Page 51 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

If Gáspár takes particular notice of the looming clouds, he doesn’t comment on them. I let my gaze sweep across the horizon, ambling over the palace belfry and down again to the sloping roofs of the houses. The city is an earthwork, banked with mounds of soil to fortify it against a siege, but I can see even from a distance the beginnings of a stone wall around the old wooden barricades, higher in some places than others. It looks like a project recently undertaken, perhaps in anticipation of the Merzani army. The Élet River gashes the city in two, a shock of silver-blue cleaving east from west.

The outer layer of the city is a scruff of farmland, squares of yellow wheat alternated with tracts of green and red paprika plants, each pepper gleaming like a ruby scythe. A long black road daggers through the farmland, terminating at the main city gate. And, of course, because it’s festival day, the road is glutted with travelers: devout men and women making their pilgrimage on foot or on horseback, slogging toward Király Szek to pay tribute to the memory of the nation’s first Patritian king.

A braid of fear and anger coils in my chest, burning like an old scar. Gáspár leads me down to the road, where we join the throng of Patritians, all a chaos of protests and muttered prayers. Their eyes glint from their dirty faces like knifepoints, bright and sharp, gazes fixed toward the gate and the palace that knuckles over the old wooden walls. None of them seems to notice that a wolf-girl has entered their procession.

“You have certainly chosen the most treacherous time to arrive in Király Szek,” Gáspár murmurs, and I hear the bridled worry in his voice. “There is no worse day to be a wolf-girl in the capital, when Patritian zeal reaches its fever pitch.”

I only stare at him as our horses jostle through the crowd. A fury deep in my marrow has been pulled to the surface, like an old ship dredged up out of the sea. “There is no day where it is safe to be a wolf-girl in the capital. Don’t forget that you meant to bring me here as a prisoner. Is there still blood on the city walls where your Saint István displayed his trophies?”

Gáspár blinks at me, a pale flush ghosting across his face. “I didn’t know that story had found its way to your village.”

“Of course it did.” My four fingers curl around my horse’s reins, tight enough to turn my knuckles white. “Do you think we just sit around a fire, mindlessly repeating the legends of our great heroes and gods? Every boy and girl in Keszi learns the story before they’re old enough to talk: how King István nailed the hearts and livers of the pagan chieftains to the gates of Király Szek. How he paraded them proudly to his visitors from the west, so they could see how holy Régország had become.”

Gáspár looks pointedly away, but his hands, too, tighten on their reins. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

I don’t argue with him. My head is a snarl of storm clouds, mirroring the sky above. Perhaps that is all it means to be pagan: to fear having your heart or liver cut out. In that way I am no different from the other wolf-girls with their easy magic and their mean smiles, no matter what Katalin or the gods might say.

The roiling of the crowd carries us through the gate. Király Szek stinks badly enough to make my eyes burn: smoke chuffs from every open window and door, from all the wooden houses that topple over and run into each other, like clumsily felled trees. The streets are made of hard, dry earth, and they cough up yellow dust with every footfall. All my life I had imagined the city would be clean and bright like a forest in the snow, and its people as fat and sated as bears in their winter dens. But Király Szek is blatantly ugly and so are its citizens. Their gums are crammed with teeth as rotted as the crumbling belfries, their jowls sagging like their own wind-beaten roofs. From somewhere farther away I hear the sound of a bell tolling, and a blacksmith’s bellows, and a torrent of curses piping from some merchant’s grizzled mouth. The procession flows left, in the direction of the palace, but I draw my horse to a halt, bewildered and breathless and my ears ringing.

Gáspár pauses, too, and raises his voice over the din. “If you want to find your father, you’ll have to go to Yehuli Street. It’s—”

But I don’t hear the rest of his words. All I can see are twin smudges of black in the distance, two figures on obsidian mounts barreling through the crowd. Woodsmen.

Beside me, Gáspár stiffens. The Woodsmen are angling toward us, their eyes pinning me in place like thrown darts. Gáspár leans toward me, and in a fierce whisper says, “Don’t utter a word.”

I choke out a laugh, lunatic with terror. “Do you really think I have plans to reveal our tryst, you fool? As much as it brings me pleasure to know that I’ve imperiled your purity, I’m more concerned with keeping Woodsman axes out of my back.”

Gáspár presses his lips together, looking mortified.

“Besides,” I bite out, “if you want to convince them you’ve kept your oath of chastity, you might consider covering the bruise on your throat first.”

He flushes the shade of a sour cherry and tugs at the collar of his suba. In another two beats, the Woodsmen reach us, the rough wind flinging their cloaks this way and that. They are both freshly shorn, with lean faces like foxes at midwinter. One of them is missing his left ear.

Gáspár nods at each of them in turn, hand still braced on the nape of his neck. “Ferenc. Miklós.”

The one with the missing ear, Ferenc, narrows his eyes. “Bárány. You’ve been gone too long. The king has been asking after his wolf-girl for more than a fortnight, and your brother is nearly done biding his time.”

It shocks me how casually they address him, Régország’s true-born prince, but I try to keep from making my dismay plain.

“I know,” Gáspár says. “I have the wolf-girl now, and I’ll take her to the palace as soon as the feast is done.”

The other Woodsman, Miklós, glances between Gáspár and me. I can feel the coldness of his gaze leaching through my wolf cloak, like a beam of icy moonlight. “Where are the other men? Peti and Ferkó, Imre . . .”

Abruptly, Gáspár’s face shutters. His shoulders rise around his ears, swelling as if with guilt. For a mute, shameful moment I almost want to heft the burden from his back to mine, take the blame for their deaths, even if it will damn me further in front of these Woodsmen. But Gáspár speaks first.

“Dead.” His voice is flat. “Ambushed by monsters as we journeyed from Ezer Szem. The wolf-girl and I barely survived.”

All at once, as though moved by invisible threads, both Woodsmen press two fingers to their chests. Their eyes close penitently. When they open them again, Ferenc says, “Three good Patritian men dead, and for what? So the king can have his—”

“Careful,” Gáspár says shortly, and Ferenc falls silent at once. “Your blades are still sworn to my father as long as he sits the throne.”

“Yes, and we’d prefer he stay there, despite his affinity for pagan magic,” Miklós says, cutting another glare toward me. “Nándor has only grown more insufferable in your absence, Bárány. He’s like a child, and this city is a toy he doesn’t want to share. He’ll be loath to see you again, but I think the shock of it will be enough to shake him loose—for now. You ought to get to the palace as quickly as you can.”

A knot of fear curls in my throat, but Gáspár doesn’t flinch at his words. “I’ll go as soon as I’ve dealt with the wolf-girl. If you can find Count Korhonen, you may be able to stall Nándor.”

Ferenc dips his head in assent. He and Miklós draw back their horses, and the crowd sweeps them away like driftwood on a river, streaming toward the palace. As soon as they’re gone, Gáspár turns to me, his face hardening all over again.

“I’ll take you to Yehuli Street,” he says—perfectly smooth, save for the flicker in his eye, like a candle flame seizing in the wind. “I’ll leave you there once you find your father.”