Page 82 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“The king would not have been able to end the war with your magic anyway,” I say. “He didn’t understand that a seer can’t choose her visions.”

Katalin’s lips quiver. “That’s not quite true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sometimes visions will come when we least expect them,” she goes on slowly. “But there are ways to force them. Just like cutting off your pinky—surely you remember how Virág would go down to the river.”

I frown at her, trying to conjure the memory. It comes back to me in jagged pieces, just a flash of Virág’s six fingers, her knees blackened with river mud. Her white hair spidering out through the water. Someone’s hand on the back of her neck.

“Yes,” I say, feeling my stomach fill with a slick nausea.

“So it’s no perfect method, but what about the gods’ magic is perfect, anyway?” Katalin runs a hand through her hair. “You can ask a question, and if you offer enough of yourself, the gods will give you some kind of hazy answer.”

“But it’s not the omniscience that my father imagines,” says Gáspár. His eye shifts uneasily between Katalin and me. “And it’s not enough to stop Nándor either.”

“No,” Katalin says. Her mouth twists, certainly displeased that she has agreed with a Woodsman.

I stare down at the water, the gray sky reflected on its murky surface. The clouds wash downriver. Quietly, I say, “But the turul is.”

I expect Katalin to scowl, to swear. To laugh in derision at my suggestion. But she only arches her eyebrow at me, bemused. “I thought you loathed all of Virág’s stories with every bone in your body.”

“I didn’t loathe her stories. Only that I was made to hear them so many times. And that they were coming from Virág’s wicked mouth.” But I don’t know whether I mean the words or not. I hated Virág’s stories because I never felt like they belonged to me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. The turul will give us enough power to stop Nándor, if we can find it and kill it.”

Gáspár’s breathing quickens. I know he wants to argue with me, to tell me that the Woodsmen have been searching for ages and have never found a trace, to remind me how we already tried to find it and failed. He stays silent, though. Katalin blinks her disbelief.

“Even if that were true, what makes you think you can find the turul?” Her nostrils flare, and for a moment it feels like the old days again: her preening, me scowling, our shared history littered with slurs and bolts of blue flame.

“I can’t find it,” I tell her, drawing a breath. “But you can.”

Confusion creases Katalin’s perfect face. It takes her a moment, gaze traveling over me and down to the water, then back up to me again. Then she hardens, her eyes like bits of ice.

“Don’t let me drown,” she says.

I’m so relieved, I almost laugh. “What if this was my grand plan all along, to save you from the king’s hands so I could kill you myself? I might have the perversity for such a thing, but not the forethought.”

Katalin sniffs. “I could hardly blame you for having your vengeance.”

And this, I suspect, is the closest she will ever come to an apology. Gáspár watches stone-faced as Katalin unpins her wolf cloak, letting it slide to the ground. She bundles her hair up onto her head, baring the pale column of her throat.

“What do you mean to do?” Gáspár asks.

“There is a way to trigger a vision,” I tell him. My hands are trembling as they move toward Katalin’s neck. “I never realized it before, but I know how it’s done. She’ll have to hold the question in her mind.”

Katalin nods. Her fingers have dug into the riverbed. “I’m ready.”

I nod back at her, steeling myself. Something passes between us then, lacing out between her chest and mine, a thread of tenuous trust.

And then I clasp my hand around her throat and force her head underwater.

Katalin submerges without struggle, her hair spilling from her head in pale rivulets. Bubbles foam around her. I hold her there for so long that even my arm starts to ache, and I feel the tense of her throat under my hand, and then finally, finally, I yank her up again.

She gasps and splutters, coughing up river water. Her eyes are misted, still half-white, and her body shudders violently with the ebbing of her vision. There is a reed pasted to her cheek and I have the urge to wipe it away, but I quash whatever gentle instinct has risen in me unbidden.

Wet-faced, Katalin groans. Gáspár watches in bridled panic, eye too bright. After another few beats, Katalin’s shaking ceases.

“I saw it,” she rasps. “The turul. Flying between the black pines, against a pure-white sky.”

My heart quickens. “Are you certain? Do you know where to go?”