“So it is,” Nándor says, shifting his gaze back to me. “As long as the firstborn son lives. And you and your people may have my father’s protection for now, but one man’s word, even the word of a king, cannot hold against the tide of an entire city.”
It’s another moment before I can untangle the threefold braid of his threat, my stomach curdling with terror. Is it Gáspár’s life, not his father’s, that he aims to take? Does he plan to banish the Yehuli on his own, with his faction of disloyal Woodsmen? And then will he march them to Keszi too?
My four fingers curl into a fist. I’ve been told of Nándor’s power, but I have never seen it. I have heard him entrance a crowd with his voice, but voices can be silenced. Hateful instinct laces through me, and I very nearly wrap my hand around his throat.
I stop before I even lift my arm. It will only bring violence upon Zsigmond, upon Jozefa and Batya and all the Yehuli behind me. For all that I lambasted Gáspár over his cringing silence, for all that I fought Katalin’s cruelty, I don’t rise against Nándor now. I let his words land on my shoulders like brittle winter leaves. He plucks the wine cup from my hand and drains it, a stain of scarlet tinging the corners of his lips. Then he smashes the glass onto the cobblestones, turns, and leads his crowd away with him.
Chapter Nineteen
The street empties within moments of Nándor’s departure. Food is swept off the feast tables. Children are bundled into their houses, hushed with their mothers’ kisses. All that remains is the red spill of wine across the cobblestones and the shattered porcelain of my cup. Dusk has sharpened into night, and the cool air stings my cheeks and nose as I help Batya and Jozefa heft their trays through the threshold, Zsigmond following close behind.
When the door is shut, Batya collapses into a chair. Jozefa wipes her brow mutely. And Zsigmond sits down at the table, hands steepled in front of him, gaze set blankly into the middle distance. The gonged absence of sound is louder than Király Szek’s church bells.
“What will you do?” I ask finally, when I can’t stand the silence any longer. My voice squeaks like a wood mouse.
“What we have always done.” Batya rubs one hand along her chin. “There’s nothing else to do. We have weathered worse threats before. It has been particularly bad these past years, with the war, but once the Merzani are pushed back from the border, Nándor will temper himself again.”
“It’s not only Nándor,” Zsigmond says softly. “There were near a hundred peasants there, and Woodsmen and nobles too. Is Nándor the mouth behind their prayers, or the answer to them?”
I don’t know how to reply. If a fire burns your hut to the ground, do you blame the man who stoked your hearth, or the god who made the winter cold?
“Yes, and still we have endured worse,” Batya says again, but I notice the way her eyes dart between my father and the doorway. “We must keep low until it passes, like we always do.”
Just like King János, I think, who has only tried to patch the holes of an unsound ship. That’s the problem with Patritians—they care about their legacies more than their lives. The king would let Keszi burn, would let my father bleed, would even let himself die if he could still have his statue carved in gold. If he could stay in that courtyard as a slender finger bone or a lock of hair or whitened eye.
Zsigmond nods, and says nothing more. Jozefa brushes a loose braid back from her mother’s face. And then I can feel my chest start to heave, tears pricking hot in the corners of my eyes. Batya draws a sharp breath, and I flush with shame at my weakness, how easily Nándor has moved me to weep, until Zsigmond rises from his chair and puts his arms around me, tucking my head under his chin.
I almost laugh then, in disbelief and despair. All my life I have only wanted my father to hold me, but now when he finally does, it feels as if he is holding me against the wolves at the door. I wipe my tears on the collar of his shirt and say, “Virág would tell you that I was a bad omen.”
Zsigmond laughs; I feel it echo through my cheek. “God has brought my daughter back to me, and whatever else has come with her is dust on the wind. Have I told you the fable of the rabbi and the golem?”
From the other side of the room, Jozefa groans. “Please, my mother has told it a thousand times. I can’t bear to hear it once more.”
Batya silences her with a glare, even as I think of how I’ve echoed her sentiment so many times. The Yehuli, I have learned, have as many stories as Virág. There are ash fables for funerals, wine fables for weddings, moon fables for trying to get your children to go to sleep at night. Thread fables are stories that mothers tell their daughters as they teach them to stitch, but I have no mother, so I’ve never heard a single one.