Page 63 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Virág, I think, would call it magic. Gáspár and the Patritians would call it power. I close my fingers over my empty palm, no longer feeling the coin’s absence. There’s only the phantom feeling of Zsigmond’s hand on my arm, its steadying pressure. The memory of his coin and the king’s sword, both splintering—our abilities twinned, if not our faces. Hope fills me soundly, like something bright beaming at the end of a dark road, washing all the shadows.

“If I knocked on your door,” I ask slowly, “would you answer?”

Zsigmond meets my gaze. The purple bruise throbs on his shoulder, and my wolf cloak suddenly feels heavy draped over my arm, but in that moment all I can see is him nodding at me, him saying, “Yes.”

Chapter Sixteen

After Lajos escorts my father from the castle, he takes me to one of the small rooms inside the Broken Tower, that long white scar furrowing the charcoal sky. The Broken Tower is the oldest part of the castle, the stones blanched by a hundred years or more of harsh weather, and once it was the fortress of Saint István’s grandfather, the chieftain of Akosvár. Old blood is dried into the floor—I can smell the memory of slain cattle and livers curdling on altars. The Patritians do no such rituals now, of course, but the Broken Tower has been left to crumble under the weight of its shameful, silent archive. The stones in the walls are loose behind the headboard of the bed; I prod one and it clatters to the ground. There’s a cold hearth in one corner, and a single window, the glass marbled with rainwater.

“Am I trapped here?” I ask with a hollow laugh. “Am I allowed to leave?”

“Of course,” Lajos says brusquely, not answering my question at all, and then he lets the door slam shut behind him.

What would be the point of locking me away? The king wants me to serve him. He has enough mute and toothless wolf-girls, fettered by their deaths, watching him narrow-eyed from the Under-World.

I sleep only in short bursts, the night seamed through with dreams. Purple and green miasmas, the chuff of smoke and the jangle of bone chimes. I dream of the turul in a golden cage, its feathers shorn, my arrow lanced into its naked breast. I dream of pine trees in the snow. Gáspár’s face, his lashes daggered with frost, his chest bare under my hands. When I wake, it’s to the clanging of my own heart, and a honeycomb of light on my cheek. The window glass is yellow and bright.

There’s a ringing in my ears, like someone has been striking an anvil inside my skull. With a shake of my head I banish the dreams, but Gáspár’s face lingers a moment longer, conjuring a jolt of want between my legs. I stoke the hearth, fists clenched, and when I manage to catch a spark I sit back on my heels, letting out a breath.

I have survived the worst things I thought possible: being taken by the Woodsmen, cowering in front of the king. Now I must make some shape out of the unimaginable after, measure my new life by its margins and limits. I retrieve Katalin’s wolf cloak, my mother’s braid still tucked safely in the pocket, and stow it inside the trunk at the foot of my bed. Gáspár’s scolding has left its mark on me—I won’t invite more danger by wearing the cloak within Király Szek.

Sometime during the night, a serving girl must have come and left new clothes for me. A simple dress of plum silk, stiflingly tight in the arms and the bust, with sleeves that pool open like two wailing mouths. I make my own adjustments, tearing off the excess fabric with my teeth, and splitting a seam inside the bodice so I can breathe easily while wearing it. As I dress, I imagine Katalin’s delicate sneer, the mocking gleam of her lambent blue eyes. She’s no proper táltos yet, but her prophecy came true all the same: I look every inch a Patritian, a moon-faced servant to the king. I look no fiercer than Riika. I search for my father’s coin, to steel myself, but then I remember that it’s gone, turned to dust by my father’s Yehuli magic. Thinking of Zsigmond soothes me by some small measure anyway.

Before my chagrin settles on me, the door to my room swings open. I am caught between exhilaration and fear, half hoping it’s Gáspár and then chiding myself for such a silly desire, when more likely it’s an assassin or a murderous Woodsman, ready to mutiny over the king’s recent bargain. As it turns out, it’s something worse than either one. Nándor stands in the threshold, wearing a pale-blue dolman and an exceedingly pleasant smile.

“Wolf-girl,” he says. “Will you come with me?”

His tone is cool and polite, his expression open, his eyes glassy and bright. For a beat, I imagine he could be any man, with no ice in his heart and none of my father’s blood on his hands. He’s so lovely I can almost believe it. But Katalin is beautiful, too, and so is the frozen lake before it fissures under you.

“Don’t you knock?” I ask, curling my four fingers into my palm.

“Does a farmer knock on the barn door?” Nándor tips his head. His voice is so light, I hardly register the insult and when I do, my face heats. “Of course not. Now come with me.”

“Why should I?” I bite back. “So you can torture me like you did Zsigmond?”

“I haven’t tortured anyone. The Yehuli man was guilty. I punished him accordingly.”

“Not guilty by the king’s laws.”

“Guilty by the law of God,” Nándor says. “Without the Prinkepatrios, we would have no kingdom at all, and no earth to walk on, for that matter. The least we can do is abide by His proscriptions.”

It was easy enough to laugh off Gáspár’s pious ramblings when it was only the two of us in the woods, and even easier once I knew the feeling of his body against mine, the sweet taste of his mouth. Now, in the heart of the capital, pressed flush by all these Patritians, his words flood me with cold.

“You can’t hurt me,” I say. “I’m under your father’s protection.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Nándor says. His lip quirks, carving its crooked dimple. “You look as sweet and pretty as any Patritian girl now. I only wished to give you my favorite view of our glorious capital.”

I try to imagine what Nándor’s favorite view could be: Perhaps the place where Saint István nailed his hearts and livers to the gate? The place where he slaughtered the pig before my father? I think of Zsigmond’s boots trampling all that stinking flesh, tangling in the entrails, and draw in a harsh breath.

“I have no interest in anything that interests you,” I tell him.

“But you are interested in protecting the king,” Nándor says keenly. “You swore as much when you made your oath. You could never hope to succeed in your goal if you don’t understand life here in the capital.”

He is most certainly trying to trick me, but he’s also right. I feel like his gaze has swept right through me, swift and clean as a scythe. He has none of Gáspár’s stiff courtly rhetoric, his prince’s dour oration. He sounds more like Katalin, forever devising new ways to beautify her cruelties, to code them for my ears alone, slipping her insults right under Virág’s nose. And, like Katalin, he shows no sign of relenting.

“Fine,” I say. “Whatever awful thing you want me to see, it can’t be worse than what you’ve done to Zsigmond already.”

Nándor beams. A knot of fear and revulsion makes my lip curl as I trail him through the castle’s winding halls, narrow and viperous, until they bear us out into the courtyard. All traces of his demonstration have been erased, buried as if under a layer of clean snow. There’s no blood soaked into the cobblestones, no vapor of rot lingering in the air. All I can think of is the frozen lake, sealing itself so neatly over my head. Nándor leads me farther down the courtyard, his neck as lithe and pale as a swan’s under the feather of his auburn hair.