Page 74 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Yes, and still we have endured worse,” Batya says again, but I notice the way her eyes dart between my father and the doorway. “We must keep low until it passes, like we always do.”

Just like King János, I think, who has only tried to patch the holes of an unsound ship. That’s the problem with Patritians—they care about their legacies more than their lives. The king would let Keszi burn, would let my father bleed, would even let himself die if he could still have his statue carved in gold. If he could stay in that courtyard as a slender finger bone or a lock of hair or whitened eye.

Zsigmond nods, and says nothing more. Jozefa brushes a loose braid back from her mother’s face. And then I can feel my chest start to heave, tears pricking hot in the corners of my eyes. Batya draws a sharp breath, and I flush with shame at my weakness, how easily Nándor has moved me to weep, until Zsigmond rises from his chair and puts his arms around me, tucking my head under his chin.

I almost laugh then, in disbelief and despair. All my life I have only wanted my father to hold me, but now when he finally does, it feels as if he is holding me against the wolves at the door. I wipe my tears on the collar of his shirt and say, “Virág would tell you that I was a bad omen.”

Zsigmond laughs; I feel it echo through my cheek. “God has brought my daughter back to me, and whatever else has come with her is dust on the wind. Have I told you the fable of the rabbi and the golem?”

From the other side of the room, Jozefa groans. “Please, my mother has told it a thousand times. I can’t bear to hear it once more.”

Batya silences her with a glare, even as I think of how I’ve echoed her sentiment so many times. The Yehuli, I have learned, have as many stories as Virág. There are ash fables for funerals, wine fables for weddings, moon fables for trying to get your children to go to sleep at night. Thread fables are stories that mothers tell their daughters as they teach them to stitch, but I have no mother, so I’ve never heard a single one.

“It is a salt fable,” Zsigmond says, releasing me. “It’s what you tell on Shabbos when you dip your bread in salt. This story is about a rabbi who lived in a city much like Király Szek, but where the Yehuli were not treated nearly as well. They would close their windows and lock their doors, but still the Patritians would come at night, to burn their houses and loot them. The rabbi lost his own wife that way, and his daughter was taken and raised as a Patritian in the house of a childless lord. He watched her dark head in a crowd of Patritians with flaxen hair, watched her grow taller and lose her baby teeth, never knowing that her real family were living behind the gates of the city’s Yehuli quarter.

“The rabbi prayed to God for an answer, and because the rabbi was a good and loyal man who loved his people, God whispered back. He told the rabbi his true name. The rabbi wrote down God’s true name on a scrap of parchment and tucked it into his sleeve, so that he wouldn’t forget it. And then he left the city and went down to the riverbed, where he began to dig in the mud. With his bare hands, he reached into the earth and shaped a man from the clay—just the rough outline of a man, with two holes for eyes and another hole for its mouth. Inside its mouth, the rabbi put the scroll with the name of God. And then the clay-man sat up.

“The clay-man followed the rabbi back to the city. He was twice the size of a normal man and four times as strong, and being made of clay, he couldn’t be wounded. When the Patritians came that night, with their pitchforks and torches, the clay-man was waiting for them. Their pitchforks bent and broke against his clay body, and he extinguished all their torches with his huge hard fingers.

“The Yehuli were so grateful for the clay-man, and grateful to the rabbi for making him. And it is said that when the rabbi wanted the clay-man to be clay again, he reached into the creature’s mouth and took the name of God back out.”

It feels like the story of Esther: I know there’s a lesson in it, but I don’t understand. All I can think of is Nándor rising out of the ice like some pale hallucination, and all the Patritians dropping to their knees in front of him. I think he is both the mouth behind their prayers and the answer to them all at once.

“But there’s no clay-man now,” I say. “There’s no one to protect you against Nándor and the rest.”

“A protector doesn’t always look like a creature made of mud,” Zsigmond says. His dark eyes throw the candlelight like a black pool reflecting the moon at its highest peak. “You could be one of us, if you chose it.”

Jozefa gives a nod, contrite. “Didn’t I say so?”

I think about writing my own name, practicing each letter until the movements became as natural as breathing. The four stark lines of the É, the V a sharp little dagger, then a stiff line for I and more hard, fast strokes for K and E. I held that scrap of parchment with my name written on it so close and tight in my palm that the ink came off in my hand, but it was finally something that belonged to me and me alone.

Nándor would take it from me, and then cleave my head from my body. He wouldn’t even keep my fingernails and the little power he could leach from them—he would kill any memory of me and send all the Yehuli out into the cold.

“I think I do,” I say, even if they feel like the last words I will speak in the world.

Zsigmond smiles at me with such firmness it’s as if he’s gripping a blade. And then he leans over and whispers the name of God in my ear.

When I leave Yehuli Street, the bells are clanging in the castle courtyard. My heart clangs with them, echoing through my rib cage and up my spine. I haven’t left the king alone for too long, but I wonder if Nándor seized the moment of my absence anyway. What if the bells are mourning bells? What if he took the life of his true-born brother after all? The words of his threat are still lacing through my mind.

But the crowd gathered in the courtyard shows no signs of mourning. Many of them are the same peasants who followed Nándor to Yehuli Street, and I wonder if they will recognize me, in my dress of pale-green silk, my face pink with the memory of my weeping. None of them seem to even notice me, though—they are jostling one another and standing on the balls of their feet, craning their necks to see what is taking place at the center of the throng. The gray sky seems equally unsettled, clouds rolling back and forth across it like a prisoner pacing his cell. I push past a merchant in a red dolman and a beggar man holding a silver coin in his mouth and come to the front of the crowd.

My vision blurs, glazing over the chuff of smoke from the marketplace and the sharp smell of spices in the air. I can see the dark shape of a Woodsman’s suba, trotting toward the barbican on his black horse. And then, beside him, impossibly: the white blur of a wolf cloak, and a girl with hair the color of snow.

I blink once, hoping I will wake from a nightmare.

I blink again, praying it’s a mirage, a trick of Király Szek’s pallid sunlight.

I blink a third time, and I know with a sickening crush of dread that it’s real.

Someone’s cart of cabbages overturns, and the cabbages go rolling across the filthy cobblestones. In the ensuing scuffle, I dart forward across the courtyard, toward the Woodsman. I skid to a halt between him and the barbican.

It’s the Woodsman with the horrible mangled nose, Lajos. He looks down his half nose at me and sneers.

“Get out of my way, wolf-girl,” he says. “Nothing you can do or say will save your sister.”

“She is not my sister,” Katalin huffs.

In that moment, I can’t decide whom I would rather kill—her or Lajos. From up on her silvery mare, Katalin’s blue eyes are gleaming with stubborn reproach, but I notice that her hands are bound, and there’s a ghost of a bruise smudged purple on her cheek. It’s not quite enough to make me pity her, but a snarl of fury coils in my gut.