Page 96 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

“If you do as I say and place the crown on my head, I will take your other eye and let you leave with your life, so long as you never return to Régország again. Perhaps the Merzani will welcome their blind, half-breed son back home.”

Gáspár swallows. “And the wolf-girl. Évike. You won’t lay a hand on her.”

As Nándor’s head swivels toward me, so does every gaze in the room. A smile curves over his face, thin and red as a knife wound.

“That I will not swear to you, brother,” he says. “Tomorrow, at my coronation, the wolf-girl will die by my hand, and a hundred more deaths will echo in its wake, for my first act as king will be to destroy the pagan villages in Ezer Szem.”

There is no strength left in me to scream, but a sob tears out of my throat, my breath hot in the shell of Lajos’s hand.

“Now,” Nándor says, rising, “there is the matter of our dear Érsek.”

The Érsek blinks at Nándor, perfectly sedate. “Yes, my lord?”

“What am I to do with you?” Nándor tilts his head. “What shall I do, when I am king of Régország, with an archbishop who helped murder the last two kings of Régország?”

This time there’s no sleepy blinking, no slow, animal twitches. The Érsek stands suddenly stiff and tall, his eyes bright.

“Yes, my lord,” he says, without coughing or wheezing once. “I awaited a true king, one who would earn my loyalty and the blessing of the Prinkepatrios, one who I would never think to betray.”

“And I’m sure you swore that same oath to my father, after you helped him murder Géza,” Nándor says coolly.

Silence blankets the Great Hall like new fallen snow. I think of the statues in the courtyard, of Géza with his beard as long as dripping moss, of how he was called Szürke Géza, or Géza the Gray, even though he never lived past middle age.

“Never, my lord.” The Érsek’s voice is silken. “I am loyal to you, now and always. I only helped your father murder Géza because I could sense his weakness, and I helped to murder Elif Hatun because King János asked me to.”

“Elif?” Gáspár rises to his feet even as the Woodsman’s blade draws a jeweled collar of blood around his throat. “Elif Hatun, the queen?”

The Érsek dips his head. “It was a quick poison, procured from a Rodinyan apothecary, which mimicked the symptoms of a fever. King János asked that I use it on his father, and then again his wife.”

“Enough,” Nándor says. A rosy flush has come over his face, the color of dawn at its earliest hour. “Do you think I care for the life of my weak-willed grandfather or that Merzani dog?”

For a moment, I think that Gáspár might lunge for him, and fear coils hard in my throat. Please, I want to say, though Lajos’s hand is still pressing hard over my nose and mouth. Please don’t be a lofty-minded martyr. Nándor’s eyes are as pale and hard as bits of ice, and the whole room is roiling with its piety.

“Nándor,” the Érsek croons. It’s a terrible sound, like the braying of a mule. “My child, remember what we have done together. Remember who breathed the power of the Prinkepatrios into you, when the cold had stopped your heart beating—”

“You have done nothing,” Nándor snarls. “I was blessed, and you merely brought me to this city so that I might make it holy too.”

“No, Nándor,” the Érsek says. “I brought a frightened peasant boy, his skin still marbled blue from the cold, and I made you into the people’s hero. You should not have lived at all, but Godfather Life took mercy on you and then I took His mercy and molded it. Can a saint ever be holier than the one who consecrated him?”

The Érsek’s boldness is almost to be admired. As if in agreement, Nándor doesn’t move, not really, but a tremor goes through him, like lightning fissuring across a still, black sky. The hall is lush and heavy with silence, a rain-swollen cloud near to bursting. Finally, Nándor lifts his head.

“I’m afraid,” he says, “that your time as archbishop has come to an end.”

I recognize the look in his eyes, despite all their snow-frosted sharpness. It’s the look of a child who’s grown too tall and strong to be cowed by his father’s whip, the look of a dog who has been lashed one too many times.

For one suspended instant, I really do believe he will let the Érsek live. Perhaps he will strip him of his title and his brown robes and banish him, like he plans to do with Gáspár. In this fleeting second of frozen time, I am convinced that Nándor will choose mercy.

Then the whisper of a prayer glides off his lips.

There’s a sound like ice breaking and the churn of freed water. The Érsek’s neck snaps back at a gruesome angle, but he’s still alive; there’s a hazy gleam of terror in his eyes as he’s lifted off the ground. An invisible hand drags him forward before dropping him into the vacant throne, bonelessly limp. Nándor prays again, something longer this time, with the cadence of a song, and a great iron crown glimmers onto the Érsek’s head.

The Érsek whimpers, perhaps garbling for a prayer of his own, but only spittle foams at the corners of his mouth, dyed the pale red of diluted blood.

I try to close my eyes, but some perverse urge keeps them open. I know that whatever happens now, my imaginings will only be worse. The crown gleams with a smoldering heat, rippling like glass in the sunlight, shiny enough for Nándor’s face to pool warped and smiling on its surface. The Érsek screams hoarsely as the hot iron sears through his skin, down to the white dome of his skull. Blood rises in the riverbed of his throat and bubbles out of his ears.

The hall fills with retching and sobbing, the cobbled noises of horror. Some of the guests scramble for the doors, but the Woodsmen are packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the threshold like sentries, looks of blank, stupid devotion on their faces.

The skin of the Érsek’s forehead melts and crumples over his eyes. He can’t even scream anymore, for all the blood in his mouth.