Page 72 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Jozefa scowls at her mother, but when she turns to me again, there is only a look of curiosity on her face, pink lips bowing. “Are you Zsigmond’s daughter?”

I nod mutely.

“You must have converted then, haven’t you? You aren’t wed.” Her gaze skims me up and down, like a merchant examining a porcelain vase for its cracks. “You look older than I am. If you want to be wed—”

“Jozefa.” Batya’s voice cuts between us. “The rabbi is going to start.”

Jozefa’s lips go taut, and she faces back toward the lectern. My cheeks are hot, but it’s a small flustering. There’s no shame pooling in my belly. I’ve long since learned to tell which questions are meant only to probe and which are meant to wound. Jozefa’s are dull, toothless—Katalin would have scoffed at such mundane impudence. I imagine she might have asked them of any Yehuli girl who was unwed at five and twenty, and the thought fills me with a tight, blooming hope, something like a coin clutched in a closed fist.

I expect the rabbi to be someone like the Érsek, but he is younger, with a dense beard that coils profusely, black as wet bramble. There are two candles on the lectern, and when he traces something into their stands, the wicks both blossom into flame. It makes my breath catch, the same as when Zsigmond did it.

He begins to speak, and I am deeply relieved to hear Régyar and not Yehuli. My skin prickles with the memory of Count Reményi’s words, how easily he imagined the Yehuli could give up their homes and their histories in Régország, how I had even briefly entertained the same fantasy. Now it seems impossible to imagine: Régyar words spill from the rabbi’s mouth as easily as water from a mountain spring. The story he tells is familiar, names and places lighting up in my mind like signal fires. There is the orphaned Yehuli girl, Esther, who was wed to a king. The king didn’t know that his new wife was Yehuli, and neither did his wicked minister, who plotted to kill all the Yehuli in the kingdom. When Zsigmond told me the story, decades ago, he gave the minister a pinched voice that made me laugh and laugh. Now, every time the rabbi starts to speak the minister’s name, the temple fills with shouting and crowing, sounds that blot the minister from the tale like a thumb smudging ink. I think of Zsigmond obscuring the first letter of emet, turning truth into death.

“Esther knew that she had been made queen so that she could help her people, but approaching the king about such things was against the law, and would lead to her death,” the rabbi says. “So for three days Esther prayed and fasted and sharpened her mind, and then she went to the king anyway.”

I already know that the story ends with Esther triumphant, the Yehuli safe, and the wicked minister killed. I know, too, that there is a lesson in it, like all of Virág’s dire tales, but I can’t tell what it is. Was Esther brave, or was she shrewd? Was the king cruel, or was he only stupid? I think Virág would say that Esther was a coward for marrying the king at all, or for not first slitting his throat while he slept soundly in their marriage bed.

A bit of grief leaches into me, like rainwater through roots. All around me the Yehuli sit with their families, shoulders brushing, hands linked together, and then there is Zsigmond and me, our thighs barely touching. Yehuli words float through the air in whispers, thin and pale as dust motes, still mostly foreign to me. I can sit in their temple and wear their clothes and even try to garble their tongue, but I am still not really one of them.

And then, extraordinarily, Zsigmond lays his hand over mine. I feel the quiver of hesitation run through his palm, and then he threads his fingers with my own. Warmth envelops me. Jozefa reaches across her mother’s lap and smooths one of the pleats of my dress, of her dress, almost absently, like she has noticed one of her own hairs out of place. Zsigmond is still staring straight ahead, watching the rabbi, but when his eye flickers to me briefly, I see in it a look of exquisite peace.

