At last I see him. Gáspár ascends the dais in his black dolman and suba, looking every inch a Woodsman again. All he’s missing is the ax at his hip. His movements are stiff and considered; I can see him wince when he lifts his arms to take the crown from Count Reményi. I feel a twinge of phantom pain go down the backs of my thighs, where my scars are a pale mirror of his fresh and lurid wounds. It is so achingly, viscerally wrong to watch him stand there beside Nándor in his brilliant red and gold, like seeing both the sun and the moon in the sky at once—Isten drawing up the dawn with one hand and painting midnight with the other.
Lajos maneuvers Katalin and me through the crowd, toward the very base of the dais, so close that I can taste the pollen-sweet scent of the spring crocuses on my tongue. I meet Gáspár’s eye, glittering wet in the meager sunlight, and I can see all my painful, ruinous love reflected back. There is another world in which we might have stayed in the cradle of tree roots forever, our words rising in cold whispers but our hands and mouths warm.
“Good people of Régország!” Count Reményi cries out—once, twice, until the sound of the crowd simmers low and then goes silent. “We are gathered here to crown our country’s next king. He is heir to the throne of Ave István, blood chieftain of the White Falcon Tribe and all its lands, and blessed by the gentle hand of the Prinkepatrios. Kneel for him and for your god.”
I recognize the words from the Saint István’s Day feast—it was how Nándor introduced his own father. As he speaks, Count Reményi unfurls his white-feathered cloak, the cloak of Akosvár and the White Falcon Tribe, the same one that Reményi himself wore that very night. Now he drapes it over Nándor’s back, and I inhale a sharp breath. Even after all his heated ramblings about the perversion of our pagan ways, he will take his throne by Isten’s rite.
Count Reményi gives Gáspár a vicious nudge, leaning close to whisper words that I can barely hear: “Say it.”
Gáspár steps forward. His face is hard, but his gloved hands are trembling.
And then Katalin screams.
She slithers boneless to the ground, thrashing and wailing. Suddenly oblivious to the threat of Lajos’s ax, I kneel down beside her, trying to turn her over clumsily with my bound hands. Her eyes have gone blank and white.
“What is the meaning of this?” Nándor cries out. The crowd lurches toward her and then shudders away again, craning their necks to view the commotion, and then leaping back in revulsion when they do.
“She’s having a vision,” I grit out between my teeth. “It will be over in a moment.”
There is the barest sheen of sweat on Nándor’s forehead; I have never seen him look so close to alarm. He turns to the crowd again, their fear swelling like a pulse of torchlight, almost visible.
“Don’t you see?” he crows. “Pagan madness and pagan magic! Once I am king, there will be no more dark horrors making their home in our Patritian land, no more cloaked servants of Thanatos leading us down to our doom.”
The veil of white vanishes from Katalin’s eyes. She sits up, straightening herself, and amidst all the tremulous rumbling of the crowd, sets her lambent blue gaze on Nándor.
“They’re coming,” she says. “The pagans. All of them, from all the villages. They’re going to storm the capital.”
The only word for it is chaos. Nándor rallies the Woodsmen to him at once, and they ascend the dais, making a bulwark around their almost-king. Gáspár hurls the crown away from him and it clatters onto the cobblestones; a bald man in stained linens leaps upon it, covering the crown with his body while a dozen more haggard and desperate peasants claw their way toward it, just for the chance to touch something made of gold.
I’ve lost sight of Gáspár behind the bastion of Woodsmen, and I nearly lose Katalin to the furious roil of the crowd. I cling to her as best I can with bound hands, huddling under a fretwork of flailing limbs, occasionally catching an elbow or the toe of a leather boot. My stomach turns over on itself, a mirrored churning of the throng.
I wonder what kind of future Virág has seen: Woodsmen thundering through Ezer Szem, axes slicing through fern and bramble and then through human flesh, before they can sing a blade or an arrowhead to life, or light one hopeless fire. Nándor at the helm, like a ship’s figurehead carved in ivory and gold, his pale hand closing around her throat. I know what choice she has made. She wants to die fighting.