Page 36 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Well, Gáspár, Évike”—she nods at each of us in turn—“will you help me slaughter Bierdna’s supper?”

Tuula’s hut is raised ten feet off the ground, straddling a quartet of oak trees that look like chicken legs, the way their roots are splayed into the frozen earth. We climb down on a rope ladder, which swings raggedly in the wind. I wonder how Tuula managed to haul the firewood up the ladder, much less our unconscious bodies. She’s as short as I am and far leaner. I don’t even try to contemplate how the bear got up there.

We haven’t gone very far from the hut when something begins to take shape in the distance, two mounds in the snow, like bleary thumbprints. I squint and squint against the snarling wind. As we approach I see a pair of horses, one black and one white, lashing their tails and snorting.

My wolf hood tumbles down my back as I turn to Tuula. “How did you find them?”

“It wasn’t easy,” she says. “Horses tend to resist my charms.”

I hold my peace about her charms.

Letting out a breath, I press my hand against my white mare’s muzzle. She snuffs into my palm, a sound of contrition, as if she’s trying to apologize for abandoning me. It surprises me how grateful I am to see her again, not just a relic from now-distant Keszi, but a means of escape, should I choose it. Tuula doesn’t appear to have a horse of her own. I find myself wondering how fast a bear can run.

Gáspár has his hand braced on his horse’s neck, but he’s watching Tuula with a tight mouth.

We continue across the plain, toward a black mass moving in the snow. We pace closer and I see that it’s not one mass but many, a shifting herd of reindeer with silvery coats. Their heads are bowed, chewing at the sparse tufts of grass that have speared through the frost. As Tuula approaches them their heads lift, limpid eyes following her in a dreamlike stupor. My skin prickles. Beneath his suba, Gáspár’s shoulders tense.

Tuula’s skirt blows out behind her, casting a dark shadow over the ice. She holds out her hand to the closest reindeer, and it saunters dutifully toward her, nosing her palm. Faster than an eyeblink, its legs buckle beneath it. The beast topples to the ground, its great coronet of antlers rolling unceremoniously in the snow.

“He’s asleep now,” Tuula says, still holding her gaze on its steel-gray ruff. “Woodsman, why don’t you make it quick?”

She returned Gáspár’s ax to him inside her hut, handing over the huge blade without a quiver of hesitation. It only made me trust her less. If she didn’t fear an armed Woodsman, she was either marvelously stupid or unfathomably powerful. Staring at the crumpled reindeer makes my mouth go dry.

Gáspár swings his ax with a determination and precision that surprises me. Until now he’s wielded it clumsily, hesitantly. Blood leaks in jagged rivulets down the snow, following the slight decline of the plain and pooling at my feet. It grafts onto the reindeer’s fur, limning each silver fiber, the way Peti’s blood hardened on my wolf cloak. Tuula reaches down to grasp the dead creature’s antlers, and realization floods me like a trough filling with rainwater.

“You’re Juvvi,” I say.

Tuula turns toward me slowly. “And what does it mean to you, wolf-girl?”

I only know what is threaded into Virág’s stories of heroes and gods, her blinkered histories. I know that when the first Northern scouts rode into Kaleva, they found the Juvvi already there, rows and rows of reindeer at their backs. They said the land was theirs, and that it had been given to them by the gods. As more Northern settlers trickled in, they resented the Juvvi for squandering the land, using it only for hunting and herding and fishing instead of farming. They pushed the Juvvi to the scraggly edges of the Far North, and then the Patrifaith pushed them even farther. Virág says that the Juvvi have a magic of their own, some boon from their gods to help them survive in this barren place, even when a series of Patritian kings tried desperately to snuff them out.

“It means you loathe the Woodsmen,” I say finally, raising my voice over the keening of the wind. “Why did you save us?”

Tuula’s gaze shifts to Gáspár, his gloved fingers curled rigidly around the handle of his ax. I see the familiar gleam of manacled hatred in her eyes, the lip curl of poison swallowed so many times. After a moment, she looks back at me.

“When I found you on the ice, I knew you would survive,” she says. “You were as cold as the Half-Sea in deep winter, but there was still color in your cheeks, and your breath was warm against my hand. He was scarcely breathing at all, and his lips were bone white. He had taken off his cloak and used it to cover you. I knew that if a Woodsman had tried to give his life to save a wolf-girl, he would be willing to make peace with a Juvvi too.”

A murder of crows tracks us from overhead, their cries glancing off the ice and echoing for miles. Tuula hums two lonely notes of a song I don’t know and the crows descend, grasping the fur of the dead reindeer in their grizzled talons. They glide up again, the flutter of their wings like a staggered heartbeat, and lift the reindeer up to the threshold of Tuula’s hut. When the crows depart again, they leave a gift of obsidian feathers, snatched up quickly and swallowed by the wind.

Tuula mounts the rope ladder, then looks back at us expectantly. I stand with my boots planted in the snow, jaw set. I’m not sure how wise it is to follow her back into the bear’s den, but the empty plain spools before me for miles, blisteringly white. I remember closing my eyes against the fist clench of cold and not expecting to open them again. Better to face the bear, I decide, and wrap my hand around the first rung of the rope ladder.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting when we reach the top. Tuula offers us food and she doesn’t try to wheedle the ax from Gáspár’s grasp. She feeds Bierdna hunks of reindeer meat by hand, pink and raw, blood dampening the fur around the bear’s mouth. Its incisors are gleaming like slender arrowheads in the firelight.

Gáspár doesn’t touch his food, and he doesn’t speak either. He stares into the hearth, his good eye angled away from me.

I half expected him to try to refute Tuula’s story. Perhaps he thought we were both doomed and it mattered little whose heartbeat faltered first. I have very nearly convinced myself of this when my traitor body turns toward him and my traitor lips part and whisper, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do it for your gratitude.”

It’s the same thing he told me so many days ago in the woods with Peti, and it makes me twice as angry now. “Is it another black mark on your soul, to save a wolf-girl’s life? If I’m made to stomach any more of your pious glowering, I’ll start to wish you had left me to drown.”

“No,” he says curtly, without meeting my eyes. “Leave it alone, Évike.”

The beats of my name are like three pulses of light: quick, moribund. I blink and they have vanished. For a moment I think I imagined him saying it, imagined him calling me anything but wolf-girl. But I know I didn’t imagine his body pressing along the length of mine, all those nights on the ice, or the heat of him as we slept in the cloister of roots, breathing soil. My only imaginings are what scroll across the insides of my eyelids: my hand on the column of his bare throat, thumb brushing the blade of his collarbone. I only allow my most prudish dreams to surface now. Anything more will make my stomach curl black with shame.

If Ördög were anything like the Prinkepatrios he would rescind my newfound magic, like a hawk snatching up a mouse, for thinking of a Woodsman this way. I look down at my right hand, bereft of its littlest finger, and feel his threads tighten around my wrist.

Gáspár is examining his own wrist, the soft stretch of skin where his cut had been. The memory of his confession makes my heart quicken, even more when I remember the vow I made in return.