Page 47 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Because I know you Patritians have your silly laws,” I say, almost regretting it even as I do. “Laws that forbid you from coupling outside of your marriage bed.”

I expect Gáspár to make a noise of reproach and stand, flicking my question off his back like a horse ridding itself of a fly. Instead he blushes profoundly, all the way from forehead to chin, but he doesn’t look away from me.

“Of all our laws, that one is perhaps the most frequently violated,” he says. “Most of the Woodsmen are boys of eight or nine when they first make their vows. They don’t know what they’re promising when they make them. I suppose it’s easier that way, never knowing what you have to live without.”

Even I am flushing by the time he finishes, but I don’t want to shrink back and give up what ground I’ve gained. Gáspár is still looking at me, a remarkable feat of cultivated tolerance. A fortnight ago he would have skulked off into the woods or threatened to gag me.

“So I ought not pity you too much,” I say, wiping my damp hands on my cloak. “Since you’ve never known the touch of a woman, I suppose you only dream of gold and of glory and of one day wearing your father’s crown. What else is there for men to desire?”

Gáspár’s lips quiver. For a moment I think he will scold me after all. But he only says, “I was made a Woodsman when I was twenty. I had plenty of time to consider what I would be living without.”

I blink at him, unable to summon words. I suppose I could have guessed, from the clumsy way he wields his ax, that he was bereft of the typical Woodsman training, but I hadn’t thought to calculate exactly how long he’s worn the cloak. Five years only, far less than most of his fellow soldiers, and scarcely long enough to scrub the impieties of manhood off him. Knowing this, and thinking of the nights we spent pressed together on the ice, makes my heart leap into my throat. Perhaps I shouldn’t have considered him so prudishly detached from the same desires that have plagued me these past weeks, that have dogged me both sleeping and waking.

I am silent for so long that finally Gáspár rises, stalking back toward his horse. The amber light of the waning sun pools on his chin and along the bridge of his nose, making him look like something engraved in gold, though far younger than his father’s profile on my minted coin. My cold brush with death had brought me to the dizzy, half-conscious revelation that he was beautiful. Looking at him again now, backlit by fire instead of ice, I come to the same epiphany, my stomach twisting in defiance of my brain.

Slowly, I rise to my feet and follow him. The dark is quickly chasing the light from the sky, like a wolf after a white lamb. The teeth of dusk are grinning up over the clouds and snarling jaggedly around the sun, and in the patches of shadow the river looks like something to be afraid of, cold and depthless. I look back at Gáspár, his face still suffused in sunlight, as if the shadows can’t touch him at all.

A languid, mosquito-flecked evening falls over us, and the Élet River begins to weave through one of Régország’s rare forests. We follow its labyrinthine path, darting like a silver blade between copses of dark oaks and dense, raveling thickets. Animals with yellow eyes blink at us from their tree holes, and red-tipped birds cast winged shadows onto our path.

This forest is unlike Ezer Szem—it is full of only mortal, comprehensible dangers like lurking wolves and steep, hidden ravines. The absence of obvious peril forces my mind to wander onto other things: the hazy shape of the capital, still distant and unreal, and Nándor, whose face is little more than a pale smudge, like a print on a windowpane, and of course my father’s coin, somehow warm enough that I can feel it suffusing heat through my cloak.

Gáspár steals frequent glances at me, tight and nervous, as if he’s afraid I’ll vanish when his head is turned.

“It’s not too late, wolf-girl,” he says. There’s no malice in the epithet, but not for lack of trying—his brow is furrowed with the effort of barbing his words. “We’re two days from Király Szek. You can still go back to your village.”

If I am a wolf-girl again, then he is a Woodsman, though there is more misery than ire in my voice when I speak. “I’ve already told you there’s nothing for me there. I can count the rest of my years there in lashings, Woodsman, and loveless, bloody couplings by the riverside. You must truly loathe me, to want to damn me to such a cold life.”

