Page 4 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“I suspected,” Virág admits. “But I couldn’t know with certainty. I also thought they might perish on their route. I thought perhaps the king would change his mind. But a vision is a vision. Now we don’t have much time.”

I open my mouth to say something, anything, but Virág’s fingers jerk roughly through my hair, smoothing the knots and tangles. I let out a feeble noise of protest. There’s a slow panic seeping into my belly.

Virág uncaps a small vial and pours its contents into her hands. It looks like white dust and smells sickly sweet. She works the mixture into my hair as if she were kneading dough for fried flatbread.

“Powdered asphodel,” she says. “It will turn your hair white.”

“Surely you don’t expect the Woodsmen to be deceived by a bit of dye,” Zsófia scoffs.

My stomach twists, sharp as a knife. “Virág . . .”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at me. She turns to Zsófia, instead.

“The Woodsmen are not expecting Katalin,” she says. “They are merely expecting a seer. Still, you will need to forge some silver.”

With an enormous, persecuted sigh, Zsófia leans over and begins to sing—too quietly for me to make out the words, but I know the tune at once. It’s the song of Vilmötten. Before doing his great deeds and making deals with gods, Vilmötten was a bard, wandering from town to town with his kantele strapped to his back, hoping to make enough coin for bread and wine. That was the part of the story I liked the best—the part where the hero was just a man.

It’s the same song that my mother used to sing to me, cocooned in the safety of our shared hut while thunder and lightning skimmed across the black summer sky. Before I became Virág’s reluctant ward.

Before the Woodsmen took my mother from me.

I’ve only felt fear like this once. It comes back to me in flashes, the memories I’ve buried down deep. My mother’s hand, slipping from mine. The dull gleam of her gray cloak as she vanished into the woods. The lock of hair she’d pressed into my palm, mere moments before she left me for good.

I try to cry out, but the sound gets strangled somewhere in my chest, and comes out a half-formed sob.

I don’t care that I’m weeping in front of Katalin and Zsófia. I don’t care that Virág might lash me for it; I don’t care that this is precise, damning proof of what a coward I really am. All I can see is my mother’s face, bleary in my fifteen-year-old memory, fading, fading, fading.

Virág grabs hold of my chin. Through the rheum of tears her mouth is set, her eyes hard.

“Listen to me,” she snarls. “We all must do what we can to keep the tribe alive. We cannot allow the king to have the power of a seer. Do you understand?”

“No,” I manage, my throat beginning to close. “I don’t understand why you want to march me to my death.”

Virág lets go of me with a sharp breath, defeated. But the next moment, she’s thrusting a small piece of polished metal toward me. I stare at my own face within it, slightly warped by the curves of the forged mirror. Katalin’s face hovers behind my own, two polar stars in the darkness of the hut, our hair gleaming like new frost. Mine is not quite white—more of a dingy gray, sooty as liquid steel.

Perhaps it’s close enough to swindle a Woodsman, but that’s where the similarities end. I’m short and thick-limbed, while Katalin is willow-tree tall, her narrow shoulders shooting up like a proud, thin trunk all long fingers and delicate wrist bones. Her skin has a milky translucence, the blue veins faintly visible, like a webbed leaf shot through with sunlight. My hair is—was—a reddish brown, as if my mother’s russet mane had been wrung out like water and sieved down to me, my eyes a murky green, my mouth small and scowling. My nose and cheeks are perpetually pink, and there’s a grid of whiskery scars across my chin from running face-first into a thicket.

I expect to see her preening, glowing. But Katalin’s lovely face looks as horror-struck as mine. In this moment only, we are perfect mirror images of each other.

Charlatan, I want to say. An hour ago you wished I would be taken.

I reach down to touch the braid in my left pocket, but it brings me no comfort this time.

“Évike.” It’s Katalin’s voice, small and hushed like I’ve never heard it before. I watch her in the mirror, but I don’t turn around. “I didn’t mean—”

“You did mean it,” I say, my jaw clenched. “Or else you’re a liar. What’s worse, a liar or a monster?”

She doesn’t answer. I expect Virág to reprimand me again, but even she is silent now too. Zsófia’s singing has trailed off, the last note of the melody still yet to be hummed. In the quiet space left by her unfinished song, I hear it—the sound of hooves on the ground.

The villagers are gathered into neat rows, backs straight and chins held high as they stare into the mouth of the woods. Women and girls in front, men and boys behind. All blades are sheathed, all arrows held flush in their quivers. The mosquito-flecked evening settles over us like thick linen. Virág leads me through the very center of the crowd, parting the girls in their pristine cloaks. The women and girls all have two faces—the wolf’s and their own. Their human faces are schooled into masks, stoic and silent, and even the youngest know well not to shiver. But as I pass between them, their lips purse and their eyes widen. Boróka lets out a tiny gasp, and then claps her hand over her mouth. I can hardly bear to look at her.

And then I can only look at the Woodsmen.

They step forward, through our cowed and impotent trees. Four of them, on obsidian horses, each mount’s breast branded with the seal of their holy order. Each Woodsman wears a dolman of finely embroidered silk, and over it, a black suba, the same shaggy woolen cloak favored by herders on the Little Plain. It almost makes me want to laugh, to think of the Woodsmen as humble shepherds. They carry no swords, but there are great steel axes hanging at their hips, so heavy it seems a miracle that they don’t topple sideways off their horses.

How did my mother feel, when she saw the horrible glint of those axes?

Three of the Woodsmen have close-cropped hair, mangled scalps visible beneath the tufts that grew back scraggly and uneven. As boys, they grow their hair out long, and then cut it on their eighteenth name days, the same day that the king puts the axes in their hands. They burn all their long hair in a bonfire, sparks and awful smell shooting up into the night sky. It’s their sacrifice to the Prinkepatrios, and in return, he promises to answer their prayers.