Page 78 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Maybe he’ll thank you for it.” My voice is hoarse, nearly inaudible. “Then he’ll never have to confess to his sin. You’ll have taken care of his shameful problem for him.”

“I don’t think so, wolf-girl,” Nándor says. “I think that my brother will weep.”

And then he digs his fingers into my wound, pressing deep through flesh and sinew, nearly down to the bone. A hot, breathtaking pain bursts across my eyes, blinding me. I scream, but the sound of it is muffled by the blood in my mouth.

Gáspár was right. Nándor will torture me to death or madness, whichever comes first, just to make him falter. Even after I’m dead, I will damn Gáspár. Maybe my corpse will be the very thing that gets him killed.

Nándor withdraws his fingers. His hand is gloved in scarlet down to the wrist, but beyond that his skin is white and unblemished, as pure as the year’s first snow. He draws his hand up over my shoulder, along my collarbone, and closes a fist over my left breast.

“You missed,” he says, and at first I don’t realize that he’s speaking to Riika, not me. “I told you to aim for her heart. But I think she will die anyway—there’s certainly enough blood on my shirt.”

The front of his dolman is flecked with red. Against the wall, Riika has started weeping, her eyes squeezed shut.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. I don’t know if she’s talking to Nándor at all.

The four fingers of my right hand curl over the stone floor. Above his collar, the pale column of Nándor’s throat is inches from my face, taut with muscle.

“Or maybe you’ll die first,” I say, drawing my lips back to show my teeth.

I raise my hand and rip open his dolman, tearing through the silk as if I have claws. I tear right down to his bare chest, just as pale and bright as the rest of him, blue veins straining under his skin like water under ice. Ördög’s threads go stiff around my wrist. Black marks feather across his skin in the shape of my fingers, my touch burning him right down to the bone. It’s a wound deep enough to kill.

Riika screams. Nándor topples back, a soft gasp escaping his lips. Blood washes over his ruined dolman, spilling onto floor like strewn flower petals, the precise color of poured wine. The light begins to drain from his eyes, a white moon slivering away, and he raises his hands. I think he might beg me for mercy and I smile at the prospect, in spite of my own dizzying pain.

Instead, he clasps his hands together and utters a quiet prayer.

The wound on his chest stitches itself back up, an invisible needle strung with invisible thread. Where his face has gone gray with lost blood it flushes pink again, the vibrant pallor of a living man. His skin is as immaculate as a frozen lake on midwinter’s coldest morning. Slowly, Nándor gets to his feet.

“Didn’t I tell you I was holy?” he rasps, as if death has not yet receded from his throat. “Would you like to try and kill me again?”

I search his body—what I can see of it—for evidence of sacrifice, any small ruination that will help me make sense of what I have seen. But I find nothing. No missing eye like his brother, no scars like Szabín. No lopped finger like me. He is unmarred by the toll that power usually takes.

It’s more terrifying than a thousand scars.

I collapse onto my hands and knees, quashed by fear and pain, as Nándor approaches me. He grasps the collar of my dress and hurls me onto my back, my wound flattening against the stone floor. My heart thrums so loudly in my ears that I can’t even hear my own scream.

“I’ll come back when you’re cold, wolf-girl.” Nándor’s voice floats above me, his face blurring and doubling behind the glaze that’s fallen over my eyes. “And then I’ll bring my brother to weep over your corpse. Or perhaps I’ll kill him first—if Godfather Death wills it.”

I try to make a sound, any sound of protest, but my lungs are like shriveled violets. I hear Nándor’s boots make their way toward the door, and then a softer set of footsteps, Riika scuttling after him. My vision ripples into black. Then there is the slide of a lock.

I don’t know how much time has passed, as life eddies from me. With every breath I can taste the metallic tang of my own blood, suffusing the air like a red mist. Through the lattice of my wet lashes, I can see the hearth, the stone floor, my abandoned wolf cloak and plum dress. My own arm, stretched out limply like a fallen branch, still swathed in pale-green silk.

Ever since the moment that Virág had her vision, I knew that I would die here in Király Szek, cold and alone. But how could I have known what would happen in between? The stretch of snowy road between Keszi and the capital, flecked with bright moments, like fires in the dark. Gáspár holding me in the cradle of tree roots, his breath damp and warm against my ear. All the nights we spent on the ice, and his arm around my waist as he pulled me up out of the freezing water. His mouth on mine, the red juice staining both of our tongues. The way he kissed my throat so gently that it felt like he was apologizing for any pain I had ever felt, whether it was his fault or not. Zsigmond embracing me, Jozefa smoothing the skirt on my lap, Batya feeding me challah. Seeing my own name etched on paper for the first time.

I try to hold each of those moments in my mind, like a butterfly in amber, encasing them in timeless suspension. But when I die, they will die with me. And it seems so terribly unfair, to leave Zsigmond and Gáspár, to leave Batya and Jozefa, alone with only their bitter memories, carrying a pain meant for two people.

And then, skimming underneath all these mortal contemplations, is the unadulterated animal instinct: I don’t want to die. Not now, not yet, at only five and twenty.

It is stubborn, bitter strength that forces me up, onto my knees and then my feet. I clamber toward the door. Pain is dragging at me like a wet dress. The door locks from the outside, to keep me in, a cow in her barn after all. I fumble at the iron handle, gathering all my will like kindling, and then setting it alight. The handle crumbles, and with it, the lock on the other side. The door groans open.

The relief of that small victory threatens to undo me. I slump against the wall, catching my breath, trying to make my vision steady. The hallway in front of me is feathering away between strands of black.

My plan forms in my body before it takes shape in my mind. I stumble down the corridor, one hand against the wall, blood painting a streak on the floor after me. I remember the way to Gáspár’s room hazily, as if I learned it in a dream. When I reach his door I half collapse upon it, my knees weakening under me.

For a moment, I hear nothing on the other side. Maybe he’s not there. Maybe Nándor has already come for him. Each terrible possibility runs itself ragged through my brain, and my vision has winnowed to nearly nothing by the time the door swings open, Gáspár standing openmouthed in the threshold.

“Évike,” he says, catching me before I fall.

He leads me into his room, and I crumple onto his bed. If my mind weren’t so pain-addled, and my lungs doing all their work just to keep me breathing, I would make a quip about someone finding the true-born prince with a wolf-girl in his bed. Even in my head, the jest is not half as clever as I would like.