I manage a short, humorless laugh. “So you were cruel to me because she was kind?”
“Silly, isn’t it? Virág told me I should be ready to do anything for Keszi, to die for my tribe. You were part of my tribe. A wolf-sister.” She tries out the word, chewing on her lip. “I should have tried to protect you too.”
Something unravels in me, like thread. I press my face to her shoulder, to the soft white fur of her wolf cloak, just below the curve of its frozen jaw.
“I could burn this whole tower down, you know,” she says. “And both of us inside it.”
I think of my own fleeting desire to see the Broken Tower crumble. But it would be a weightless gesture, a shout without an echo. They would only build it up again, or fashion something new from its ashes. Even smashing Saint István’s statue or snapping his saintly finger bones would be like kicking a lone rock down a dark abyss. Just the way that killing the turul hadn’t killed us, hadn’t killed everyone in Keszi, the Patrifaith would survive some shattered marble and ruined stone.
“I would rather die by steel, I think,” I tell her. “It’s quicker and cleaner, and I won’t have to smell my own burning skin.”
“I suppose that’s fair enough,” Katalin says. Without forcing me from her shoulder, she starts to sing. A low song, sweet and brief, one that Virág often used for a lullaby. For a moment I think she’s forging a blade, but it would be as useless as a fire; we might kill one or two or three Woodsmen, but it would never be enough for all of them.
When Katalin’s song is done, there’s a small silver disk cupped in her palm, slick enough to be a mirror. Holding it up, I see that inside is the wavering reflection of a perfect pagan girl, myths and stories and magic braided into her hair, history in the flash of her eyes and the set of her jaw. For better or worse, no one would guess at the taint of my father’s blood.
The door opens again, Lajos and the two other Woodsmen behind it. There is rope for our hands, pulled tight enough to burn the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. The Woodsmen take us down the castle’s serpentine hallways for the last time, through the smolder of half-lit torches, and out into the courtyard.
There’s no stale air from the marketplace drifting over the palace gates; the stalls have all been shuttered for Nándor’s coronation. The foul cobblestones have been scrubbed of their muck and laid over with lush woven rugs, in wine-dark violet and evergreen and gold. Garlands of white and purple flowers trim a makeshift dais, their delicate petals curling up in search of a cloud-wreathed sun. They are early crocuses, which bloom only on the southern slope of a single hill in Szarvasvár.
The dais has been built to hold a new throne, one of freshly burnished gold. I wonder if Nándor had my father make it, too, standing over him with a lash in hand. The back has been wrought into the shape of a three-pronged spear, each prong sharpened to a glistening point, like a jagged golden tooth. It has been draped with a great tapestry that bears the seal of House Bárány. So that Nándor can claim the throne under the Bárány name, even though he is a bastard by Patritian law. Seeing it fills me with a turbid, manacled fury, but it’s nothing compared to seeing Nándor himself.
He ascends the dais in all the heat and clamor of the crowd, his admirers with their faces shining as bright as coins newly minted. They pelt him with woven laurel crowns and bouquets of tulips that they must have paid for in blood, because the Merzani are burning all the flower fields on the Great Plain. His dolman is pure white, like the sky in deep winter, and over it is a red-and-gold mente, with furred sleeves that hang nearly to the ground. They sweep through tulip petals, which are strewn over the dais like pale-bellied carps beached on the shoreline.
A coterie of Woodsmen rings the dais in a black collar, pushing back against the teeming of the crowd. On the dais is another man, wearing a dark-blue mente, a lone feather pinned to his chest.
Count Reményi holds the crown on a red satin pillow. I scan the crowd in a blind panic, searching for my father’s face among the shining hundreds, and find him flanked by two Woodsmen. I cannot imagine why Nándor hasn’t killed him already—perhaps he wants Zsigmond to see what it looks like, when a Patritian king wears his crown. A beat of relief goes through me before I remember that it’s all for nothing. Nándor will slit his throat as soon as the crowd disperses; maybe before, if he wants to make a show of it. I expect there will be a thousand eyes on me when I die.