Page 45 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

But the old woman doesn’t reply; she just keeps stirring the pot. Frankly, of all the things she could have done to evoke Virág, her ignoring me summons perhaps the greatest guilty nostalgia. The woman doesn’t seem remotely perturbed by my presence, bloodstained wolf cloak and all. Maybe her vision is going, and I look like a vaguely girl-shaped smudge.

“Have you always lived in Szarvasvár?” Gáspár asks. I wonder if he’s thinking about the seashells on the door.

“I have always lived along this riverbed,” the old woman says.

Closer now, the gulyás is even more tempting than before. She ladles two servings into bowls of hammered tin, lumpy with carrots and potatoes and thin strips of meat. The spices have dyed the broth red.

It hasn’t been long since we’ve eaten—two rabbits that I shot near where we found the circle of stones—but I am suddenly ferocious with hunger.

I lift the spoon to my lips. “What is this meat?”

“Mink,” the woman says.

But there are no minks in Szarvasvár. There are no minks anywhere south of Kaleva, now, because soldiers and missionaries from the south hunted them to extinction. Virág has a pair of mittens made of sleek brown mink fur, and I remember rubbing my hands across the surface of them, imagining what it might have been like to live in Régország before the Patrifaith beat down its doors.

I look down at the stew again, and I gag.

Coiled vipers and earthworms are writhing in a horrible knot. The edges of the tin bowl are greasy with mud and pitted with the corpses of fruit flies. Perched carefully on my spoon, a tiny gray toad gives a diminutive croak.

Ice in my veins, I turn to Gáspár. He’s lifting his own spoon to his mouth. I launch myself across the table and knock the spoon out of his hand, tipping both of our bowls onto the ground. The vipers go hissing and skittering across the floor, while the earthworms wriggle blindly in the dirt. The mud laps at the old woman’s skirt like dark water.

“What are you doing?” Gáspár demands.

I grab his chin and tilt his face toward her. “Look.”

The woman is not a woman anymore, or, rather, she never was one at all. Her hair is swamp grass. Her eyes are two smooth white stones. Beneath her dress and her apron, her skin has a sheen of red and hardness that was not there before; her wrinkles are lines that someone has etched into the mud of a dried-up riverbed.

“Come eat, children,” she says, in a voice like the sound of wind rasping through the cattails. “You’re tired. You’re hungry, and there’s plenty to go around.”

Suddenly, I feel very tired indeed. Gáspár slumps back down in his chair, eyelid fluttering under the weight of her enchantment.

My own eyelids are heavy, but through my lashes I can see the not-woman looming over me, hands outstretched. She has fish scales for fingernails that look iridescent in the firelight. Dirt is caulked under those nails, crumbling and black.

Her fingers curl around Gáspár’s throat, and I watch, trancelike, as his veins throb and darken, a poison threading down his neck and under his dolman. His chest heaves, and a blind panic knifes through the haze of her enchantment.

Still woozy, I reach for her, but my limbs are stiff and too heavy. I fall out of the chair, collapsing on my hands and knees in the dirt. Gáspár slumps in his seat, eye shut. The blackness in his veins is pulsing, and I can smell the green rot of blighted wood and it reminds me of Peti dying and I nearly retch. With great effort, I reach for her ankles, sturdy as twin oaks beneath the fringe of her white muslin dress.

Witches don’t bleed, of course. There’s no skin to blister. Ördög’s magic does its work anyway: a chunk of her leg breaks off in my grasp, like the handle of a clay pot. The not-woman releases Gáspár and stares down at the wound, blank pebble eyes narrowing in impossible shock.

She reaches for me, hobbling on the crooked stump of her leg, and then I reach for the other one. Another piece of her comes away in my hand, staining my palms with red dust. She crumples, and as she falls to the ground, her clay fingers close around the hood of my wolf cloak. She smells like pond water gone green and stagnant in the summer heat. Hunks of her crumble over me, a shard of cheek and the nub of her thumb. I grasp her by the wrist and don’t let go, until the roughhewn bits of her are scattered across the dirt floor.

My cloak is dyed crimson with clay-grime. I cough and splutter, pushing myself to my feet, still dizzy with the ebbing of the witch’s spell. Gáspár is slumped and motionless, tarry blackness pulsing in his veins. I drag myself toward him, but then I feel a pull in the opposite direction. I turn. There’s a green vine nosing out of the dirt, and it has laced itself around my ankle.

Fear closes around my heart. For the first time since killing the witch, I look around the house. The roof is not thatched with grass at all. It’s hair. Human hair. The jars on her shelves are teeming with earthworms and red-bellied snakes, tiny toads and plaintively buzzing flies. In one of them I swear I see a pink wedge of tongue, still wriggling.

I force myself forward, nails scraping through the dirt, against the tug of the vine. Its thorns are goring through the leather of my boot. As the weariness sloughs off me, I manage to turn and tear the vine from its root, then scramble toward Gáspár and loop his arm over my shoulder. He feels impossibly heavy—even as I lift him and stagger toward the door, I worry that I’ll collapse before I reach it.

The knife-slit of light ahead is narrowing. At first I think it’s a trick of my hazy mind, but then I feel the dirt under me roiling, rising. The sod walls are shrinking in on us, so tight and close that my lungs fill with the scent of damp soil and I can scarcely breathe. No, not shrinking.

Swallowing.

Strung limp over my back, Gáspár gives me no help. My vision ripples and blurs.

I barrel through the threshold just before the sod roof caves in on us. Through the snarl of weeds and dirt, I hear the wind chimes pealing out our exit—only they’re not seashells but finger bones, all cobwebbed up in black thread alongside a small child’s skull. When the house crumples, the bones ring with their own demise.

All the fires in the other sod houses have gone out. A wind sweeps through, blowing yellow hair off their roofs. I collapse to the ground, Gáspár rolling limp onto his back. His eye is still shut and wind shivers into the hollow of my ear and I want to cry out, the way I did for seven days and seven nights after my mother was taken.

Tamping down the urge to weep, I tug at the collar of Gáspár’s dolman, trying to see how deep the poison has gone. His chest is still rising and falling, only more slowly now, with more beats between each breath. With mounting panic, I loose the gold buttons down the front of his jacket, fingers sweeping through the fur lining. Underneath he wears a chemise of black leather, blood-slicked.