Page 83 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“Of course I’m certain,” Katalin snaps. “You’re not a seer, so you wouldn’t understand, but a vision isn’t something you can forget. Every single vision I’ve ever had plays on the insides of my eyelids when I try to sleep at night.”

Despite the sharpness of her voice, for once I truly pity her. Katalin wrings water from her hair, fingers still quivering between the white strands. Gáspár rises to his feet, flask in hand.

“You lead the way, then,” he says. “But we’ll need to hurry. Nándor’s men won’t be very far behind.”

Slowly, Katalin stands too. I take another moment before I follow them, staring up at the sky. The sun’s red eye is like a drop of blood in the river, the clouds streaming sickly pink around it. My mind goes back to Zsigmond’s house, and I imagine that I am sitting there with him practicing my letters, Régyar and Yehuli both. I let the image fill me up and then I let it go, scattering it like flower petals into the wind.

The snow starts falling later that day, the sky going sleek and gray. The ground mottles with new frost, crunching under our horses’ hooves. The hills have begun to flatten, racing toward a distant white horizon. Somewhere farther north, the Kalevans have hunkered down for true winter, Tuula and Szabín among them. I imagine that Bierdna is running out in front of us, flicking snowflakes off her ears. I follow the dark shape of her, invisible to anyone but me, with a fierce, unblinking determination.

I worry over the prospect of a storm, but snowfall lightens and then shivers away. Gauzy ribbons of cloud wrap around the sun, and light comes straining through like milk through cheesecloth. Katalin brings her horse to my side and then nudges me, pointing wordlessly over her shoulder. I turn around. Our footsteps have frozen in the snow, leaving a miles-long trail behind us. A wave of despair runs over me.

Gáspár must see it written on my face, because he says, “Let’s stop for now.”

There’s no way to erase the trail that we have left, and it’s not snowing hard enough to cover our tracks in time, which means that Nándor’s men will have a path guiding them right to us. I feel a hopeless anguish unspooling in me. I clamber down off my horse and tie her to a nearby tree with numbing fingers.

I think it might be a relief to cry, but all my tears have been spent in silence during the ride, my hood pulled up over my face so neither Gáspár nor Katalin could see. Instead, I reach for the bow strapped to my horse’s back. The familiar tensing of my muscles and the twang of the bow string in my ear will comfort me better than anything else now.

“I’ll hunt,” I say.

Gáspár and Katalin nod their agreement, both pink-faced and grim. I move through the copse of bare, frost-dewed trees, listening for sounds of scuffling in the snow, watching for bright, blinking eyes. I catch two gamy rabbits, their patchy fur coming off in my hands. By the time I return, the sun is a band of gold along the horizon and Katalin has kindled a fire. Gáspár is whispering something to her, his mouth not far from her ear. She has a hardened look on her face, a tiny furrow between her brow.

I drop the dead rabbits by the fire and warm my hands. Katalin comes over to me, her borrowed wolf cloak sweeping up small flurries of new snow.

“What did he say to you?” I ask.

“He said he was sorry,” she replies.

“For what?”

“For terrifying us all our lives,” Katalin says. “I suppose he ought to apologize for it, being the prince. I could have done without his mooning eyes, though. Well, eye.”

Something like a laugh coils in my belly, but I am too exhausted to loose it past my lips. Besides, I don’t want Katalin to think that I will forgive her so easily, or that saving her life means I have any interest in being friends.

My gaze wanders to Gáspár, still standing beside the horses. We are not very far now from the woods where we encountered the beautiful girl who was a monster. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. My arm still throbs with an irregular, phantom pain, soothed by the memory of his hands pressing gently over the wound.

Katalin and I skin and gut the rabbits in silence, and Gáspár keeps his distance. Perhaps he has regretted agreeing to this plan; maybe he doubts Katalin’s vision. I can’t let myself think of what will happen if we fail, but my stomach churns like white water and I only manage a few bites of rabbit. Zsigmond’s face keeps drifting across my mind.

Night comes over our scrubby patch of forest with a vengeance, blanketing us in a swift and total blackness. Once the sun is down, we warm ourselves for a few more heady, stolen moments before we have to stamp out the fire again. Nándor’s men would see the light of it from miles away. Katalin offers to take the first watch, so I pad down beside a mangled midwinter tree, my back against the frozen bark. Sleep seems both inescapably tempting and utterly impossible.

I don’t know how long it is before Gáspár joins me. His boots tread through the frost. There is only the jeweled scattering of starlight, and the pallid horn of the moon. His face holds what light it can, silver on his cheeks and the curve of his nose, the rigid line of his jaw. He stands before me and doesn’t speak, so I push myself to my feet, brushing snow from my skirts.

I have so much to say to him and also nothing at all. Our breaths cloud with cold. Words constellate in my mind, sibilant and bright.

“Would you like to hear a story?”

The stories always began in the dark. Virág’s six-fingered hands could make shadow puppets that the rest of us could not: turul hawks, racka sheep, stags with their huge coronets of bone. We watched their silhouettes dance across the thatched roof of her hut, fire warming our cheeks, wild-haired and wild-eyed, our noses running from the cold. The memory cows me for a moment, making something deep in my belly twist with pain.

Gáspár blinks slowly. “All right.”

“I’ll tell you about Vilmötten and his flaming sword.” Even the name Vilmötten tastes sour on my tongue as I think of Nándor’s body floating up from the ice, just the way the bard crawled out of the Under-World.

“I think I already know it,” he says. “My wet nurse had an endless number of stories, and that was one of her favorites.”

“Was your wet nurse a pagan?”

“Certainly not,” he says. “The way she told it, Vilmötten prayed to the Prinkepatrios for a weapon with which to defeat Régország’s pagan enemies, and all the world’s nonbelievers, and so Godfather Life granted him a blade that was unbreakable, and could catch fire when he held it up to the light of the sun.”

For a moment I want to tell him that it’s not right, that Vilmötten was our hero, not theirs. But I think of the counts in their bear cloaks and feathered mantles, and of the king in his fingernail crown. You can’t hoard stories the way you hoard gold, despite what Virág would say. There’s nothing to stop anyone from taking the bits they like, and changing or erasing the rest, like a finger smudging over ink. Like shouts drowning out the sound of a vicious minister’s name.