The Wolf and the Woodsman
Ava Reid
Chapter One
The trees have to be tied down by sunset. When the Woodsmen come, they always try to run.
The girls who are skilled forgers fashion little iron stakes to drive through the roots of the trees and into the earth, anchoring them in place. With no gift for forging between the two of us, Boróka and I haul a great length of rope, snaring any trees we pass in clumsy loops and awkward knots. When we finish, it looks the spider web of some giant creature, something the woods might cough up. The thought doesn’t even make me shiver. Nothing that might break through the tree line could be worse than the Woodsmen.
“Who do you think it will be?” Boróka asks. The light of the setting sun filters through the patchy cathedral of tree cover, dappling her face. Tears are pearled in the corners of her eyes.
“Virág,” I say. “With any luck.”
Boróka’s mouth twists.
“Though I suspect halfway through their journey the Woodsmen will tire of her babbling about weather omens and dump her in the Black Lake.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Of course I don’t. I wouldn’t wish the Woodsmen on anyone, no matter how much they lashed me, how meanly they chided me, or how many hours I spent scraping their cold gulyás out of yesterday’s pots. But it’s easier to loathe Virág than to worry I might lose her.
The wind picks up, carrying the voices of the other girls toward us, as silvery as the bone chimes hanging outside of Virág’s hut. They sing to make their forging gift stronger, the way the great hero Vilm?tten did, when he crafted the sword of the gods. As their song falters, so does their steel. Almost unconsciously I move toward them, bow and arrow shifting on my back. Instead of listening to their words, I look at their hands.
They rub their palms together, gently at first, and then with greater ferocity, as if they might scour their skin right off. By the time the song is done, each girl is gripping a small iron stake, as slick and sturdy as any that might come off a blacksmith’s blazing forge. Boróka notices me watching—notices the look of jilted longing she’s seen on my face a hundred times before.
“Ignore them,” Boróka whispers.
It’s easy for her to say. If Isten, the father-god, cast his smiling face down on the woods right now, he would see a mottled rainbow of gray and tawny smeared against the green bramble. Their wolf cloaks gleam even in the ebbing sunlight, the individual hairs turned almost translucent. The teeth of the dead animals, still fully intact, form an arc over each girl’s head, as if the animal were about to eat her. Boróka’s wolf cloak is a bleached ochre—a healer’s color.
But when Isten saw me, all he would see is a cloak of plain wool, thin and patched with my own lazy threadwork. I can always feel the humiliating weight of it, clothed in my own inferiority. I turn to Boróka to reply, but then I hear a hushed giggle behind me, and the smell of something burning fills my nose.
I whirl around, my hair trailing blue fire. Biting back a yelp, my impotent hands fly up to try to smother the flame. It’s all they want from me, that wild-eyed panic, and they get it. The fire is out before I know it, but my throat is burning as I march toward Katalin and her lackeys.
“I’m terribly sorry, évike,” Katalin says. “The skill of fire-making is hard to master. My hand must have slipped.”
“What a pity that you find such a simple skill so difficult to perform,” I snap.
My comment only earns another chorus of laughs. Katalin’s hood is pulled up over her head, the wolf’s mouth twisted into an ugly snarl, eyes glassy and blind. Her cloak is precisely the same color as her hair, white as a carp’s belly, or, if I’m charitable, the winter’s first snow. It’s a seer’s color.
I want to tear her pristine cloak off her back and make her watch as I drag it through the muddy riverbed. A small, mute part of me wants to hang it over my own shoulders, but I know I would only feel like a fraud.
“Perhaps I do,” Katalin says with a shrug. “Or perhaps I can have another girl make my fires for me, when I am the village táltos.”
“Virág isn’t dead yet.”
“Of course it won’t be you, évike,” she presses on, ignoring me. “It will have to be someone who can light more than a spark.”
“Or heal more than a splinter,” írisz, one of her preening wolf pack, speaks up.
“Or forge a sewing needle,” Zsófia, the other one, adds.