Page 90 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“You’re a prince,” I said dimly. “You shouldn’t be chained up with wolf-girls and Juvvi and a runaway Daughter.” From her side of the cage, Tuula scowled at me.

“What part of being a prince,” he’d said, “means that one should try and shirk the consequences of their mistakes?”

“Ask your father,” I said. “He does it all the time, and he’s the king.”

Gáspár had fallen silent after that.

Now I think I do understand that real, ravaging Patritian guilt. It feels less like a weight and more like an absence. Like the Woodsmen with their missing eyes and their missing ears and their missing noses, something vital has been cut out of me.

There is also the fact that my magic is gone.

I had tried, of course, to kill Lajos when he came around the cart reluctantly to feed me. But I succeeded only in wrapping my sore fingers around his wrist and holding it limply, like a child pestering her mother. No invisible threads laced into my skin, no Under-World power staggered through me. Lajos shook off my grasp and shoved me away from him, and I stared down at my pitiful bound hands in a numb sort of disbelief. Katalin watched with pursed, twitching lips, even her eye looking trapped behind three neat wounds running from her forehead to her jaw.

“Have you lost your magic, then?” she asked briskly, sounding as impatient as Virág when I came to her moping over some small injustice. “I did say the gods would find a way to punish you.”

“What about you?” I bit out. “You haven’t even tried to heal yourself.”

“And I’m not going to, but not because I can’t,” Katalin replied. “I want her to feel guilty every time she looks at me.”

She nodded at Tuula, who made a noise in the back of her throat. “Who says I’m interested in looking at you?” Tuula muttered.

No one in the cart has spoken since then, even though a storm passed during that time, leaving us soaked and shivering and staring stubbornly at the floor, refusing to even huddle together in furious silence. Gáspár passed me a fur through the bars of the cage, and Katalin sparked up a tiny fire in her palm, but I am almost relieved when we reach the gates of Király Szek, if only because the clouds thin and quiet overhead.

As we clatter through the main gates and into the marketplace, Gáspár draws his horse to my side of the cage.

“I won’t let my father hurt you,” he says. “Not again, Évike. I swear.”

“I don’t think you have the power to make that promise,” I say, and it nearly guts me, the way his face falls.

A part of me feels numb even thinking of my fate, that the king might decide to punish me for stealing his seer and trying to take the turul’s magic for myself. My own life seems so pitiful in comparison to the hundreds of others who circle me; I am one small star in a huge and brilliant constellation. All I can hope is that him having the turul will give him enough power to stand against Nándor, to keep the Yehuli and the pagans safe. That our sacrifice will be enough.

People pour past us, stopping to gawk and gape. Király Szek’s peasants look no richer or cleaner for the turul’s death, despite all their railing against the poisonous influence of our pagan magic. Two Woodsmen have to clamber down from their horses to throw more ropes over Bierdna, anticipating the bear’s panic, but she shuffles forward, her eyes black with their animal dullness, and none of Tuula’s fire. Tuula hunches in the cart, avoiding the gazes of the Patritians, and Szabín puts one bracing hand on her shoulder.

As we pass through the marketplace, air roiling with smoke and paprika smell, I push myself to my knees and peer through the bars, hoping to catch a glimpse of Yehuli Street. Of Zsigmond’s house. I can’t smell any pig’s blood, and the windows are yellow with light. The relief that goes through me is enough to make my eyes mist. We clatter into the courtyard, right to the mouth of the barbican, where the cart grinds suddenly to a halt.

One by one, the Woodsmen yank us out of the cage, checking to make sure our bindings are still tight. I want to tell them there’s no use binding my hands, because I couldn’t forge a blade or turn their axes to dust even if I thought it would help, or if I were simply feeling rash and vengeful, but I can’t find my voice.

“We’re meant to take the wolf-girls right to the king,” Lajos tells Gáspár. “The others can go to the dungeons.”

“So we can rot there until some tribunal packed with Patritians finds us guilty and the king has our heads off?” Tuula asks. She straightens, and Bierdna gives a low, shackled growl. “Is that your god’s justice?”

“Keep your mouth shut, Juvvi scum,” Lajos snarls, jabbing her with the blunt end of his ax.

“My father could be convinced of your innocence,” Gáspár says evenly, though there’s a pulling between his brows. “Once he has the turul, he—”

Tuula interrupts him with a laugh. “And you, the false prince, Fekete, think you can comfort me? You let them take your power from you, hang you in a Woodsman’s suba, and send you into the bleak wilderness while the king sits in his castle tending to his bastards like pretty sheep? I’d rather die with a blade in my hand, or at least with fire in my heart, than live as the shadow of a shadow.”

Gáspár doesn’t reply, his mouth quivering, but Tuula’s words kindle a simmering anger in my belly.

“Leave him alone,” I snap. “You’ll only shorten your life here in Király Szek if you can’t stop yourself from snarling like an animal.”

The hair on Bierdna’s back is bristling. Tuula’s lips twist with a smile.

“I never thought I’d see you so toothless, wolf-girl,” she says. “Lying with a Woodsman has snuffed all your flame.”

Before I can reply, Lajos jerks his head. The rest of his retinue circle Tuula and Szabín like black birds, crowding them toward the barbican. It takes another four Woodsmen to wrangle the bear, dragging her into the palace hall. Her claws leave long gouges in the stone floor.

We don’t make it very far down the corridor when a figure crosses through the archway. The collar of a blue dolman parts like two strewn tulips over the pale column of his throat. Nándor.