I linger by the feast table, scarcely able to restrain myself from clinging to Zsigmond’s side like a child myself. He speaks mostly to Batya in soft tones, clutching a cup of wine. I can see how each Yehuli family is like a constellation, and Zsigmond is his own unclustered star, winking its singular light. Just like how I was in Keszi, a daughter without her mother, nothing to give me shape except my braid in one pocket and my coin in the other. I fill a cup of wine for myself and swallow it down in one gulp.
“My mother will take offense if you don’t try her dumplings,” Jozefa says.
I put down my glass. “Your mother called me chubby.”
Jozefa regards me with a furrowed brow, as if she is trying to judge the veracity of her mother’s claim. “She’ll take offense anyway. And if you’re chubby, then so am I. We fit into the same dress.”
She takes a biscuit and eats it in two bites, smiling wolfishly. I watch her, uneasy. Batya’s other daughters are older, married, with the exhaustion of three children each gleaming dully behind their eyes. Jozefa has her mother’s bright, clear eyes and a face full of freckles that look scattered by an indolent hand. She is pretty in a razor-edged way; after spending so many years tormented by Katalin and the other girls in Keszi, it’s hard for me to look at pretty girls and not think of the blades behind their smiles. If we were in Keszi, Jozefa seems the type who would pull my hair and sneer at me. But now she only fills my glass with wine again, and then tops off her own.
“Thank you,” I say.
My voice is laced with suspicion, and she can tell. Jozefa’s lips purse. “My mother says you come from the pagan villages in Farkasvár, and that your mother was a pagan. Why are you in Király Szek?”
I swallow my wine. “It’s a long story.”
“We Yehuli like stories, in case you couldn’t tell.” Her eyes are light and laughing. “You ought to get used to telling them, if you want to be one of us.”
I almost say that I have plenty of practice listening, but I have done little telling of my own. “But I can’t be one of you, can I? I hardly know your language or your prayers or . . .”
“You can learn,” Jozefa says with a shrug. “You’re not simple, are you? Even my little cousin can read the holy book, and he still thinks that black hens lay black eggs. And even though your mother wasn’t Yehuli, you can do a conversion.”
“Does that happen very often?” I ask keenly. “Conversions.”
“Not very much anymore. But a long time ago, before the Patrifaith came to Régország, there were plenty of Yehuli men and women who married outsiders. Then they converted and raised their children here and no one could even know they were different at all. Of course, that was when we were allowed to live where we liked, and there was no Yehuli Street.”
“Before the Patrifaith?” Though Virág claims to remember a time when there were no three-pronged spears or Woodsman axes flashing, it is impossible for me to conceive.
“Of course,” Jozefa says. “The Yehuli lived in this city when King István wasn’t even a dream in his mother’s mind. Why else do you think our temple is so grand even when we can only work the days and the jobs that the Patritians allow us? Our temple was here before the Broken Tower, and long before the king carved his chapel into the hillside.”
The revelation of it shocks me. All I know of Régyar history is what I learned at Virág’s feet, and of course there was never any mention of the Yehuli. Jozefa watches my face flush first with bewilderment, and then with anger, thinking of the Patrifaith like a wave eating away at some pale and ancient stone.
“Why have you been so kind to me?” The question is not the one I intended to ask, but it rises up without me realizing it.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Jozefa counters, brow lowering. “Zsigmond has been alone nearly all his life; it was difficult to watch. Now he’s learned the daughter he thought was dead is alive after all—why should we take offense that her mother was some pagan woman?”
“Because I’m only half—” I start, and then stop abruptly, because Jozefa is looking at me as if I really am simple.
“Some on this street might not like it,” she says. “But I think it’s Patritians who care more about measuring blood.”
Not just Patritians. My thoughts go to Katalin, her face cast blue in the light of her flame. For all her eloquent assurance, Jozefa might be as sheltered as a fox pup in its den. Blood has power. I’ve seen it streaked across Gáspár’s wrist, felt it drying on the backs of my thighs. I’ve been eating the truth of it all my life, even before I knew you could cut your arm to kindle a fire, or lop off your pinky to invite ?rd?g’s magic inside you.