Page 6 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I scarcely even think to fear the forest. I am too busy fearing the Woodsmen.

Although I don’t care to, I learn their names quickly enough. The young blond Woodsman who bound me is Imre, the rugged older one with a bow and quiver strapped to his side is Ferkó, and the surly Woodsman behind me is Peti. Whenever I dare to glance over my shoulder, I see Peti staring daggers into my back, almost certainly wishing he could put an ax through it. Eventually I stop looking behind me at all.

“When are you going to dazzle us with your magic, wolf-girl?” Imre asks as we pass by a copse of trees that bear fleshy, foul-smelling fruit the shade of cloudy river water.

I stiffen. Wolf-girl is one of their many names for us, but I find it more unbearable than any of the others. After all, I have no magic, and I’ve done nothing to earn the cloak that hangs spuriously on my shoulders.

“I can’t choose when the visions come,” I reply, and hope he doesn’t notice the way my face burns with the lie.

“A lot of use that is. Don’t they teach you a way to call your visions?”

His casual tone frightens me more than Peti’s livid silence. No conversation should be easy between predator and prey. “It’s not something that can be taught.”

“Ah.” Imre’s blue eyes gleam. “Just as we in the Holy Order of Woodsmen are not taught to hate all pagans with the greatest passion. The loathing is in our blood.”

My grip tightens around the reins, stomach roiling. “You must hate me, then.”

“Certainly,” Imre replies. “But unlike the dullard on your other side, or the simpleton behind, I’d rather pass the time by talking than staring into the darkness and waiting to die.”

“Perhaps the rest of us would rather die in silence,” Ferkó mutters.

“The Woodsmen do not fear death,” Peti speaks up gravely. “The Prinkepatrios welcomes us to eternal glory.”

“Only if you die with honor. And I intend to run away screaming the moment I see so much as a pair of eyes in the dark.”

“That’s not funny,” Peti growls, bringing his horse to a canter so he can give Imre a steely glare.

“Don’t worry, Peti. I was only teasing. I promise to protect you when the monsters come.”

Peti’s ear tips turn red. “You’re going to tease your way to an early grave.”

“Better to die young with a smile on my face than live a long life without laughter.”

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have become a Woodsman,” Peti says.

“Quiet.” It’s the captain’s voice. I haven’t heard him speak since we entered the woods, and he’s quieter now than I expected, almost like he’s embarrassed of his authority. Of course I haven’t dared to ask his name. On the rare occasions that his soldiers do speak to him, they refer to him only as kapitány. He hasn’t fixed me with murderous stares like Peti, or tried to goad me into terrifying conversation like Imre, but I fear him worse than both of them put together. Despite the softness of his voice, his missing eye speaks of one thing—a fierce devotion to his god, which means a greater hatred for pagans and wolf-girls than either of these shorn men.

The captain halts on the path. We skid to a stop behind him, and I peer down at the ground, half expecting to see a mangle of entrails or the corpse of something freshly slaughtered. But it’s only a circle etched in the dirt. I might have believed it was an accident, maybe an animal dragging its tail on the ground behind it, but then I look again. Farther down the path are cloven prints, and then beyond that, the unmistakable stumbling tracks of a barefooted man. Looking at it makes me feel dizzy and sick.

The footprints lead us away from the circle and toward a tight grove of oak trees. Their leaves are brown, dead, curling like Virág’s ancient reed roof. The trunks have the same circle etched into them, and their roots are fetid and black. The smell of spoiled meat blows past us.

“Shall we investigate, kapitány?” Ferkó asks, drawing his ax.

The captain is silent as he glances around the grove. He turns his head fully to either side, so he can examine it all despite his missing eye. For a moment, his gaze lands on me, and my stomach turns into a cold, dark pit.

“No,” he says. “Let’s move on.”

By the time we stop for the night, I have planned my escape seven times.

Leap off my horse and disappear into the trees before the Woodsmen can think to stop me. Cut the rope around my wrists on a sharp rock and flee back to Keszi. Pray to Isten that the Woodsmen die in the forest somewhere and never come to find me. Pray the king doesn’t decide to punish all of Keszi for my ruse and burn our village to the ground like his great-grandfather, Saint István, did to the rest of the pagan tribes.

I would rather stare down the awful rotted heart of the forest than face the Woodsmen and their axes. I know it makes me a coward, and perhaps also a fool. But my mother’s fate is a flitting bird I refuse to follow. I can’t swallow the thought of the Woodsmen killing the little part of her that’s left in me, the facsimile of our shared blood.

We are finally allowed to camp in a small clearing, gridded by a copse of birch trees, their pale skin half-shed. Spirals of birch paper are littered in the dead grass, and there is still the faint but unmistakable scent of meat left out too long in the sun. Peti and Ferkó scout the area for safety, axes drawn. I can’t help but eye the bow and quiver on Ferkó’s back, muscles twitching with deep-rooted memory. I will never shoot an arrow again. Imre collects logs and dry leaves for a fire, and sets them on the ground in front of the captain. I stand pressed to my mare’s flank, wrists still painfully bound.

The captain removes his gloves and clasps his bare hands together. For a moment I think he might start to pray, and want to turn away in revulsion. But he only utters a single word: “Megvilágit.”

He says it almost as if it were a question, or a polite request, the same deferential tenor to his voice that shocked me before. And then a fire roars to life in front of him.