Page 50 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“And how does this add to the tally of your sins?” My voice is shaking, tunic still slung low across my collarbone, baring one of my breasts. I pull it up again, flushing, as the sting of his rejection begins to settle. “When you bow at the feet of the Érsek, will you ask Godfather Life to forgive you for kissing a wolf-girl? What about all those nights you spent holding her against the cold? There was no dead creature to move your limbs then.”

His fingers curl around the handle of his ax. For a moment I think he will raise it against me, even after all of this, the miles we’ve put behind us, our frigid days in Kaleva, after he blackened his soul to save my life. But Gáspár only looks at the ground and then shakes his head.

“It was enchantment,” he says again. “Why are you clamoring to convince me otherwise? You’re a wolf-girl; I’m a Woodsman. You said before that I was no more than a monster to you. This is a shame for us both to share.”

What little reason his words have is lost in the boil of my rage. Hearing him speak like the silver-tongued prince again, with his rigid courtly eloquence, sends me to the bitterest, meanest place I know. I scarcely hesitate before opening up my most ancient wound again, so I can make him share in its hurt. “I’m no true wolf-girl. You’ve known it since that night on the Black Lake. I’ve already turned my back on my village—I’m not some dumb, struck dog who runs back to its vicious master for another lashing. And you’re no true Woodsman, either, except for your blushing piety and your slavish dog’s devotion to the father who only ever showed you the end of his blade.”

Gáspár flinches, but it is not enough to make me regret the cruelty of my words. I rub the red juice from my lips and try to will down the hot coil of tears in my throat. Perhaps I wanted to kiss him to prove how little I cared for my people, for my mother’s braid in my pocket, her life ended by some Woodsman at the behest of his father. Perhaps I wanted to forget that between here and Király Szek I am not pagan, not Yehuli, only some stupid girl with her hand in both pockets, finding comfort in cold, dead things. Maybe I wanted his touch to erase me.

Or perhaps I wanted the opposite: maybe I wanted his kiss to give me shape, to see how my body transfigured under his hands. I don’t know who I have been with him these past weeks, indulging every perverse instinct, killing fat, slumbering rabbits and openly professing to loathe my own people. My most spiteful self, and perhaps my truest.

Gáspár meets my gaze, his black eye pooling with moonlight. He runs a hand through his dark hair, the same hand that grasped my hip like he could not bring me close enough. His face is so hard that, for a moment, I am almost ready to believe it was nothing but enchantment after all, just the red juice in our mouths. But when he speaks, his voice is thin with anguish.

“What would you have me do?” he asks. “You have already ruined me.”

Chapter Thirteen

Near where the Élet River finally snakes through Király Szek, the land smooths and flattens, and green grass turns flaxen where it marks the edge of the Great Plain. The Great Plain swallows up nearly all of Akosvár, and the capital, too, the wide, fertile grassland that the Merzani are currently trying to conquer and burn. But there are no enemy fires burning on the horizon, just the dark swell of our shared silence, almost tangible. Neither of us has spoken in nearly two days.

My anger fizzled early, and in its absence, there came a pall of despair, all my blustery certainty withered like a stalk of wheat. The silence has given my mind the chance to run its worried circuit, returning only a hopeless augury: I have damned myself entirely, having chosen to walk right into the arms of the enemy. And our encounter with the creature has cost me even the meager protection of Gáspár’s proximity. He walks several yards ahead of me, showing me only the back of him, his shoulders stiff under his suba. When we reach the city, I suspect he will leave me for good.

My belly fills with an embarrassed, lurking hurt. I should not be mourning the loss of a Woodsman’s goodwill, or thinking hungrily of his touch. Pagans don’t have a ritual of repentance like the Patritians do, a cheek-to-the-floor confession, but I was always made to pay for my mistakes in other ways. Now I almost wish for lashings, or to be tasked with Virág’s most odious chores. I wonder if there is a Yehuli way of killing your guilt and burying it. Perhaps I will learn soon.

Or perhaps I will be dead first. Gáspár stops suddenly, his horse’s tail bridling. I come to his side slowly, the way one would approach a dog that was keen to snap. Seeing his profile, amber cast in the midday sunlight, makes my stomach clench like a fist. There is still a bruise on his throat in the shape of my mouth, stubbornly violet.

“What is it?” I manage. My voice is hoarse from disuse.

