Chapter Twenty-Three
I am half-deaf by the time we reach Király Szek six long days and nights later, between the rattle of the cart’s wheels and the thundering of a dozen horses, hurried and whipped so brutally by their Woodsman riders that their rumps are raw and gashed, all the sounds swelling up around me like the press of a hundred people in a crowd. I push myself as far to the corner of the cage as I can, avoiding everyone’s gaze except Gáspár’s, who rides alongside the cart sullen-faced, after initially refusing the dignity of a mount. When I woke again, I gave it my best jabbering effort to convince the Woodsmen that I’d forced Gáspár at sword point to come with me, and that he was innocent of any crimes against the king. The lie tasted like nothing, as slick as swallowed water.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” Gáspár had fumed, and of course he wasn’t really angry at me for lying, only angry that I’d somehow cheated him out of his proper atonement. Even stripped of his Woodsman suba, he still clung to his Patritian morals, only now I was the object of his misguided nobility. “I shouldn’t be walking free while you’re in a cage.”
“You’re a prince,” I said dimly. “You shouldn’t be chained up with wolf-girls and Juvvi and a runaway Daughter.” From her side of the cage, Tuula scowled at me.
“What part of being a prince,” he’d said, “means that one should try and shirk the consequences of their mistakes?”
“Ask your father,” I said. “He does it all the time, and he’s the king.”
Gáspár had fallen silent after that.
Now I think I do understand that real, ravaging Patritian guilt. It feels less like a weight and more like an absence. Like the Woodsmen with their missing eyes and their missing ears and their missing noses, something vital has been cut out of me.
There is also the fact that my magic is gone.
I had tried, of course, to kill Lajos when he came around the cart reluctantly to feed me. But I succeeded only in wrapping my sore fingers around his wrist and holding it limply, like a child pestering her mother. No invisible threads laced into my skin, no Under-World power staggered through me. Lajos shook off my grasp and shoved me away from him, and I stared down at my pitiful bound hands in a numb sort of disbelief. Katalin watched with pursed, twitching lips, even her eye looking trapped behind three neat wounds running from her forehead to her jaw.
“Have you lost your magic, then?” she asked briskly, sounding as impatient as Virág when I came to her moping over some small injustice. “I did say the gods would find a way to punish you.”
“What about you?” I bit out. “You haven’t even tried to heal yourself.”
“And I’m not going to, but not because I can’t,” Katalin replied. “I want her to feel guilty every time she looks at me.”
She nodded at Tuula, who made a noise in the back of her throat. “Who says I’m interested in looking at you?” Tuula muttered.
No one in the cart has spoken since then, even though a storm passed during that time, leaving us soaked and shivering and staring stubbornly at the floor, refusing to even huddle together in furious silence. Gáspár passed me a fur through the bars of the cage, and Katalin sparked up a tiny fire in her palm, but I am almost relieved when we reach the gates of Király Szek, if only because the clouds thin and quiet overhead.
As we clatter through the main gates and into the marketplace, Gáspár draws his horse to my side of the cage.
“I won’t let my father hurt you,” he says. “Not again, évike. I swear.”
“I don’t think you have the power to make that promise,” I say, and it nearly guts me, the way his face falls.
A part of me feels numb even thinking of my fate, that the king might decide to punish me for stealing his seer and trying to take the turul’s magic for myself. My own life seems so pitiful in comparison to the hundreds of others who circle me; I am one small star in a huge and brilliant constellation. All I can hope is that him having the turul will give him enough power to stand against Nándor, to keep the Yehuli and the pagans safe. That our sacrifice will be enough.
People pour past us, stopping to gawk and gape. Király Szek’s peasants look no richer or cleaner for the turul’s death, despite all their railing against the poisonous influence of our pagan magic. Two Woodsmen have to clamber down from their horses to throw more ropes over Bierdna, anticipating the bear’s panic, but she shuffles forward, her eyes black with their animal dullness, and none of Tuula’s fire. Tuula hunches in the cart, avoiding the gazes of the Patritians, and Szabín puts one bracing hand on her shoulder.