Page 42 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

And so Vilmötten was allowed to enter the Middle-World again. But later, when he fell down and cut his hand on a sharp rock, he saw that the cut was not bleeding. The skin had stitched up again in an instant, tight as a drum. Vilmötten looked at his reflection in a lake of ice and saw that all his wrinkles had been smoothed, the gray on his temple dyed black and new. He was young again, and no wound or fever could harm him. Ördög, the god of death, had given Vilmötten the gift of life.

The story is the origin of the other girls’ healing magic, only they are not quite as immaculate as Vilmötten. Their hair still goes silver and their skin still creases with time, just slower than others’. Slower than mine. And the healing takes something from them: I have seen Boróka’s face grow paler and paler as she worked, sweat pearling on her brow, and afterward she was so tired she slept through two sunrises without waking. It almost seemed like it aged her, the work of her magic eating away at the years of her life.

As I skid across the lake, toward the dark mound of Tuula’s hut in the distance, I stare down at my hand with its missing finger. I remember closing my fist over the fire, watching the flames die beneath my touch, and it occurs to me: if the other wolf-girls can make fire and I can snuff it out, it means that perhaps, where they heal, I can hurt.

I’m too afraid to wonder what it will take from me. I clamber up the snowbank, panting hard. Just past her hut, Tuula’s reindeer move in blurs of silver, like clouds drifting. Their antlers are bone grails, holding cupfuls of sky. They are still nosing the ground absently as I approach, their sleek flanks rising and falling with their breath.

The threads around my wrist go taut. I reach my four-fingered hand toward the nearest reindeer, and I almost hesitate. My intent wavers for a moment, and then snaps back again, like a scale righting itself after the weight is lifted. I splay my fingers against its flank, feeling the soft give of its fur.

Moments whip past me, wind snarling. And then the reindeer rears its head and grunts and bolts away from me, but not before I see the burned mark on its side, a red blister in the shape of my hand.

The rest of the herd startles with it, bucking down the plain. I let them shoulder past me, waiting for the repercussion. Waiting for what I have done to echo, for it to reverberate in my ear like a plucked bow string. Nothing. I wait and wait, and I don’t realize that I’m crying until I feel the tears freezing on my cheeks.

If it were so easy as that, I could’ve had power long ago. If I had known, I would have lopped off my finger in a heartbeat. I would have killed all of Katalin’s blue flames, and I would never have lowed for any of Virág’s lashings. I feel like a guileless child that I had to wait for a Woodsman to teach me what it meant to sacrifice. That I hadn’t understood the stories of my own people until I’d spoken them aloud myself, with Gáspár listening.

My people. Katalin would have snatched the words right from my mouth.

I hear the shuffle of footsteps behind me. Quickly, I wipe the frozen tears off my cheeks and turn. Gáspár is pacing across the plain, wind carding through his dark hair. Something hard and hot rises in my throat.

“What an odd reversal of fortune,” I say, as he halts before me. “A Woodsman chasing a wolf-girl back to Keszi.”

“I’m not chasing you,” Gáspár says. His lip twitches, like he’s trying especially hard to keep from scowling. “You are not a seer. The king would have no use for you anyway.”

The old wound still prickles. “I’m not a seer, but I have power. You’ve seen it.”

“An even odder reversal of fortune.” Gáspár’s eye narrows. “A wolf-girl begging for a Woodsman to take her to Király Szek.”

“I’m not begging you,” I say. With a sudden rush of feckless spite, I add, “Would you like it if I did?”

I only said it to make him flush, and it succeeds. His ear tips turn pink, but his gaze is unflinching. “I suppose it depends on what you were begging for.”

My cheeks fill with an answering warmth. I hadn’t expected his rejoinder, or the way he’s looking at me so intently, without blinking.

“I don’t have to beg,” I say. “You can’t stop me. You said that if you knew your mother was alive, you wouldn’t stop looking for her. My father is alive in Király Szek and Nándor has lit a fire at his feet. What else am I to do?”

A long, rough breath comes out of Gáspár’s mouth, as pale as mist in the cold.

“You’re a fool,” he says baldly. “A bigger fool than a Woodsman who thought he might make a bargain with a wolf-girl, or who thought he might find the turul. Whatever power you have, it’s not enough—it’s not nearly enough. Nándor is a worse threat, it’s true. But there is no safety for a wolf-girl in my father’s city either. I swore once that I would tell you what the king does to the women that he takes.”

My fingers curl into my palm. “And will you?”

“No,” he says. “But I will tell you that when I was a boy, my father had decided that my mother shouldn’t leave the castle. He had a number of chambers set aside for her, and they all had iron bars on the windows. He would only come in at night, and berate her in words she didn’t understand. So I would stand there, speaking Merzani to my mother and Régyar to my father, translating his slurs and her pleading, and pushing myself between them, so his blows would land on me, instead.”

Shock twists through me, and then a torrent of grief. Thinking of him as a little boy almost undoes me, and I open my mouth to reply, but Gáspár speaks first.

“I don’t say that to earn your pity. I am the one who ought to be pitying you, for how little you understand about what you plan to do. My father is a weaker man than Nándor in some ways, but he is hardly less cruel. If he would do such a thing to his wife, only because she was a foreigner, and to his son, only because he dared stand between them, what do you think he will do to you? The wolf-girl who swindled him?”

I shake my head fiercely, as if his words are arrows and I can keep them from hitting their mark. Shivering against the wind, I reach for the coin in my pocket. I have traced its engravings so many times that I have memorized their strokes, even if I don’t understand their meaning. If it is a choice between drowning in the same river that has dragged me down a thousand times or walking into a pit of fire that has never burned me once, I will choose the flames and learn to bear it. But I cannot bear one more moment of Katalin’s fury, or another lick of Virág’s reed whip. Not when my father is somewhere in Király Szek, frothing at the shore like a tide missing the pull of its moon.

“Then perhaps you’ll get to see me bare after all,” I tell him, squeezing out the jest around the lump in my throat. “Does the king pluck his wolf-girls like roosters before he cooks and eats them?”

Gáspár just stares at me, lips parted, his eye filled with all the hazy midday sunlight. His face wavers somewhere between incredulous and furious, and I see the shift, the moment when he chooses his mute fury: he raises his shoulders around his ears, fists clenching at his sides, and stalks away from me without another word.

It is dark again by the time we are saddling our horses, by the time we have shaken Tuula and Szabín. In the Kalevan winter, the daylight hours slip through your hands like water. Overhead, the stars are bright jewels threaded through the quilt of evening sky. My mare’s coat gleams white, her mane like streaks of moonlight. Gáspár’s black mount is almost invisible in the night, and when he leaps on the horse’s back, all wrapped in his suba, he looks almost invisible too.

He doesn’t speak to me as we set off across the tundra. I armor myself in the certainty of my power, that red handprint on the reindeer’s flank, and the memory of my father’s voice, distant as the calling of a crow. They are enough to keep my back straight, my eyes fixed forward and south. But around the reins, my fingers are trembling.

Chapter Eleven