Page 40 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Szabín’s grip only tightens. “No Southerner has ever come to Kaleva without hunger in their eyes.”

I want to reply that being from Keszi hardly makes me a Southerner, but Szabín’s meaning is plain: to her, we are all Southerners. I steal a quick glance at Gáspár below, still holding fast to the ladder, and he looks back up at me in bewilderment.

“I’m already quite full of reindeer meat, thanks to Tuula,” I say, and smile as sweetly as I can manage. Szabín’s scowl only deepens. “What’s the use of renouncing your oath, sister, if you treat every pagan you meet with wariness and reproach?”

“You are the only one I’ve ever met,” Szabín says. She has the same muzzled disdain as Gáspár in the earliest days of our journey, when he alternated only between admonishing me for my barbarity and fretting over the state of his soul. “And you’ve done nothing to earn my trust.”

“I’ve done nothing to earn your ire either,” I say. The wind snarls past us with a renewed ferocity, shaking the ladder, and if Gáspár hadn’t been holding it from below I might have fallen. I have the odd, unbidden feeling that if I did fall, he would move to catch me. “It seems ill fitting for someone who shares their bed with a Juvvi to curl their lip at me. Do you take off your pendant before your coupling?”

My words are enough to unbalance her, to make her hold slacken at last. I wrench myself free, leaving a few hairs of my wolf cloak behind in her fingers, and hurry the rest of the way down the ladder. When my boots touch the snow I see that Szabín is still staring at me from above, her eyes narrowed, thin as gashes.

“What did she say to you?” Gáspár asks.

“Morbid Patritian dramatics,” I reply, voice short. Her words have pricked me in an unexpectedly tender place, or perhaps it’s only a deeper and older ember that she blew to life. Szabín is less a foe and more a fool, for believing that a Patritian could ever live in sated, happy peace with a Juvvi. Someone’s blade will swing between them eventually, or their own rages will burn Tuula’s hut to the ground. There is a small part of me that bristles with the knowledge that I am just as much a fool for ever finding comfort in the arms of a Woodsman. I turn up my hood again and face my gaze forward.

In daylight, the lake is as smooth as a polished silver coin, and the reflections of the dark trees are rippled on its surface. They are warped into something smaller and more comprehensible now, a tree I could have climbed as a child back in Keszi.

I step over their reflections as we walk, the ice groaning and creaking under our feet, but nothing breaks. I can’t even see the hole where I fell through, or the lacework of cracks. The ice has stitched itself back together like white silk over a black tear.

When we finish our crossing I could kiss the hard, solid ground in relief, even despite the ceaseless danger of the wood, thrumming as if with its own green-white heartbeat. Wreathed in fog, the forest is unchanged: there are the huge trees, lichen-thick and turned dark with snow melt, the frost glittering on each pine needle like strewn glass.

I remember the certainty I felt only a little over a day ago, some unnamable instinct flaring in my chest as I stared up at the tangle of branches, all knitted together like the weave of a basket, blue sky scarcely bleeding through. I feel none of that same certainty now. There is only Nándor’s name gliding through my mind, and the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days pattering after it like a hunting dog trailing its quarry. I press my palm against the nearest trunk, but if I ever did have some primal witch’s sense, it is gone now.

Despair looses in me. “I don’t know anymore. I thought the turul would be here, but now . . .”

Gáspár’s expression doesn’t shift; it’s as if my words have glanced off him. There is only the same hard look in his eyes, as if he had scarcely expected anything less. I don’t know why that, his disappointment, wounds me worse than anything.

Then, a flicker in his eye. “Do you hear that?”

I pause, balled fist falling to my side. It’s the ground, not the trees, that’s throbbing beneath our feet, and all of a sudden the wind has gone silent. I open my mouth to reply, but the words shrivel in my throat as a giant hand curls around the trunk nearest me, its fingers the precise color and texture of the bark. The hand twists for a moment to find its purchase, and then it wrenches the tree from its roots, flinging it upward into the oblivious gray sky.

The creature standing before me has no eyes, just two misshapen slits in the corrugated bark of its face. Its grizzled beard is made from garlands of pine needles and dead leaves, held together with sticky yellow sap. Its body is as thick as two trees, dovetailed, and its arms and legs are fat with moss and rot. A single bird circles its head, as if looking for a place to nest among the animate foliage.

I am still staring, openmouthed and dumb, when its fingers wrap around my torso and lift me into the air.

Gáspár shouts my name, those three syllables that shocked me so completely the night before, and then I hear the rasp of metal as he draws his ax. The creature turns me over in its hands, letting me slip from its grasp and then catching me again, like a cat with some curious plaything. Every time the ground comes rushing up at me my stomach roils in nauseated protest, but I am too rattled to even scream, much less try to reach for my inscrutable new magic.

I am overwhelmed only by my own desperate stupidity when the creature picks me up by my cloak, threadlike in its giant fingers, and holds me above its open mouth. Its breath reeks of burning flesh and rotted wood and a few tears prick at the corners of my eyes, futile and doomed. Gáspár’s ax clangs furiously against the creature’s wooden leg, and the immediacy of his action shocks me now: there’s no hesitation, not like the way his blade faltered in the tent with Kajetán.

And then, inexplicably, another voice rings out sharp and clear: “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”

The creature pauses, letting me dangle squirming from its fingers. The bark of its face crumples like a furrowed brow. With its free hand it scratches its head, puzzled—looking, for a moment, quite human.

Tuula is a brightly colored speck in the snow. She repeats, “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”

The creature’s eye-slits narrow. When I slip from its grasp, I squeeze my own eyes shut, bracing to hit the ground hard. But the impact is muffled, muted. I open my eyes and find myself draped across Bierdna’s back. The bear twists its head around and sniffs at me, and my breath catches on the words thank you. When have I begun to imagine that it can understand me?

Gáspár freezes halfway in his path toward me, ax held tight, face pale. When he looks me up and down I don’t think I am inventing the concern in his eye, but he stops himself before he reaches my side.

I slide off the bear, still gasping. Tuula looks down her nose at me, arms folded, Szabín at her back. Once I can manage to speak, I can only ask, “What is that?”

“Just one of our pesky, awful wood giants,” Tuula says. “They’re very strong, as you can see, but very stupid. If you tell them a riddle, they’ll be stuck for ages trying to solve it, and stand still until finally they forget what you said in the first place.”

I just stare up at her, miserable and cowed. True to her word, the creature is rooted to the ground, still scratching its wooden head.

“It’s a river, by the way,” Tuula goes on.

“A what?”