Katalin slides down from her horse, fingers curled around the hilt of her blade. “I don’t think you can stop us.”
“You don’t know anything, wolf-girl,” Tuula says, the wind tangling with her words. “You’re just like any other hungry Southerner, thinking you can tear the North apart and eat its most tender bits. You can’t eat a thing that’s still alive.”
The bear growls, plumes of pale air rising from her nostrils.
“And what about you?” Gáspár asks, turning to Szabín. She’s staring down at her ice-caulked boots, hood over her face. “Am I not still your prince? Will you betray the Crown?”
“I am already hell-bound.” Szabín shakes off her hood. “No wisdom or reason will save me now. So I will go with my heart.”
Bierdna rears on her hind legs, giving a roar that ripples in the wind. It echoes in the emptiness a thousand times over, like a scrap of silk folded into itself again and again. Gáspár draws his sword.
The bear’s giant paw slams into him and sends Gáspár rolling across the snow. He picks himself up, frost clinging to the black wool of his cloak, but Katalin’s blade is quick, slashing across Bierdna’s shoulder. The bear hardly reacts at all. There’s a mean glint in her watery eyes, but it’s human and familiar, somehow. It’s Tuula’s rage I’m seeing in her gaze, fierce but calculated.
I fumble for my hunting bow, even though it won’t do me much good at such close range. Katalin moves toward Bierdna again, but the bear’s claws are faster. She swipes three red lines across the left side of Katalin’s face, narrowly missing her eye. Her scream is bitten back, swallowed up by the wind. Gáspár lands a wet, sickening blow in the bear’s side, and Tuula screams too.
I hardly notice Szabín, standing at the edge of the brawl, has taken a knife from her cloak.
“No,” I gasp out, but she doesn’t hear. Szabín pushes up her sleeve and cuts right over the white mangle of scars, a wellspring of blood brimming up over the ragged flaps of skin. Then she smears the blood on Tuula’s cheek.
The other girl doesn’t react. Her forehead is pearling with beads of sweat, eyes as hard as flint. Bierdna’s wound begins to close, slowly, blood misting into the air. I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing, Patritian power and Juvvi magic working as one. The shock of it sends Gáspár stumbling back, red blooming beneath the ruined fabric of his dolman.
Bierdna gives a throaty roar. Blood bubbles in the black pits of her nose. The cold air has turned thick and hot with the smell of it, and I turn briefly back toward the forest to see blood—Gáspár’s this time—splatter across the trunk of the nearest tree. The wood soaks it in, breathing it, suffusing the blood all the way down to its gnarled roots.
Fear opens a chasm inside of me. Gáspár spits blood from his mouth. And then, like the nocking of an arrow, something fits together perfectly inside my mind.
I don’t turn back again until I’ve taken two strides onto the frozen water. I can scarcely stand to look at Gáspár, his dolman shredded, his chest weeping red. He strains under the bear’s heavy paw, searching for me. His eye widens when he sees me moving, with slow, deliberate certainty, toward the center of the lake.
“évike, stop!” he cries. The sound shatters me like glass, but I can’t turn back now. I keep going until I can feel the ice thinning. Until I can see the solid opalescence transform into watery translucence.
I take another step.
The ice gives a lurching, seismic shift under my feet, and as I am plunged into the dark water once more, all I can think is: As it is in the Upper-World, so it is in the Under-World.
This time, I bury all my desperate, flailing instinct and let my limbs slacken. Every inch of my body is daggered with cold, like a thousand tiny, sharp teeth gnawing at my skin. For a moment I am perfectly still, held in an icy suspension, even the sound of rushing water gone silent. I wonder if this is how Nándor felt when the black water swallowed him. If this is how Katalin felt as I held her head under the river. I wonder if I can possibly be the same, if I survive this.
There will be some vengeance for killing it, Katalin said. There must be. The gods won’t let you have anything for free.
Maybe I’m wrong—maybe I’ve misinterpreted Tuula’s words, or missed all the meaning in Virág’s stories. Maybe, when the breath burns out of my throat and the cold grows over my limbs like white moss, I will simply die. And then where will I go? ?rd?g gave me his magic, but will he welcome me into his kingdom? Or have I betrayed him already with my treasonous yearnings, my love for a Woodsman, my knowledge of Yehuli prayers?