Page 39 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“If your mother were alive,” I ask, pausing to draw a shallow breath, “out there somewhere, would you ever stop looking for her?”

Gáspár blinks. After another beat of silence, he says, “No. But I would hope that she was out there looking for me too.”

“What if she didn’t know?” I press on. “What if she thought that you were dead?”

“This is sounding less hypothetical by the second,” Gáspár says, but his tone is gentle.

Hands shaking, I pull the coin from my pocket and hold it out to him.

“Can you read it?” My voice sounds thin, almost unintelligible in the wind. “There’s Régyar on it.”

Gáspár takes the coin and turns it over. I realize for the first time that his hand is ungloved, bare. “It only says the king’s name. Bárány János. I can’t read the Yehuli.”

“I could,” I whisper. “Once.”

I hear the shift in Gáspár’s breathing. “I thought you said you never knew your father.”

It was just a small lie, and I’m surprised he even remembered. I shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut as if I can will all of it back to me, half-forgotten memories pulsing like distant torchlight.

“He came every year when I was young. Virág and the other women didn’t like it, but he stayed with my mother and me in our hut. He brought us trinkets from Király Szek, and books. Long scrolls. When he unraveled them, they stretched all the way from the door of our hut to the hearth in the corner. He started teaching me the letters, alef and bet and gimel . . .” The memory winks away from me, but I swear I can hear old parchment crinkling. “There was a story of a clever trickster queen and a wicked minister, and when he told it he gave the minister a silly, pinched voice, so he sounded like an old woman with a stuffed nose.”

I let out a short laugh, and when I look at Gáspár he’s smiling faintly too. But there’s something stiff and guarded in it, like a rabbit sensing a snare.

“He wasn’t there, when my mother was taken.” My voice grows smaller with every word. “The Woodsmen came for her, and the other men and women burned everything that he’d given us, all the scrolls and stories. I buried the coin in the woods and dug it up later.”

“What about your father?” Gáspár prompts, gentle still. “Why wouldn’t he come back for you?”

“Because he thought I was dead,” I say. I feel the oddest flood of relief as I say it, like the power I thought the words might have is nothing but ash on the wind. “And he had every right to think it, in truth. When a woman with a young child, a boy, is taken, it’s custom to leave the child out in the woods and let the cold and the wolves at him. There’s hardly enough food to go around as it is, but when the child is a girl, they find enough to spare until she grows into her magic. Everyone in Keszi already knew that I had none, and wasn’t worth a bit of bread from their table.”

Something snaps, lightning in the air. I double over, gasping for breath, as the power of the story is dredged out of me like a clump of dead leaves, trapped so long beneath the rushing water. Bent at the waist, I cough and splutter, and then Gáspár lays his hand on my back. I can feel his fingers tensing through my wolf cloak, like he can’t decide whether to snatch it away or let it stay.

“Virág saved me,” I manage. “Even though I was a terrible, sullen, mean child who always had a red nose and skinned knees.” Gáspár opens his mouth, but I go on fiercely before he can get in a word, “And don’t tell me I haven’t changed a bit.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

Stomach unsettled, I reach for the coin in my pocket before remembering that he still has it, bright as a pooling of sunlight in his cupped palm. He holds it gingerly, like it’s something extraordinarily precious, even though one piece of gold can’t be worth very much to a prince, disinherited or not.

“You know that my father is in Király Szek,” I say. The wind has lulled to only the feeblest wailing, and it sounds like an animal orphaned on the ice. “Nándor will drive him out, won’t he? Given the first chance? And now no one will be there to stop it.”

Gáspár hesitates. I hear his teeth come together, his jaw shifting to its familiar clench. Then he nods.

I look down at my own hands. In the moonlight, they are pale as lamb tallow, knuckles nicked with tiny scars. There is the absence of my pinky, the black space where it once was suffused with a power I still don’t understand. And then there is Gáspár, tall and silent as a sentinel beside me. If the moon slivers away and the wind picks up again with enough force to blister skin, I wonder if it will be dark and cold enough for him to want to hold me again, and for us both to promise ourselves we will break apart at the first rosy band of dawn.

“Don’t be rash, Évike,” he says softly, and then he drops the coin into my hand. I squeeze it so tightly that its scored edges press feathered imprints across my palm, and when I finally tuck it back in my pocket, I can still feel the heat his skin has left on it.

Chapter Ten

I sleep uneasily, in a thrall of worry, belly quaking. Szabín’s words are looping through my mind, and my teeth are gritted around the shape of Nándor’s name. I’m shivering even under the reindeer pelt, my body contorting itself into a shape that fits Gáspár’s perfectly, a flesh memory of our nights spent in the frozen forest. I glance so often at his sleeping form that I’m disgusted with myself, and I drag my pelt toward the bear, instead. A bear is an enemy I can more easily understand, and fear or loathe accordingly. Even snoring, I can see all its teeth.

A purple dawn lifts off the ice, sunrise steaming behind a haze of clouds and fog. Gáspár turns on his side, eye open, and meets my gaze at last. I feel a twitch of shame, wondering if he saw me moving and thrashing through the night. The memory of our conversation is an insistent hum in the back of my mind, like the soft lap of water against the lakeshore. I push myself up, careful not to rouse the bear, and crouch beside him.

“Seven days,” I whisper. “There’s still time to find the turul, but only if we leave now.”

Gáspár nods and rises, a muscle feathering in his jaw. Wordless, he reaches for his ax, propped up against the woodpile. I have gotten quite good at deciphering his moody silences and I can tell something is caught in him like a burr in a dog’s coat, but I can’t press him for it now. From the small hut’s second room, Tuula and Szabín still haven’t stirred. I raise the hood of my cloak and push open the door, cold stinging my cheeks and nose.

He starts to climb down the rope ladder, and as soon as his feet touch the ice below I follow. I haven’t gotten far before I feel something snatch at my hood from above, and with a choked gasp I nearly slip from the rung. When my hood falls back I only see Szabín staring down at me, her lips pressed angrily, pendant glinting with a sharp and vicious light.

“Let go of me,” I bite out. “Or are we prisoners here?”