I drop the dead rabbits by the fire and warm my hands. Katalin comes over to me, her borrowed wolf cloak sweeping up small flurries of new snow.
“What did he say to you?” I ask.
“He said he was sorry,” she replies.
“For what?”
“For terrifying us all our lives,” Katalin says. “I suppose he ought to apologize for it, being the prince. I could have done without his mooning eyes, though. Well, eye.”
Something like a laugh coils in my belly, but I am too exhausted to loose it past my lips. Besides, I don’t want Katalin to think that I will forgive her so easily, or that saving her life means I have any interest in being friends.
My gaze wanders to Gáspár, still standing beside the horses. We are not very far now from the woods where we encountered the beautiful girl who was a monster. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. My arm still throbs with an irregular, phantom pain, soothed by the memory of his hands pressing gently over the wound.
Katalin and I skin and gut the rabbits in silence, and Gáspár keeps his distance. Perhaps he has regretted agreeing to this plan; maybe he doubts Katalin’s vision. I can’t let myself think of what will happen if we fail, but my stomach churns like white water and I only manage a few bites of rabbit. Zsigmond’s face keeps drifting across my mind.
Night comes over our scrubby patch of forest with a vengeance, blanketing us in a swift and total blackness. Once the sun is down, we warm ourselves for a few more heady, stolen moments before we have to stamp out the fire again. Nándor’s men would see the light of it from miles away. Katalin offers to take the first watch, so I pad down beside a mangled midwinter tree, my back against the frozen bark. Sleep seems both inescapably tempting and utterly impossible.
I don’t know how long it is before Gáspár joins me. His boots tread through the frost. There is only the jeweled scattering of starlight, and the pallid horn of the moon. His face holds what light it can, silver on his cheeks and the curve of his nose, the rigid line of his jaw. He stands before me and doesn’t speak, so I push myself to my feet, brushing snow from my skirts.
I have so much to say to him and also nothing at all. Our breaths cloud with cold. Words constellate in my mind, sibilant and bright.
“Would you like to hear a story?”
The stories always began in the dark. Virág’s six-fingered hands could make shadow puppets that the rest of us could not: turul hawks, racka sheep, stags with their huge coronets of bone. We watched their silhouettes dance across the thatched roof of her hut, fire warming our cheeks, wild-haired and wild-eyed, our noses running from the cold. The memory cows me for a moment, making something deep in my belly twist with pain.
Gáspár blinks slowly. “All right.”
“I’ll tell you about Vilm?tten and his flaming sword.” Even the name Vilm?tten tastes sour on my tongue as I think of Nándor’s body floating up from the ice, just the way the bard crawled out of the Under-World.
“I think I already know it,” he says. “My wet nurse had an endless number of stories, and that was one of her favorites.”
“Was your wet nurse a pagan?”
“Certainly not,” he says. “The way she told it, Vilm?tten prayed to the Prinkepatrios for a weapon with which to defeat Régország’s pagan enemies, and all the world’s nonbelievers, and so Godfather Life granted him a blade that was unbreakable, and could catch fire when he held it up to the light of the sun.”
For a moment I want to tell him that it’s not right, that Vilm?tten was our hero, not theirs. But I think of the counts in their bear cloaks and feathered mantles, and of the king in his fingernail crown. You can’t hoard stories the way you hoard gold, despite what Virág would say. There’s nothing to stop anyone from taking the bits they like, and changing or erasing the rest, like a finger smudging over ink. Like shouts drowning out the sound of a vicious minister’s name.
I ought to ask him whether he thinks we can find the turul, if we will succeed now where we failed before. But there’s another question burning in my throat like a held breath.
“Do you remember those nights on the ice?” I ask. “When we almost froze to death under a pitch-black sky like this one? Did you love me then, or hate me?”
Gáspár’s throat bobs in the dark.
“I hated you then,” he says. “For being the only warm, bright thing for miles.”
“What about on the Little Plain?” I ask. “When you killed Kajetán to save me?”