After the reading, bodies flood from the temple into the street. Feast tables are laid with huge platters of triangular-shaped dumplings, thin pancakes rolled with sweet cheese and topped with the last blackberries of summer, carafes of wine, and the same hard biscuits that Batya brought my father in his gift basket, thumbprints of sour-cherry jam at their centers. Zsigmond told me this was a minor holiday, but it looks as big as any feast we have ever had in Keszi. Farther down the road, there is a man performing a bawdy shadow-puppet play, telling the story of Esther with some embellishments not fit for children’s ears. The children are not listening anyway: they run through their mothers’ skirts, mouths stained purple with berry juice. The girls wear paper crowns, imagining themselves Queen Esther. The dusky evening sky is banded with orange and gold.

I linger by the feast table, scarcely able to restrain myself from clinging to Zsigmond’s side like a child myself. He speaks mostly to Batya in soft tones, clutching a cup of wine. I can see how each Yehuli family is like a constellation, and Zsigmond is his own unclustered star, winking its singular light. Just like how I was in Keszi, a daughter without her mother, nothing to give me shape except my braid in one pocket and my coin in the other. I fill a cup of wine for myself and swallow it down in one gulp.

“My mother will take offense if you don’t try her dumplings,” Jozefa says.

I put down my glass. “Your mother called me chubby.”

Jozefa regards me with a furrowed brow, as if she is trying to judge the veracity of her mother’s claim. “She’ll take offense anyway. And if you’re chubby, then so am I. We fit into the same dress.”

She takes a biscuit and eats it in two bites, smiling wolfishly. I watch her, uneasy. Batya’s other daughters are older, married, with the exhaustion of three children each gleaming dully behind their eyes. Jozefa has her mother’s bright, clear eyes and a face full of freckles that look scattered by an indolent hand. She is pretty in a razor-edged way; after spending so many years tormented by Katalin and the other girls in Keszi, it’s hard for me to look at pretty girls and not think of the blades behind their smiles. If we were in Keszi, Jozefa seems the type who would pull my hair and sneer at me. But now she only fills my glass with wine again, and then tops off her own.

“Thank you,” I say.

My voice is laced with suspicion, and she can tell. Jozefa’s lips purse. “My mother says you come from the pagan villages in Farkasvár, and that your mother was a pagan. Why are you in Király Szek?”

I swallow my wine. “It’s a long story.”

“We Yehuli like stories, in case you couldn’t tell.” Her eyes are light and laughing. “You ought to get used to telling them, if you want to be one of us.”

I almost say that I have plenty of practice listening, but I have done little telling of my own. “But I can’t be one of you, can I? I hardly know your language or your prayers or . . .”

“You can learn,” Jozefa says with a shrug. “You’re not simple, are you? Even my little cousin can read the holy book, and he still thinks that black hens lay black eggs. And even though your mother wasn’t Yehuli, you can do a conversion.”

“Does that happen very often?” I ask keenly. “Conversions.”

“Not very much anymore. But a long time ago, before the Patrifaith came to Régország, there were plenty of Yehuli men and women who married outsiders. Then they converted and raised their children here and no one could even know they were different at all. Of course, that was when we were allowed to live where we liked, and there was no Yehuli Street.”

“Before the Patrifaith?” Though Virág claims to remember a time when there were no three-pronged spears or Woodsman axes flashing, it is impossible for me to conceive.

“Of course,” Jozefa says. “The Yehuli lived in this city when King István wasn’t even a dream in his mother’s mind. Why else do you think our temple is so grand even when we can only work the days and the jobs that the Patritians allow us? Our temple was here before the Broken Tower, and long before the king carved his chapel into the hillside.”

The revelation of it shocks me. All I know of Régyar history is what I learned at Virág’s feet, and of course there was never any mention of the Yehuli. Jozefa watches my face flush first with bewilderment, and then with anger, thinking of the Patrifaith like a wave eating away at some pale and ancient stone.

“Why have you been so kind to me?” The question is not the one I intended to ask, but it rises up without me realizing it.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Jozefa counters, brow lowering. “Zsigmond has been alone nearly all his life; it was difficult to watch. Now he’s learned the daughter he thought was dead is alive after all—why should we take offense that her mother was some pagan woman?”