When Nándor finally does topple over, his eyes are as clouded as two bits of sea glass, and his mouth and chin are a glut of red-black blood.
Gáspár’s shoulders rise and fall in the silence, and I let my bow drop to the ground. He starts to speak, but I grasp the collar of his suba and it hushes him.
“Don’t,” I say. “A king shouldn’t begin his rule with a blackened conscience. My soul is perfectly content to bear the burden of it instead.”
He lets out a breath that is half a laugh, though there is a peculiar grief threaded under the sound. It swells in me, too, the acknowledgment of something lost. The hazy, half-dreamed future where he writes poems from the cloistered safety of his Volken hermitage, and I am either his scullery maid or his bride.
“If there is anyone I would damn my soul for,” Gáspár says, “it would be you.”
I echo his laugh then, and he kisses me gently on the mouth. In another moment, the courtyard will flood with survivors, limping Woodsmen and wounded wolf-girls, and curious peasants who dare to pick their way through the wreckage. Someday an archivist will shelve a book about the siege of Király Szek in the palace library, and it will document the lives lost, the ground gained, the treaties signed, and the maps redrawn. But it will not say anything about this: a wolf-girl and a Woodsman holding each other in the blood-drenched aftermath, and the clouds cleaving open above them, letting out a gutted light.
Epilogue
The woods are restless today, with the snickering of elms, the low, mournful murmur of the willow trees, and of course the anxious whispers of our cowardly poplars. I pick my way through the copse, taking great care not to trip over the lumpy fretwork of their roots, and I rest my hand against the trunk of an oak to feel its timbered heartbeat. My own heart is quivering, like something ready to leap.
As I tread back to Keszi, I see the long tables dragged out and dressed in red cloth, piled high with root vegetables, potatoes the size of a fist. There’s an edible garland of rawboned carrots and pearl onions, and the smell of gulyás rises like plumes of smoke. I lean over a pot bubbling with sorrel leaves and boiled eggs and listen to the sizzle of hot dough. The vinegar smell of pickled cabbage leads me to Virág’s hut, where she is holding court around her hearth, most of the village’s small children in attendance.
Her six-fingered hands are animated, alive, tracing the contours of a story I’ve heard half a hundred times before. The children are chewing plates of cabbage and summer’s last plums, mouths stained purple. I recognize one girl among them: no more than seven years old, with a snarl of dark hair, an orphan. Her mother was struck down by some ghoulish sickness that resisted even Boróka’s efforts.
I crouch beside her on the dirt floor. Her face is pinched in the firelight, a furrow deepening between her brows as Virág speaks. With the story of Csilla and ?rd?g, Virág has perfected her theatre—she knows precisely when to pause for the whispers and gasps, and what parts will make her audience fall silent, shuddering in fear. The little girl is staring intently at the banked fire, watching embers eat away at the wood.
“You don’t have to listen, you know,” I say to her softly.
My own hand is splayed on the ground beside her, missing its fifth finger. Her eyes go to it, tracing the absence. She looks between my hand and Virág’s.
“What happened?” she asks in a whisper.
“I’ll tell you, if you like,” I say, and she nods, so I do. Virág frowns from the other side of the fire; I can hear the echo of her scolding looped through my mind. She thinks I am raising a generation of happy masochists, scarcely better than the Woodsmen. I reply that when summers are long and food is plentiful and mothers stay alive until their daughters are grown, no one will be desperate enough to lop off their fingers or their little toes. Besides, she is happy to try to argue her end; I will not stop speaking mine.
By the time I’ve finished talking, the little girl’s eyelids are heavy. I hand her to Virág, who tucks her into bed, my old bed, for a nap. She kisses me briskly on the forehead, a swallowed rebuke on her tongue, then chases me out of her hut.
Villagers have begun to gather around the long tables. Katalin is bent over a pot of sour-cherry soup, precisely the color of a midsummer sunrise. When she sees me approaching, she looks up, lifting the corner of her mouth that’s stippled with scar tissue.
“They’re almost here,” she says. “I’ve seen it.”