“Will you tell me a story, wolf-girl?” he mumbles against my thigh. In his mouth the epithet is toothless, even tender.
“I think I am all out of stories now,” I confess.
His soft laugh warms my skin through the fabric of my dress. “Then let’s just sleep.”
We don’t, though. Not yet. We sit. We breathe. We speak in hushed tones, as if there were someone else here we might risk waking. I do tell him the story of the rabbi and the clay-man, in the end. I tell him about Queen Esther too. We stumble through some Old Régyar. I let Gáspár teach me a few words of Merzani, and they coat my tongue like a sip of good wine. We hold each other all through the night, until the sun rises.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I wake sometime in the morning, when the sky is as pink as the shell of an ear, delicate and raw. The stretch of bed next to me is cold, the sheets streaked with old blood, and Gáspár is gone. Futile panic rises in me. I throw off the covers and run between the window, still gridded with its iron bars, and the door, sealed as tightly as before. As the last bit of moribund hope leaves me, I stand in the center of the empty room and wish I could make all the stone crumble, the floor collapse, and the roof cave. I would bury myself in the ruin, if only I could bring the Broken Tower down with me.
The door opens with a shuddering metallic sound, the scraping of its iron grate against the stone floor. I see Lajos’s wreck of a nose before I see Katalin’s face—her wounds, now black and scabbing, her eyes furiously blue. He shoves her through the threshold, and she stumbles forward into my arms.
“The king wants both of your hair braided,” Lajos says shortly. He jerks his chin between the two of us; it’s mounded white with scar tissue.
“Why?” I ask. My voice is hoarse with all the hours of whispering.
“In the pagan way,” he says, and closes the door behind him.
“And why should we?” asks Katalin, once she has righted herself, even though Lajos is long gone. “If they’re going to slit my throat, I don’t much care whether there are pretty ribbons in my hair.”
I think of Gáspár’s back, latticed with its gruesome lash wounds. “They’ll find some way to punish you for your refusal, you know. The best you can hope for is a sweet, easy death.”
Katalin’s jaw unlatches. “What have they done to make you so meek? If I knew, I would have done it long ago.”
That kindles an old flame in me, and my face grows warm. “And for what? Why did you hate me so much? Was it because I didn’t stay down when you shoved me, or because I didn’t swallow every insult you hurled at me? Did you sleep more soundly at night when you knew that I was weeping in my bed, three huts away?”
For a long moment, Katalin says nothing. There is a faint rosiness to her cheeks, and this, I realize with a morose satisfaction, is more than I have ever managed to fluster her before. I am ready to consider it a perverse victory in the hours before my death, but then Katalin turns me around and starts running her fingers through my hair.
I’m afraid to speak, afraid to imperil this precarious moment that seems hesitantly to approach camaraderie. I think of Virág’s hands, supremely agile with their six fingers, threading my hair into dozens of intricate braids as thin as fishbones. I think of Zsófia shrouding me with her silver dye. I think of the way that they trussed me for the Woodsmen like a prized pig, fat under the farmer’s blade.
“Your hair is impossible,” Katalin huffs, but she finishes my last braid and ties it off with a strip of brown leather.
“It’s finally done now,” I say, my gaze fixed dully in the middle distance. “I’ll die in Király Szek like I was supposed to.”
Katalin makes a halting sound, and her fingers tense against my scalp. “I never wanted you to die for me, idiot.”
“It certainly seemed like you did,” I say, “given how much you tormented me.”
“I wasn’t the best—”
“You were terrible,” I cut in.
Katalin gives her head a dignified shake. “Do you know what Virág always told me, when we were alone? A seer never trembles, she said. Stupid old bat. She was always kind to me, but that’s because she had to be; I was the next táltos, and I was supposed to take her place. She forced me to swallow every vision like it was sweet wine instead of poison, and said that it was kindness. She had no reason to be kind to you, with you being barren and all, but she was, anyway—between the lashings, at least. I hated you for that.”