Page 37 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“How many days until Saint István’s feast?” I ask, my voice more uncertain than I want it to be.

Gáspár rolls his sleeve back down, still facing away from me. “Too few.”

Tuula is watching us with lidded eyes as the bear licks her hand clean, its shoulder blades as huge as boulders. Its ear twitches, like it’s trying to rid itself of a fly. Seeing the beast cowed like that, demure as a house cat, makes an idea take root in my mind. Tuula splayed a reindeer on its belly with just the touch of her hand, and summoned a murder of crows with two notes of a nameless lullaby. What would it take, I wonder, for her to call down something bigger and more reticent?

Something luminous with the gods’ magic?

I am opening my mouth to speak when the door clatters open, letting in a vicious squall and another girl with it. She is bundled in reindeer fur, hood pulled up over her head.

The bear lurches to its feet, snuffling around the hem of the girl’s cloak. Out of habit, I reach into my pocket for my knife before remembering that it was taken from me. I find my coin instead, and clamp my fingers around it. Beside me, Gáspár stiffens, reaching for his ax.

“Szabín,” Tuula says, rising. “Our guests are awake. Évike and Gáspár—”

The woman—Szabín—flicks off her hood, but she doesn’t stop to greet Tuula. Instead, she crosses the room in one long stride and drops to her knees in front of Gáspár. As she does, her cloak flaps open, revealing a loose brown tunic and the cord of a necklace. Its pendant, a sheet of metal hammered into the shape of a three-pronged spear, gleams with firelight in its grooves and edges.

“What are you doing?” Tuula demands. “Don’t humble yourself to a Woodsman.”

The revulsion in her voice is blatant, unbidden. Gáspár doesn’t flinch.

“He’s no ordinary Woodsman,” Szabín says. Her eyes are wide and beseeching, even as Gáspár looks down at her in his blank bewilderment. “May Godfather Life keep you, my prince.”

From across the room, Tuula makes a choking sound. Realization smooths the furrow in Gáspár’s brow, and he offers Szabín a hand.

“May Godfather Death spare you,” he says. “Do not kneel for me, Daughter.”

Szabín takes his hand and rises to her feet. When he lets go, her sleeve slides down her wrist and nestles in the crook of her elbow, and I can’t help but stare in horror: every inch of her skin is mangled pink and white with scar tissue, a hundred raised marks that make Gáspár’s blemishes look as innocent as a bramble’s needling. Tuula’s face is twisted with sorrow, not shock. Gáspár’s eye hardens.

Szabín quickly rolls down her sleeve to hide the scarred flesh, a blush deepening her exceptionally pale face.

“Forgive me, my prince,” she says to Gáspár. “I saved you, but I cannot serve you. I am no one’s Daughter anymore.”

Szabín sits down by the fire, her shoulders up around her ears and her hands folded in her lap. Unlike Tuula, she looks a true Northerner: her eyes are two pools of ice-melt and her hair is pale as wheat chaff, shorn close to her scalp. It’s almost like a Woodsman’s. There is something harsh and roughhewn about her face, something almost masculine. From behind or in half-light, I might have mistaken her for a boy. The bear rests its black nose on the toe of Szabín’s boot, eyelids drooping.

“I’ve seen you before,” Szabín whispers, staring at Gáspár. She must not have recognized him at first, when she found him on the ice, all pale and no scowl on his face. “You came to visit our monastery in Kuihta with your father. Back then, you had two eyes.”

“Things change,” Gáspár says shortly.

“Yes, they do. That was when I thought I could be a faithful servant to the Prinkepatrios. I prayed every day that I was in Kuihta, every hour. Supplicants came to us for healing—fevers and boils, shattered bones. They needed my blood for it. Eventually I grew weary of bleeding for others. I wanted something for myself.”

I can hardly bear to look at her now, knowing what’s beneath her robes. Gáspár pulls his suba tighter around himself.

“Yet you still wear his symbol.” He gestures to her necklace. “Do you still pray to Godfather Life? Does He still answer?”

“Sometimes.” Szabín runs her thumb down the length of the iron pendant. “But the moment I decided to run, there was a change. He still answers my call, but His voice is distant. It used to feel as though I was whispering in His ear, but now it feels as though I’m shouting to Him across a lake in the snow.”

I remember the way Gáspár’s spoken prayers failed him when he tried to light the fire on the Little Plain. Perhaps each step he took farther north with a wolf-girl at his side made the threads noosing him to the Prinkepatrios weather and snap too. The thought drops in my stomach, heavy with unexpected guilt.

“Kuihta.” Gáspár says the Northern word carefully in his Southerner’s accent, as if it’s an ember on his tongue. “That’s the monastery where my brother was fostered. Nándor.”

A shadow falls over Szabín’s face. “Yes. I knew him well.”

The air in the room shimmers, the way it does in the languid summer heat. There is a swell of silence that it seems no one wants to fill until Gáspár says, “You must have seen the moment that he began to make himself a saint.”

Szabín’s fingers curl around the prongs of her pendant with such rapid certainty that I can tell it’s an old habit, not quite shaken. “Every Son and Daughter in Kuihta witnessed it.”

“Then it’s true?” Gáspár’s voice is flat, but his throat bobs. “I always thought it was a story invented for the Érsek’s pleasure.”

“No,” says Szabín. “I was there, that day on the ice.”