Page 87 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“It’s not just for your sake,” he says. “Nándor wants me dead, too, or at least in chains. It’s hard to sleep knowing I could wake with a knife to my throat.”

I’m glad to hear him say that it’s his fear of Nándor that keeps him from sleeping, and not regret over what we’ve done. Even stripped of his ax and Woodsman suba, there is still a century of gory hatreds stretching long between us, and so many gods darkening the sky with displeasure at our coupling.

“Do you ever think of letting him have it?” I ask. “This whole ugly, bloody country, I mean. Sometimes I think Nándor is what it deserves.”

Gáspár’s lips go taut, considering. “You mean I ought to leave him to the throne and go herd reindeer in the corner of the world?”

“You wouldn’t have to herd reindeer.” I try to imagine what sort of avocation might keep him occupied, him with his clever tongue and sharp mind, his carefully considered principles. “You could write treatises and dabble in poetry from the safety of your Volken hermitage.”

Amusement crinkles his eye. “And what would you do?”

Once I would have been eager to abandon Régország entirely, if I’d ever had the chance and the will to leave it. But those kinds of bitter perversities seem behind me now. I have felt my father’s arms circle me and heard the temple filling with Yehuli prayer; I have had a man hold me through the cold and promise to follow me wherever I go. It weighs me down, that love, fettering me to this terrible destiny. Katalin’s prophecy floats through my mind.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll have me as your scullery maid after all.”

Gáspár scoffs, but there is laughter under it. “I’d rather have you as my wife.”

We let it linger there in the cold, in the silence, that beautiful and impossible dream. We will always be foiled by history, manacled by blood. I know how well it turned out, his father marrying a nonbeliever, and though I feel I know myself very little now, I don’t think I would relish spending my days bastioned behind castle walls. Yet Gáspár is not the frivolous type. This moment is as much a surrender as him kneeling. I want to kiss him again, my own knees weakening with another lovely capitulation.

Katalin’s voice cuts through the air. “We’ll have to keep moving. We’re very close now, but so are Nándor’s men, certainly.”

A part of me wonders how they haven’t caught up to us already. Perhaps they were stalled by the snow and the cold, or some other unforeseeable disaster, but it seems too much to hope for. I clamber onto my own horse and we spur on, kicking up white in our wake.

It’s quiet in the forest. There are no animals scurrying in the underbrush or in the branches overhead. There are only the wind that makes the trees creak and moan like the wood-rotted roof of an old house, and the snow that falls softly through the empty spaces in the canopy, the cracked-glass splits that expose flashes of gray and white. The hair on the back of my neck is raised, and my horse’s ears are pressed flat to her skull.

“Slow down,” Katalin says, and I nudge my horse to a trot. “We’re so close—look for a trunk soaked in blood.”

Gáspár’s head jerks left and right, and then his eye angles up again, toward the sky. I can tell by the girth of the trees and the impossible silence in the air that we’re close to the same forest that our hunt for the turul led us to before, where the trees uprooted themselves and chased us to the lake.

My gaze fixes on something shiny in the distance. The lake is glimmering there beyond the lattice of pines, rimy with ice, like a huge pupilless eye.

I turn to Katalin, my heart in my throat. “Is this the way?”

“Yes,” she says. Her knuckles are white on the reins. “Toward the water.”

Deftly, we maneuver our horses through the maze of trees, stopping only when we’ve reached the frost-hardened bank. The lake is perfectly slick—a true mirror, false clouds gathering in white fists on its surface.

Gáspár brings his horse to my side. I can see the tension in his shoulders as he holds the memory of the ice and the cold water seething beneath it. And then I remember, too, that Tuula told us the name of the lake.

“What does Taivas mean,” I ask him, “in the Northern tongue?”

“‘Sky,’” he replies. “But what does it matter?”

“This is it,” Katalin says. “It must be, but—”

I slide down from my horse, chest tight. I am thinking about Isten finding Ördög in the Under-World. I am thinking about the rabbi digging into the dirt and mud of the riverbank to create life.

“Stop!”

The word rings out, arching over the lake, but it’s not Gáspár’s voice. I turn around, the soles of my boots sliding perilously on the bank, to see Tuula and Szabín racing through the woods toward us. Bierdna is at their backs, her huge tongue lolling as she runs. Ice sprays up from their feet.

“Tuula,” Gáspár says, when they skid to a halt in front of him. “Why are you here?”

“Me?” Her voice is thick with poison. “This is my home. I know why you’re here, like all the Woodsmen before, and I can’t let you do this.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “The turul’s powers—they’re the only way we can stop Nándor. And if we don’t stop Nándor, he will come for the pagans—including the Juvvi eventually. What other choice do we have?”

My words are dulled arrows; they bounce off her and land in the snow. Tuula’s dark eyes narrow and flash.