“Bite down,” Imre says. I realize with a start that his face is damp too.
A word of protest rises in my throat, but I remember the mad, monstrous look on Peti’s face as he pressed his blade to my skin, and the word dies before I can speak it.
The captain brings down his ax in a neat arc, right below Peti’s left shoulder. The swift scything of the ax ruffles the hairs of his suba, and when the blade buries itself in the earth, they lie flat again.
For a long moment, the forest is silent. Ferkó and Imre get to their feet. The captain lifts his ax, the sickled edge of the blade dripping something viscous and black. With bleary, languid movements, as if he’s just been woken from slumber, Peti shifts on the grass, raising his head. When his torso rises, his arm doesn’t come with it.
I see the white knob of bone jutting from his shoulder, and the jewel-hued mangle of flesh, red as overripe berries. I see the ragged flaps of skin draped over the sudden termination of his arm, fluttering limply in the scant breeze.
The knife falls out of Peti’s mouth. He screams, louder than anything I have heard before. My stomach clenches like a fist and I double over, palms pressed against the damp earth, retching.
Chapter Three
Peti weeps through the night, without ceasing. After Ferkó takes a heated blade to his shoulder, Imre packs his wound with strips of burlap and leather, and fistfuls of dry leaves webbed together by sap. I watch them, huddled by the vanishing fire, my mouth still tasting of bile. The captain stands over Peti’s lost limb and clasps his hands, whispers his deferent prayer. Blue-white flame streaks across the length of his severed arm, bright as the tail of a comet. Peti’s fingers melt like nubs of candle wax. His knucklebones puddle in the dirt, some strange white flora. I think I might be sick again.
A pitiful dawn creeps over the forest, the pinks and golds of sunrise strained through the dark latticework of tree branches and bracken, squeezing out their color. All that reaches me is a bleached yellow light. It falls on my shaking hands, nicked with tiny scratches from palm to fingernail, and the splatter of dried bloodstains on my wolf cloak. It falls on the captain, turning his black suba silvery with dust motes. It falls on Peti, his chest rising in fits and starts, every breath a violence. His white lips part with a guttering moan.
“You’re going to bring every godforsaken monster in Ezer Szem right to us,” Ferkó growls. He nudges Imre’s knife toward Peti with the toe of his boot. “Bite down on this, if you must.”
Peti doesn’t reply. His eyelashes give a limp, moth-wing flutter.
Neither the Woodsmen nor I have slept. The wound on my throat is still wet, and it opens whenever I try to speak, so I keep my lips pressed firm. I am focusing on quelling the roil of my stomach when the captain stalks toward me, dead leaves crunching with every step.
“Stand up,” he says.
My heart stutters as I rise to my feet. Now that I know the king wants me delivered to the capital unharmed, I ought to feel emboldened. But the memory of his blade swinging through Peti’s arm ebbs some of that nascent bluster. A vow to the king still seems a flimsy shield to put between the captain’s ax and me.
“I suppose I should thank you,” I say, throat dry. “For saving my life.”
Without meeting my gaze, the captain says, “I find no glory in saving wolf-girls, and I don’t uphold my oath for your gratitude.”
Anger burns in my chest. The Woodsmen are as pious as they are cruel, and any vengeance they may want to have upon me is tempered by their stupid devotion. “You must regret it, then.”
“I didn’t say that.” He gives me one swift, probing glare. “And you may very well have managed without my help. You bit off Peti’s ear.”
I feel a little flush of shame, only because I have confirmed Woodsman stories about pagan barbarity. But then I remember the arc of the captain’s ax, the patch over his missing eye, and the shame dies as quickly as a snuffed candle.
“I thought that missing body parts make the Woodsmen more powerful,” I say. “Perhaps he should have thanked me.”
“There is no such thing as the power of the Woodsmen,” says the captain. “There is only the power of the Prinkepatrios as it flows through us, and we are His humble servants.”
“We in Keszi don’t fear servants. We fear brutes with axes.”
I wait to see if my needling has stuck him. But the captain just arches a brow. He doesn’t speak like a brute with an ax. His voice is measured, and his words have an easy eloquence. A particularly clever soldier, I decide. But a soldier all the same.