Page 27 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Gáspár shifts suddenly. From my vantage point, I can see only a sliver of his face, but I know from the slope of his shoulders and the slowness of his pace that Kajetán’s death is weighing upon him already, another black mark on his soul. I am too ashamed to meet his eye, to face the anguish I have caused him with my temerity.

He kneels beside the bed of burnt logs and clasps his hands together. “Megvilágit.”

A small fire blooms in the hearth, its flames murmuring, low. Not nearly enough to keep the whole village warm through the winter. I shoulder through the crowd until I am standing as near to him as I dare.

Gáspár clasps his hands again, brow furrowed. “Megvilágit.”

The flames crest higher, waving and blue now, like waterweed as it ripples along the lakebed. It’s only a bruised shadow of the bonfire that crawled over the logs before, hurling its light for miles.

Gáspár turns to me. “Évike, give me your knife.”

I’m too dumbstruck to refuse. My knife—his knife—which I snatched back from Kajetán’s cold fingers before the villagers thundered into the tent, is still befouled with blood. I hold it out to Gáspár and he takes it, blade first. All around the villagers have hushed, lips pursed, waiting.

Staring down with consummate focus, Gáspár finally removes his gloves. He rolls up the sleeve of his dolman to reveal a raised grid of scars along his wrist, ribbons of white against his bronze skin. My breath catches in my throat. It takes him a moment to find a clear spot. When he finally does, he draws my blade across his arm with a gasp, his blood splattering onto the stone.

Fingers shaking, Gáspár lets the knife fall into the grass. He clasps his hands together once more. “Megvilágit.”

The fire bursts into the air with such ferocity that Gáspár leaps back as fingers of flame snatch at his suba. Sparks dapple the immense blackness of the sky. The sound of the villagers’ relief is as loud as the prairie wind.

“Thank you, Sir Woodsman!” they cry. “You’ve saved us!”

They flood around him, reaching out to flatten their palms against his chest, to run their fingers through the fur of his suba. None of them mentions the knife, the wound. Gáspár rolls his sleeve back down to cover the blood and puts on his gloves. The flaxen-haired girl brushes her thumb along his jawline and murmurs something that I’m too far away to hear. My stomach knots with nausea.

It seems like hours before the crowd thins and the villagers filter back into their tents. Each blade of grass is a slender mirror for the firelight, making it look like I’m standing in a field of quivering flames. Gáspár kneels to pick up the knife, then walks toward me.

He stares at me without blinking, eye half-lidded. For once his jaw is slack, lips slightly parted, like all the strength has gone out of him. I can’t even bear to look down at his wrist.

“Can I trust you not to be such an imprudent fool?” he asks.

I almost wish for his bristling reproach, his self-righteous sulking. Anything is better than this, the unfathomable weariness on his face. I consider telling him that I don’t need a knife to be an imprudent fool, but I don’t think it will earn me one of his flushing grimaces, not this time. I only nod, and he hands the knife back to me, hilt first.

My fingers curl around the cold metal, and then the wretched question bubbles out of me. “An eye wasn’t enough?”

“What?”

“You already gave him your eye.” My chest tightens. “Are all Woodsmen scarred like you?”

“Every one of them worth mentioning.”

“Why?” I manage. “Why do you do it?”

“The Prinkepatrios rewards sacrifice,” he replies. “Sometimes sacrifice comes in the form of flesh.”

I choke out a laugh. The memory of my blade against his wrist is blinkering across my vision, and it makes me want to retch. “So is it justice or mercy that you should bleed for your salvation?”

“Mercy,” Gáspár says. His eye is black, holding none of the flame. “In all this time, He has never asked me for my life.”

Chapter Seven

The snowflakes swirl around us, a white eddy in the air. They land in my hair, still patchy with silver dye, and nestle in Gáspár’s dark curls. If I don’t blink often enough, the snowflakes gather on my lashes and melt, icy water stinging my eyes. Beneath our feet, the ground is dusted with a faint layer of early frost, the black earth still bleeding through. It’s as if Isten blew on a great frozen dandelion, and its downy seeds scattered throughout the pine forest of the Far North.

There are only two seasons in Kaleva: winter and not-winter. Not-winter is short and muggy, a time when flies run rampant and plants poke their flower heads cautiously out of the dirt, only to be plucked and shucked and kept for a colder, hungrier day. Calves are born and killed so their meat can be salted and saved. In not-winter, the Kalevans enjoy a few hours of weak sunlight and a brief thawing of their rivers and lakes, revealing water that’s clearer and bluer than the sky itself.

Not-winter is almost over.

I lead the way through the forest, Gáspár’s horse trotting more slowly behind. Since leaving the village two days ago, our conversations have been curt and perfunctory, and on his part, mostly monosyllabic. I apologize tacitly by offering him the meatiest parts of the rabbits I shoot, and by resisting the urge to badger him during his evening prayers. I’m not sure the message reaches him.

There are pinpricks of red on the snow, tracking us like tiny footprints, whispering the story of our time in Kajetán’s village. Gáspár tucks his sleeve under his glove, but the blood trickles out from it anyway, with a soft pattering sound that has followed us for miles. Abruptly, Gáspár brings his horse to a halt and stares up at the sky, letting the flakes land on his face and turn to water.