Page 30 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Are those the sorts of tales that pagan mothers tell their children to lull them to sleep?” Although Gáspár’s voice is only lightly scathing, hearing the word mother come out of his mouth makes me go stiff with fury.

“I told you—my mother was taken by the Woodsmen when I was ten,” I say coldly. “Virág was the only one telling them. Besides, I thought you might enjoy this one. Since you Woodsmen are so fond of severing limbs.”

Gáspár’s breath catches. I know it’s especially cruel of me to bring up Peti, but speaking of mothers opens up my oldest wound, making me as vicious as wolf with a thorn in its paw.

“I lost my own mother when I was eight, wolf-girl,” he says. There is the whetted edge to his voice again, wielding the revelation as meanly as a blade. “You don’t need to enlighten me about that particular pain.”

It was stupid of me to speak without remembering: Gáspár is the son of King János’s Merzani queen, the foreign bride he wed to stave off a war with our southern rival, much to the distaste of his courtiers. She died almost two decades ago of some ghoulish fever, and war between the two nations began with the first toll of Király Szek’s mourning bells. Of course, no one thought too kindly of the heir she left behind, his blood blackened with the lineage of the enemy.

I feel such a sharp, sudden sadness it’s as if someone has stuck a knife between my ribs. With some difficulty, I shift to feel the braid in my pocket. When at last I do speak, my voice sounds odd, distant. “Do you remember her at all?”

“Not very much.” Each word is a huff of white. His shoulders slacken against me. “She couldn’t speak Régyar well. She spoke Merzani to me, but only when no one else was around to hear.”

“Every day I think I’m remembering less of my mother than the day before.”

The confession is out of me before I can even think to muzzle myself. Before I can think of how this Woodsman might turn it into a weapon.

“So do I,” Gáspár says, after a long moment. “Olacakla çare bulunmaz.”

I furrow my brow. The words are similar in their cadence to Régyar, but for all their unexpected familiarity, I can’t understand them. “Is that Merzani? What does it mean?”

“‘There is no remedy for what will be.’”

The adage hangs in the air, a sibilant constellation. My chest aches. I wonder what kind of Under-World life he had in Király Szek while Katalin and her friends were rubbing dirt in my face and burning off my hair.

Blue light trickles in from the narrow spaces, a silken evening streaming through the roots and the storm. “It’s not the same. You have a father still.”

Gáspár tilts his head. “So do you.”

I have to wriggle my hands into my wolf cloak to find my coin, caught between our adjacent bodies. When I do, I grip it tightly despite my trembling fingers. “Maybe.”

“More so than the other wolf-girls, I hear.”

The girls in Keszi do have fathers, of course, but only in the way that flowers have seeds which sprouted them. Faceless village men who might briefly catch their eye and then look away, flushing and guilty. Courtship is limited to furtive romps in the woods or private dalliances by the riverside. Mothers raise their children alone.

I don’t like thinking of it. It reminds me that our lives in Keszi are structured around survival, and extraneous things—love—are to be cut off like a fetid limb. The way Csilla left her arm behind in Ördög’s marsh, or how I was carved out of Keszi too. All the village men feared that I would pass my barren bloodline on to a child, and so they were careful, when we coupled, to never risk making me a mother.

It makes me flush to think of coupling when I am pressed so close to Gáspár. But now I can only see the whorls of his dark hair, his long and regal nose, and the delicate curve of his jaw, shadowed with stubble. Once I coupled with a boy from Keszi, and his bristled face left a rash of red along my throat and chin. Sourly, I remember the girl from Kajetán’s village, stroking Gáspár’s cheek. I wonder if he imagined kissing her. I suspect he is far too grim and pious to think of me the way I have been thinking of him. He smells of pine and salt, not so terribly different from the men I’ve lain beside. I wonder if he is as ticklish behind the ear, or if his hair is as downy on the nape of his neck.

The snow piles over our tangle of roots, soft as distant footfalls. The blue evening has winnowed away, leaving only the slenderest planks of moonlight to illuminate our small hollow. That pale light lacquers to Gáspár’s profile, making him look softer and younger than his twenty-five years, and hardly like a Woodsman at all.

I lean back against the weave of roots, damp with snowmelt, my hair tangling in garlands of moss. My head is so close to Gáspár’s that I think our cheeks might touch and I wonder how I will sleep at all. I needn’t have worried too much about it. As soon as I close my eyes, the world shudders away.

It’s still dark when I open my eyes, in that bleary place between sleeping and waking. I’ve shifted in the night, my cheek pressed to the mangle of wood and moss. Gáspár’s body is a warm crescent around mine, my back against his chest. I half convince myself I must be dreaming: clutched in this cradle of roots, Gáspár’s arms braced over me like a reed roof, everything seems hazy and unreal.

Even more so when I feel his breath on my cheek. “Why do you still wear the wolf cloaks?”

“When the first Woodsmen chased the Wolf Tribe into the forest, most of them died,” I reply. My voice is thick with sleep, each word a labor. “The men were warriors, so the king’s soldiers killed them. It was only the women and children left. The soldiers thought that they would be eaten, or die of hunger and cold, but they didn’t. Their wolf cloaks kept them warm, and they built their villages in the safety of the forest.”

“That’s why . . .” Gáspár murmurs.

“That’s why it’s the women who have magic,” I finish, blinking into the filmy dark. “That’s why we pray for nothing so much as we pray for more baby girls to be born.”

Gáspár is silent for so long that I wonder if he’s fallen back to sleep. When he does speak at last, his words shiver along my throat. “You are an oddity, then.”

“That’s an awfully kind way of putting it.”

“Maybe it means you can be closer to our god,” he says, “because you’re further away from your own.”