Gáspár’s gaze lifts, but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes. I remember the way my thumb brushed across his cheekbone, my lips against his eyelid. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. His jaw is set hard, and when he speaks, it is with a Woodsman’s steel edge.

“This is your last chance,” he says. “Turn back and spare yourself.”

He has done all he can to keep his words from betraying concern, his eye cold and unflinching. But I have seen enough of his dogged pretense to recognize it, the calculated falsehood of his ambivalence. I know the way his mouth tastes now. I have heard him moan into the shell of my ear.

“I’ll turn back if you will,” I say. “I’ll go back to Keszi and face my lashings if you flee to Rodinya and find some amiable lord to shelter you. How is that for a bargain?”

Gáspár doesn’t reply, and I didn’t expect him to; he turns away from me and spurs his horse onward, following the line of the river. I urge my mare slowly after him, face burning. It is the memory of tenderness that wounds me more than the desire. I have desired many men who had me brusquely and were afterward too ashamed to meet my eyes. But I have never wanted to kiss their wounds, or bare to them any of my own. I had thought myself truest when I was skinning baby rabbits and seething with vicious hatreds, but perhaps that tenderness is true too. I wonder how tender I might have been, if I had not lived cowering under the threat of Virág’s reed whip, forever menaced by Katalin’s blue flame.

But that matters little now. I ought to slough off any tenderness like old dead skin. It will only leave me soft-bellied and spent when we reach Király Szek. The river churns beside me, the foaming crests of the waves iridescent when they catch the sunlight. Gáspár has gone so far ahead that I can scarcely see him now, unless I raise a hand to shield my eyes and squint against the glare.

I have never deserved less to wear the wolf cloak over my shoulders, but a memory rises in me anyway, stinging and sour, like a swallow of saltwater. If Gáspár were speaking to me, I would tell him one last story: Once, Vilmötten did slay a dragon—not the one who loved a human woman, I don’t think. But this dragon was a man with seven heads, too, and he rode into battle with full mail on the back of an eight-legged horse.

Vilmötten was not a warrior. He was only a bard who had been granted the favor of the gods. He wondered how he might slay such a creature, with nothing to his name but a five-stringed kantele, which made music, not war. Isten told him he must forge a sword.

“But how?” Vilmötten asked. “I have no steel to melt, and no skills as a smith. Besides, what kind of blade could slay such a monster?”

“The sword that you make with the blessings of the gods,” Isten replied. And then he clipped off one of his fingernails and let it fall to the Middle-World below. It was thick and heavy as steel, and carved with the magic of the father-god himself. And because the nail had been a sacrifice, death lived inside it also.

Vilmötten had the power to make fire, thanks to the star he had swallowed. While he worked, he sang. He sang a song of battle (the words of which have been forgotten, or maybe just forgotten by Virág). When he finished his forging, the song ended too.

Vilmötten’s sword looked like nothing special. It had a bronze hilt and a silver blade. But when he held it up to the sky, a bright flame burst across the length of it, as if someone had struck the blade with a piece of flint. He slew the dragon with his sword, cutting off all seven of its heads in one swing. The sword was coveted across all of Régország and the lands beyond, but when Vilmötten sailed away to the realm of the gods, the sword was lost.

I have no gleaming sword forged from a sliver of Isten’s nail; I have only my own untested magic, and Király Szek is filled with a thousand dragons, all of them men in disguise. Still, I let the words twine silently through my mind, as if I might make a weapon of them. Virág’s stories never comforted me when I was sitting at her hearth, knees pulled to my chest, aching with the labor of her chores and chafing under Katalin’s cruel stare. Now so many miles from Keszi the familiar words gird me like battle mail, and it seems like a trickster god’s mean joke: that I should yearn for her solace only as soon as I have forsaken it. I reach for my mother’s braid, red as a fox’s pelt and smooth from all my years of stroking. I wonder if Gáspár has kept any relic of his mother. I wonder if I will ever have a chance to ask him.

I draw my hand to my lips, still swollen with the memory of his touch, and then urge my horse forward after him.

Two miles out of the capital, the sky ceases to be blue.

We stand on a small hill outside of Király Szek, wind bristling past us. A mass of seething clouds is gathered over the city, thick and low-hanging, lush with unshed rain. It casts the city in a grayish half-light, almost like the murky reflection of the real Király Szek rippling on the surface of a lake at dusk. It almost comforts me, that black mantle of storm clouds. Maybe a torrent of rain will come down and wash the festival-goers out of the streets.