And this, I suspect, is the closest she will ever come to an apology. Gáspár watches stone-faced as Katalin unpins her wolf cloak, letting it slide to the ground. She bundles her hair up onto her head, baring the pale column of her throat.
“What do you mean to do?” Gáspár asks.
“There is a way to trigger a vision,” I tell him. My hands are trembling as they move toward Katalin’s neck. “I never realized it before, but I know how it’s done. She’ll have to hold the question in her mind.”
Katalin nods. Her fingers have dug into the riverbed. “I’m ready.”
I nod back at her, steeling myself. Something passes between us then, lacing out between her chest and mine, a thread of tenuous trust.
And then I clasp my hand around her throat and force her head underwater.
Katalin submerges without struggle, her hair spilling from her head in pale rivulets. Bubbles foam around her. I hold her there for so long that even my arm starts to ache, and I feel the tense of her throat under my hand, and then finally, finally, I yank her up again.
She gasps and splutters, coughing up river water. Her eyes are misted, still half-white, and her body shudders violently with the ebbing of her vision. There is a reed pasted to her cheek and I have the urge to wipe it away, but I quash whatever gentle instinct has risen in me unbidden.
Wet-faced, Katalin groans. Gáspár watches in bridled panic, eye too bright. After another few beats, Katalin’s shaking ceases.
“I saw it,” she rasps. “The turul. Flying between the black pines, against a pure-white sky.”
My heart quickens. “Are you certain? Do you know where to go?”
“Of course I’m certain,” Katalin snaps. “You’re not a seer, so you wouldn’t understand, but a vision isn’t something you can forget. Every single vision I’ve ever had plays on the insides of my eyelids when I try to sleep at night.”
Despite the sharpness of her voice, for once I truly pity her. Katalin wrings water from her hair, fingers still quivering between the white strands. Gáspár rises to his feet, flask in hand.
“You lead the way, then,” he says. “But we’ll need to hurry. Nándor’s men won’t be very far behind.”
Slowly, Katalin stands too. I take another moment before I follow them, staring up at the sky. The sun’s red eye is like a drop of blood in the river, the clouds streaming sickly pink around it. My mind goes back to Zsigmond’s house, and I imagine that I am sitting there with him practicing my letters, Régyar and Yehuli both. I let the image fill me up and then I let it go, scattering it like flower petals into the wind.
The snow starts falling later that day, the sky going sleek and gray. The ground mottles with new frost, crunching under our horses’ hooves. The hills have begun to flatten, racing toward a distant white horizon. Somewhere farther north, the Kalevans have hunkered down for true winter, Tuula and Szabín among them. I imagine that Bierdna is running out in front of us, flicking snowflakes off her ears. I follow the dark shape of her, invisible to anyone but me, with a fierce, unblinking determination.
I worry over the prospect of a storm, but snowfall lightens and then shivers away. Gauzy ribbons of cloud wrap around the sun, and light comes straining through like milk through cheesecloth. Katalin brings her horse to my side and then nudges me, pointing wordlessly over her shoulder. I turn around. Our footsteps have frozen in the snow, leaving a miles-long trail behind us. A wave of despair runs over me.
Gáspár must see it written on my face, because he says, “Let’s stop for now.”
There’s no way to erase the trail that we have left, and it’s not snowing hard enough to cover our tracks in time, which means that Nándor’s men will have a path guiding them right to us. I feel a hopeless anguish unspooling in me. I clamber down off my horse and tie her to a nearby tree with numbing fingers.
I think it might be a relief to cry, but all my tears have been spent in silence during the ride, my hood pulled up over my face so neither Gáspár nor Katalin could see. Instead, I reach for the bow strapped to my horse’s back. The familiar tensing of my muscles and the twang of the bow string in my ear will comfort me better than anything else now.
“I’ll hunt,” I say.
Gáspár and Katalin nod their agreement, both pink-faced and grim. I move through the copse of bare, frost-dewed trees, listening for sounds of scuffling in the snow, watching for bright, blinking eyes. I catch two gamy rabbits, their patchy fur coming off in my hands. By the time I return, the sun is a band of gold along the horizon and Katalin has kindled a fire. Gáspár is whispering something to her, his mouth not far from her ear. She has a hardened look on her face, a tiny furrow between her brow.