Page 73 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Because I’m only half—” I start, and then stop abruptly, because Jozefa is looking at me as if I really am simple.

“Some on this street might not like it,” she says. “But I think it’s Patritians who care more about measuring blood.”

Not just Patritians. My thoughts go to Katalin, her face cast blue in the light of her flame. For all her eloquent assurance, Jozefa might be as sheltered as a fox pup in its den. Blood has power. I’ve seen it streaked across Gáspár’s wrist, felt it drying on the backs of my thighs. I’ve been eating the truth of it all my life, even before I knew you could cut your arm to kindle a fire, or lop off your pinky to invite Ördög’s magic inside you.

Several feet away, Batya throws her head back and laughs at something my father has said. Her eyes are gleaming. I remember how she sat with her daughters in the temple, the absence of a husband obvious to me only now.

“What about your father?” I ask keenly, no longer caring to be tactful. “Where is he?”

“He died when I was a child.” Jozefa blinks, untroubled. “I don’t remember him at all. But I do know what it’s like to be without one.”

The baldness of her answer almost makes me feel embarrassed for asking, and doubly ashamed for thinking that she was as soft as a kit, oblivious to any suffering. I see a different cant to Batya’s smile now, and a new meaning to the way Zsigmond has laid his hand on her arm.

I open my mouth to reply, but the wind picks up then, ferrying the sound of voices down Yehuli Street. Firelight dances on the facades of the houses, and moving shadows fall upon the cobblestones. Now all my blood turns cold.

My mind conjures images of stakes and torches, bodies in the street. But I can’t see any blades glinting, only a crowd gathering at the very end of the road, mostly peasants in their homespun clothes. They are murmuring, their heads bobbing like prairie mice, but there is one voice, dulcet and familiar, that rises above the rest.

“See how they celebrate while our soldiers are struck down by Merzani steel,” Nándor says. “See how heartily they eat while the bey’s army burns our crops in Akosvár. If you believe, as I do, that the Prinkepatrios rewards staunch faith and punishes apostasy, then how can you believe that we are not being punished for sheltering heathens in our city?”

A chorus of approval lifts from the crowd. Jozefa has gone stiff beside me, one hand gripping the edge of the feast table. Her knuckles are white. Behind me, Zsigmond’s gaze passes between Nándor and me, the wine-flush draining from his cheeks.

“All this time the king has been searching for the power to defeat the Merzani and to end the war,” Nándor goes on. He paces to the front of the crowd, his boot steps feather-light. “Stealing magic from pagan girls’ fingernails, like some sort of impious grave robber. Perhaps the solution has been before us all this time: send the Yehuli from this city, and wipe the pagans from this Earth.”

His words are openly mutinous. I scan the crowd, searching for Gáspár, for anyone who might bear witness to Nándor’s treason. My heart leaps when I see a black suba, but it’s not Gáspár—it’s only a nameless Woodsman whose face is unfamiliar to me. My gaze lands on another Woodsman, and then another, their axes at their hips and their eyes following Nándor reverently. My vision falters, and I feel sick enough to retch.

The crowd presses around Nándor, pushing farther down the road. All the sounds of our feast have gone silent. Children are clinging to their fathers’ legs, the feathers from their masks snatched up in the wind. The rabbi is mutely cradling his cup of wine in one hand and a half-eaten biscuit in the other. We are all, in this moment, part of the same constellation: dozens of stars clustered in identical terror.

Nándor breaks from the crowd. In the evening light, his face is incandescent, torchlight flickering on the shining planes of his cheeks. He comes toward me, and Jozefa gives a tiny gasp of fear, stumbling back. I hold myself still. My heart is all roaring clamor. When Nándor finally stops, our noses are a hair’s breadth apart. I can see a small, imperfect birthmark under his left eyebrow.

“Évike,” he says. “What a terrible disappointment. There’s hardly any trace of pagan left in you. Pity for my father—he wanted a vicious wolf-girl, and he got a slavering Yehuli dog.”

He wants his words to draw deep gouges in me, deep enough to make me cower, or else rise to violence like a wolf with an arrow in its hind. Pain makes animals mean, but I must be more than just an animal now. The crowd thrums in bridled fury behind him, so many faces blank with their loathing. Ashen-faced peasants mostly, along with a handful of Woodsmen and even a few nobles in their jewel-bright dolmans. Something familiar sharpens out of the throng: Count Reményi, his weasel eyes narrowed like knife points.

“Wolf-girl or Yehuli, I know what to do with seditious bastards,” I say, though my voice is more uncertain than I would like. “And I know what shackles you now, Nándor. You want to be a Patritian king of a Patritian country, but it’s Patritian law that the crown goes to the firstborn son. The true-born son.”

I expect Nándor to flinch, if only briefly, but he scarcely even blinks at me. His gaze wanders over my shoulder, landing on Zsigmond. My heart stutters.

“So it is,” Nándor says, shifting his gaze back to me. “As long as the firstborn son lives. And you and your people may have my father’s protection for now, but one man’s word, even the word of a king, cannot hold against the tide of an entire city.”

It’s another moment before I can untangle the threefold braid of his threat, my stomach curdling with terror. Is it Gáspár’s life, not his father’s, that he aims to take? Does he plan to banish the Yehuli on his own, with his faction of disloyal Woodsmen? And then will he march them to Keszi too?

My four fingers curl into a fist. I’ve been told of Nándor’s power, but I have never seen it. I have heard him entrance a crowd with his voice, but voices can be silenced. Hateful instinct laces through me, and I very nearly wrap my hand around his throat.

I stop before I even lift my arm. It will only bring violence upon Zsigmond, upon Jozefa and Batya and all the Yehuli behind me. For all that I lambasted Gáspár over his cringing silence, for all that I fought Katalin’s cruelty, I don’t rise against Nándor now. I let his words land on my shoulders like brittle winter leaves. He plucks the wine cup from my hand and drains it, a stain of scarlet tinging the corners of his lips. Then he smashes the glass onto the cobblestones, turns, and leads his crowd away with him.

Chapter Nineteen

The street empties within moments of Nándor’s departure. Food is swept off the feast tables. Children are bundled into their houses, hushed with their mothers’ kisses. All that remains is the red spill of wine across the cobblestones and the shattered porcelain of my cup. Dusk has sharpened into night, and the cool air stings my cheeks and nose as I help Batya and Jozefa heft their trays through the threshold, Zsigmond following close behind.

When the door is shut, Batya collapses into a chair. Jozefa wipes her brow mutely. And Zsigmond sits down at the table, hands steepled in front of him, gaze set blankly into the middle distance. The gonged absence of sound is louder than Király Szek’s church bells.

“What will you do?” I ask finally, when I can’t stand the silence any longer. My voice squeaks like a wood mouse.

“What we have always done.” Batya rubs one hand along her chin. “There’s nothing else to do. We have weathered worse threats before. It has been particularly bad these past years, with the war, but once the Merzani are pushed back from the border, Nándor will temper himself again.”

“It’s not only Nándor,” Zsigmond says softly. “There were near a hundred peasants there, and Woodsmen and nobles too. Is Nándor the mouth behind their prayers, or the answer to them?”

I don’t know how to reply. If a fire burns your hut to the ground, do you blame the man who stoked your hearth, or the god who made the winter cold?