Page 11 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I only understood later why it was such a flawless ruse. She’d left no evidence of her wicked intent, no wound I could point to and say, See, she hurt me. When I tried to articulate my pain, I’d only seemed like a jabbering child. Why hadn’t I just come out, after all? Everyone knows the forest is dangerous at night.

Watching Peti die against me feels like waiting for Katalin in the woods. It’s my own revulsion and terror, my own misplaced pity and guilt that’s wounding me, nothing more. I hate the captain for binding me to my own helplessness. I hate him so much that it’s a heat unfolding in my chest, livid and breathless.

All of a sudden, my horse stops. She presses close to Imre’s black steed, ears pulled flat against her ivory head.

“Do you hear that?” Imre asks. His pale lashes are clumped with tiny pearls of ice. In the distance, almost too far away to notice, there is a slow, measured rustling.

“It’s Peti,” Ferkó says, bringing his horse to my other side. “The monsters in the wood can hear him moaning from miles away. It’s drawing them out of their dens and—”

The captain circles back toward us, hand on his ax. There’s a sprinkling of white in his dark curls, a coronet of frost.

“Keep quiet,” he snaps, but his throat is pulsing.

Peti stills against me. We say nothing as the rustling grows louder. Closer. I can feel my mare’s chest heaving between my thighs. Imre draws his ax and Ferkó draws his bow and we all push together, a single mass of huge human prey.

The fog spits something onto the path in front of us. All four horses rear, whinnying madly, and Peti slides off my mare, pulling me down with him. I land on my back against the hard, cold earth, too shocked to even scream.

“Stop!” the captain cries.

“It’s a chicken,” Imre says.

A solitary hen is pecking its way across the path, oblivious to the chaos it has created. Its feathers are as shiny as polished obsidian. Even its beak and comb are black.

I can’t help myself. I start to laugh. I laugh so hard that my eyes water, even as my mare trots anxious circles in the path, snorting in reproach. Imre is laughing, too, and the sound chases the remnants of fear from my heart and melts the ice in my belly. The captain looks at me as if I’ve grown seven heads.

“Is that the worst you have to offer?” Imre asks the woods, once his hysteria has subsided. “A black hen?”

The dead trees whisper an unintelligible reply. The captain leaps down from his horse, boots thudding. I push myself onto my elbows, a knot of panic rising in my throat once more.

But the captain doesn’t approach me. He kneels beside Peti and removes one glove, pressing two fingers against the column of his throat. The gentleness of it knocks the breath from me, and I have to remind myself what it is that I’ve seen: the gleam of his ax in the dark, the swift certainty of his fingers as he yoked my wrist to Peti’s.

The captain lifts his head. There’s a wet sheen over his black eye, like the pond on a starless night. “He’s dead.”

There’s no more laughter.

We see three more chickens on our route, while the fog begins to thin and the forest grows sparser around us. As we press on, the trees give way to grassy flatlands, and black pieces of night sky dagger through the mist. The glaze of frost melts from our hands and faces. When I get my first glimpse of the lake, it’s all I can do to stop myself from leaping off my horse and bounding toward it, so grateful to be out of the woods.

The Black Lake stretches all the way to the horizon, wisps of fog hovering over its surface like steam hissing out of a pot. Beneath the mist, it glitters darkly under a white sliver of moon, the reflection of the stars speckling its surface. It looks like a pool of night, and I almost believe I could dip my hand into the water and pluck out a jewel-bright star for myself.

“It’s beautiful,” Imre whispers. Ferkó sinks to his knees, whispering prayers in the Old Tongue, eyes closed as the wind sweeps across his reverent face.

“It should be a safe place to camp,” the captain says, unmoved.

I don’t expect such exuberance from him regardless, but I can tell Peti’s fate is tempering his relief. After Peti died, the captain laid one hand over his face, brushing his eyes gently shut. He pulled his legs straight, ankles touching, and placed his good arm over his chest, in some awkward approximation of slumber. It was too stiff to be real sleep, too self-consciously pious, just like the captain himself. Seeing it filled me with my own awful grief, knowing I would have no such ceremony of my own. There would be no one to close my sightless eyes or worry over the position of my limbs. If my body even survived my death, that is—no one in Keszi knows what the king does with his wolf-girls. Only that they never come back.

Then the captain clasped his hands, whispered his prayer, and Peti’s body went up in flame and smoke.

Now I watch the captain climb down from his mount and kneel before the Black Lake. He removes his gloves and dips his bare hands in the water. His penitence pricks me like a thorn. Will the captain grow somber and grim after my death too? I doubt it very much. Among the Woodsmen, I imagine a wolf-girl being killed is cause for great cheer.

Imre tugs the end of the rope snarled around my wrists, leading me toward the beginnings of their campsite. There is already a bed of cold wood, and a cast-iron kettle, rusted around its edges. We will have to boil the water before we can drink it. The Black Lake is touched with salt, as if Isten carved out a hole in the earth and then poured the ocean into it to make Régország its own tiny, landlocked sea. Beyond it is the Little Plain, a scraggly prairie flecked with salt flats and occasional stretches of marshland, spilling out beside the tributaries that carve the land like a cracked mirror. It marks the western edge of Farkasvár, the region containing Keszi, which King István made when he diced up old tribal territories into tidy new districts and installed a preening count to rule over each one.

The captain lights a fire on the bank and Imre sets his kettle over it. He boils tough game and vegetables for stew, the onion stinging my eyes but making my belly whine. With the captain’s brutal pace, I haven’t eaten at all since leaving Keszi.

It should be unthinkable to share a meal with the Woodsmen. I don’t want to acknowledge that we have anything in common—even something as small and silly as liking this stew. It’s the same kind of lean meal we would eat in Keszi, scrounged together in the dead of winter when our stores have nearly been emptied. It reminds me of home, and I don’t want the Woodsmen poisoning my memories. Along with my coin and my braid, and Katalin’s wolf cloak, they’re all that I have left.

But I’m hungry. Every bite of the stew feels treacherous, and I think, suddenly and viciously, of Katalin. My people, she said. Virág had stopped her before she finished, but I know what she would have said. That I don’t belong in Keszi. That half my blood is tainted, and I’ll never really be one of them.

A true wolf-girl would have refused the stew. She would let herself starve rather than making nice with Woodsmen.