Page 67 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I blink at him, shoulders still raised around my ears. It only now occurs to me how much I am braced for scoldings and lashings, flinching at the slightest change in pitch or the sudden tense of a fist. But Zsigmond looks at me steadily, his thick brows pulled together with concern rather than consternation.

“I need your help,” I say, encouraged by his gentle face. “Someone left a note for me, in the palace. I can’t read it.”

A breath goes out of Zsigmond. I think I hear relief in it. I realize that he, too, has been bracing for something worse.

“Let me see,” he says. And then, almost as a second thought, “Évike.”

Hearing him say my name melts some of the ice in my belly. I reach into the folds of my skirt and retrieve the scrap of parchment, now bunched small and tight, no bigger than an acorn. I try to smooth it flat again before I hand it to him, but even I can see that the ink has run into a bizarre cartography, a pattern that is no pattern at all. Zsigmond squints at it anyway, holding the note up to the candlelight, ink darkening the pads of his thumbs.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment. “I can make out a few letters, but the rest is too smudged.”

I nod, a burn rising in my throat. “Thank you for trying.”

Zsigmond nods back at me. He puts the parchment down on the table, and like a lunatic I almost laugh at the absurdity of it: my note on his table. Me, standing in my father’s house, shorn of my wolf cloak, looking into his eyes. As a child it would have seemed a more impossible dream than seeing my mother again, or than gleefully watching Katalin pecked to death by a thousand crows. I hoarded those unfathomable dreams as I did my braid and my coin, polishing them in my mind like a mirror, seething, waiting.

“Do you remember her?” The words tumble out of my mouth almost without me willing it. “My mother.”

Zsigmond’s face creases. The corners of his mouth pull down, and I can hear him swallowing. For a moment I think, with no small amount of alarm, that he might cry.

“Of course I do,” he says. “You must think I’m a monster, or at least an especially cold and callous man. You must have wondered why I never came back for you, or why I never tried to stop them from taking Magda.”

Hearing him say it conjures an old pain, the oldest pain I know, and it makes me as mean as a limping dog.

“Yes,” I say, venom lacing my voice. “I did wonder why my own father seemed not to care for me at all.”

Zsigmond is silent, gaze faltering. I am glad, just for a moment, that I have cowed him. I have spent so many years coaxed out of my own pain, half convinced that I had no right to feel it. Afraid that even that would be taken from me, and the memories that came with it.

“I named you, you know,” Zsigmond says finally. His voice is tight, small, as if someone has wrapped a tender hand around his throat. “Évike. It means ‘life,’ in the Yehuli tongue. I went to Keszi every year for six years in a row, and spent seven days with Magda every time. It doesn’t amount to very much, and none of my family or friends here in Király Szek could understand why I was so taken with a woman that I seemed to scarcely know at all, and whose life was so different from mine. But in truth, it only took one day for me to know that I loved her. And I did love her.”

“Then why did you leave her?” There’s a dull ache in my chest, like the tick of blood behind a bruise.

“She didn’t want to come with me. What sort of life is there, for a pagan woman in Király Szek?” I narrow my eyes at his words, and Zsigmond’s face goes pale with chagrin. “Never mind the Patritians—it’s not looked upon well for a Yehuli man to wed a woman outside the community. And then the king removed me from my post, and I couldn’t return to Keszi on my own. It was too dangerous to traverse the forest without the escort of the Woodsmen. I had been warned by that woman, Virág, that Magda’s child—that our child—would be an outcast in Keszi too. But Magda wanted to keep you. There was nothing I could do.”

His voice tips up at the end, edging with desperation. His eyes are starry and wet, bleary with the reflection of candlelight. I try to memorize the canvas of his face, every fold in his brow, the particular set of his jaw, so I can hold it with me and know this: for so long I thought that I was carrying the weight of my mother’s death alone, but in the moment that the king swung his blade, he cleaved that pain in two. My father has carried his piece of it all these years, like a stone split down its middle, the jagged edges of his half fitting perfectly with mine.

“Tell me something about her,” I say, biting my lip. “Something I don’t know.”

“She wanted to learn to read,” Zsigmond says. He gives several measured blinks, drying his eyes. “I always brought a book with me when I traveled, so I could show her the letters. By the time she died, I had taught her the alphabet. She could spell her name.”

It would have been too much, to hold this grief on my own. But Zsigmond is still looking at me, gaze clear now and starless, and the hearth floods the room with such a wonderful smoky warmth that I never want to leave it. Words float up.

“Will you teach me too?”

I am not a particularly fast learner. The night unspools over us like Zsigmond’s endless rolls of parchment. The quill feels awkward in my hand, too small and thin. It doesn’t make sense that two etched lines meeting in a downward point mean the sound vee, which, Zsigmond tells me, is the second letter of my name, but he says it doesn’t matter. A long time ago someone sat down and decided that these etched lines meant something, and then everyone else agreed to it and made it true. My quill moves painstakingly across the parchment, tracing letter after letter, until I can recognize them all even upside down.

It takes hours, but once I have them committed to my mind, it all seems so simple that it makes my blood boil. Like with my magic, I feel as if I’ve just learned a secret that the world has been cruelly conspiring to keep from me. I write my name over and over again, five letters and three syllables that hold me like a cupped hand. É-V-I-K-E.

Zsigmond is not a particularly patient tutor. After I have exhausted three hours of his time, he returns to his own books with a sigh. I like this streak of peevishness in him, and that he trusts me enough to let it show. The books that he pores over are Yehuli holy texts, and he spends as many hours studying them as I do learning the Régyar letters for the first time.

It seems like a strange thing to me, that you should have to study from a book in order to properly worship the Yehuli god. No one in Keszi can read, and the Patritians make it sound like their god is something you ought to know, or else not ask too many questions about. Zsigmond scrawls questions into the very margins of his scrolls, underlining passages that he agrees with and marking up ones that he doesn’t. All of it baffles me. Can you believe in something while still running your hand over its every contour, feeling for bumps and bruises, like a farmer trying to pick the best, roundest peach?

“That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”

I wonder—stupidly, shamefully—what Gáspár would say about that. I think he would say that God is too big for one mortal hand to hold. You would need a thousand pairs of limbs to carry it, and a thousand eyes to see it. Or something like that, in his pompous prince’s voice.

A thin band of orange light lips over the horizon, and muffled words leaf through Zsigmond’s window, like a plant stretching its long green vines. Eventually, there’s a knock on the door. I watch from behind the table as he opens it to reveal the same stout woman who chided me from her threshold only two days ago. She pauses when she sees me, her wide mouth falling open as if it is a hatch.

“Zsigmond, who—” she starts.