There’s a pressure in my chest like something trying to gash right through me, and I almost let instinct take over, that snarling animal’s desire to live. My legs twitch faintly, shackled with cold. And then, with a flood of warmth, I think of Gáspár. If I’m to save him and everyone else, this is the only way.
Something tugs on me from below, just the faintest pull, like a thread lacing around my ankle. The cool suspension of the water is gone. For a moment, relief tastes as heady as swallowed wine—and then I’m hurtling downward, like a lobbed knife, still wrapped in skeins of velvet darkness.
Light rushes back at me. The force of it peels back my eyelids, and I see only the blur of white sky, smudged with gathering storm clouds. A coil of pine fronds flashes across my vision, and finally I land with an agonizing thud against something quite solid, my arms and legs tangled in the needly branches of a very, very tall tree.
I don’t have time to feel relief. I sway precariously with each howl of wind, demanding that I straighten my legs and crawl to safety, or else plummet to the ground in a twisted heap. I am still drenched, cold water crystalizing on my hair and cloak. As I brush needles from my face, I see that the tips of my fingers are already swollen and blue. My heart stammers, skipping its beats.
Move, I tell myself, forcing my numbing fingers to flex and grasp. Move or die.
With great care, I crawl from the web of branches that cradle me toward the fat bulwark of the trunk. When I reach it, I wrap my arms around its girth and cling to it fiercely, wind stinging my eyes.
As I hold to the trunk, the wind battering me from all sides, the cold water hardening on my skin, I think that I have made a terrible mistake. The turul isn’t for me to find—me with my half-tainted blood, with my malice for my own people. How many times did I rail against Virág’s stories, only to ask them to save me now? I feel as hollow as a gutted animal, nothing left in me but fear and regret over my own reckless bluster.
But Katalin’s vision can’t be wrong. I brace myself with the thought, downing it like a sip of wine I want to swallow over and over. The wind bristles over me, carding its fingers through my stiff, freezing hair.
I dig my fingernails into the bark, scrabbling for purchase. And then I see it: an amber tail feather, the sharp crescent of a beak that gleams like molten gold.
All my breath rushes out of me, and then it’s only adrenaline that moves my limbs. I heave and strain and shimmy my way up the trunk, my vision surging away and then billowing back dizzyingly. I don’t know how high I am, just that the white clouds are so dense I could believe them to be the snow-packed earth, and that the tree is spiraling up into them, cutting through them as if with a knife.
With every move, I remind myself what I have to lose if I fail. I imagine Yehuli Street littered with tiny fires, the doors flung open to reveal black and empty houses. A caravan of Yehuli winding toward the Stake. Boróka’s wolf cloak matted with gore. Virág folded in on herself like a conch shell, pitiful and tiny in death. Even Katalin a bluish corpse, blood drying in ten perfect daubs at the ends of her bare fingers.
And worst of all, Gáspár: his throat open under Nándor’s knife, eye like an empty inkwell, vacantly black. The thought maddens me with grief and I jerk myself up onto the next branch, ignoring the blood crusting on my lips and the twanging pain in my muscles.
When I do, I am eye-to-eye with the turul.
I half expect it to flutter away, or screech in protest at my intrusion. I feel stupid and clumsily human, an unmoored trespasser in this celestial world. But instead it perches on a thin branch, its head cocked to one side so it can look at me. Its eye is black and shiny enough that I can see myself in it, warped and small, like something trapped at the bottom of a well. I wonder if it looked at Vilm?tten the same way.
Nothing survived the journey with me, not the hunting bow or even my dagger. This is Isten’s very cruelest joke, certainly: that I will have to use my magic to kill the turul. I raise my hand, and I feel ?rd?g’s threads give a twitch of resistance. My determination puddles out of me. I can’t do it.
Stories are supposed to live longer than people, and the turul is the most ancient story of them all. Tears go running hotly down my face. Maybe killing it will save this generation of pagans, but what about the next? When the fabric of our stories thins and wears, the people will be alive, but they won’t be pagans anymore. And that, I realize, is what Virág always feared the most. Not our deaths, or even her death. She was afraid of our lives becoming our own. She was afraid of our threads snapping, of us becoming just girls, and not wolf-girls.