Page 18 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

He stops himself before he reaches me, fingers curling to a fist. “You don’t understand, wolf-girl. Taking Peti’s arm was a mercy, to spare both his soul and mine. Now he must face the judgment of the Prinkepatrios for his crime, and my soul is blackened with his death.”

I stare up at him, openmouthed. “So it’s the fate of your own soul that has you so troubled? You’d rather make a man suffer than bear the guilt of killing him? You’re right—you won’t survive a day in Kaleva without me.”

“Killing is a mortal sin, especially killing a man of the Patrifaith.” Gáspár’s eye is thin as the mark of an arrowhead. “Better to wound than to kill, and better to suffer than to die before confession. Peti will never be absolved, and the Prinkepatrios will punish him in the afterlife.”

I choke down a noise of derision. “But the Prinkepatrios has no compunctions about kidnapping wolf-girls. And binding me to a dying man, making me hear every gasp of his pain—more cruelty that doesn’t require absolution.”

“That was Ferkó’s idea,” Gáspár says, gaze lowering. “Not mine.”

“Then you’re cruel and gutless.” My face is hot. “Do you always let your men guide the swing of your ax?”

“Not anymore,” Gáspár says shortly. “They’re dead now.”

Something sinks in my belly with the heaviness of a stone. Ferkó and Imre lie by the fire, their bodies cradled in a sepulcher of blood-damp grass. The mist over the water has cleared, and there are little blades of moonlight rippled across its surface, turning it silver and bright as a mirror. From where I stand, it seems inconceivable that anyone could call the lake Black.

Gáspár stamps over to the corpses, and I follow. Before he can say a word I snatch up Ferkó’s bow and quiver, swinging both onto my back. Their familiar weight is a comfort, like a song I will never forget.

“Do we have to burn them too?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, and kneels beside the bodies. His hands clasp. “Megvilágit.”

A thread of flame knits down Ferkó’s ruined face and over his blood-drenched Woodsman’s suba. Imre’s heart purples under the firelight, like a fist-sized bruise. The air fills with something feverish and awful, and suddenly my own cloak feels too heavy, my hair too warm on the back of my neck.

The forest of Ezer Szem is behind us, but the Little Plain is ahead, a scraggly quilt of grassland between us and the frozen plateaus. In the North winter has already cracked open like a quail egg, spilling ice and snow.

“If we’re going to Kaleva, we don’t need a map,” I say. “We’ll just go north until there’s nowhere left to go.”

Gáspár gets to his feet, the wound on his chest still leaking. Beneath the blood and the frayed strips of his dolman, his skin is olive-toned and knotted with muscle. My fingers squeeze around the hilt of my knife—his knife. Of course he wouldn’t want me to bandage him. If the Prinkepatrios does keep an almanac of sin, I wonder how the touch of a wolf-girl will add to his tally.

A bargain between a Woodsman and a wolf-girl already seems a fragile and terrible thing. Whose god would approve of it?

I’m flushed for no reason at all by the time Gáspár marches past me, careful not to let our shoulders brush. It’s not until we’re both squared on our mounts that I look down at my hands again, his blood still scored across my palms.

Chapter Five

The Little Plain skims out before us, yellow and endless, flecked by streaks of lavender thistle weed and the odd black tree. The sun filters blearily through a gauze of clouds, thin as gulyás broth. The last flies of autumn hover around our heads, humming their nasally swan songs, flitting iridescent wings. There are no other sounds, save for the soft footfalls of our horses and the wind blowing the grass flat against the loamy earth.

There’s something about all the infinite open space that makes my belly feel like a gaping chasm, sheer and scraped empty. I’m used to the close cluster of trees, the choking press of bark and bramble.

“I almost prefer the woods,” I muse aloud as the grass paints ruffled shadows on our horses’ flanks.

Gáspár’s mouth falls open. “How could you say such a thing? You saw what happened to Ferkó and Imre. Your kind really are as hard-hearted as Woodsman stories say.”

I make a silent note to never be flippant around him again. But all my years with Virág have taught me how to ebb righteous anger. Turning my voice low and pliant, I ask, “What were those creatures by the lake? Do the Woodsmen have an inventory of everything they kill in the forest?”

“They were monsters,” he says flatly. “Some Woodsmen call them lidércek. It doesn’t matter. There’s no use giving a name to evil.”

His cold, superior tone rankles me, especially after all the prattling about the blackness of his soul. “Do you call a hawk evil when it snatches up a mouse to eat? Do you call a fire evil when it burns your logs to ash? Do you call the night sky evil when it drinks down the day? Of course not. They are surviving, like the rest of us.”

I’m surprised by the ferocity in my voice, and by how much I sound like Virág.

“I don’t think the hawk is evil,” Gáspár says after a moment. “But I’m not a mouse.”

“And thank Isten you aren’t,” I say. “Mice don’t have the luxury of passing moral judgment on every living thing they come across. Mice just get eaten.”

Gáspár stiffens on his mount. “The Prinkepatrios demands moral fortitude from all of His followers. It’s the best we can do to mold ourselves to His image.”

“And he rewards you with feeble, fire-making magic?” I can’t even light a match myself, of course, but if the price of Woodsman power is being honor-bound to some morose, pitiless god who demands purity and perfection, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost. Our gods ask for very little by comparison: smiling emptily through Virág’s interminable stories, sacrificing wood fowl by the riverside—wretched tasks that I railed against with every breath, though both are preferable to parting with my pinkies or my little toes.