Page 8 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Sweat clings to his face in a sickly sheen, cast a livid green by the lantern light. Peti is breathing hard, his heart pounding wildly against our adjacent chests, like someone is hammering on the door of my rib cage. Animal instinct edges out the fear. Driven by a mad, frantic desire to live, I lift my head and sink my teeth into his ear.

He screams, and I jerk back with as much force as I can. Blood spurts through the air and lands in thick strands on my wolf cloak, on Katalin’s beautiful white wolf cloak. Peti rolls off me, sobbing and clutching the side of his head.

I spit muscle and sinew out of my mouth and wipe his blood from my face.

“You wanted a wild wolf-girl,” I say in a strangled voice that doesn’t sound at all like my own. “You got one.”

“Not me,” Peti groans. “The king. He hasn’t—he won’t do what needs to be done. He’ll let his country burn before he rids the country of the pagan scourge.”

His words chill me. I tell myself they’re the ramblings of a madman with one fewer ear than most. But my moment of bewilderment gives him an opportunity. He’s on top of me once again, blade flush against my throat.

“You don’t deserve the dignity of a swift death,” he growls. The knife digs into my skin. Not deep enough to kill, but enough to draw a collar of beaded red around my neck. Enough to make me stammer out a sob and squeeze my eyes shut. At least I can choose to die without looking at his face, terrible and stupid with bloodlust.

Then his weight vanishes from my chest. I open my eyes to see the captain lift Peti’s body off me and throw him to the ground, limp and boneless. For a moment, my heart staggers with relief, almost gratitude, before loathing takes hold of me again. I hate the cold blackness of the captain’s eye and the sharp cut of his jaw even as he pulls Peti off me.

Peti cowers under the gleam of the captain’s ax, weeping.

“Your orders were to bring the wolf-girl to the capital, not to mutilate and murder her,” the captain says, raising his voice over the sound of Peti’s wailing.

“Király és szentség!” he bawls. “The king only commands half my loyalty. I must do what is right by the one true god, and by Nándor—”

“It was the king who put the ax in your hand,” the captain cuts in, but I see something that looks like panic dart across his face. “You betrayed the Crown.”

“What about her?” Peti raises a trembling finger and points at me. “She dishonors the very name of Régország with her filthy pagan magic.”

The captain’s gaze flickers briefly over me, an unreadable expression in his eye. “Her fate is for the king to decide.”

Imre and Ferkó both come running, hair mussed and axes in their hands.

“What’s going on?” Imre demands.

“She bit off my ear,” Peti whimpers.

“You tried to kill me,” I remind him, my voice shaking.

“Traitor.” Ferkó spits on the ground in front of him. “You know the king’s orders.”

“And should I follow the orders of a king who defies the will of God?” The wild, wheeling look of desperation in Peti’s eyes fades. For a moment there’s something more lucid about him, blood trickling from the ruin of his ear. “When there is another who ought to wear the crown, and will honor the Prinkepatrios in his reign? Nándor—”

“Don’t.” The word huffs out of the captain’s mouth in a white cloud. “Don’t say his name again.”

Imre’s brows pull together, but his grip on the ax doesn’t slacken. “You know the punishment for treachery, Peti.”

Weeping again, Peti doesn’t reply.

The captain glances between Ferkó and Imre. “Hold him down.”

Together the Woodsmen lurch toward him, and Peti howls. They wrestle him onto his back, pinning his arms flat, limbs spread-eagled. I watch and watch, horror building in my chest. The captain stands at Peti’s feet, hairs rising on his black suba. In the lantern light, Peti’s face is slick with tears.

Imre kneels on Peti’s hand, keeping his arm pressed to the ground. He unsheathes the knife from his boot and thrusts the hilt of it into Peti’s mouth.

“Bite down,” Imre says. I realize with a start that his face is damp too.

A word of protest rises in my throat, but I remember the mad, monstrous look on Peti’s face as he pressed his blade to my skin, and the word dies before I can speak it.

The captain brings down his ax in a neat arc, right below Peti’s left shoulder. The swift scything of the ax ruffles the hairs of his suba, and when the blade buries itself in the earth, they lie flat again.

For a long moment, the forest is silent. Ferkó and Imre get to their feet. The captain lifts his ax, the sickled edge of the blade dripping something viscous and black. With bleary, languid movements, as if he’s just been woken from slumber, Peti shifts on the grass, raising his head. When his torso rises, his arm doesn’t come with it.