Page 53 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Her rebuff needles through my numb resolve. I have to draw in another quick breath to keep from whimpering, though I know Gáspár sees the anguish on my face. He reaches toward me, gloved hand open, and then abruptly draws back. The clear retraction of his kindness nearly unravels me. I held him so fast and so close and with such desperate fervor that he will never touch me again, like when you pluck an apple too soon and it rots before you can eat it.

When I reach the next threshold, I no longer hear Gáspár’s footsteps behind me.

The man who answers the door is young enough to be my brother, but I can find none of my features in his. He wears an odd white hat, almost like a woman’s bonnet, and it skews sideways, the string come loose behind one of his ears. He gawks at me for several beats before relenting to my reedy voice and wide, desperate eyes.

“Please,” I say. “Do you know where I can find Zsigmond?”

The boy’s face goes wan. “Didn’t you hear? Zsigmond was taken to trial outside of the king’s palace. Nándor had him arrested, for working on the Patritian holy day.”

I charge back into the procession of festival-goers as the storm clouds churn and roil overhead. Once there, I am swept up in a current of pedestrians, shouldering from market stall to market stall. Saint István’s feast must be the biggest market day of the year. People stream around me, coins clenched in dirty fists, arms curling around loaves of bread and long coils of smoked sausage. My poor, jostled mare kicks out her hind legs and topples a stinking bucket of trout heads to the ground, eliciting a curse from the fishmonger. Someone is selling fat sacks of red paprika, and the smell of it cuts through everything else, stinging like salt in a wound.

Gáspár shoves through the crowd and manages to catch one corner of my wolf cloak, yanking it right off my back.

“Have you gone absolutely mad?” he snarls. “The people in this city are God-fearing Patritians, and on this, the holiest day, they are riled to the peak of their zealotry. They would line up at the gates for a chance to prove their faith by killing you, especially the men—to them you are a pagan before you are a woman.”

Even without my cloak I am an oddity in the crowd, among the dour Patritian women with their covered hair and downcast eyes. I can scarcely hear my own voice over the ragged, vicious pounding of my heart.

“What else would you have me do?” I bite back. “Nándor has my father.”

“I would have you not be a fool,” Gáspár says—harshly, but there’s a desperate, pleading look in his eye that makes me pause, drawing in a furious breath. “If you charge into the palace like this, you’ll damn both of us and your father.”

Both of us. He’s afraid that I’ll reveal him, as a failure who brought back the wrong wolf-girl, or worse, as a failure who kissed that wolf-girl and bared his throat for her to latch her teeth into. My fear and hurt hardens into fury, and I no longer care about my dignity or his.

“Is there really nothing more precious to you than your purity?” I spit. “You’ve spent too many nights lying beside a wolf-girl to flush and fret over it now. I don’t have any plans to reveal you, so save your miserable spluttering. If you’re right, one of your prized, pious killers will put a blade through my back first, and your secret will die when I do.”

Gáspár holds my wolf cloak limply, the wind ruffling his hair across his face. Unlike the other occasions when I have spoken of our tryst or his compromised chastity, no color rises to his cheeks, and his eye is narrowed thin as an arrow slit.

“Do you really think that’s all I care about?” he demands. “If you’re really so keen to damn us both—”

“No,” I cut in, thinking of cut hearts and my mother’s braid in my pocket. “Not both of us. You are still a Woodsman, a prince. His son. The worst thing your father took from you is an eye.”

With difficulty, I turn my horse and maneuver her through the crowd. In the distance, the castle looms like a great dark bird, but it casts no shadow because there is no sun. The crumbling stone of the Broken Tower is a pale gash against the charcoal sky.

The narrow street opens to a courtyard, penned by a gate of black wood. Here the festival-goers are packed so close, straining over one another’s heads, that I can’t inch my horse any farther. I slip off her back and shoulder through the crowd, past good Patritian women with white bonnets and Patritian men with grim, sweat-stained faces. The smell of fried bread drifts past me, mingling with something fouler and worse.

I elbow past a weaver woman with six teeth, who scowls at me and claws at my arm in retaliation. I scarcely feel the swipe of her nails. I push and push until I reach the very front of the crowd, staring out at the square courtyard with its filthy gray stones. In the center is a huddle of Woodsmen, and a Yehuli man between them, and he is standing on the corpse of a killed pig.

My stomach lurches at the sight and smell of it. I raise a hand to my mouth, bile crawling up my throat.

The man’s arms are bound behind his back with a long, frayed rope, taut with his pulling. He wears the same odd white hat as the boy I saw on Yehuli Street. From where I stand all I can see is a slivered fraction of his face, pale as a waning moon. He has a long nose and woolly gray brows, and his chin is raised defiantly, as if he can’t even see the gore on the ground beneath him.

There are two more men in the courtyard. One is hunched with age, swaddled in the dull tawny robes of a Patritian holy man. He blinks his small, bright eyes like a little brown mole, fingers curling around the iron pendant at his throat.

The other man is far too young to be king, but that is not the thought that dominates me in the moment. All I can think is that he is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He is no older than Gáspár, sweet-faced and almost boyish, wearing a dolman dyed the color of a velvet-dark evening. His auburn hair curls loosely to the nape of his neck, luxuriant, as if it’s mocking the shorn heads of the Woodsmen beside him. He has the dewy complexion of an opal newly polished, and blue eyes that gleam beneath feathered golden lashes. When he smiles, it etches crooked dimples into his cheeks, the kind of small flaw that throws the rest of his face into breathless relief, every other feature made lovelier by comparison.

The man circles my father with the lithe grace of a hawk just before it snatches its prey.

“What do you say, Zsidó Zsigmond, to these charges?” he asks, sounding terribly pleasant, as though he were inquiring to a merchant about the price of some coveted ware. “Do you confess that you were indeed working on the last Lord’s Day?”

“I am paid to work on the Lord’s Day,” Zsigmond says. “Commissioned by your own father to—”

I don’t hear the rest. Gáspár has shoved his way to my side, his hand closing around my wrist.

“You need to leave,” he rasps. “If you only heed my warning once in your life, wolf-girl, please sheathe your claws now.”

My four fingers curl into a fist at my side. Ördög’s magic is there, coiled like a snake ready to strike, but the ragged desperation in Gáspár’s voice stills me, just for a moment, as the crowd pushes around us.

“These sorts of trials aren’t unusual,” he goes on, quickly, now that he’s gotten me to falter, “but they make a mockery of the very notion of justice. Yehuli men and women are charged with a number of invented, flimsy accusations, and then paraded around in chains for the crowd to gnash their teeth at. It’s an easy way to win the favor of peasants who loathe the Yehuli.”