Page 57 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Did my mother have a chance to clean her face before they killed her?

There’s a bone-toothed comb for my tangled hair and a new tunic made of bristly wool that I know will be too small and too tight, so I shake my head. Riika chews her lip and looks like she might weep, so I put it on anyway, blinking numbly as a seam splits up my thigh.

“You don’t look like a monster,” she whispers, almost to herself.

I think about how many times I woke, sweating and screaming, from nightmares about Woodsmen with gleaming sharp teeth and claws beneath their black gloves, and wonder if good Patritian girls like Riika have dreams about wolf-girls eating them.

“Let’s go,” Lajos says shortly, prodding me with the blunt edge of his ax.

This time, no one pulls a hood over my eyes as Lajos leads me barefooted out of the dungeon. We turn down long hallways that curve as wickedly as viper tongues. Small square windows wink star-glutted light—in the time I’ve spent in the dungeon, evening has withered into night. Finally, an arched doorway opens like a scowling mouth, bearing us into the Great Hall.

Feasting tables have already been laid out with cooked swans, their necks curling like white-gloved hands and their beaks still intact; a whole roast boar gumming a green apple, its side split open to reveal a stuffing of dried cherries and link sausages; two enormous pies molded to resemble twin crowns; bowls of red-currant soup the color of a lake at sunrise. Gáspár was right—there’s no peasant fare here.

The Patritian guests rise as I enter, whispering like a sibilant tide. The women all have their hair covered, in headscarves or rheumy veils or silly boxed hats, and each man wears a silk dolman, cinched at the waist with a woven belt of red. The men in Keszi wear the same embroidered belts to ward off demons from the forest, who confuse the red with blood and think their would-be victims already dead, and I want to laugh seeing these pious Patritian men wearing them, too, until I realize I am the evil thing they are trying to keep at bay.

My gait must have faltered, because Lajos gives me another vicious shove.

Iron chandeliers wheel overhead, candle flames blinking at me like the thousand eyes of Ezer Szem in the dark. My heart is a riot as I fix my gaze on the dais ahead, where a long table has been set out and laid with white cloth. There are six chairs girding the table, and at the very center, knuckling out of the white like a tree in the snow, is a carved wooden throne.

For now, the throne is empty. But in the threshold behind the dais, a cluster of figures emerges. Three boys at first, the youngest no older than twelve, each dressed in a dolman of emerald green. One has a Northerner’s frosted hair, nervous as an albino fawn, skittering-bright under a hunter’s stare. One has chestnut hair like mine, curling maniacally around his overlarge ears. The last has hair the color of beechwood, shot through with streaks of darker brown. The king’s young bastard sons, all born of different mothers.

Nándor strides in behind them, and the guests all leap to their feet so quickly they trip and scuffle, like a flock of bejeweled birds, squawking out their blessings and prayers. He wears a dolman of ivory and gold, and I wonder if he put it on after he wrung my father’s blood from his hands.

I didn’t let myself think of seeing Gáspár here, but he comes last through the archway, head bowed, eye following some invisible path toward the dais. His black dolman is buttoned all the way to the line of his jaw, obscuring the bruise I left on his throat. He takes a seat at the very last chair, farthest from the throne, beside the boy with beechwood hair, and gives his younger brother a gentle smile that steals the breath from my lungs.

I want him to lift his gaze and find me in the crowd, Lajos’s ax in my back. I don’t dare make a sound, but I stare at him as if I can will him to stare back, to see what his cowardice has done.

Lajos prods me to the corner of the chamber, where I am half-hidden behind a wrought-iron candle holder. I wonder again if my mother stood in this very spot in the king’s Great Hall, knees trembling as she waited to die. The thought passes through my mind like wind thrashing open the flap of a tent, leaving me ragged and ruined. I blink furiously, wishing that I could cry and be comforted—I would take even Virág’s perfunctory comfort, her six fingers stroking roughly through my hair—but I won’t let these Patritians see me weeping.

Nándor rises to his feet, and the tittering guests fall silent at once, like a candle being snuffed.

“Now arrives your king,” he says. “Heir to the throne of Ave István, blood chieftain of the White Falcon Tribe and all its lands, and blessed by the gentle hand of the Prinkepatrios. Kneel for him and for your god. Király és szentség.”

“Király és szentség,” the guests murmur, and then fold to their knees.

I have spent all my life hating the king so fiercely, so blindly, that when I finally see him, I don’t know what to think or how to feel. He could not have been as monstrous as my imaginings, because even the worst monsters, like dragons, look only like men. King János is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He has the look of a man who grew his beard long and gray for the precise purpose of hiding a weak chin. He wears a dolman of exquisite gold, and over it a velvet mente with a furred collar and sleeves that drape all the way down to the stone floor.

I almost don’t notice his crown. It’s a funny thing, oddly skewed, a bleached color somewhere between yellow and white. It’s not the grand coronet I envisioned, knobbed with precious stones. It’s made up of a thousand tiny pieces tacked together, and I can’t tell what they are until I look down at my own hand, feverishly clutching the hem of my too-small tunic.

King János wears a crown of fingernails.

In the gauze of candlelight, I stare at the nails on the king’s crown. There are infinitesimal slivers of blood between each one, where bone was peeled away from skin. I try to find my mother’s fingernails among them, but it’s too dark and I’ve forgotten what her hands looked like, much less her nails. Were they long and elegant, like Katalin’s? Short and bitten to nubs, like mine? Did they wait to take her fingernails until after they killed her, or did they flay them off while she was still alive, shucking them like insect shells, so they could hear her whimper?

King János lifts his hand, his own fingers gnarled with golden rings. The cold candles lining the feast tables blossom with flame, wicks cringing black. A murmur rises from the guests, something appreciative but guarded, the way a warrior might admire a compatriot’s particularly gruesome kill. The king brings his hands together, rings clattering, and knives and forks and spoons glimmer onto the tables in front of us, silver dinnerware shining bright as blades.

He’s forging.

I’ve never seen a Woodsman do it before, and not even a whisper of a prayer has left the king’s lips. The guests are flashing their eyes now, like prey animals at the mouths of their burrows.

The room starts to shrink away, candlelight pinwheeling through my darkening vision. My heart thrums like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. I try to count how many wolf-girls have been taken from Keszi. One every two or three years, for all the years that János has been king. It tallies to twelve girls, not including me.

Twelve girls. Ten fingernails each. Is it enough to cobble together into King János’s bone crown? Enough to leach the magic from his victims’ cold skin and give the king the power that he craves?

The king takes a seat and coughs into the luxurious sleeve of his mente.

“Now,” he says in a phlegmy voice, once he has finished, “bring in the counts.”

I push myself onto my toes, still feeling the thrust of Lajos’s ax between my shoulder blades, and wait to see more men come swathed in silk and velvet. But the first man who enters is dressed plainly, in a pagan’s brown tunic and woolen cloak. The recognition gives way to terrible grief, like the first bite of an apple before you taste the curdle of its rot. He is wearing a grand headdress of antlers, and two men beside him are leading a massive buck, its own antlers sawed to sad nubs. The deer strains and strains against its bounds, fur matted with blood where the rope has cut in.