And then he cuts his flaming sword across the flat of Nándor’s blade with such force that he knocks it from his hand. It sails across the courtyard and clatters onto the cobblestones at the foot of Saint István’s statue.
The shock creeps onto Nándor’s face in slow, bitter increments, like the trickle of snowmelt. What little color there was vanishes from his cheeks, and his jaw goes slack. For a moment it seems impossible that I ever thought he was beautiful. He looks like a river carp, pale and belly-slit.
“Meghal,” Gáspár says, and the flame of his blade snuffs out. He lowers his sword as he paces toward Nándor, who has backed nearly to the barbican.
“Brother—” Nándor starts. He splays his palms, raising his arms over his head. By the time Gáspár reaches him, his hands are up, and he is cowering. “I ask you now to show mercy . . .”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Gáspár says. His face is hard, his heated sword point mere inches from the curve of Nándor’s throat. “It’s not worth blackening souls for—mine or yours. If you surrender, call off your Woodsmen, and repent for your sins of violence and patricide, then I will make you the same offer that you made me: live in exile, in the Volkstadt, and never again take up arms against Régország.”
As silence swans over the courtyard, a memory prickles at me. We are standing in Kajetán’s tent, the headman’s knife cold against my tongue. Gáspár had been keen to spare him then, too, despite all his gruesome treachery. I realize now that it was more than the Woodsman oath that stilled Gáspár’s blade. It was his own private vow, a constellation hung with a hundred starry virtues and lessons, and he followed it like a ship’s captain charting a course across the wine-black sea. Its stars had been gleaned from old tomes in the palace archives, from the stories of his wet nurse, from the Merzani proverbs that his mother whispered into his hair. From the lectures of the érsek and his battalion of tutors, even from his cruel and inconstant father.
How had he managed to swallow it all and not die of poison? When Merzani words clashed with their Régyar cousins inside him, how was he not cut up by their sibilant swordplay? For so long I’d thought my mixed blood a curse, blamed it for the absence of Isten’s magic. Watching Gáspár now, offering his traitor brother mercy, I think that blood cannot be either blessing or curse. It can only be.
Wind sweeps white petals into the air. In the distance, there is the sound of blades singing, metal rasping. Gáspár holds his sword without trembling as a swallow ticks in Nándor’s throat. For a moment I think he will acquiesce.
And then his lips part with the utterance of a prayer.
Gáspár’s sword, Saint István’s sword, shatters like window glass. In the same instant, a small dagger gleams into Nándor’s hand. The panicked, animal part of me, that pure race of adrenaline, is what nocks my arrow and draws back my bow string, but before I can shoot, Nándor has his good arm wrenched around Gáspár. His dagger is at his throat.
“I warned you, wolf-girl,” Nándor says. Each word is a plume of frosted breath against his brother’s cheek. “I warned you that it would not be so easy to kill me.”
Bow string taut, I meet Gáspár’s eye. Where my love immobilized me before, making me flounder with hopeless weakness, now it coats me all over with iron. Nándor draws a line of blood along his brother’s neck, tongue curling in the nascent shape of another prayer.
This is a power I’ve always had, one that I’ve earned, one that can’t be taken from me by some capricious god. The wood rough against my palm, the tail of the arrow brushing my cheek. It does not matter whose histories sing in my blood.
I let my fingers slide off the bow string. My arrow looses through the air, quick as a wing beat, and buries itself in Nándor’s throat.
He coughs. He chokes. Blood wells in his mouth, bubbling over his lips in place of a prayer. He lets go of Gáspár and falls to his knees, grasping at his own neck as blood gathers at the site of the wound. Gáspár stumbles toward me, and we both watch as Nándor splutters out his last, wordless breaths. Ruby-bright droplets limn his collarbone, like icicles on eaves. I think of the shorn falcon, screeching and flapping its wings as it died inside its gilded cage, and it pleases me that Nándor will not have the dignity of last words.