Page 66 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Their blades meet with a sound that reminds me of ice cracking under my feet. Nándor lunges forward, his sword wheeling wildly, as if he’s hoping to get in a jab on chance alone. Gáspár falls back, blocking each blow as they come, steady. All his clumsiness with the ax seems hazy and distant, and my face heats remembering the way that I mocked him for it. He fights like a real soldier now, steel-boned and iron-blooded, only leaning heavily to the right, his head turning back and forth to cover his blind side.

Nándor retreats, the sword whirling blindly at his hip. He leads with his right foot and leaps out again, aiming his blow at Gáspár’s left, where he struggles to see. Gáspár would call it a dirty trick, the low tactic of a man without honor. But I suspect Nándor would not think his honor imperiled by something as trivial as a play fight with a blunted practice sword.

Especially not if he won. Matyi has come to stand beside me, a safe distance from the scything of his brothers’ blades. His gaze travels anxiously between the fight and me, as if he’s trying to gauge which is the greater danger.

“You should take your brother at his word,” I say, trying to smooth the rough edges of my voice, trying to wring some kindness out of me, some deep-buried instinct for mothering. But when I look at Matyi I can’t see anything but a boy who will grow into a man, or worse, a Woodsman. “It’s your father who hurts wolf-girls, not the other way around.”

“Gáspár says you would have killed him.” Matyi regards me soberly.

It feels churlish and silly to argue with a child, but anger blackens in me anyway. “Your father would have killed me. And then Nándor would have taken his crown, and—”

“No,” Matyi cuts in, with a rigid certainty that makes him sound very much like Gáspár indeed. “That’s the pagan way, to have a king choose his successor, the way the tribal chieftains chose which son they wanted to rule when they were dead. I have a tutor from the Volkstadt who told me so. In all the other Patritian kingdoms, it’s the eldest son, the true-born son, who must rule by the law of God.”

My eyes dart back toward Nándor and Gáspár, the air gashed by their blades. I understand now why Nándor recoiled at once when he saw Gáspár in the crowd, why his presence alone seemed to make Nándor falter in his plans.

“So he’s a hypocrite,” I say, pleased by my own conclusion. “If he wants to claim the throne, he’ll have to acknowledge that there’s something right about our pagan ways, and wrong about his Patritian ones.”

Matyi lifts a shoulder, taking a slight step to the left. Perhaps my enthusiasm has made me seem more frightening, my smile showing the edges of my teeth.

“Some people say that my father’s marriage was never legitimate,” Matyi mumbles, cowed by my smirk. “Because Elif Hatun never made her proper conversion.”

“Gáspár’s mother?”

He nods.

I think of what Gáspár told me about his mother, a crumbling pillar in her palace quarters, eroded day after day by the tide of a thousand foreign tongues. Had she held on to her faith in mute stubbornness? Or had the Régyar words tumbled right out of her when she tried to take her vows, like a mouthful of rotted teeth? I wonder if that’s what has cursed Gáspár more than anything: the legacy of his mother’s quiet rebellion.

The rasping of wood goes silent for a moment, and I turn my gaze back toward their fight. Their swords are pressed together, faces close as they push and push, each trying to make the other crumble. It is Gáspár, finally, who falters. He lets Nándor’s blade slide off his, and though he steps backward, clearly yielding, his brother doesn’t hesitate. He strikes a blow to Gáspár’s blind left side that sends him stumbling back across the courtyard. Nándor’s sword waves like a war banner.

“A well-fought battle,” Nándor says, letting his blade clatter to the ground. His auburn hair is exquisitely tousled, as if the wind took to it with gentle fingers. “But I can hardly feign surprise at the outcome. Monsters are one thing, Gáspár, but men are a far greater challenge. You’ll need both eyes to fight your mortal enemies and win.”

“You’ve made your point,” Gáspár says sharply. Under his black dolman, his chest is heaving, and I feel a traitorous tug of affection. “At least Matyi saw a demonstration of proper swordsmanship.”

