“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll have me as your scullery maid after all.”
Gáspár scoffs, but there is laughter under it. “I’d rather have you as my wife.”
We let it linger there in the cold, in the silence, that beautiful and impossible dream. We will always be foiled by history, manacled by blood. I know how well it turned out, his father marrying a nonbeliever, and though I feel I know myself very little now, I don’t think I would relish spending my days bastioned behind castle walls. Yet Gáspár is not the frivolous type. This moment is as much a surrender as him kneeling. I want to kiss him again, my own knees weakening with another lovely capitulation.
Katalin’s voice cuts through the air. “We’ll have to keep moving. We’re very close now, but so are Nándor’s men, certainly.”
A part of me wonders how they haven’t caught up to us already. Perhaps they were stalled by the snow and the cold, or some other unforeseeable disaster, but it seems too much to hope for. I clamber onto my own horse and we spur on, kicking up white in our wake.
It’s quiet in the forest. There are no animals scurrying in the underbrush or in the branches overhead. There are only the wind that makes the trees creak and moan like the wood-rotted roof of an old house, and the snow that falls softly through the empty spaces in the canopy, the cracked-glass splits that expose flashes of gray and white. The hair on the back of my neck is raised, and my horse’s ears are pressed flat to her skull.
“Slow down,” Katalin says, and I nudge my horse to a trot. “We’re so close—look for a trunk soaked in blood.”
Gáspár’s head jerks left and right, and then his eye angles up again, toward the sky. I can tell by the girth of the trees and the impossible silence in the air that we’re close to the same forest that our hunt for the turul led us to before, where the trees uprooted themselves and chased us to the lake.
My gaze fixes on something shiny in the distance. The lake is glimmering there beyond the lattice of pines, rimy with ice, like a huge pupilless eye.
I turn to Katalin, my heart in my throat. “Is this the way?”
“Yes,” she says. Her knuckles are white on the reins. “Toward the water.”
Deftly, we maneuver our horses through the maze of trees, stopping only when we’ve reached the frost-hardened bank. The lake is perfectly slick—a true mirror, false clouds gathering in white fists on its surface.
Gáspár brings his horse to my side. I can see the tension in his shoulders as he holds the memory of the ice and the cold water seething beneath it. And then I remember, too, that Tuula told us the name of the lake.
“What does Taivas mean,” I ask him, “in the Northern tongue?”
“‘Sky,’” he replies. “But what does it matter?”
“This is it,” Katalin says. “It must be, but—”
I slide down from my horse, chest tight. I am thinking about Isten finding ?rd?g in the Under-World. I am thinking about the rabbi digging into the dirt and mud of the riverbank to create life.
“Stop!”
The word rings out, arching over the lake, but it’s not Gáspár’s voice. I turn around, the soles of my boots sliding perilously on the bank, to see Tuula and Szabín racing through the woods toward us. Bierdna is at their backs, her huge tongue lolling as she runs. Ice sprays up from their feet.
“Tuula,” Gáspár says, when they skid to a halt in front of him. “Why are you here?”
“Me?” Her voice is thick with poison. “This is my home. I know why you’re here, like all the Woodsmen before, and I can’t let you do this.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “The turul’s powers— they’re the only way we can stop Nándor. And if we don’t stop Nándor, he will come for the pagans—including the Juvvi eventually. What other choice do we have?”
My words are dulled arrows; they bounce off her and land in the snow. Tuula’s dark eyes narrow and flash.
“Find another way,” she says. “The turul belongs to all of us. You cannot have it for your own.”
“This is for all of us. Maybe the gods are willing us here.” I say the words without really believing them, imagining a long red thread unspooling from here to Keszi, thin and close to snapping.
“And maybe the gods have willed me here to stay your hand.”
I wonder if Tuula’s mother told her the stories of Vilm?tten, too, weaving them into her long dark braid. If even when the Patritians tore her mother’s hand from hers, she kept the story of the turul clutched against her chest, bright and hot as a small flame. The thought nearly undoes me. I want to tell her that if there were any other way, I would do it—but Katalin’s vision can’t be changed and Yehuli Street might already be looted and empty.