Page 95 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

Nándor tosses the crown into the fire. It chokes and splutters, and for a moment burns a bright, sharp blue, streaming up nearly to the ceiling, where the chandeliers groan and sway. When it calms and cringes orange again, the crown is nothing but ash. Sad embers crawl over the stone floor like blinkering fireflies.

My mother’s fingernails, the fingernails of eleven other wolf-girls—gone, and all their magic with them. My bargain with the king and his promises to keep the Yehuli and Keszi safe are smoke in the air.

“A true king’s crown is no hideous thing, suffused with pagan magic,” the Érsek proclaims, with as much gravity as he can manage in his thin voice. “The crown of a true king is a beautiful thing to look upon, and it is forged in pure gold.”

All through the room, hands grasp at iron pendants. Voices weave and tangle like a thousand dark threads. They lace around his ankles and shoot up, up, up through his arm and coil in his mouth, until the words that leave his parted lips are echoed by a hundred others.

“Bring him,” Nándor says. The smile on his face is blissful and horrible.

He gestures to the Woodsmen guarding the door, and they part again, this time for another man to stumble through. He is slight of build, dressed in plain merchant’s clothes, with limp gray curls and a stubborn mouth that is better suited to frowning than smiling. Zsigmond.

Until now, my panic has been a caged thing, manacled by the knowledge that I am surrounded by Woodsmen on all sides, and that my magic is gone. Something looses in me and I am screaming, all that numb terror burst like a bloodletting, plunging through the crowd toward the dais. The Woodsmen are on me before I can make it within steps of Nándor. The blade of an ax presses between my shoulder blades, and someone jerks my arms behind my back.

Gáspár lurches forward, the Woodsman’s knife drawing a line of blood along his throat. “Don’t touch her—”

“Quiet the wolf-girl,” snaps the Érsek.

Lajos stalks forward and claps a heavy gloved hand over my mouth. I keep screaming anyway, until he pinches my nose shut and I turn light-headed and dizzy. Tears cloud my vision. All I can see is Zsigmond’s doomed march up to the dais, knees quaking. When he gets there, he bows his head and kneels.

Nándor returns him a flimsy smile, then turns to address the crowd. “The Yehuli are a blight on our city, friends,” he says. I choke against the hot press of Lajos’s hand. “But I am told there is no finer goldsmith in all of Király Szek.”

Perhaps there is some seed of truth in it, but what is truer than anything is this: Nándor wants to wound me in whatever way he can. I struggle to meet Zsigmond’s eyes, and when I do, I see that he is crying too. Quiet, dignified tears, nothing like my own.

“A crown, then,” he says to Nándor, voice low and rough, “for our new king.”

A wooden workbench is brought for him, and on it a gleaming block of gold. There are no tools, not even a hot kettle with a flame hissing under it, but Zsigmond doesn’t ask after any. He steps forward and puts his bare hands on the gold, palms flattening against it, feeling its shape and its heft. Then, without a word, he takes a finger and traces something onto its surface, once and then again, and it’s three times before I recognize what it is: emet. Truth.

He traces and traces until the gold turns to something like clay in his hands. He holds it in a way that reminds me of Virág kneading dough. Sweat pearls around his hairline, dampening his curls. And then, into the soft gold, he traces something else, letters I don’t recognize at first. But he traces them so many times that eventually I can make out the shapes of the kaf and the tav and the resh and the little dots and dashes that fill in the rest of the sounds. He is tracing the Yehuli word for crown.

It seems to come into the shape almost by itself, as though he’s imbued the gold with its own sort of mind, a lumbering cleverness, the way the rabbi did the clay-man that he carved up from the riverbed. The crown is a thick circlet with a domed top, lined with filigree plates and strands of gilt beads that hang down and finally, at its peak, the three-pronged symbol of the Prinkepatrios. My father traces more words, words that I don’t know, and they etch delicate patterns into the gold, the heads and shoulders of saints and feathery outlines of holy fire. When Zsigmond finishes, he’s panting.

Nándor leans close to the workbench, candles casting the crown’s golden light along the curves of his face. He runs the pad of his thumb around the edge of it, tracing the shapes of the saints, every filigreed frond of flame. He smiles again, but he does not put it on.

“Stories of Yehuli craftsmanship have not been exaggerated,” he murmurs. “And you, Zsidó Zsigmond, are gifted even for your kind.”

“Yes,” Zsigmond says evenly, placing one trembling hand flat on the workbench. “I have upheld my oath and made your crown. Now you must uphold yours: leave the Yehuli be.”

The word oath strikes my heart like an arrow. I strain against Lajos’s grasp, but it’s useless, and I’m far too late, anyway. Far too late to have told Zsigmond what he needed to know: that you should never strike a deal with a Bárány.

Nándor’s gaze travels lazily to the Woodsmen beside the dais.

“Soldiers,” he drawls, “seize him.”

They have Zsigmond’s arms behind his back before I can even scream again. By the time they are dragging him away, Lajos has pinched his fingers over my nose once more, leaving me breathless, head throbbing and vision warping as tears burn salt trails down my cheeks. Putting my faith in King János was like boarding a ship with green rot in its hull and hoping that it wouldn’t sink. But Zsigmond making a deal with Nándor is like asking the river for mercy as its black water fills your lungs.

I think of Yehuli Street, looted and empty, Jozefa and Batya fleeing as torchlight shines bright on their terrified faces.

The Érsek ambles toward the dais. “But won’t you let me crown you today, my lord, in the sight of all your honored guests?”

“No,” Nándor replies, and the Érsek gives a little shudder, as if unmoored by his defiance. “No, my coronation will take place tomorrow, and it is my dear brother who will place the crown on my head.”

He has all four of his brothers at blade point but it’s Gáspár he addresses, Gáspár he bounds up the dais to see. He leans close to him, their noses nearly touching. From my vantage point they look like skewed mirror images of each other, Nándor’s face washed and pale, no more than a vague, jagged shape under ice.

“Never,” Gáspár says, his throat bobbing beneath the Woodsman’s blade.

“I suspected you might refuse,” Nándor says. “You would easily offer your own life as forfeit, being the gallant Woodsman that you are, but what about the lives of your brothers?”

He shifts toward Matyi, who is shivering in his bright-green dolman, eyes pressed tightly shut. Gáspár flinches, but he doesn’t rise to Nándor’s threat. Blood from his earlier wound is gleaming ruby-bright in the hollow of his collarbone.