Page 24 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I think he almost smiles, but he catches himself. A smile would look odd and terrifying on his face, like a wolf trying to dance, or a bear plucking the strings of a kantele.

“Was Dorottya berating you?” he asks.

There’s a note of concern in his voice, or maybe it’s only my imagining. “No, though she did have some venomous words about the Yehuli.”

Gáspár tilts his head. “I can’t see how she managed to guess at your bloodline. You don’t have much of the Yehuli look.”

“She didn’t. She recognized my father’s coin.” I stare up at him, remembering King János’s engraved profile, all dull-eyed and weak-chinned. Gáspár’s eye is bright and keen, his jaw as sharp as the edge of a blade. He must have more of his mother in him. “Is there a Yehuli look?”

“Many people say there is.” He lifts one shoulder, his gaze still on me. “Something in the nose, or the brow, perhaps. There were several Yehuli men at court, tax collectors and moneylenders. None of them had your nose or your brow, and certainly not your eyes.”

I blink at him. “My eyes?”

“Yes,” he says, curtly and with a hint of embarrassment. “They’re very green.”

My stomach quivers with the pulse of a thousand tiny wings. It’s an odd feeling, not unpleasant. “Is there a Merzani look, then?”

Gáspár goes silent. I wonder if I’ve pushed him too far, if this brief moment of peace will snap beneath us like a rope bridge over churning waters. After a moment, he says, “I don’t know. My mother was the only other Merzani I’ve ever met.”

“And do you take after her?” For some reason I feel the need to pretend that I haven’t studied his father’s gilded image with Gáspár’s face in mind, making a catalogue of their many differences.

“So they say.” His voice is perfectly flat, as if the answer is a groove well worn. “I have the wrong complexion for my father’s tastes. One of the counts proposed that I spend a year indoors to see if that improved my prospects.”

His words almost provoke a huff of laughter, but I swallow it down. I’m not sure he would believe it was a laugh of exasperation and solidarity, and not a mockery of his pain. Gáspár looks away at last, over his shoulder at the villagers gathered around the fire. There are more now than before, their backs arched with their long day in the field, a thread of exhaustion running under all their mumbled words.

The sky has washed itself a dusky violet, the color of a bruise still aching. Bands of pink and gold stripe along the horizon, neat as the lashes down the back of my thighs. The violence of the sunset shocks me—in Keszi we only saw pieces of purple light the size of glass shards, sieved through the fretwork of tree branches. A thrill of cold air brushes up my spine. I marvel and marvel, not caring that I must look as dumb and wide-eyed as a child, and then I hear the sound of music.

The villagers’ clothes look richer and finer in the firelight, as if imbued with the glossiness of woven silk. Someone’s kantele starts to play, and I remember Virág’s story about Vilmötten, who was wandering in the forest when he heard a lovely sound, only to find the intestines of a squirrel strung up between two trees, which he took and fashioned into a lute that sang more beautifully than any nightingale or wood thrush. Even the coil-furred dog has added its howling to the harmony.

Gáspár and I watch as the villagers form two long lines, men on one side and women on the other. I recognize the steps at once: it’s the same frantic couple’s dance we do in Keszi, only when we need a particular distraction from the cold or the emptiness in our bellies. The men and women swap partners, tapping the ground and leaping in time with the kantele’s strumming, laughing when one girl’s skirt nearly catches the fire.

Looking at them fills me with the worst type of loathing: envy. If not for the sweep of grass on all sides and the black diamond shadows that their tents cast on the earth, I might have believed I was back in Keszi now, sulking ostentatiously as the other girls claimed their dance partners. Only, these villagers don’t live in fear of the Woodsmen or the many horrors of Ezer Szem.

But now they have a monster of their own, I remind myself. No matter how attentively they stoke their divine flame.

One girl breaks off from the circle. She’s pretty and soft-looking, with Boróka’s flaxen hair and the eyes of a doe oblivious to the arc of a hunter’s arrow. She approaches Gáspár shyly, and holds out her hand. There’s a smear of soot on her cheek, but even so there’s something endearing about it.

Gáspár shakes his head politely, and the girl shrinks back, crestfallen and flushing. I catch myself wondering if he’s ever touched a woman who wasn’t a wolf-girl. The Woodsmen are a holy order, after all.

I lean toward him, my voice a whisper. “You didn’t need to turn her down on my behalf.”

“I didn’t,” Gáspár says, mouth thinning.

“Then why? She seemed your type.”

Gáspár stiffens, and his shoulders rise around his ears. I can tell I have landed on an area of particular sensitivity. “And what type is that?”

I glance over at the girl, folded neatly back into the dancing circle, arm-in-arm with another flaxen-haired man who looks to be her brother. I think of my own fumbling trysts by the riverside, of the men and boys who slipped their hands between my thighs and then begged me not to tell anyone, please, after we were both sweat-slick and panting. In turn they told me that I was pretty, which perhaps was true, and that I was sweet, which certainly was not, but only when we were in the dark, alone.

“Innocent,” I say.

Gáspár scoffs at me, suba shifting as he angles his body away. His face is lucent in the firelight, like a bit of amber knuckling out of black pine. I consider that I might be the victim of some trickster god’s cruel prank, cursed to keep thinking of the way his skin looks burnished in the glow of the flame, or the way his jaw tenses when my taunts have hit their mark. I tell myself to stop noticing any of it.

There is a lull in the music, and one voice rises above the rest. “Where is Kajetán?”

“He must be hiding away in his tent,” says Dorottya. She knifes her narrow body through the crowd. “Someone go fetch him.”

“I’ll go,” Gáspár offers, stepping forward with altogether too much eagerness. I can tell he is desperate to leave our conversation behind. “I must tell him that I failed to find the monster.”