I say the last bit with more cruelty than I thought I could muster, and just because I want him to flush. He does, and then abruptly his face hardens.

“You are being unrepentantly stupid,” he says. “You might return to Keszi shameful and cowed, but with your heart still beating in your chest. Whatever magic you do have, it doesn’t matter. Király Szek is no place for a wolf-girl who values her life as you claim to. Your mother and all the other women my father brought had magic, and none of them survived the capital either.”

“And what about you?” I demand, blood pulsing thickly now, almost bewildered by my own sudden fury. “If Nándor has as much power as you say, you are no less stupid than I am for thinking you can survive him. You ought to flee east and find some obliging Rodinyan lord with a pretty daughter you can wed, and then he can raise his armies against Nándor. You would be safe there.”

Gáspár gives a laugh, humorless and short. “Because, unlike you, I care for others besides myself. Your people, pagan and Yehuli both, would be damned in the meantime. And I would leave my father to die in my absence like a coward.”

“Maybe you should care for yourself a bit more, then! Your father has earned none of your unbending loyalty,” I say sharply. “You are a wiser and gentler and more courageous son than he deserves.”

We both fall silent then, wind scuttling through the branches. My face heats with the feeling that I have confessed something I ought not have confessed, not when we are robed in a hundred years of boiling hatreds and both staring down the end of his brother’s blade. Gáspár draws in a breath, and I brace myself for his response, but he only lets it out again, wordless.

“If I were you, I would leave him to die,” I say, just to fill the unbearable silence, though even as I do, my chest tightens. Virág’s face, Boróka’s face, even Katalin’s face float up at me. If I succeed in finding my father, it means I will never see them again.

“I know,” Gáspár says, quietly.

And then neither of us can bear to say any more. Gray-washed evening light is falling through the tree cover, the path before us quilted with planks of sun and shadow. My vision is glazing over the endless thatch of trunks and coils of bramble when I see something move behind the trees. A flash of white skin among the evergreen leaves—something small and mortal-looking.

I glance at Gáspár, his eye flashing. In our shared second of silent indecision, a cry rings out from the brush. It is a human cry, and that makes our choice for us. I dig my heels into the horse’s flank, and my mare bolts through the tangled bramble. The pounding of hooves on the ground tells me that Gáspár is close behind.

The chase ends as quickly as it started. The figure has stopped inside a copse of willow trees, lithe branches swaying in the scant breeze, their fronds gossamer as a widow’s mourning veil. I jerk the reins and my horse skids to a halt.

There is nothing inhuman about her, I realize with a long breath of relief. No red-clay skin or unseeing white eyes. In fact, it’s very apparent how human she is, because she wears no clothes at all. A curtain of dark hair falls over her breasts, its color stark against her ivory skin. The soles of her feet are black with dirt.

I only notice her eyes as I slide off my horse. They are bluer than any eyes I have ever seen, bluer than Katalin’s, which inspired one of the village boys to compose a keening ballad in their honor. As children Boróka and I had cried ourselves laughing about that preening youth, even as we both tacitly wished he would sing about our eyes.

These eyes, though—there would be no songs written about their beauty, only their haunting pull. They are spangled bright with tears, even though her lips are a pale unfeeling line. Bewildered, I try to marry the anguish in her gaze with the pitiless cut of her mouth, like knitting together the hides of two different animals. Gáspár’s boot steps fall on the ground behind me.

“What’s happened, miss?” he asks, reaching out one gloved hand to bridge the space between us and the girl. “Why are you in the woods alone?” He leaves unsaid the question of where her clothes are, but I can tell by the pinking of his cheeks that he has not managed to entirely avert his eye.

The girl lifts her head, almost shyly, settling her bright-blue eyes upon me. For a moment I’m stunned in the path of her gaze, like a deer catching a hunter’s downwind scent, even as my heart clangs in my chest. She turns to Gáspár, and her stare roots him there too.