Page 41 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“The answer to the riddle.” Her voice hitches. “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves. A river. I suppose you ought to know, since you’re planning on braving the woods alone. I won’t relish saving your insipid life again, wolf-girl.”

I swallow the insult, at least half-deserved, and get to my feet without breaking my stare. Reindeer and crows, wood giants and bears. Tuula has knowledge and magic that make the North look like water in a cupped hand, something that can be held fast and close. If she were to draw a map of Kaleva, it would be marked with paths that circumvent the monsters and moving trees, lines that cleave through danger to safety. Even the women of my village could never dream of moving through the forest with such assurance.

I clench my four-fingered hand, still pale with its untested power. Tuula is watching me with her black hawk’s glare, as if she can even see into the animal part of my mind, can see the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days, or the hunger in my eyes. Szabín was right about one thing—no one would come to such a bitter, brutal place unless they were desperate.

“You know where it is, don’t you?” I say, pushing to my feet. “The turul.”

Tuula’s voice comes back sharp and quick. “The turul is not for you to find.”

The briskness of her reply makes heat bloom in my chest. I stride toward her, even as the bear growls, showing her yellow teeth. “You knew we were here for the turul. All this time and you didn’t say a word.”

“Of course I knew,” Tuula snaps. “You wouldn’t trudge this far north except to make some reckless grab for power. And the Woodsmen all want the same thing. If they’re not trying to stamp out the Juvvi, they’re trying to steal the magic that keeps us safe from them.”

I turn to Gáspár, heart pounding. He hasn’t taken a step closer toward us, but his hand has gone to his ax. Storm clouds are brushing across his face.

“Why bother saving us, then?” I bite out. “Why not leave us to die?”

Tuula’s mouth puckers, like she’s tasted some fruit gone foul. “I told you, wolf-girl. I’m not entirely black-hearted. Woodsmen are human, underneath those ridiculous uniforms and all their fanatically devout loathing. I hoped that in your gratitude I might persuade you to give up this senseless quest.”

Her voice is relentlessly smooth, and it makes an awful helplessness well up inside of me. Gáspár’s words are circling my head like a flock of crows, my father’s coin burning me through the fabric of my cloak.

“You may be content hiding here in the corner of the world,” I say, and this time I look toward Szabín, too, scowling under her hood, “but there are so many people who don’t have the protection of the ice and snow and magic. If the turul is the only thing that can match Nándor’s power, you’re damning them by concealing it.”

“I’m not concealing anything.” Tuula steps toward the bear, resting her hand on the breadth of its huge shoulders. “The turul is not for you to find. And perhaps I made a mistake, not leaving you to freeze. The prince has gotten his poison into you—you might as well swear fealty to their god, too, because your village will not take you back if you deliver the turul right into the hands of the king.”

Rage sweeps through me with such a viciousness that it makes my eyes water. I look at Gáspár, blank-faced, stupidly. I have tried for so long not to think of Virág, not to think of the turul tumbling out of the sky, my arrow in its breast. But I have always known, of course, the truth: that killing the turul will sever me from Keszi for good. I cannot go limping back to Virág with its blood still wet on my hands; she would let the wolves at me this time, and not feel a twitch of guilt.

I open my mouth, but no words rise from my throat. The bear huffs, moisture beading on its black nose. And then Gáspár says, “It’s no use.”

Words rise quickly, furiously. “What?”

“It’s no use prodding her; she won’t reveal the turul.” His voice is hard and flat, and he gives Tuula a flint-eyed stare. “Besides, we’ve lost too much time already. Saint István’s feast is in seven days, and if I linger any longer here, I won’t be able to stop him.”

“You said you couldn’t stop him without the turul.” In turn, my voice sounds as wavering as the wind. “We struck a bargain.”

“I know.”

He says nothing more, and I can only look at him: his sharp, square jaw, his skin like polished bronze. His dark lashes and petulant lips. Only he’s not scowling now: his eye is steady, but almost too bright.

“It’s not my fault,” I manage, thinking of the Woodsmen running through our village, of all the ways that the king would find to punish Keszi. “Your father—”

“I know,” Gáspár says again, in a hushed, plying tone, like he’s trying to coax a rabbit from its burrow and into his trap. “And I swear to you that I will keep my father from having his vengeance on your village, but I have to return to Király Szek now. There’s no more time to waste.”

The tenor of his words makes me feel child-small, my face pink against the blister of the wind. “And what am I to do?”

“Go home,” he says.

For a moment, I let myself imagine it. I think of dragging myself back through the tundra, across the Little Plain, past the villagers with their pitchforks and their burning eyes, the word witch on their tongues. I think of facing down the monsters of Ezer Szem and bursting through the tree line, panting and gasping, and seeing only the other villagers’ empty stares. Katalin will breathe her blue flame at me—but not before tearing her wolf cloak off my back. The boys I’ve coupled with will look away, flushing in shame. Boróka will make her wheedling protests. I can’t even let myself think of Virág. And they will all hate me twice over, for not dying when I was supposed to.

And then, without my willing it, another flood of images comes volleying up. I think of Gáspár’s arms braced around me inside the damp tree hollow, roots holding us in that timeless suspension. His soft, weary voice in my ear, the pine-salt smell of him. Him diving into the ice after me, and putting his own cloak around me even as he froze. My stomach folds with shame. I’d told him how much they all loathed me, how they wanted to leave me to be eaten, even confessed the awful secret of my waning grief: that sometimes I couldn’t remember my mother at all. I sheathed my claws and hid my teeth for him, and now he wants me to go soft and toothless back to Virág with her reed whip, and Katalin with her fire, and all the other villagers with their pitiless gazes.

Anything I can think to say feels abysmally stupid. So I turn away from Gáspár, away from Tuula and Szabín and the infernal bear, and trample through the snow, toward the lake’s pale, unblinking eye.

The way Virág’s story goes, Vilmötten left his home for Kaleva, nothing but his kantele strapped to his back. He traveled for so long that he found himself no longer in the Middle-World, the mortal world, but in the Under-World, Ördög’s kingdom. All around him he saw the souls of the departed, dead of illness or old age or grievous injury, their skin black and fetid, worms writhing in the sockets of their missing eyes.

No mortal had ever traveled to the Under-World and returned. Vilmötten knew that. But he began to pluck his kantele and sing, a song so beautiful that it moved Ördög, the god of death himself, to tears.

“You may go,” he told Vilmötten. “But you can never return.”