of violence and patricide, then I will make you the same offer that you made me: live in exile, in the Volkstadt, and never again take up arms against Régország.”

As silence swans over the courtyard, a memory prickles at me. We are standing in Kajetán’s tent, the headman’s knife cold against my tongue. Gáspár had been keen to spare him then, too, despite all his gruesome treachery. I realize now that it was more than the Woodsman oath that stilled Gáspár’s blade. It was his own private vow, a constellation hung with a hundred starry virtues and lessons, and he followed it like a ship’s captain charting a course across the wine-black sea. Its stars had been gleaned from old tomes in the palace archives, from the stories of his wet nurse, from the Merzani proverbs that his mother whispered into his hair. From the lectures of the Érsek and his battalion of tutors, even from his cruel and inconstant father.

How had he managed to swallow it all and not die of poison? When Merzani words clashed with their Régyar cousins inside him, how was he not cut up by their sibilant swordplay? For so long I’d thought my mixed blood a curse, blamed it for the absence of Isten’s magic. Watching Gáspár now, offering his traitor brother mercy, I think that blood cannot be either blessing or curse. It can only be.

Wind sweeps white petals into the air. In the distance, there is the sound of blades singing, metal rasping. Gáspár holds his sword without trembling as a swallow ticks in Nándor’s throat. For a moment I think he will acquiesce.

And then his lips part with the utterance of a prayer.

Gáspár’s sword, Saint István’s sword, shatters like window glass. In the same instant, a small dagger gleams into Nándor’s hand. The panicked, animal part of me, that pure race of adrenaline, is what nocks my arrow and draws back my bow string, but before I can shoot, Nándor has his good arm wrenched around Gáspár. His dagger is at his throat.

“I warned you, wolf-girl,” Nándor says. Each word is a plume of frosted breath against his brother’s cheek. “I warned you that it would not be so easy to kill me.”

Bow string taut, I meet Gáspár’s eye. Where my love immobilized me before, making me flounder with hopeless weakness, now it coats me all over with iron. Nándor draws a line of blood along his brother’s neck, tongue curling in the nascent shape of another prayer.

This is a power I’ve always had, one that I’ve earned, one that can’t be taken from me by some capricious god. The wood rough against my palm, the tail of the arrow brushing my cheek. It does not matter whose histories sing in my blood.

I let my fingers slide off the bow string. My arrow looses through the air, quick as a wing beat, and buries itself in Nándor’s throat.

He coughs. He chokes. Blood wells in his mouth, bubbling over his lips in place of a prayer. He lets go of Gáspár and falls to his knees, grasping at his own neck as blood gathers at the site of the wound. Gáspár stumbles toward me, and we both watch as Nándor splutters out his last, wordless breaths. Ruby-bright droplets limn his collarbone, like icicles on eaves. I think of the shorn falcon, screeching and flapping its wings as it died inside its gilded cage, and it pleases me that Nándor will not have the dignity of last words.

When Nándor finally does topple over, his eyes are as clouded as two bits of sea glass, and his mouth and chin are a glut of red-black blood.

Gáspár’s shoulders rise and fall in the silence, and I let my bow drop to the ground. He starts to speak, but I grasp the collar of his suba and it hushes him.

“Don’t,” I say. “A king shouldn’t begin his rule with a blackened conscience. My soul is perfectly content to bear the burden of it instead.”

He lets out a breath that is half a laugh, though there is a peculiar grief threaded under the sound. It swells in me, too, the acknowledgment of something lost. The hazy, half-dreamed future where he writes poems from the cloistered safety of his Volken hermitage, and I am either his scullery maid or his bride.

“If there is anyone I would damn my soul for,” Gáspár says, “it would be you.”