Page 77 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Tell him I have no use for his dresses,” I spit. “If he thinks I’ll uphold my end of our bargain if he doesn’t care to—”

A sudden, taut cord of pain laces through my arm, splitting the gristle of my shoulder. I turn around slowly, the room tilting on an uneven axis. Riika lets a small dagger drop from her hand, the blade of it thick with my blood.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “He didn’t want me to have to do it.”

I sway on my feet, the ground lurching toward me and then shuddering away again. I don’t need to ask to know that she doesn’t mean the king.

“What did he offer you?” I bite out as my vision starts to ripple and fray.

Riika’s eyes mist. Her lower lip trembles, jutting out beneath the icicle edge of her teeth.

“Nothing,” she replies softly, voice tipping up so that the word is almost a question. “He just said it would make him very happy, if I were to help him, and that Godfather Life would reward me too.”

I hear the sweet melody of her voice that half sings the words, and I see the flush in her cheeks, and I know that she is in love with him. I want to scream and shake her and tell her what a fool she is, this pitiable Northern girl, for thinking that Nándor might love her back. But I am too dizzy to speak.

Pressing down on the wound with my right hand, I push past her. The pressure of my fingers only makes it worse, so I tear a scrap of fabric from Jozefa’s dress and knot it over the wound, fingers slick and trembling. I should kill her, I think, but I can’t bring myself to. I am as stupid as she is, for coming to the capital at all, for believing that I was strong or clever enough to survive here.

A million thoughts gutter through my mind, each more terrible than the last. I drop to my knees and scramble to find the dagger before Riika can get to it again. I curl my bloody fingers around its hilt just as the door swings open, Nándor’s boot steps calm and soft upon the floor.

Chapter Twenty

I try to stagger to my feet, but Nándor places a gentle hand on my shoulder, squeezing my wound with just enough force to make me gasp. Pain blankets my vision in white.

“Stay down,” Nándor says. “I like the way you look when you’re kneeling.”

His nails feel as sharp as knives. I draw in a breath and reach for him, but before I can wrap my fingers around his wrist, he steps backward. The inertia sends me tumbling forward, catching myself on my hands. The floor is slick with my blood.

“How terribly heroic,” I bite out, “to send a serving girl to do your ugly work for you.”

Nándor stands up and walks over to where Riika has pressed herself against the wall, trembling. He runs a red-dyed finger down her cheek, and her face softens like challah bread fresh from the oven.

“I have friends everywhere, wolf-girl,” he says, looking at me while he grips Riika’s chin. “You should have figured that out by now.”

Friends in the Woodsman barracks and in the king’s council hall. I remember Count Reményi’s knifepoint eyes, sharpening as they found me in the dark. I remember Zsigmond shaking under Nándor’s stare, and the rabbi freezing like a frightened deer, and all the Yehuli children weeping. Anger cleaves through the pain.

“Then why did it take you so long to kill me?” I manage.

“You would have been dead your first day in the city if you’d been able to read my note,” he says. “I left it at your door, but I forgot that you wolf-girls are as dumb as dead fish, and can’t even spell your own names.”

I make a sound that’s almost a laugh: it was my own illiteracy that saved me, or at least prolonged my life. He must have invited me somewhere, perhaps pretending to be the king, and waited in the dark with a knife to cut my throat. And if he’d come to my room any other evening while I slept, he would have found it empty, too, since I have spent the past five nights at Zsigmond’s house.

“It won’t do you any good,” I say. The room, his face, all of it is blinkering with pale stars. “Even if I’m dead, the king will never name you. Not when there’s still a true-born son . . .”

I trail off, stuttering in agony. Nándor pushes off the wall and crouches down before me, his blue eyes so clear and cold I can almost see the ice in them still.

“Perhaps,” he says. “Perhaps not. Either way, you will not be alive to see it. Nor will you be alive to see Yehuli Street looted and empty, or your village turned to ash.”

I have no doubt that he means it, that he will turn his cold fire on Yehuli Street and Keszi the moment he gets the chance. I try to remember how many Woodsmen I saw in the crowd and calculate the number that the king still has on his side, but my mind feels like a frayed rope, only a few threads away from snapping.

“The king’s real heir lives,” I say, though my tongue tastes like copper and my eyes are starting to film. “And while he does, you have no chance of ever sitting the throne, unless you aim to rule by pagan right.”

I hope to see even a trace of disconcert on Nándor’s face, but he only smiles, such a beautiful, pure white smile that for just a moment I believe Szabín—that a chicken would bat its lashes at him while he butchered it.

“I know you have kept a close eye on my brother, as he has on you,” Nándor says. “I haven’t much wondered about why, since he came back to Király Szek with a bruise on his throat in the shape of your mouth.”

He knows. Of course he knows. Fear runs bleakly up my spine.

“What do you think my brother will do, when he sees your body?” Very calmly, Nándor begins untying the makeshift bandage I have knotted over my own shoulder. “What concessions do you think he will grant me?”