Page 98 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

I’m afraid to speak, afraid to imperil this precarious moment that seems hesitantly to approach camaraderie. I think of Virág’s hands, supremely agile with their six fingers, threading my hair into dozens of intricate braids as thin as fishbones. I think of Zsófia shrouding me with her silver dye. I think of the way that they trussed me for the Woodsmen like a prized pig, fat under the farmer’s blade.

“Your hair is impossible,” Katalin huffs, but she finishes my last braid and ties it off with a strip of brown leather.

“It’s finally done now,” I say, my gaze fixed dully in the middle distance. “I’ll die in Király Szek like I was supposed to.”

Katalin makes a halting sound, and her fingers tense against my scalp. “I never wanted you to die for me, idiot.”

“It certainly seemed like you did,” I say, “given how much you tormented me.”

“I wasn’t the best—”

“You were terrible,” I cut in.

Katalin gives her head a dignified shake. “Do you know what Virág always told me, when we were alone? A seer never trembles, she said. Stupid old bat. She was always kind to me, but that’s because she had to be; I was the next táltos, and I was supposed to take her place. She forced me to swallow every vision like it was sweet wine instead of poison, and said that it was kindness. She had no reason to be kind to you, with you being barren and all, but she was, anyway—between the lashings, at least. I hated you for that.”

I manage a short, humorless laugh. “So you were cruel to me because she was kind?”

“Silly, isn’t it? Virág told me I should be ready to do anything for Keszi, to die for my tribe. You were part of my tribe. A wolf-sister.” She tries out the word, chewing on her lip. “I should have tried to protect you too.”

Something unravels in me, like thread. I press my face to her shoulder, to the soft white fur of her wolf cloak, just below the curve of its frozen jaw.

“I could burn this whole tower down, you know,” she says. “And both of us inside it.”

I think of my own fleeting desire to see the Broken Tower crumble. But it would be a weightless gesture, a shout without an echo. They would only build it up again, or fashion something new from its ashes. Even smashing Saint István’s statue or snapping his saintly finger bones would be like kicking a lone rock down a dark abyss. Just the way that killing the turul hadn’t killed us, hadn’t killed everyone in Keszi, the Patrifaith would survive some shattered marble and ruined stone.

“I would rather die by steel, I think,” I tell her. “It’s quicker and cleaner, and I won’t have to smell my own burning skin.”

“I suppose that’s fair enough,” Katalin says. Without forcing me from her shoulder, she starts to sing. A low song, sweet and brief, one that Virág often used for a lullaby. For a moment I think she’s forging a blade, but it would be as useless as a fire; we might kill one or two or three Woodsmen, but it would never be enough for all of them.

When Katalin’s song is done, there’s a small silver disk cupped in her palm, slick enough to be a mirror. Holding it up, I see that inside is the wavering reflection of a perfect pagan girl, myths and stories and magic braided into her hair, history in the flash of her eyes and the set of her jaw. For better or worse, no one would guess at the taint of my father’s blood.

The door opens again, Lajos and the two other Woodsmen behind it. There is rope for our hands, pulled tight enough to burn the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. The Woodsmen take us down the castle’s serpentine hallways for the last time, through the smolder of half-lit torches, and out into the courtyard.

There’s no stale air from the marketplace drifting over the palace gates; the stalls have all been shuttered for Nándor’s coronation. The foul cobblestones have been scrubbed of their muck and laid over with lush woven rugs, in wine-dark violet and evergreen and gold. Garlands of white and purple flowers trim a makeshift dais, their delicate petals curling up in search of a cloud-wreathed sun. They are early crocuses, which bloom only on the southern slope of a single hill in Szarvasvár.

The dais has been built to hold a new throne, one of freshly burnished gold. I wonder if Nándor had my father make it, too, standing over him with a lash in hand. The back has been wrought into the shape of a three-pronged spear, each prong sharpened to a glistening point, like a jagged golden tooth. It has been draped with a great tapestry that bears the seal of House Bárány. So that Nándor can claim the throne under the Bárány name, even though he is a bastard by Patritian law. Seeing it fills me with a turbid, manacled fury, but it’s nothing compared to seeing Nándor himself.

He ascends the dais in all the heat and clamor of the crowd, his admirers with their faces shining as bright as coins newly minted. They pelt him with woven laurel crowns and bouquets of tulips that they must have paid for in blood, because the Merzani are burning all the flower fields on the Great Plain. His dolman is pure white, like the sky in deep winter, and over it is a red-and-gold mente, with furred sleeves that hang nearly to the ground. They sweep through tulip petals, which are strewn over the dais like pale-bellied carps beached on the shoreline.

A coterie of Woodsmen rings the dais in a black collar, pushing back against the teeming of the crowd. On the dais is another man, wearing a dark-blue mente, a lone feather pinned to his chest.

Count Reményi holds the crown on a red satin pillow. I scan the crowd in a blind panic, searching for my father’s face among the shining hundreds, and find him flanked by two Woodsmen. I cannot imagine why Nándor hasn’t killed him already—perhaps he wants Zsigmond to see what it looks like, when a Patritian king wears his crown. A beat of relief goes through me before I remember that it’s all for nothing. Nándor will slit his throat as soon as the crowd disperses; maybe before, if he wants to make a show of it. I expect there will be a thousand eyes on me when I die.

At last I see him. Gáspár ascends the dais in his black dolman and suba, looking every inch a Woodsman again. All he’s missing is the ax at his hip. His movements are stiff and considered; I can see him wince when he lifts his arms to take the crown from Count Reményi. I feel a twinge of phantom pain go down the backs of my thighs, where my scars are a pale mirror of his fresh and lurid wounds. It is so achingly, viscerally wrong to watch him stand there beside Nándor in his brilliant red and gold, like seeing both the sun and the moon in the sky at once—Isten drawing up the dawn with one hand and painting midnight with the other.

Lajos maneuvers Katalin and me through the crowd, toward the very base of the dais, so close that I can taste the pollen-sweet scent of the spring crocuses on my tongue. I meet Gáspár’s eye, glittering wet in the meager sunlight, and I can see all my painful, ruinous love reflected back. There is another world in which we might have stayed in the cradle of tree roots forever, our words rising in cold whispers but our hands and mouths warm.

“Good people of Régország!” Count Reményi cries out—once, twice, until the sound of the crowd simmers low and then goes silent. “We are gathered here to crown our country’s next king. He is heir to the throne of Ave István, blood chieftain of the White Falcon Tribe and all its lands, and blessed by the gentle hand of the Prinkepatrios. Kneel for him and for your god.”

I recognize the words from the Saint István’s Day feast—it was how Nándor introduced his own father. As he speaks, Count Reményi unfurls his white-feathered cloak, the cloak of Akosvár and the White Falcon Tribe, the same one that Reményi himself wore that very night. Now he drapes it over Nándor’s back, and I inhale a sharp breath. Even after all his heated ramblings about the perversion of our pagan ways, he will take his throne by Isten’s rite.

Count Reményi gives Gáspár a vicious nudge, leaning close to whisper words that I can barely hear: “Say it.”

Gáspár steps forward. His face is hard, but his gloved hands are trembling.

And then Katalin screams.

She slithers boneless to the ground, thrashing and wailing. Suddenly oblivious to the threat of Lajos’s ax, I kneel down beside her, trying to turn her over clumsily with my bound hands. Her eyes have gone blank and white.