Page 54 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Ice edges into my veins. “And the pig . . . ?”

Gáspár lets out a breath. “Yehuli scripture forbids them from eating or touching pig.”

And then I think I really will be sick, with the smell of the pig’s blood and viscera stiff and heavy in the air, and Nándor’s gloating voice running over me like water in a stream bed, and I grab hold of Gáspár’s arm to steady myself. He tenses under my touch but doesn’t jerk away.

“He can’t,” I manage. “Please—you have to say something. You have to stop him.”

“Your father is in no real danger, at least not yet,” Gáspár replies, but a swallow ticks in his throat. “Our protestations are better spent at the king’s feet, or later, when there’s no audience to preen for. Nándor won’t abandon his fun while there are half a hundred peasants looking on, cheering for a Yehuli man’s debasement.”

The evenness of his voice, the pinched-nose rationality of his proposal, makes my vision glaze with fury. Nándor might as well be Virág, standing over me with her reed whip, or Katalin—they have the same gleeful venom in their eyes. I let go of Gáspár’s arm as brusquely as I can, hoping to leave marks.

“Will you only move to prevent injustice when no one is watching?” I ask, with as much meanness as I can muster. “It’s no wonder the people prefer Nándor—at least he’s not a coward.”

“I suppose a coward is anyone who acts with forethought, who doesn’t hurl themselves into the jaws of the beast only to prove their own heroism?” Gáspár’s eye is as black as pitch. “Surviving in Király Szek is a test of shrewdness, not of bravery. You will not last long here unless you understand that.”

There is an undercurrent of desperation to his words, even concern, but I am too angry to be moved. I have done plenty of kneeling. It has never earned me any mercy. The crowd’s chanting rises, louder, like a flock of birds taking flight into the gray sky, and Nándor smiles and smiles as pig’s blood soaks my father’s boots.

“Stop!”

The word shudders out of me, unbidden, before I can think to prevent it. And because I’ve already started, I say again, “Stop, let him go!”

The onlookers go quiet. Nándor’s eyes lift, scanning the crowd until they find me—his lambent, laughing eyes. He considers me for a moment, blinking once, and then his gaze shifts, landing on Gáspár.

“Is this an illusion of Thanatos?” he asks, and then pauses, although it is not a question anyone is supposed to answer. “Or is it my brother back again, with a wolf-girl by his side?”

Nándor leaves my father and strides toward us. Instinctively, my hand goes for my knife, but then I remember that it’s gone, along with my braid and my coin.

My four fingers open, unfurling like a flower, as Nándor nears. If he reaches for me I will grasp him first and see what Ördög’s power can do, but here before all these Patritians, and four Woodsmen guards, I realize with a slippery feeling in my stomach that it will not be enough. It can’t be. The beautiful man stalks toward me, his eyes searing right through my skin, and I think I finally understand Gáspár’s dire warnings.

Yet, when Nándor does pause in front of us, he scarcely seems to glance my way at all. Instead, he wraps his arms around Gáspár.

“Welcome home,” he says, voice muffled against the fur of Gáspár’s suba.

Gáspár says nothing. He is rigid inside Nándor’s embrace, his brother’s mouth hovering far too close to the bruise on his throat. A weight settles on my chest, my breathing short and quick. Gáspár disentangles himself as soon as he’s able.

“This must be the wolf-girl Father wanted,” says Nándor. He clasps his hand under my chin, his long fingers stroking down my cheek. “She’s rough-looking, like all wolf-girls, and a bit plain-faced besides.”

His thumb curls over my lip. I cannot look anywhere else, trapped in his bewitching viper’s stare. I think of biting off his thumb, like I did Peti’s ear. I imagine watching him scream and fumble for his missing finger amidst the spray of blood and the stuttering pain. But it is precisely that stupid, vicious instinct that will get me killed faster.

Still, I jerk my chin away, my four fingers clenching.

“You know that Father wants his wolf-girls unharmed,” Gáspár says, smooth-voiced and princely again, the same tenor to his words that always made me bristle and scowl. His eye reveals only a quick glimmer of unease.

“I also know that Father wants his wolf-girls silent and cowed,” says Nándor. He blinks toward me. “You’ve charged into the palace courtyard in the midst of our Saint István’s Day celebration, looking every inch a barbarian, more wolf than girl. Tell me, what do you care about the fate of this Yehuli man?”

I could kill him. Or, at least, I could try. Ördög’s threads twitch around my wrist. But even if I succeeded, if he burned up like a lightning-struck tree under my touch, I would not escape the city alive. And what then? Keszi would be punished for my crime, and so would the Yehuli as soon as the king figured out I was one of them.

In this moment I am nothing at all to this brilliant would-be prince, worth less than the muck on his boots—and yet whatever I do next will decide the fate of two peoples, a whole village and every house on that long gray street.

My mouth opens mutely, then closes again. After all the weeks I spent upbraiding Gáspár for his deference, the easy way his knees buckle and his head bows, I realize that he is, in fact, cleverer than me. What kind of idiot bird pecks at its master between the bars of its cage?

A terrible fear settles over me, heavy as my missing wolf cloak.

“Very well then,” Nándor says. “We deal with wolf-girls the same way we deal with Yehuli merchant scum.”

And then the crowd is chanting, screaming, spittle foaming in their open mouths. I am reminded of the black snapping jaws of the wolves that skulk around Keszi, on the deepest, coldest winter days, watching and growling and waiting for someone to wander too far into the woods.

I waver between shrinking back and leaping forward, and in that manic, seizing moment of indecision, I manage to meet my father’s eyes over the broad sweep of Nándor’s shoulder. They are as blank as two tide pools at midnight, no starry pinprick of recognition in them. I am staring at a stranger. I am going to die for a man who doesn’t even know me.