Page 94 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“You’re weak,” she says. There’s a vicious, satisfied gleam in her eyes that I would have thought reserved only for me. “You don’t deserve this power, because you’re too feeble to survive it. Could you stand it, a new vision every night? Never knowing what kind of horror it would bring?” She laughs again, as bright and clear as a bell. “You’re weaker than every wolf-girl you ever brought back to Király Szek, and you’re far, far weaker than me.”

“Please,” the king bawls. “Please . . . I just want it to end.”

In spite of all the pagan blood he’s spilled and even my mother’s fingernails on his crown, I feel a prickling of pity. King János is still a man, after all, guilelessly mortal, and in the end less a tyrant than a fool. The king reaches up with feebly spasming hands and starts to claw at his own eyes, fingers slipping into the sockets and then pulling. Someone in the crowd shrieks like a sparrow hawk. I search for Gáspár and see the horror flashing in the one eye he has left, almost as if he’s having a vision of his own.

And then the king sprawls forward, Nándor’s knife in his back.

Chapter Twenty-Four

At first there is no sound, and then only the scything of blades. The Woodsmen on the wall lurch forward, axes drawn, and descend on the dais like crows over carrion. They have their weapons at the throats of the princes, including Gáspár, before the guests can even start clamoring for the door. A black shadow washes over the threshold: more Woodsmen, their blades flashing, barring every exit.

Nándor removes the knife from his father’s back with a gentle twist.

“My dear friends,” he says, voice rising over the sounds of their screaming and the winking of jewels on fingers and throats as the guests roil together in the terrible hot hall, “there is no need to be afraid.”

“You’ve killed him!” someone cries. “The king is dead!”

“Yes,” Nándor says. Blood has begun to seep down the stone floor, like tributaries on a map marked in red ink. “And now a new rule can begin.”

“But the laws of succession—” another guest starts.

Before they can finish, the Érsek hobbles up to the dais, robes trailing through the king’s blood. Seeing him pick his way around King János’s body like he would a puddle of muck in the road is what finally jolts me from my stupor. I let out a half-mute stammer of protest, unheard over the clamoring guests. The Woodsmen have grasped Katalin, jerking her arms behind her back.

“The Patritian laws of succession are subject to interpretation by the church’s authorities,” the Érsek coughs out. “The Prinkepatrios has chosen me to interpret his laws, and so I have chosen a new king, to lead our nation out of darkness.”

“Isn’t it convenient,” Gáspár says, straining against the knife at his throat, “that Godfather Life has changed his views on the rule of succession to put you in power?”

He speaks to Nándor, voice lancing through the crowd’s uncertain tittering. A word floats up from the throng, its three hard syllables like dropped stones. “Fekete.”

Nándor’s face is as pale as Saint István’s marble statue, smooth and unweathered by time. “Convenient? No. This is a burden that the Prinkepatrios has placed on me, brother. I don’t presume to argue with His judgment. Do you? Do you?” he presses, turning to the men and women gathered in the hall. “Those who have been loyal to me will receive many blessings, and a great bounty in heaven. And those who defy me—well, you defy the will of God.”

The dagger of his stare cuts right to Gáspár as he says it. The crowd murmurs again, someone choking out a sob. Some unnamable black thing is pooling in my belly, an awful oily mingling of fear and dread and utter, complete despair. The turul lies in the spill of King János’s blood, eyeless.

There is a rustling behind the row of soldiers guarding the threshold, and the line breaks to let another Woodsman through. The front of his dolman is gashed, his face blood-flecked. He is dragging something behind him, a mangle of ruined flesh and torn silk, sinew stretched like pink cables over a gutted chest. It’s not until I see the yellow curve of a bear’s claw that I recognize it as Count Korhonen.

“Apologies, my lord,” the Woodsman pants. “Furedi and Németh managed to escape and flee to their fortresses.”

Nándor’s gaze flickers to Count Korhonen’s body, over the arc of his collapsed rib cage. His eyes are glazed, slick, like stones in the riverbed.

“No matter,” he says. “I will send the Woodsmen to root them out and bring them to kneel before me, or else die.”

“We have put the other Woodsmen in chains,” the panting soldier goes on. “After a week in the dungeon with no food or water, I suspect they will be clamoring to embrace their new king.”

The soldiers, the soldiers, where are the other soldiers? I wonder desperately. The Woodsmen are all raised in the strangling grasp of the Patrifaith, but the soldiers of the king’s army are ordinary men, with wives and sons and daughters, less likely to want to bleed for the lofty ideals of princes and kings. But then I remember that every legion King János could scrape together is in Akosvár, a seawall against the tide of the Merzani army.

“Good,” Nándor says. “For if they don’t, they can join the demon Thanatos.”

At the sound of his name, a shudder runs through the crowd. The men and women give full-bodied quakes, like the word itself is a ghost to be exorcised. I squeeze my own eyes shut, wishing the star-daggered blackness would swallow me. When I open them again, Nándor has leapt back up onto the dais, running his hand down the edge of his father’s throne with the hungry gaze of a dog in heat.

“Ah, my lord,” the Érsek says. “What is a king without a crown?”

Nándor blinks, then looks back at the priest. His eyes rest on the Érsek for one long moment. “Of course.”

Then he leaps down the dais and snatches up the king’s crown of fingernails. My heart thrashes like willow branches in the wind, my throat and stomach burning. Nándor gestures to the nearest Woodsman, the one who dragged in Count Korhonen’s body. “Sir, if you please.”

The Érsek wheezes out a protest—it’s his duty to crown the king, after all—but the Woodsman comes forward and clasps his hands.

“Megvilágit,” he whispers. A fist of flame closes around the king’s body, orange fingers catching on his ruined dolman, his blood-slick mente. It spreads sickly, like a strewing of lambent petals, gleaming red and gold. The smell of burning hair fills my nose, along with the ugly char of bone. I almost retch.