Page 97 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

In another moment, it’s done. The Érsek’s body topples out of the throne, a mound of blood-drenched brown robes and stinking flesh like warm pink candle wax. Nándor bends delicately over the corpse.

“Do not be afraid, good people of Régország,” he says, lifting the Érsek’s iron chain off his body and winding it around his throat, instead. “I am both royalty and divinity now.”

Water skims across my skin like the edge of a blade, hot and cold at once. I look up from under my damp hair at the Woodsman who holds the now-empty bucket. It’s a Woodsman I’ve seen before, one with a missing ear. The absence of it makes his head look lopsided. Like a tree with branches but no roots.

“What’s the point?” I ask through chattering teeth. “I’m going to die tomorrow.”

“The king wants you to look clean,” the Woodsman says. “I don’t ask questions, nor should you.”

“He’s not the king yet,” I say.

When I’ve been cleaned to Nándor’s satisfaction, and even my wolf cloak brushed and made to shine, I’m brought to my old bedchamber. I try, in a hopeless and perfunctory sort of way, but the iron bars on the window hold fast, the door is tightly sealed, and my magic is well and truly gone.

I want to cry again, only because it seems the proper thing to do. But all my tears have been ground out of me, like dead skin scrubbed off a wound. Instead I fold myself against the eastern wall, where the sun will rise tomorrow on the day of my execution, my face flush against the cool stone.

The memories of my mother’s comforts are distant and removed, the tenor of her hushing and the feel of her palm on my forehead nearly lost to me now. But I do remember Virág’s comforts well. Her six-fingered hands could comb through my hair as nimbly as a squirrel leaping among the branches, and on the days I came to her hut weeping, she sat me down by the hearth and brushed my hair and braided it until all my tears had dried. The memory seems as pale and hollow as the inside of a conch now, drained of all its warmth. I think of Zsigmond holding me to his chest, but that memory feels twice-removed, too, like I’m remembering a ghost. Tomorrow, he will likely be dead, too, and all of Yehuli Street abandoned.

This is the wretched state of my mind when the door swings open. Two Woodsmen shoulder through, carrying another man between them. He is bare-chested, his blood leaking onto the stone floor. Gáspár.

I lurch to my feet, heart throbbing its jagged beat, but before I can manage a word the Woodsmen have hefted him onto the bed. Then they turn on their heels and vanish, the door thudding shut behind them.

Gáspár lies facedown, unmoving. The expanse of his back is etched so thoroughly with lash wounds that it’s a fretwork of flesh and blood, gleaming braids of red stitched through with pink. The sight of it, and the copper stench in my nose, and the faint moan that feathers through his parted lips—it all makes my chest ache unbearably. And then I do cry, tears stinging the corners of my eyes, as I take Gáspár’s head into my lap and brush back the curls from his sweat-damp forehead.

After a few moments, his lashes flutter and he looks blearily up at me. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” I say, and laugh at his absurd unselfishness in spite of myself. The laugh sounds all wrong, like a river bubbling over and flooding someone’s sod house. “He won’t hurt me until morning.”

He lets out a breath, and very slowly, his arms move to circle my waist. Pain draws deep furrows on his brow. I’ve never felt so limp and miserable before, paralyzed by my love. This is the feeling, I think, that keeps mother deer loping after their feeble and defenseless fawns. A mad thing, really, that makes you so terribly attuned to mortality, to the soft places where throats meet jaws, to the hawks circling overhead and the wolves lurking just beyond the tree line. I lean over and press my lips to his hair.

“Will you tell me a story, wolf-girl?” he mumbles against my thigh. In his mouth the epithet is toothless, even tender.

“I think I am all out of stories now,” I confess.

His soft laugh warms my skin through the fabric of my dress. “Then let’s just sleep.”

We don’t, though. Not yet. We sit. We breathe. We speak in hushed tones, as if there were someone else here we might risk waking. I do tell him the story of the rabbi and the clay-man, in the end. I tell him about Queen Esther too. We stumble through some Old Régyar. I let Gáspár teach me a few words of Merzani, and they coat my tongue like a sip of good wine. We hold each other all through the night, until the sun rises.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I wake sometime in the morning, when the sky is as pink as the shell of an ear, delicate and raw. The stretch of bed next to me is cold, the sheets streaked with old blood, and Gáspár is gone. Futile panic rises in me. I throw off the covers and run between the window, still gridded with its iron bars, and the door, sealed as tightly as before. As the last bit of moribund hope leaves me, I stand in the center of the empty room and wish I could make all the stone crumble, the floor collapse, and the roof cave. I would bury myself in the ruin, if only I could bring the Broken Tower down with me.

The door opens with a shuddering metallic sound, the scraping of its iron grate against the stone floor. I see Lajos’s wreck of a nose before I see Katalin’s face—her wounds, now black and scabbing, her eyes furiously blue. He shoves her through the threshold, and she stumbles forward into my arms.

“The king wants both of your hair braided,” Lajos says shortly. He jerks his chin between the two of us; it’s mounded white with scar tissue.

“Why?” I ask. My voice is hoarse with all the hours of whispering.

“In the pagan way,” he says, and closes the door behind him.

“And why should we?” asks Katalin, once she has righted herself, even though Lajos is long gone. “If they’re going to slit my throat, I don’t much care whether there are pretty ribbons in my hair.”

I think of Gáspár’s back, latticed with its gruesome lash wounds. “They’ll find some way to punish you for your refusal, you know. The best you can hope for is a sweet, easy death.”

Katalin’s jaw unlatches. “What have they done to make you so meek? If I knew, I would have done it long ago.”

That kindles an old flame in me, and my face grows warm. “And for what? Why did you hate me so much? Was it because I didn’t stay down when you shoved me, or because I didn’t swallow every insult you hurled at me? Did you sleep more soundly at night when you knew that I was weeping in my bed, three huts away?”

For a long moment, Katalin says nothing. There is a faint rosiness to her cheeks, and this, I realize with a morose satisfaction, is more than I have ever managed to fluster her before. I am ready to consider it a perverse victory in the hours before my death, but then Katalin turns me around and starts running her fingers through my hair.