Page 61 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I remember Gáspár asking me the same thing, lake water lapping at our boots. Saying it to the king now feels as if I am handing him something fragile and precious, like my own cut tongue.

“Évike,” I say. “My name is Évike.”

The king dips his head, swallowing my name whole. “Do you, Évike of Keszi, swear to protect the crown of Régország? To be my sword where I have none, and to speak with my voice when I cannot?”

“Yes.” I am surprised by how lightly the vow leaves my lips, like an ember drifting out of a hearth. “I swear it.”

“To make this a true Patritian oath, you must kneel.”

I cast a glance at Lajos, whose gaze is burning holes in my back. “Call off your dogs first.”

“Stand down,” the king tells the Woodsmen.

Very slowly, Lajos lowers his blade. Beside him, Ferenc does the same, but I can hear him mutter something that sounds like a curse, close to treachery.

I relax my grasp on the king’s wrist, Ördög’s threads loosing. His skin is slick and red where I have grasped him, etched with four burn marks the length and breadth of my fingers. Keeping one eye on the king and another on the Woodsmen behind me, I lower myself to the ground.

“Father, this is madness,” comes Nándor’s voice, words slipped through the white grit of his teeth. There are murmurs of agreement from the guests, those who aren’t too slack-jawed to speak.

The king bends to pick up the pearled hilt of his blade, long sleeves pooling on the stone floor. He closes his eyes and another blade shimmers to life, shooting out of the hilt like a tree streaming up toward the sun. I wonder what Virág would think, if she saw it, the loathsome king suffused with pagan magic. I wonder what she would think if she saw me, shoulders bent under his blade. It shouldn’t rattle her at all. If she has taught me anything, it has been how to kneel.

King János lays his sword on each of my shoulders, one after the other. I can scarcely feel the press of it. All I can feel is the steadying of my heartbeat, like a wheel falling into a groove. I was cast out to the Woodsmen, but I have survived. I have come to the capital, but I have not met my mother’s fate. I am alive despite so many wishing me dead, pagan and Patritian alike. I feel as if I have crawled up from some black abyss, eyes flashing and wild as light fills them for the first time. The weight of their loathing lifts from me like a loosed cloak. Here in the capital, their words and their lashes cannot reach me, and I am the one who keeps the wolves from Keszi’s door. Even with my oath tethering me to the king, my life feels more like my own than it ever has before. Mine to spend as I see fit, and mine to lose foolishly, if that’s what I wish.

Gáspár is staring at me with a pale, stricken face, but he no longer gets to care what I do. Nándor pushes out of his seat and stalks from the room, footsteps brisk against the cold stone. When I rise again, I can scarcely hear the Patritians weeping.

Lajos takes me down to the dungeon again, where they are keeping my father.

I retrieve my wolf cloak from my old cell—it’s damp and filthy, the wolf’s teeth blackened, as if by soot—but I don’t put it on. It feels wrong to wear it, after what I’ve done, like a dress or a doll that’s been outgrown. I drape it over my arm, instead, the wolf’s head hanging limp and its eyes particularly glassy. No one stops me as I move in and out of the cells. Lajos doesn’t lift a hand. My oath to the king has armored me, but even better than that, my display of magic has clearly cowed him. I could turn his ax to nothing in my hand. He watches me like a carp at the end of a fisherman’s line, openmouthed, and flinches whenever I make an abrupt move. He looks the way I have always wanted the Woodsmen to look: afraid. Lajos seems nearly old enough to have taken my mother.

My father is in the very last cell, a great distance from my own. Maybe he was there all night, same as I was, the two of us curled like mollusks against the wet, dirty floor, oblivious symmetries of each other. The thought chills and heartens me in equal measure. A bad memory shared between two people carries with it only half the pain. Now my father is drawn up neatly on the far left side of his cell, legs crossed at the ankle, face angled toward the dank ceiling. When Lajos unlatches the door, he doesn’t leap to his feet. He only looks at me oddly and blinks.

Staring at him now, even in the grizzled torchlight, I can see his features better than I did in the courtyard. His eyes are a warm brown, keen and bright, drawing what little light there is and holding it. His nose is proud and almost regal; I think he would make a fine profile for a minted coin, between that and the stubborn triangle of his chin. His lips are thin and terse. His hair is thoroughly grayed, which disappoints me—I wish I could see whether it was the same chestnut hue as my own. Zsigmond seems to chafe under my probing stare, his shoulders rising around his ears.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Suddenly my mouth goes as dry as cotton. I can’t think of how to answer him, so I reach into the pocket of my wolf cloak, fumbling for my coin, and hold it out to him, fingers quivering.

Zsigmond rises to his feet, unsteadily. When he reaches me, he takes the coin with such delicacy that not even the pads of our thumbs touch. I try not to feel deflated by his balking gingerness. He watches me with one eye, and with the other, examines the coin in the scant torchlight.

Finally, he says, “Where did you get this?”

“You gave it to me.” My voice doesn’t have half the certainty I want it to. I wonder if he’ll believe me at all. “Well, you gave it to my mother, and then she gave it to me.”

“Are you Rákhel’s daughter?”

Some name I don’t recognize, a woman I don’t know. My stomach hollows.

“No,” I say, “I’m yours.”

Zsigmond looks at me, long and hard. He is not much taller than I am and I can see one blue vein on his temple throbbing as he stares, reminding me, with a bitter start, of Virág. I chase the thought from my mind. His bushy brows draw together.

“It’s not possible,” he says. “I had a daughter once, true, but . . .”

“She’s not dead,” I whisper. “The Woodsmen came to Magda and they took her, but Virág—she saved me.”

“Virág?”

I blink, baffled that he has caught onto her name, that this is the part of my story he has picked out. “Yes, the seer. She has white hair and twelve fingers.”