When she opens them again, her eyes are blue, only wider and colder than before, as if the chill air snuck into her as the vision flooded out.
“Katalin,” I manage. “What did you see?”
She flings herself up and rolls away from me, panting. “A tree, its trunk soaked in blood. And you—évike, you were the one to kill it. The turul.”
The realization is like a rush of freezing lake water. I want to fight it, to armor myself against its truth, but a seer’s visions have never been wrong before. Gáspár lays a hand on the small of my back.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Katalin’s eyes thin. Her white hair is pasted to her forehead with cold sweat. “What are you apologizing for?”
“Well—” I begin, but then I stop, because I’m not exactly sure either.
“I never apologized to you,” she says.
Stiffening, I say, “I don’t suppose you’ll do it now, though.”
“No,” she concedes. She draws herself into a sitting position, knees against her chest, still managing, somehow, to look down her nose at me. “But I won’t taunt you for making besotted eyes at a Woodsman, or even for lying with one, if that’s as true as I suspect. As it is in the Upper-World, so it is in the Under-World.”
Gáspár’s brow furrows. “What?”
“It’s just a saying,” I explain wearily. “One of Virág’s adages. It means that there is a balance between two things, sort of like a bargain.”
Virág’s name burns a hole in my tongue. On her best days, she held me in her lap and whispered her stories in my ear, and I didn’t hate them so much when they were only for me, only for the two of us, and not a whetted blade that Katalin and the rest could use to wound me. If there are any threads still left to tie me back to her and to Keszi, I can feel them wearing with every passing moment, with every step that I move closer to the pine forest and the turul. Katalin’s vision feels like the swing of a sword.
Gáspár must notice my anguish, because he says, “Sleep now. I’ll take the first watch.”
Numbly, I nod. I sink down, resting my head in his lap and letting my eyes slide shut. Dreams loose through my mind: hunting dogs with snapping jaws, the turul in a golden cage. Nándor’s chest sewing up again, his wound vanishing bloodlessly. The ice ossifying around his pupils. My father embracing me and whispering the true name of God in my ear. The name was him asking me to save them, to be as shrewd as Queen Esther or as strong as the clay-man, and I am neither, just a girl shivering in the dark.
When I wake, the sky is still fuzzy and black and Gáspár’s hand is cupping my cheek. I rouse quickly, shaking off slumber. Katalin has already woken and is guiding her horse toward a small patch of bristly grass, sweeping the frost off it with the toe of her boot. Gáspár stands and saddles his own horse, exhaustion etched in violet circles under his eye. My stomach clenches.
“I’m sorry you’ve had to stay awake so long on my account,” I say, meaning it. “I hope you enjoyed at least one of your sleepless nights.”
I only want to see him flush, and he does, his cheeks and ear tips pinking faintly.
“It’s not just for your sake,” he says. “Nándor wants me dead, too, or at least in chains. It’s hard to sleep knowing I could wake with a knife to my throat.”
I’m glad to hear him say that it’s his fear of Nándor that keeps him from sleeping, and not regret over what we’ve done. Even stripped of his ax and Woodsman suba, there is still a century of gory hatreds stretching long between us, and so many gods darkening the sky with displeasure at our coupling.
“Do you ever think of letting him have it?” I ask. “This whole ugly, bloody country, I mean. Sometimes I think Nándor is what it deserves.”
Gáspár’s lips go taut, considering. “You mean I ought to leave him to the throne and go herd reindeer in the corner of the world?”
“You wouldn’t have to herd reindeer.” I try to imagine what sort of avocation might keep him occupied, him with his clever tongue and sharp mind, his carefully considered principles. “You could write treatises and dabble in poetry from the safety of your Volken hermitage.”
Amusement crinkles his eye. “And what would you do?”
Once I would have been eager to abandon Régország entirely, if I’d ever had the chance and the will to leave it. But those kinds of bitter perversities seem behind me now. I have felt my father’s arms circle me and heard the temple filling with Yehuli prayer; I have had a man hold me through the cold and promise to follow me wherever I go. It weighs me down, that love, fettering me to this terrible destiny. Katalin’s prophecy floats through my mind.