Page 55 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Gáspár’s voice arcs over the din. “The wolf-girl is Father’s prize. He’ll be the one to decide what to do with her.”

But Nándor only raises a beckoning hand. The Woodsmen descend, all at once, like a murder of crows coming down on a corpse. Everything that follows, I see only in flashes: a billowing black suba—not Gáspár’s—and the metal glint of an ax. Nándor’s incandescent smile. My spooked mare charging the crowd, sides heaving, whinnying through her flared nostrils. A Woodsman’s gloved hand jams against the back of my throat, forcing me to the ground, my hair grazing over the filthy cobblestones.

I look up again, with difficulty. Nándor is pacing toward my mare, making hushing sounds. She stills, letting him place one hand on her muzzle, and the other on her broad neck.

“What a lovely beast,” he murmurs. “Her coat is pure white. There are no other horses in our stables with such a coat. I do appreciate a unique, unblemished beauty.”

A Woodsman’s ax slides between my shoulder blades. “Where shall we take her, my lord?”

If they call him lord, I wonder, what do they call the king?

“Where we take all the wolf-girls,” Nándor says, his voice hitching with impatience.

The crowd is still chanting, the words all running together, until I can’t hear anything but dull, oblivious noise. I stare through the matted tangle of my hair at Nándor, watching as he takes my horse by the reins and leads her toward the palace door. The storm clouds seethe overhead, glowering as if they were Isten’s great black brow. A strain of murky light beams through, catching on Nándor’s hair, on the sweet curve of his jaw, whiter than my mare’s pelt. I remember what Szabín said, about him floundering up out of the ice and then standing again as if his pulse had never stopped its pounding.

I am almost ready to believe it now. There is ice in his eyes still, like his death has lived with him all the years since.

I cannot twist my neck far enough to see Gáspár’s face, but he is by my side, unmoving and silent. From the waist down he looks like any other Woodsman, dressed finely in his black suba and his embroidered leather boots. There are flies hovering over the pig’s carcass, circling the bloody gouges where someone has stabbed out its eyes. And then I hear my father’s footsteps, fading, as someone leads him away too.

The Woodsman throws a hood over my eyes and takes me on a dizzying journey through the dungeons. I almost want to laugh when he peels back my blinds: they are dark and damp, the ceilings slick with sour water and the walls clotted blue-white with mold, but they are nothing worse than that. I have been imagining some peculiar torture, designed specifically for wolf-girls.

He thrusts me into the cell and shuts me behind the rust-gritted bars. I hear his suba ghosting through the foul puddles as he goes, ascending a flight of crooked stairs and leaving me alone in the greasy smear of dimming torchlight.

I slide to my knees in the mud and grime, my cheek against the mold-speckled wall. Even after everything, I am surprised by how easy it is to cry. I cry so hard I’m certain someone will come slit my throat to shut me up, and by the time I finish I’m half praying that they do, as I’m imagining my mother in this same cell. My mind conjures its vague memories of her body, contorting them into a shape that matches my own. Small, cowed, kneeling. I almost think I will find a clump of her soft red hair buried in the muck, or a white clavicle bone.

I fall asleep that way, curled around my mother’s ghost.

Chapter Fourteen

“Évike.”

I wake to the sound of my name and to Gáspár standing outside of my cell. He has my cloak draped over his arm, the wolf looking limp and more dead than usual. I wipe the grime from my face and stand, knees quivering under me.

“I brought this for you,” he says, holding my cloak through the bars.

In the oily gleam of lantern light, his face looks cleaved in two: one half dewed in gold and the other cached in darkness. His good eye is shadow-drenched, so I have to read his expression by the clench of his jaw, the white line of his lips. Torchlight leaps off his ax blade, glinting wetly.

Very slowly, I take my cloak from him. I search its pockets, but my knife is gone.

“I had to take it.” His voice is sharp enough to scythe through the bars. “I can’t worry about you trying anything so abysmally stupid again.”

“How utterly noble of you.”

My words glance off him like arrows off a steel breastplate. He doesn’t shift. My braid and my coin are still inside the pockets, but they feel leached of their warmth. When I run my finger along the grooved edge of the coin, all I can think about is my father’s blank-faced stare and the alien shape of his nose and mouth. We could have passed each other obliviously in a crowd.

“Have you finished with all your snarling outrage, then?” Gáspár asks, and not kindly. “I told you what would happen if you came to the city. If you provoked Nándor.”

“You were planning to bring me anyway!” I burst out. “If your men hadn’t been killed, if you hadn’t figured out I wasn’t a seer, you would have brought me right to your father’s feet and let him do what he wished to me. When did you begin to have compunctions about seizing girls and trussing them up for the king like sheep to the slaughter? Was it after you knew the taste of my mouth, or after you felt the shape of my body under my cloak?”

I expect it to rattle him, and it does, but only for a moment. A grit of his teeth chases the flush from his cheeks.

“If I wanted you to die, I would have let Peti kill you. I would have let you drown under the ice. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you from tearing into Nándor’s false trial,” he says. “I could have left you to Miklós and Ferenc. If they weren’t bound by oath to serve my father, do you know what they would have done to you?”

Hearts and livers on the city gates. I think of the crowd closing in around me, the spittle foaming in their open mouths. My five-fingered hand curls around the iron bars. It doesn’t matter how sharp my claws are; I can’t cut a thousand throats.

“You’ve not an ounce of good sense,” Gáspár goes on, in his pinched-nose prince’s voice. Despite everything, I can tell a part of him relishes the opportunity to castigate me. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? Half of Király Szek has now seen you for a vicious wolf-girl, and Nándor looks more vindicated in his loathings than ever.”

I know there’s truth in his words, but all I can feel is hurt and toothless anger. I might as well be back in Virág’s hut, my thighs stinging with her lashes.