Page 85 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I close my eyes. Gáspár lifts my dress up around my hips, and I gasp as his mouth skims the inside of my thigh. A thrill of pleasure rolls through me, his mouth going higher, finding its place between my legs. I let out a soft moan, a whimper. His tongue trails hotly through me. And then I drop to my knees beside him, hands clutching at his face, and kiss him fiercely on the lips.

Without breaking our kiss, I bear him down into the snow, his cloak fanning out over the frozen earth. I can only think of how much I want to be closer to him, to have him hold me against the cold like he did so many nights in Kaleva. He kisses my jaw and my throat. I wonder if he thinks of his Woodsman oath as I straddle him, his hands moving under my dress and over my breasts. His thumb brushes my nipple and I make a stammering noise against his mouth, needy and breathless.

“Will you disavow me this time?” I ask him, my hair branching over both of us, like the soft limbs of a willow tree. “Will you push me away and tell me never to speak of it again, and prattle on and on about how touching my body blackened your soul?”

I hadn’t expected that old hurt to flare in me, or the way my voice shakes with each word. Gáspár’s face creases.

“You’ve killed any part of me that was a devout and loyal Woodsman,” he says. There is pain threaded through his voice; I imagine the Prinkepatrios fading from his mind, like a moon paring away in the black sky. His hand shifts from my breast, closing into a fist over my heart. “This is all that’s left now.”

No one since my mother has spoken to me so sweetly, not even Virág on her warmest days, and certainly none of the men I’ve lain with by the riverside, who only whispered their rote flattery in the dark. Somehow it makes me want to weep. I touch my forehead to his, fingers sliding under the band of his trousers.

“Do you still pray?”

He shudders as I grasp him, eye flashing. “Sometimes.”

“Pray for me, then,” I say, my chest tightening, “and for my father and everyone on Yehuli Street, and for all of Keszi too.”

It is treachery to ask it, to suggest that his god is as real as mine, but since leaving Keszi I have seen so many kinds of power and magic that I never could have dreamed before. I have even learned to shape the letters of my name. Besides, the worse treachery is kissing a Woodsman, and I have already done that and more.

“I will,” he says. His lips graze my temple, and I hear his huff of breath as I sink myself onto him. He knots his fingers into my hair. “I will.”

When morning comes, my wet lashes are clumped with frost and Gáspár is gone. I sit up with a terrible start, fear pooling in my belly before I see him hunched over the fire, several yards away. A fine layer of snow has gathered on the stubbled grass, glittering like a Patritian woman’s jeweled veil. I hope that the second flurry was enough to cover our tracks.

Katalin is perched on a sharp gray rock, frost growing over it like pale lichen. In one hand, she holds a long, shining sword, its silver blade a blinding mirror for all the snow. She must have forged it last night, wrapping it in the steady rhythm of her song.

“What?” she says when she sees me looking. “I’m not going to leave the task of killing the turul up to you.”

I roll my eyes and turn away.

“Because the gods will certainly be furious with whoever does it,” Katalin goes on. “I can endure some of Isten’s fury, but you are already half-cursed and I wouldn’t wish a greater burden on you.”

My body tenses, but I don’t spit back at her or scowl. As far as I can tell, this is Katalin’s version of kindness.

While Gáspár waters and saddles the horses, I drag a big stick down from the mangled tree and whet one of its ends to a point. Then I find a clear patch of snow and begin to etch my letters into it. I start with my name, and the easy familiarity of it settles into my bones like good wine. Then I try more Régyar. I’ve never seen most of the words before, but I can match the sounds to letters. Katalin watches me with a cool, guarded interest, but Gáspár strides over and looks at the words from over my shoulder.

“Did your father teach you that?” he asks.

I nod. I concentrate and etch his name into the snow. G-Á-S-P-Á-R. I think I have spelled it right.

Gáspár smiles when he sees it, chewing the inner corner of his mouth. “You write nearly as well as my littlest brother.”

I elbow him fiercely in the side. “If you teach me how to spell, I’ll teach you how to shoot an arrow as well as any clumsy, one-armed child in Király Szek, which is probably the best you can hope for.”

Gáspár laughs then, and Katalin laughs, too, like a preening white bird on her perch.

We pack up our campsite, burying the ashy remains of our fire and heaping snow over the dark patches that our sleeping bodies have made. But I hesitate before scrubbing away the words I have scratched into the frost. I stand there for one long cold moment, the wind sweeping ice and sharp pine smell from the north, staring at our names written there beside each other, as clear and bright as anything.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The tundra stretches out before us like a long tract of silvery sky, cloudy mounds of snow banked on its surface. I’ve counted six days since we left Király Szek, and overhead, the real sky is the gray color of water that’s been wrung through someone’s dirty laundry, flat as a mirror without any of a mirror’s luster. Small tufts of brittle grass peek through the frost, but our horses trample them as they pass, or else eat them right down to the roots. The horses are hungrier than we are. I can find the burrows of winter-fat rabbits and slumbering squirrels, but there will be nothing green here again until spring.

I try to mark the places that we have passed before, remembering a rocky overhang where Gáspár and I sheltered one night, wrapped together for warmth, or a small ravine that had once been a river, the old waters etching a permanent groove into the earth. If I stare all the way to the horizon, I can glimpse the dark silhouette of the pine forest, trees bristling against the vicious wind. Gáspár keeps a steady pace beside me, and my eyes dart to his with an animal’s unconscious twitch, just to make sure he’s still there. I would rather be looking at him than thinking of what we left behind in Király Szek, or about Nándor’s men snarling through the snow after us, or about the dangers of the forest ahead. His presence soothes me, though only by a small measure.

Katalin has taken to her role of guiding us with a true táltos’s steely determination, her horse pacing out several yards ahead of ours and her face ever forward, like an arrow aiming true. Once the sparse daylight winnows away, the sky goes dark and the snow starts to fall with such ferocity that it feels as if Isten himself is hurling handfuls of it down upon us. At the very least it covers our tracks, and we ride doggedly through it, but I begin to think that it is some sort of divine punishment. If Isten can read our intent, he must be trying to stop us. Katalin doesn’t do very much to dispel the notion.

“There will be some vengeance for killing it,” Katalin says, as we bed down to steal a few precious hours of slumber before riding on. “There must be. The gods won’t let you have anything for free.”

“Did you see that in your vision?” I ask, half-hopeful and half-despaired.