Page 52 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I nod, not trusting myself to speak without weeping, or else saying something damningly stupid. The same bell tolls again, a gonging that echoes through the ground and vibrates through my fingers and toes. The wind carries the smell of ash and smoke toward us, and I loop the reins twice around my hand, driving my horse against the current of the crowd.

Yehuli Street is as silent as a winter morning in the woods, before even the foxes rouse white-coated from their dens. Wool stockings and muslin dresses hang out on lines that stretch from window to window, fluttering emptily, like clothespinned ghosts. I had expected to feel some bolt of recognition, the illumination of instinct long-buried, my memory struck up like a match. But I feel nothing. Yehuli Street spools out before me, each squat gray house the same as the last, like pale fingerprints against the darkening sky.

“Where is everyone?” I whisper. The silence feels precarious, and I don’t want to be responsible for breaking it.

He frowns at me, jaw set sharply. I am keeping him from his task, but I can’t bring myself to care, not when my mouth has gone dry and my heart has stirred to a manic beat.

“It’s a Yehuli holy day,” he says. “On this day their god forbids them from working.”

“And are all these houses . . .” I trail off, gaze running down the length of the street, edged by hovel after hovel.

“Yehuli houses. They are forbidden from occupying any other part of the city that the king himself has not ordained.”

The wind snarls through my hair and blows the fur of my wolf cloak flat. I feel unspeakably cold. One of Katalin’s chants burrows its way into my mind: Yehuli slave, Yehuli scum, Yehuli bow to anyone.

“Do you know where my father lives?” I ask, voice small.

I see the moment that Gáspár’s face softens, his jaw losing its whetted edge, and then the instant when it goes hard again, like he has only just remembered that he is supposed to loathe me.

“No,” he says. “You’ll have to knock and see.”

This is where he would take his leave, disappear down Yehuli Street and let fate decide what will become of me. But Gáspár only sits stiffly on his mount, back straight as a blade. A swell of fierce gratitude and painful affection rises in my chest, but I swallow it back down.

I leap off my horse, blood roaring hot in my ears. The direness of the situation occurs to me all over again, my mind racing with thoughts of disembodied livers and hearts, Virág’s desperate warnings. Here in Király Szek my wolf cloak may as well be a death shroud. Every moment that I am without my father is an opportunity for a Patritian to take my head off.

All furious panic, I hurl myself to the nearest door and pound on it rudely, then stand back, chest heaving. After a few moments, the door lurches open, ancient springs squealing. A squat woman blinks at me from the threshold, a gilt-edged book shoved under her arm.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she demands—angrily, and I don’t blame her. I must look half-mad in my wolf cloak, tunic still stained with red juice. I force my numb lips to move.

“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say. “Is this his house? Do you know—”

The woman lets out a chortling laugh and slams the door in my face.

It all happens too fast for me to feel any way about it. My mind hardly registers her rebuff before my legs are carrying me to the next house. I hear Gáspár slide off his horse, and by the time the second door clatters open, he is right behind me.

“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say, before the man can speak. “Is this his house? Do you know where he lives?”

The man has long curling black hair, laced through with threads of gray. When he opens his mouth I see that one of his teeth has been set in silver. I reach for the coin in my pocket, ready to hold it up like some mute, useless offering.

“We are all Zsidó here, girl,” he scoffs. “Zsidó is the name the Patritians gave us, so they wouldn’t sully their Patritian mouths by speaking in our tongue.”

And then he closes the door without another word. Knees quaking, I turn slowly toward Gáspár. A flush of red goes through my face, my throat tightening with a coil of shame and anger.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand. “Did you want me to look a blundering simpleton, some insipid wolf-girl you dragged out of the woods to civilize?”

For a moment, Gáspár doesn’t reply, only stares at me with a tight mouth. There’s a familiar glint of misery in his eye.

“I thought you knew,” he says finally. “I didn’t realize how little you’d been told about the Yehuli and how they live here.”

I don’t want to hear any more. I turn on my heel, cheeks still burning, and march up to the next house. Paint is peeling off the wood in long tongues of red, and something that looks like a silver scroll is hammered to the door. It’s stamped with more Yehuli letters that make my eyes water and my mind glaze over, like staring at a bleary shape on the horizon.

Another woman opens the door. She has chestnut hair braided neatly as a string of garlic, her eyes wavering between green and hazel. I can see rough, vague mirrors of my own features in hers—the reddish tint to her hair, the pointed nose, the small, worrying mouth—and in that suspended instant I manage to convince myself that I have found my father’s house, and that she is an aunt or a cousin or maybe even a sister.

“Is this Zsigmond’s house?” I ask, voice squeezed tight with hope.

The woman shakes her head, sadly.

“Not on Shabbos,” she whispers, and then closes the door.