At the sound of his name, Matyi dashes toward his brothers, casting me one last, glowering look of deep mistrust. I watch the three of them in tense silence, the wind carrying the smell of ash from someone’s hearth and hot paprika from the marketplace, wondering if it’s possible that no one else saw what I did: that Gáspár let his brother win.

It’s late by the time I finally return to my room, the sky as glossy as black silk. I have endured a dinner with the king, a small feast, during which he hosted two emissaries from the Volkstadt, both wearing brilliantly colored satins with ruffled collars that looked like the plumages of exotic birds. The king tried desperately to ply them with wine and food and flattery, while they appeared mostly bored for the duration of it, and spoke brazenly to one another in their own language. The Volken tongue sounded lyrical by turns, as if they were reciting riddles and rhymes, and then became abruptly harsh, too strange and guttural to imitate. But by the end they still offered the king a thousand men each to help fight the Merzani invaders, and the king smiled and smiled even though he had a red-currant seed stuck in his teeth. Nándor looked disappointed by the outcome, and I couldn’t see why. Perhaps he had hoped for more men, or for a better deal that didn’t see us losing gold and silver, because the king had then quickly agreed to lease them some of the mines in Szarvasvár, which is on the border with the Volkstadt anyway.

My mind wandered, and I stole far too many glances at Gáspár, trying vainly to draw his gaze toward me. Our weeks together taught me to read his scowls and frowns, how to tell real anger from flushing pretense, how to coax gentleness from him as if with a needle, his smiles as rare and precious as blood drops. Now his expressions are more indecipherable to me than the words of the Volken men preening at my elbow. But Gáspár scarcely even looked up from his plate, lips purpling with the stain of wine.

When the Volken men pulled out a contract for the king to sign, I glanced over at it, but it was only ink splashed on a page. The king might have been signing the whole country into bondage or selling me off to the Volken emissaries, and I wouldn’t have known until they were fitting me with chains.

And then, after all of that, I find a note tucked under my door.

It’s a short message, and the ink is wet, fresh. It blackens the pad of my thumb when I unfold it. I can’t even read who has signed it, if anyone at all. My mind tries desperately to constellate the loops and lines, but staring at it makes me want to cry like a child.

It must be Nándor, I decide. His earlier warning in the courtyard hadn’t stuck, and he wanted to intimidate me further, or perhaps only punish me for daring to hold my ground against him, for smiling blithely at his barbed words. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes and then fall onto the page in hot splashes, thinning the black ink to a rheumy gray.

I will die here, I think, just like Elif Hatun, deaf to the threats whispered in her ear. Something in me hardens at the thought, all my fear and humiliation congealing into blustery courage. I crumple the note in my fist and hurry down the halls, through the barbican, and out toward Yehuli Street.

Chapter Seventeen

Zsigmond’s house is nothing like I expect. In fact, half of me is still thinking of him as a Yehuli man, and wondering what sort of house a Yehuli man would live in, while the other half of me thinks of him as my father, and my mind paints its own misty imaginings of what sort of house my father would live in. I wonder if I will ever think of him as my father, a Yehuli man. A Yehuli man who is my father.

There is only one room, with a bed and a hearth and a table with chairs. It is not entirely unlike Virág’s hut, but Zsigmond’s things are finer, merchant-crafted rather than homespun. Wrought-iron candle stands with carved ivy clambering up the length. A woven tablecloth embroidered with flowers and leaves that has no moth-eaten edges. The familiarity of it chills me rather than comforts me. I realize for the first time that I want Zsigmond to be different from anything I have known before. A new father for my new life.

“Thank you,” I stammer out, clenching and unclenching my fingers as Zsigmond stokes the fire. “I’m sorry it’s so late. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

The fire crackles pleasantly, tongues of flame licking at the blackened stone. Zsigmond stands, brushing ash from his knees, and says, “You did. But I asked you to come, and I never told you when, so I should have known to expect you at any hour of the day.”