Virág would sigh and shake her head, or if she were in a particularly bitter mood, order me to scrub her tunic clean as punishment for my failure and my foul mouth. But after a while she gave up watching me crouch futilely over her hearth, and I gave up trying to do magic at all. Fire-making was meant to be the simplest of the three skills. If I couldn’t manage that, how could I ever hope to forge metal or heal wounds?
I had always thought that somehow she was playing me for a fool, like there was some secret she and the rest of the women knew and were all gleefully keeping from me. I knew the stories as well as any of them, but it still wasn’t enough. It was better than thinking that I’d been cursed, or that there was something strange and ruinous in my blood.
I want to reach for the gold coin in my pocket now, but my hands are tied. On the other side of the fire, the captain is laying out his mat. There’s a small knife strapped to his boot, right below the crook of his knee, steel handle glinting in the firelight.
“The area looks clear, kapitány,” Peti says. “I’ll take first watch.”
I wonder if he means watching me, or watching for something in the woods that we could never hope to see before it kills us. Ezer Szem means thousand-eyed. If you stare long enough into the darkness of the forest, eventually something will stare right back.
Exhaustion has begun to eat away at my fear, eroding it like the riverbank after a rainstorm. There’s no way to tell how long we’ve been in the woods, but my body aches as if I’ve been riding for a day or more. Imre and Ferkó pad down beside the fire, resting their heads on their packs.
The captain looks at me expectantly, his single eye unblinking. When I don’t move, his fingers go to his ax, and he draws it with an odd, mortified hesitation, like he can’t quite gauge the weight of it in his hands. Stupid, I think of my own evaluation. He and his blade have both been honed for killing pagan girls like me.
He closes the space between us in three long strides. I imagine the trajectory of his ax—the arc it would have to follow to meet my throat. But perhaps I can better estimate the danger by looking in his eye. It’s angled downward, lashes casting a feathery shadow across his cheekbone.
Without speaking, the captain thrusts the hilt of his ax against my back, right between the blades of my shoulders. Through my wolf cloak and my tunic beneath, I can feel the press of the wood, its muffled meanness. The captain swallows, throat bobbing.
My legs tremble as I lower myself to the ground. I wonder if he recognizes the fettered hatred in the grit of my teeth, or if he only sees my white-faced fear. I wonder if it brings him pleasure, to see me on my knees. I don’t breathe again until the captain returns to his own mat, even if his one black eye is still watching me.
I’m supposed to sleep. But my gaze keeps drawing back to the blade on his boot.
Night falls differently in Ezer Szem. The wind goes silent when the sun goes down. The shadows mottle themselves into shapes that look like claws and teeth. After a few hours, the fire is smoldering, more ash than flame, and I can’t see farther than a few feet in front of me. I can only hear the soft, sleeping exhales of the Woodsmen and the crackle of dead leaves as something moves behind the tree line.
I can’t steal the captain’s knife without waking him. But maybe I can slip away while they’re asleep and vanish into the darkness of the woods. I’ll take my chances with monsters. The Woodsmen are worse.
Jaw clenched, I push myself up onto my elbows, then my knees. I shimmy onto the balls of my feet and stand, wincing as my sore muscles arch and bend. I take two preliminary paces backward, pausing to listen for the sound of someone stirring. Nothing. I turn to face the cold, solid blackness.
I haven’t gone more than fifty paces away from camp when something catches the collar of my cloak. A scream boils in my belly, but I swallow it down. I try to adjust my eyes, to see what awful creature has gotten ahold of me. But all I can hear is heavy human breathing. A hot, mortal hand grazes the skin of my throat.
Out of the darkness, a lantern blazes gauzy and yellow, illuminating a crescent of its face: a stubbled chin and nose red with broken blood vessels. It’s no monster. It’s Peti.
I let out a breath that sounds like shaky laughter. My escape plan is foiled before it’s even begun, and I’m a daft, doomed fool. “What are you going to do with me?”
“What our captain doesn’t have the piety to do,” he says, and draws his ax.
I realize at once that I’ve made a terrible mistake. There’s nothing human about Peti’s face at all. His lips pull back into a snarl, showing all the icicle points of his teeth, and even the whites of his eyes are burning, stitched through with red.