For a moment, I hear nothing on the other side. Maybe he’s not there. Maybe Nándor has already come for him. Each terrible possibility runs itself ragged through my brain, and my vision has winnowed to nearly nothing by the time the door swings open, Gáspár standing openmouthed in the threshold.
“évike,” he says, catching me before I fall.
He leads me into his room, and I crumple onto his bed. If my mind weren’t so pain-addled, and my lungs doing all their work just to keep me breathing, I would make a quip about someone finding the true-born prince with a wolf-girl in his bed. Even in my head, the jest is not half as clever as I would like.
My blood leaks onto his sheets. Gáspár holds my arm in his lap, gloved hands running over my wound.
“Tell me what to do,” he says, and the helplessness in his voice nearly ruins me. “Tell me how to . . .”
“Take off your gloves,” I manage, eyelids fluttering.
I watch him as he does, removing each one and letting them drift to the ground, limp as shed black feathers. “Why?” he asks. “What now?”
“No reason,” I mumble. “I’m just tired of you wearing them.”
He lets out a breath that is half annoyance, half exasperated amusement. When his bare fingers touch my skin through the dress, I feel them shaking.
“I have to stop the bleeding,” he says. His hand presses hard over my wound, and I let out a whimper of pain. “I’m sorry. It’s going to hurt. Try and bear it.”
The fabric of my dress is so blood-drenched that I can see the shape of my wound beneath it, wide and clenching. Gáspár pulls at the silk, but the seams hold fast. I hear panic in the hitch of his breath and then he leans over me, mouth so close to my throat that I think for a startled moment he will draw his lips over my old scar again. Instead he takes the fabric between his teeth, incisor grazing my shoulder, and pulls until the sleeve of my dress flowers open.
I remember how Imre stuck the hilt of his knife into Peti’s mouth and told him to bite down while Gáspár cut off his arm. Even then, even when he was only a Woodsman to me, there was horror and regret in his eye. Now Gáspár works with a black determination, his gaze narrowed to nothing but his hands and my bare, bleeding arm in front of him. He tears strips of fabric from his bedclothes and wraps them tight around my shoulder. The pain ebbs, if only slightly.
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice tight. “You’ve lost so much blood already . . .”
“It’s my hunting arm,” I say quietly. Even if I survive, I will never draw a bow again.
Gáspár’s face crumples. In that moment he looks so miserable that I want to apologize for every little cut I have made in him, every drop of blood my words have drawn.
“What happened?” he whispers.
And so I tell him everything: about the Yehuli holiday and Nándor’s mob, about Riika and the dagger, and every single one of his brother’s threats, and worst of all, about his brother’s terrifying power. Gáspár’s brow furrows as I speak, his lips pressing together until they are nearly white. As the pain recedes further, tidewater drawing back from the shore, I become aware of his hand against my arm, his bare knuckles brushing my skin.
“He wants to kill you,” I say at last, hoarse with exhaustion. “And then he’ll banish all the Yehuli, and destroy Keszi.”
Gáspár’s jaw sets. “It won’t be as easy for him as he thinks.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not as daft as you imagine me, évike,” he says, but his tone is gentle. “I have Miklós and Ferenc switch off guarding my door while I sleep. I don’t eat anything unless I have procured it myself. When I must attend feasts, I let the wine touch my lips but I never swallow it. I know that I am what stands between Nándor and the crown, and that he will do anything to get his hands around my throat.”
My mouth goes dry. “He thought that killing me would make you drop your guard.”
Gáspár nods, just once, and doesn’t meet my eyes.
“None of it matters now.” A bolt of pain runs through me, and I shiver. “He’s too powerful. There’s no way to stop him. Even my magic was nothing against him.”
“Then you must let the king have her,” Gáspár says. “Your seer. It’s not the power of the turul, but it is enough to help my father hold on to his crown.”