Page 22 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I stare at the black outline of his body, light pooling on each crease in his dolman. I should only be thinking about his ax and his horrible missing eye. But instead I am wondering why he cares so much for his oath and so little for his crown. Why he seems to suggest that it’s easier to be a Woodsman than a prince. I curl onto one of the cowhides on the other side of the tent, closer to the fire, and sleep claims me before I can begin to wonder why I am thinking of him so much at all.

Chapter Six

By morning, frost lies over the Little Plain, a garland on each blade of grass. The sky is seething and gray, clouds swollen, all of it a bad omen. These are signs that Virág taught me could portend a monster, but Gáspár and I can find no trace of one.

The plain isn’t like the woods—there are no tree holes to hide in, no shadows to conceal the presence of something large with fangs and claws. No prophetic smears of blood or masticated piles of bone. As we trace a two-mile perimeter around the village, tents swaying scantly in the distance, Gáspár’s shoulders coil with frustration.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “People don’t simply disappear.”

“I know,” I say. The forest could swallow things up, but not the plain. “Maybe they’re lying.”

“They have nothing to gain from lying.”

“Maybe they’re not thinking of the proper sort of monster. Virág once lived in a village with a woman who was married to a dragon and didn’t even know it.”

Gáspár thins his mouth. “A dragon is a beast.”

“If girls can be wolves, can’t men be beasts?” I ask. That silences him, so I go on. “A woman was married to a man that she loved very much, even though he was from a different village. Their village was a peaceful one, so it shocked no one more than her when, one day, the village’s children began disappearing. Their parents searched for them desperately, but they could only find the barest traces of hair and bone, and their baby teeth. And then the woman noticed that her husband began to act strangely. And she realized that she could not remember the name of the village he was from, or how she had met him at all.

“Thinking that she might weep, the woman went out to sit under a citrus tree. The leaves began to rustle overhead, and she looked up, her face shifting from sadness to horror. Do you know what she saw there?”

“The bodies of children,” Gáspár says flatly.

“No. She saw her husband’s seven heads, hidden there among the branches, their eyes closed, as if they were sleeping.”

I half expect him to scoff at my pagan nonsense, the way I laughed baldly at his Patritian tales. But his face is open, almost expectant. “And what happened then?”

“The woman rolled all the heads up into her arms and took them to her husband, to confront him. He began to weep at the sight of them, and then he showed her the bodies of the children he had taken, all the meatiest parts picked clean. Still weeping, he said that he had cut off his heads in order to marry her, and that he had only killed and eaten the children so that he might not be tempted to eat her, instead.”

“Did the villagers band together and kill the dragon?”

“How terribly Patritian of you,” I say. “No, the woman kept her husband’s secret, and she fed him the tender hearts of baby lambs.”

I enjoy the scowl on his face, and ignore the homesickness winding in my chest. The memory of Virág’s words is sharp and sweet all at once, like the taste of a sour cherry. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of her hut, my fingers twined with Boróka’s, listening as she filled our heads with stories of man-dragons and trickster gods.

By midday, Gáspár has made no good on his promise to slay the monster. I try not to gloat too much, but our stomachs are growling. Although game is scarce on the Little Plain, most of it chased into early hibernation by the wind and the nascent snow, with Ferkó’s bow I manage to kill a lithe hare with black-tipped ears. I skin and gut it quietly while Gáspár plucks up the bow and quiver himself. If I were more charitable, and Gáspár less stubborn, I would have offered to hunt for him. But my goodwill has evaporated after so many hours of pacing wind-chapped through the plain, and despite our bargain I think he is still loath to accept help from a wolf-girl.

He pulls back the string of the bow against his cheek with great effort and lets it snap forward. The arrow wobbles out of its notch like a bird in drunken flight, and then spirals to an early demise at my feet. I can’t help it—I laugh.

“I hope you make a better prince than you do a Woodsman.”

Flushing, Gáspár snatches up the arrow. He leans close to me, chest swelling, and in the cold daylight I can see pink rivulets of scar tissue furrowing from beneath his eye patch. The dark lashes on his good eye are quivering, like he can scarcely be convinced of his own boldness.

“I am still a prince,” he reminds me, voice low. “And you’re a trifling wolf-girl.”

I can’t find it in me to be ruffled by his bluster; if anything, he’s only proven that even my most artless jibes can rile him.

“Then it must hurt to know how much you need me,” I say. “How you couldn’t survive without me.”

Muscles tensed, I brace myself for his rejoinder. But Gáspár’s eye only narrows further, storm clouds bruising across his face.

“Your life still depends on my survival. If the prince perishes on your watch, you’ll be the one to pay for it. Tell me, wolf-girl, who belongs to whom?”

He speaks of the prince as if he were someone else, someone he knows but not very well. I wonder again why he seems to despise power as much as I desire it. But it only makes my heart flutter with anger, real anger, more than just preening spite.

“My life is worth much less than yours,” I snap. “If it now belongs to you, then you struck a poor bargain.”

Gáspár draws a breath. “If only it were just your life. I’ll remind you that you staked the future of your whole village on this bargain, trusting me to protect it from my father’s wrath. If you fail, their lives will be forfeit too.”