Peti rocks against my chest, groaning. We have both been propped on the back of my white mare, Peti in front of me, his knees braced around my horse’s neck. His hand fists her mane, knuckles pale. Where our wrists are joined, I can feel the cold slickness of his skin, as if he’s been doused in filmy pond water.
All around us, the forest has gone silent. Where there was once the crackle of dead leaves or the faint patter of footsteps, now there’s nothing, not even the whispering of wind. My heart is a riot, but my stomach is pure ice. I think that perhaps the forest is showing me what a fool I am, to forget my fear of it in favor of the Woodsmen.
“Wolf-girl,” Peti whispers. His head rolls backward, onto my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I bite out. “Don’t speak.”
“Do you know what will be done with you?” Peti presses on. I can’t see his eyes, but the back of his neck, the skin of his jaw—it’s all a marbled gray, the color of lichen on a log. “When you reach the capital. The king, the weak heathen of a king . . . no, not him, his son . . .”
I straighten my back, trying to shift his weight off me. “Do you mean the prince?”
The king has a bevy of bastards, but only one true-born son. The black prince, we call him, an epithet that’s more like an elision, a beat of silence between breaths. We in Keszi know so little of him, only that he’s the offspring of Régország’s long-dead and much-loathed foreigner queen, a footnote in the folk tune that we call the Song of the Five Kings.
First came King István, his cape as white as snow,
Then his son, Tódor, who set the North aglow,
After there was Géza, whose beard was long and gray,
Finally, King János—
And his son, Fekete.
“Not the prince,” murmurs Peti. His breath curls, white with cold. “His other son. His true son. Nándor.”
My shoulders rise. It’s the second time I’ve heard that name. I remember the shadow that fell over the captain’s face when Peti invoked Nándor before, and I glance toward him now. His horse is several paces ahead, wreathed in mist, just a black smear in the haze of gray.
“Nándor,” I repeat, skin prickling. “What does he mean to do with me, then?”
Peti’s mouth opens and closes mutely, like a carp washed up on the riverbank. He leans over the side of the horse and retches, blood and bile splattering the path.
My vision ripples. The smell of him is worse than anything, worse than his clammy touch, the rimy gleam of his skin, worse even than the black stain soaking through the tangle of dead leaves and burlap on his shoulder, his makeshift bandages. Worse than the stomach-clenching sensation of looking for his arm and realizing with a start that it’s not there, the morbid blank space of it. Peti smells like the green rot of damp wood, mold-slicked, dying. I try to hold my breath.
He mumbles something in Old Régyar, raising his good hand, and mine along with it, to wipe the sick from his chin.
Revulsion snares in me like a fishhook, twining with something lower, worse. I remember one of Katalin’s cruelest and cleverest tricks. We were both girls then, not long after my mother had been taken, and she asked me to play a game. My heart had leapt at her invitation, eager for even the unlikely prospect of friendship. She told me to go hide somewhere in the woods, and she would look for me. I bedded down in a snarl of bracken and dug a small hole for my chin in the dirt. I waited and waited, until the patches of sky visible between the fingers of briar and the swaying willow fronds turned a deep, glossy blue. The chill of dusk lay over me like a second cloak, and all of a sudden the shadows of the trees looked like gaping mouths and the bramble holding me was not a cradle but a cage. I fled from my hiding place, thorns snatching at my clothes, and stumbled weeping into Keszi.
Virág was baffled by my tears. “Why didn’t you just come out?”
I blinked helplessly at Katalin, too shaken to speak.
She blinked back at me, cunningly guileless. “I looked for you everywhere. I couldn’t find you.”
I only understood later why it was such a flawless ruse. She’d left no evidence of her wicked intent, no wound I could point to and say, See, she hurt me. When I tried to articulate my pain, I’d only seemed like a jabbering child. Why hadn’t I just come out, after all? Everyone knows the forest is dangerous at night.
Watching Peti die against me feels like waiting for Katalin in the woods. It’s my own revulsion and terror, my own misplaced pity and guilt that’s wounding me, nothing more. I hate the captain for binding me to my own helplessness. I hate him so much that it’s a heat unfolding in my chest, livid and breathless.