“Good,” Nándor says. “For if they don’t, they can join the demon Thanatos.”
At the sound of his name, a shudder runs through the crowd. The men and women give full-bodied quakes, like the word itself is a ghost to be exorcised. I squeeze my own eyes shut, wishing the star-daggered blackness would swallow me. When I open them again, Nándor has leapt back up onto the dais, running his hand down the edge of his father’s throne with the hungry gaze of a dog in heat.
“Ah, my lord,” the érsek says. “What is a king without a crown?”
Nándor blinks, then looks back at the priest. His eyes rest on the érsek for one long moment. “Of course.”
Then he leaps down the dais and snatches up the king’s crown of fingernails. My heart thrashes like willow branches in the wind, my throat and stomach burning. Nándor gestures to the nearest Woodsman, the one who dragged in Count Korhonen’s body. “Sir, if you please.”
The érsek wheezes out a protest—it’s his duty to crown the king, after all—but the Woodsman comes forward and clasps his hands.
“Megvilágit,” he whispers. A fist of flame closes around the king’s body, orange fingers catching on his ruined dolman, his blood-slick mente. It spreads sickly, like a strewing of lambent petals, gleaming red and gold. The smell of burning hair fills my nose, along with the ugly char of bone. I almost retch.
Nándor tosses the crown into the fire. It chokes and splutters, and for a moment burns a bright, sharp blue, streaming up nearly to the ceiling, where the chandeliers groan and sway. When it calms and cringes orange again, the crown is nothing but ash. Sad embers crawl over the stone floor like blinkering fireflies.
My mother’s fingernails, the fingernails of eleven other wolf-girls—gone, and all their magic with them. My bargain with the king and his promises to keep the Yehuli and Keszi safe are smoke in the air.
“A true king’s crown is no hideous thing, suffused with pagan magic,” the érsek proclaims, with as much gravity as he can manage in his thin voice. “The crown of a true king is a beautiful thing to look upon, and it is forged in pure gold.”
All through the room, hands grasp at iron pendants. Voices weave and tangle like a thousand dark threads. They lace around his ankles and shoot up, up, up through his arm and coil in his mouth, until the words that leave his parted lips are echoed by a hundred others.
“Bring him,” Nándor says. The smile on his face is blissful and horrible.
He gestures to the Woodsmen guarding the door, and they part again, this time for another man to stumble through. He is slight of build, dressed in plain merchant’s clothes, with limp gray curls and a stubborn mouth that is better suited to frowning than smiling. Zsigmond.
Until now, my panic has been a caged thing, manacled by the knowledge that I am surrounded by Woodsmen on all sides, and that my magic is gone. Something looses in me and I am screaming, all that numb terror burst like a bloodletting, plunging through the crowd toward the dais. The Woodsmen are on me before I can make it within steps of Nándor. The blade of an ax presses between my shoulder blades, and someone jerks my arms behind my back.
Gáspár lurches forward, the Woodsman’s knife drawing a line of blood along his throat. “Don’t touch her—”
“Quiet the wolf-girl,” snaps the érsek.
Lajos stalks forward and claps a heavy gloved hand over my mouth. I keep screaming anyway, until he pinches my nose shut and I turn light-headed and dizzy. Tears cloud my vision. All I can see is Zsigmond’s doomed march up to the dais, knees quaking. When he gets there, he bows his head and kneels.
Nándor returns him a flimsy smile, then turns to address the crowd. “The Yehuli are a blight on our city, friends,” he says. I choke against the hot press of Lajos’s hand. “But I am told there is no finer goldsmith in all of Király Szek.”
Perhaps there is some seed of truth in it, but what is truer than anything is this: Nándor wants to wound me in whatever way he can. I struggle to meet Zsigmond’s eyes, and when I do, I see that he is crying too. Quiet, dignified tears, nothing like my own.
“A crown, then,” he says to Nándor, voice low and rough, “for our new king.”
A wooden workbench is brought for him, and on it a gleaming block of gold. There are no tools, not even a hot kettle with a flame hissing under it, but Zsigmond doesn’t ask after any. He steps forward and puts his bare hands on the gold, palms flattening against it, feeling its shape and its heft. Then, without a word, he takes a finger and traces something onto its surface, once and then again, and it’s three times before I recognize what it is: emet. Truth.