It’s the first time we’ve had a chance to speak since he came to see me in my cell, and the memory of it bruises me. Despite it, I have some small instinct to tell him everything that has happened: about the council meeting, about Zsigmond. As if he can help fill some of the empty spaces. But I have quashed the instinct by the time he opens his mouth.
“You did survive,” he says quietly.
“No thanks to you,” I bite back. I think of the way he sat silently at the banquet table while the king held his sword over my head, and I feel as wretched as ever.
Gáspár holds my gaze, throat bobbing. “I tried.”
“If you mean your pitiful protests at the feast—”
“No,” he says, with a thread of stubborn petulance that I’ve found myself oddly missing. “Before the feast. I begged my father for your life, even though I thought you might be the death of me.”
I remember how Nándor touched me so easily, putting his finger to my lips as if he weren’t afraid that I might threaten his holiness. I wonder what Gáspár would do, if he weren’t afraid. But he hasn’t confessed me like a sin. He hasn’t tried to absolve himself of what he’s done, of what we did, together.
“Did you kneel for him?” I ask perversely.
It is not a question meant to be answered, and I half expect Gáspár to scowl at me and turn away. For a suspended moment, there’s no sound in the church except the harmony of our breathing; even the trickle of water and the king’s footsteps have gone silent. Gáspár stares at me without blinking, for so long that my own eyes are hot and damp by the end of it, by the time he finally says, “Yes.”
Chapter Eighteen
After the first time I spend five straight nights at Zsigmond’s house, tracing letters. It doesn’t seem quite right, to call what I am doing writing, not yet. I can only copy what I see on Zsigmond’s parchments; I can’t conjure any words of my own. Zsigmond watches me over the top of his book, until I am yawning with every other breath and my vision is too glazed to read anything, and then he puts me to sleep in his bed, covering me with a quilt that smells of candle wax and ink and old paper, that smells like him. When pink dawn light filters through the window and lands gridded on my bleary face, I know it is time to return to the castle, to sit dull-eyed at the king’s side like some exceptionally devoted guard dog. Council meetings and banquets and church visits wend past me in an oblivious litany. All day I can think of nothing except returning to Zsigmond that night.
He tells me stories of my mother, only the good ones, when she was rosy-cheeked and alive, still swollen with the distant dream of me. I tell him about Virág and her theatrically grim predictions, careful never to mention anything about lashings, trying to wring the small bits of humor out of a mostly humorless life. Zsigmond is particularly good at that; he has none of Virág’s self-pitying gloom. Even when he speaks of his abuse at Nándor’s hands, he makes me laugh at his depiction of the Woodsmen as sheep newly shorn, embarrassed of their nascent nudity, bleating after their prettier, fluffier master. It is only then that I feel brave enough to recall Count Reményi’s words.
“During the council meeting,” I start, my voice low and uncertain, “there was one count, the count of Akosvár, who said that there was a place for Yehuli where they could have towns and villages of their own. A strip of land in Rodinya that has been set aside for them. He said the other countries in the west are already sending their Yehuli there.”
The lambent humor drains from Zsigmond’s eyes. “They call it the Stake. It is cobbled from the worst bits of land in the Rodinyan empire, scraggly and cold, where not much good can grow. The Yehuli there live in their own towns and villages, it’s true, but there are laws forbidding them from owning land and selling wares, from working on certain days, from sending their children to school. And then Patritians come from the nearby cities, to burn Yehuli houses, to kill. They don’t spare even the women and children.”
A lump rises hard and hot in my throat. “But doesn’t all that happen here? Nándor had you arrested and tortured for working on a Patritian holy day, and now he threatens to visit violence upon the Yehuli . . .”
“My family,” Zsigmond starts, and then clears his throat, amending himself, “our family has lived in Király Szek for six generations. We have served kings and counts. We have done everything from goldsmithing to street sweeping. We watched the city gates fall to King István’s enemies and then be built back up again; we saw his coronation and murmured about it in Old Régyar with the rest of them. This is our home, as much as Keszi is yours.”