Page 33 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Gáspár stops. He turns toward me in slow, careful increments, teeth gritted so tightly I can see the pulse of muscle along his jaw. He doesn’t speak.

“Maybe you think me more of a wolf than before,” I press on, heart pounding, “and less a girl. But you can’t look at me with your one eye as if I’m a monster for doing something terrible so I could finally have something of my own. You know what the price of power is. You know better than anyone. We’re the same now.”

The wind gives a blood-chilling widow’s wail. Gáspár stares and stares, black hair feathering across his forehead. Then he starts to laugh.

I stare back, blinking in bewilderment. If he was trying to diffuse my rage, it worked—I’m too baffled to be angry.

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand, wolf-girl,” he says, once his laughter has died.

Wounded by his mirth, a sickly cruelty comes over me. “So you do believe you have something in common with me after all. A trifling wolf-girl and the Régyar prince—”

“That’s enough,” he growls.

I haven’t seen this much fire in him since we confronted Kajetán in his tent. Gáspár’s black eye is cold again, pitiless, and seeing it makes me put on my own armor in return. Spitefully, I reach for the one thing I had sworn to myself I wouldn’t use against him, because it would damn me too. “For such a pious Woodsman you were certainly eager to bed down with me—the cold was as good an excuse as any. It must be quite difficult to be five and twenty and have never come so close to a woman before. I’ll tell you that I look just the same as any blushing Patritian girl under my cloak.”

“Can you never keep your mouth shut?” Gáspár snarls, but there’s a thread of misery running under his rage. His cheeks are tinged pink, and not just from the bite of the wind.

“Only if you admit that you’re wrong. Admit that, in some way, we’re the same.” The words come rushing out with such breathless vigor that I have to stop walking and put my hand on a nearby tree to steady myself.

“Do you want us to be the same?” he asks, eye narrowed. “Is that the great hypocrisy the pagans want us to confess to?”

I don’t know what the other pagans want. I don’t know what I want. All I know is that, for the first time, I feel like I might finally crack the shiny, stubborn facade of him. Gáspár stares down at me, squinting against the wind. My eyes trace the lines of his face, the hills and valleys of muscle and bone. In the past days I have come to recognize the haughty way he draws his breaths and the stubborn clenching of his jaw, and I think of him so often I would recognize even his silhouette if he were only a painted shadow on the wall. For the briefest moment I want to run my finger down his cheek the way that village girl did, only to see how he would respond. I want to do something lewder and worse.

When I finally speak, my voice is hoarse, my throat aching. “Just tell me the truth.”

Gáspár only shakes his head. He cannot guess what sort of lascivious things have been blooming red and hot in my mind. “The truth is so much less than you imagine it to be.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I am so much less than you imagine me to be,” he says. “An honorable Woodsman, a noble prince. You think I plucked out my own eye to have power, when in truth it was taken by force to strip me of it.”

“I don’t have the patience for riddles,” I say, scowling.

“My father cut out my eye, wolf-girl. He cauterized the wound himself before placing the ax in my hand. His way of saying I was better off as a Woodsman than I was as his heir.”

I dig my fingers into the tree bark, wincing as the wood splinters under my nail. “But you’re his only true-born son.”

“And what does that matter, when the enemy’s blood flows through my veins?” He gives a hollow laugh. “The peasants cried out for my father to disinherit me, and Nándor and the Érsek whispered in his ear until one day he finally picked up the knife and took my eye. Only one of the counts, the Kalevan count, ever raised his hand to try and stop it. But the rest would rather see a bastard take the throne than a prince with sullied blood. The king has four other sons, and they are all pure Régyar.”

My shoulders rise and I shut my eyes, as if I can armor myself against the revelation. I wonder if when I open them I will see a Woodsman standing before me, and my fear and loathing will graft onto me like a steel breastplate. But in the darkness behind my eyelids, I can only see Gáspár kneeling, and a blade flashing, and his father blood-drenched and laughing.

“So you do the king’s bidding,” I whisper, “even though he doesn’t think you’re a contender for the crown.”

Gáspár inclines his head, not quite a nod. “He doesn’t think I’m his son, not anymore. He tore out my eye, which meant I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I would never have a chance to earn the blessing of Godfather Life on my own, for a sacrifice given freely. It’s not a sacrifice when you’re chained to the floor, screaming.”

I think of his wrist, latticed with all its little wounds. I think of the way he scorned his title whenever he could and how he swallowed the name Bárány while Kajetán berated him. A breathtaking pain licks through me, worse than any of Virág’s lashings, worse than Kajetán’s thumb against my throat or even the severing of my finger.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though it scarcely seems enough. “For all my stupid slights. You only deserved half of them.”

Gáspár doesn’t laugh or smile, and I didn’t expect him to, but his jaw unclenches, just a little bit. “I understand why you won’t spurn your newfound power, whatever it is. Witch or wolf-girl, I am with you. There’s scarcely more than a week until Saint István’s festival, and we can’t turn back now.”

He sets his gaze upon me, and for the first time, I see only the eye that is, black and blazing, and don’t wonder about the grisly scar where the other one was. Tiny tremors of pain are ribboning from my absent finger, down my hand and up my arm, odd and phantasmal. I open my mouth to reply, but then I look up.

Without noticing, we have walked into a different kind of forest. A forest like Ezer Szem, where every rustle of leaves sounds like whispered words and every footfall on the ground might be the circling of a monster. My hand is on the trunk of a tree as broad as a merchant’s cart, and when I narrow my eyes to try to glimpse the top, my head spins and I stumble back, dry-mouthed.

“This is it,” I whisper. “The turul—it’s here.”

“How do you know?”