The érsek whimpers, perhaps garbling for a prayer of his own, but only spittle foams at the corners of his mouth, dyed the pale red of diluted blood.
I try to close my eyes, but some perverse urge keeps them open. I know that whatever happens now, my imaginings will only be worse. The crown gleams with a smoldering heat, rippling like glass in the sunlight, shiny enough for Nándor’s face to pool warped and smiling on its surface. The érsek screams hoarsely as the hot iron sears through his skin, down to the white dome of his skull. Blood rises in the riverbed of his throat and bubbles out of his ears.
The hall fills with retching and sobbing, the cobbled noises of horror. Some of the guests scramble for the doors, but the Woodsmen are packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the threshold like sentries, looks of blank, stupid devotion on their faces.
The skin of the érsek’s forehead melts and crumples over his eyes. He can’t even scream anymore, for all the blood in his mouth.
In another moment, it’s done. The érsek’s body topples out of the throne, a mound of blood-drenched brown robes and stinking flesh like warm pink candle wax. Nándor bends delicately over the corpse.
“Do not be afraid, good people of Régország,” he says, lifting the érsek’s iron chain off his body and winding it around his throat, instead. “I am both royalty and divinity now.”
Water skims across my skin like the edge of a blade, hot and cold at once. I look up from under my damp hair at the Woodsman who holds the now-empty bucket. It’s a Woodsman I’ve seen before, one with a missing ear. The absence of it makes his head look lopsided. Like a tree with branches but no roots.
“What’s the point?” I ask through chattering teeth. “I’m going to die tomorrow.”
“The king wants you to look clean,” the Woodsman says. “I don’t ask questions, nor should you.”
“He’s not the king yet,” I say.
When I’ve been cleaned to Nándor’s satisfaction, and even my wolf cloak brushed and made to shine, I’m brought to my old bedchamber. I try, in a hopeless and perfunctory sort of way, but the iron bars on the window hold fast, the door is tightly sealed, and my magic is well and truly gone.
I want to cry again, only because it seems the proper thing to do. But all my tears have been ground out of me, like dead skin scrubbed off a wound. Instead I fold myself against the eastern wall, where the sun will rise tomorrow on the day of my execution, my face flush against the cool stone.
The memories of my mother’s comforts are distant and removed, the tenor of her hushing and the feel of her palm on my forehead nearly lost to me now. But I do remember Virág’s comforts well. Her six-fingered hands could comb through my hair as nimbly as a squirrel leaping among the branches, and on the days I came to her hut weeping, she sat me down by the hearth and brushed my hair and braided it until all my tears had dried. The memory seems as pale and hollow as the inside of a conch now, drained of all its warmth. I think of Zsigmond holding me to his chest, but that memory feels twice-removed, too, like I’m remembering a ghost. Tomorrow, he will likely be dead, too, and all of Yehuli Street abandoned.
This is the wretched state of my mind when the door swings open. Two Woodsmen shoulder through, carrying another man between them. He is bare-chested, his blood leaking onto the stone floor. Gáspár.
I lurch to my feet, heart throbbing its jagged beat, but before I can manage a word the Woodsmen have hefted him onto the bed. Then they turn on their heels and vanish, the door thudding shut behind them.
Gáspár lies facedown, unmoving. The expanse of his back is etched so thoroughly with lash wounds that it’s a fretwork of flesh and blood, gleaming braids of red stitched through with pink. The sight of it, and the copper stench in my nose, and the faint moan that feathers through his parted lips—it all makes my chest ache unbearably. And then I do cry, tears stinging the corners of my eyes, as I take Gáspár’s head into my lap and brush back the curls from his sweat-damp forehead.
After a few moments, his lashes flutter and he looks blearily up at me. “Did he hurt you?”
“No,” I say, and laugh at his absurd unselfishness in spite of myself. The laugh sounds all wrong, like a river bubbling over and flooding someone’s sod house. “He won’t hurt me until morning.”
He lets out a breath, and very slowly, his arms move to circle my waist. Pain draws deep furrows on his brow. I’ve never felt so limp and miserable before, paralyzed by my love. This is the feeling, I think, that keeps mother deer loping after their feeble and defenseless fawns. A mad thing, really, that makes you so terribly attuned to mortality, to the soft places where throats meet jaws, to the hawks circling overhead and the wolves lurking just beyond the tree line. I lean over and press my lips to his hair.