Several feet away, Batya throws her head back and laughs at something my father has said. Her eyes are gleaming. I remember how she sat with her daughters in the temple, the absence of a husband obvious to me only now.
“What about your father?” I ask keenly, no longer caring to be tactful. “Where is he?”
“He died when I was a child.” Jozefa blinks, untroubled. “I don’t remember him at all. But I do know what it’s like to be without one.”
The baldness of her answer almost makes me feel embarrassed for asking, and doubly ashamed for thinking that she was as soft as a kit, oblivious to any suffering. I see a different cant to Batya’s smile now, and a new meaning to the way Zsigmond has laid his hand on her arm.
I open my mouth to reply, but the wind picks up then, ferrying the sound of voices down Yehuli Street. Firelight dances on the facades of the houses, and moving shadows fall upon the cobblestones. Now all my blood turns cold.
My mind conjures images of stakes and torches, bodies in the street. But I can’t see any blades glinting, only a crowd gathering at the very end of the road, mostly peasants in their homespun clothes. They are murmuring, their heads bobbing like prairie mice, but there is one voice, dulcet and familiar, that rises above the rest.
“See how they celebrate while our soldiers are struck down by Merzani steel,” Nándor says. “See how heartily they eat while the bey’s army burns our crops in Akosvár. If you believe, as I do, that the Prinkepatrios rewards staunch faith and punishes apostasy, then how can you believe that we are not being punished for sheltering heathens in our city?”
A chorus of approval lifts from the crowd. Jozefa has gone stiff beside me, one hand gripping the edge of the feast table. Her knuckles are white. Behind me, Zsigmond’s gaze passes between Nándor and me, the wine-flush draining from his cheeks.
“All this time the king has been searching for the power to defeat the Merzani and to end the war,” Nándor goes on. He paces to the front of the crowd, his boot steps feather-light. “Stealing magic from pagan girls’ fingernails, like some sort of impious grave robber. Perhaps the solution has been before us all this time: send the Yehuli from this city, and wipe the pagans from this Earth.”
His words are openly mutinous. I scan the crowd, searching for Gáspár, for anyone who might bear witness to Nándor’s treason. My heart leaps when I see a black suba, but it’s not Gáspár—it’s only a nameless Woodsman whose face is unfamiliar to me. My gaze lands on another Woodsman, and then another, their axes at their hips and their eyes following Nándor reverently. My vision falters, and I feel sick enough to retch.
The crowd presses around Nándor, pushing farther down the road. All the sounds of our feast have gone silent. Children are clinging to their fathers’ legs, the feathers from their masks snatched up in the wind. The rabbi is mutely cradling his cup of wine in one hand and a half-eaten biscuit in the other. We are all, in this moment, part of the same constellation: dozens of stars clustered in identical terror.
Nándor breaks from the crowd. In the evening light, his face is incandescent, torchlight flickering on the shining planes of his cheeks. He comes toward me, and Jozefa gives a tiny gasp of fear, stumbling back. I hold myself still. My heart is all roaring clamor. When Nándor finally stops, our noses are a hair’s breadth apart. I can see a small, imperfect birthmark under his left eyebrow.
“évike,” he says. “What a terrible disappointment. There’s hardly any trace of pagan left in you. Pity for my father—he wanted a vicious wolf-girl, and he got a slavering Yehuli dog.”
He wants his words to draw deep gouges in me, deep enough to make me cower, or else rise to violence like a wolf with an arrow in its hind. Pain makes animals mean, but I must be more than just an animal now. The crowd thrums in bridled fury behind him, so many faces blank with their loathing. Ashen-faced peasants mostly, along with a handful of Woodsmen and even a few nobles in their jewel-bright dolmans. Something familiar sharpens out of the throng: Count Reményi, his weasel eyes narrowed like knife points.
“Wolf-girl or Yehuli, I know what to do with seditious bastards,” I say, though my voice is more uncertain than I would like. “And I know what shackles you now, Nándor. You want to be a Patritian king of a Patritian country, but it’s Patritian law that the crown goes to the firstborn son. The true-born son.”
I expect Nándor to flinch, if only briefly, but he scarcely even blinks at me. His gaze wanders over my shoulder, landing on Zsigmond. My heart stutters.