“I must have hated you then too,” he says. “For making me trade my soul for your life.”
I nod, but there’s a burning in my chest. I’m not sure how much longer I can play this game, even if I want to know the truth more than anything. In the stories, there are always three tasks, three questions, three chances to damn yourself or to cheat death, or to win a bargain with a trickster god.
“And what about when you pulled me out of the water?” I ask. “After I fell through the frozen lake?”
Gáspár grips his own wrist, palm covering the pale tracery of scars. Silence swans over us. For a moment I wonder if he won’t answer me at all.
“I think I loved you then,” he says. “And I hated myself for it.”
His voice flickers like a flame in the wind, sparking up and then blowing flat again. I remember precisely when I realized how beautiful he was, both of us shivering wet and drenched in cold white light. Now I feel the darkness bending and folding around us, black as a Woodsman’s suba.
“But you followed me here.” My own voice is a whisper. “What a foolish thing for a pious prince to do.”
A breath comes out of him. “You’ve made me a fool many times over.”
My instinct is to laugh; all of his foolishness is couched in loyalty and humility, his stubborn virtues and steadfast, noble promises. I wish I could say the same of myself. I take a step toward him, my nose level with his chin. Since we have kissed before, I know exactly how much closer I would have to move in order to meet his mouth, and how his lips would part if I did, and the low sound that I might draw out of him as he braced his arms around my waist.
Instead, I speak. “Do you love me now?”
“Yes,” he says. There is some of his prince’s petulance to the word, like he has to stop himself from scowling at me as he says it. Below it, a gentleness, like the way his mouth ran over the scar on my throat.
“Do you desire me?”
Before we went to the dungeons, I returned to my chamber to reclaim my wolf cloak, and to change from Jozefa’s ruined dress to the new one the king had sewn for me. Gáspár had turned his back as I stripped off the pale silk, baring my skin and breasts to the stone wall, but when he turned again I saw him flushed all the way to his ear tips, his lower lip bitten and bloody.
“Yes,” he says.
I swallow. “And will you follow me further into the cold?”
Gáspár’s chin lifts, eye going to the star-wild sky and then back to me again. He swallows, the bronze skin of his throat shuddering in the frosted light.
“Yes,” he says finally.
Something warm spreads itself through my body, deeper in my marrow and blood. It is not as quick and bright as joy, the sudden burst of flint touching tinder; it is more like an old tree set alight in the summer, fire crawling through the gnarls and whorls of all that black wood. A bit of my own petulance flowers up.
“I won’t believe you,” I say, “unless you kneel.”
Very slowly, Gáspár lowers himself to the ground. His boots leave long tracks in the snow. He looks up at me, shoulders rising and falling, waiting.
I take another step toward him, close enough that the silk of my dress feathers against his cheek. I cup my hands around his face, my thumb grazing the edge of his eye patch. Gáspár flinches once, almost imperceptibly, but he doesn’t pull away.
Gáspár’s hands wander too. They go under my skirt, running up the backs of my thighs, his fingers tracing the grid of scars there. I tense, and he feels it, stilling himself against my skin.
“Where did you get these?” he asks quietly.
“I was punished often,” I say. “For talking back, for running away. I was terrible and rude and you would probably think I deserved most of them.”
He manages a laugh that looks like pale smoke in the frigid air. “That sounds like the sort of punishment a Patritian would dream up.”
I close my eyes. Gáspár lifts my dress up around my hips, and I gasp as his mouth skims the inside of my thigh. A thrill of pleasure rolls through me, his mouth going higher, finding its place between my legs. I let out a soft moan, a whimper. His tongue trails hotly through me. And then I drop to my knees beside him, hands clutching at his face, and kiss him fiercely on the lips.
Without breaking our kiss, I bear him down into the snow, his cloak fanning out over the frozen earth. I can only think of how much I want to be closer to him, to have him hold me against the cold like he did so many nights in Kaleva. He kisses my jaw and my throat. I wonder if he thinks of his Woodsman oath as I straddle him, his hands moving under my dress and over my breasts. His thumb brushes my nipple and I make a stammering noise against his mouth, needy and breathless.