The other two creatures abandon Ferkó and Imre and pace a tightening circle, herding us toward the lake. I step down into the cold water, my arm shooting out to keep my balance, and find myself back-to-back with the captain. We move farther in until I am drowned up to my waist, and the beasts are paddling toward us, the flies that are their eyes buzzing plaintively. Their teeth are red with Woodsman blood.
One of them springs toward me, out of the water, and I duck down, letting it land thrashing on top of me. I bite back a scream as its mouth closes over my shoulder blade. As quickly as a braid of pain laces down my arm, a sudden flood of anger edges it out. I’m infuriated that I might die so banally, not by the swing of King János’s blade, but snapped up in the jaws of some nameless monster. From this vantage point, I stick my knife between its protruding ribs and give it a vicious twist. The monster falls back with a squeal, wound leaking.
The captain is wrestling his own creature, which is still fighting even with its left arm nearly cleaved from its body. The arm hangs on with only thin strands of muscle and sinew. The captain swings at the beast but misses. His movements are clumsy; the ax seems too heavy in his hands, and for a moment I’m stunned by his fumbling ineptitude. The creature manages to tear a chunk of fabric from the captain’s dolman, leaving a swath of his bronze skin exposed.
The Woodsman spins wildly in the water, his head moving rapidly from left to right, trying to make up for his blind spot. Acting on instinct, I shift to guard the captain’s left side, and when the monster lunges again, both of our weapons meet in the very center of its chest, metal rasping against metal. With a shriek, the creature falls back into the lake.
For one long moment, its body is wracked with terrible spasms. Blood pools in the water around it, dark and sickly, reeking like the green rot of Ezer Szem. Then, abruptly, the splashing stops. The flies cease their buzzing. There is only the sound of the captain breathing raggedly, and the crooked beat of my own heart.
We crawl back to the shore, the stars still winking with their wretched cheer. I collapse onto the bank, my cheek pressed to the cool grass, watching the captain through half-shut eyes as he falls beside me. Damp from the water, my hair drapes over my wolf cloak and onto the ground, patches of brown streaked through the vanishing silver dye. The captain rolls over to meet my gaze, chest heaving.
“Te nem vagy táltos,” he manages, eye wide as he takes in the sight of me, chestnut-haired, unmasked. You are not a seer.
“Te nem vagy harcos,” I shoot back between ragged breaths. You are not a warrior.
“No,” he agrees, cheeks flushing faintly. “I’m not.” With great difficulty, he pushes himself to a sitting position and holds out a gloved hand. “Bárány Gáspár.”
Chapter Four
I stare at the captain through the spider web of wet hair, come loose from all its careful braids, and try to make myself swallow his words. The Song of the Five Kings thrums through my head, the melody simple, familiar. We call the prince black—Fekete. But that’s not his real name.
I push my hair back and struggle to read the captain’s face.
Not the captain. The prince.
I can only stammer out a single word of my own. “Why?”
“You’ll have to be more specific than that.”
My throat is raw from screaming and choking on lake water as I pulled myself to the shore, and my voice comes out hoarse, nothing like the snarl I want it to be. “Why did you lie to me?”
He regards the wound on his chest, the throbbing etch of the creature’s claws. Where strips of his dolman have been torn away there are three long gashes, ruby-hued and new.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he says after a moment. “You never asked my name.”
“You never asked mine,” I snap back. “And you never asked me if I had visions. If you’re not a liar, then neither am I.”
Gáspár fixes his gaze on me, weary. “What’s your name, wolf-girl?”
I press my lips together. I consider lying, or at least staying silent, making him work for it. But I’m too exhausted to do any of that.
“évike,” I say. “My name is évike.”
“And you are not a seer.”
“No.” I lift my chin. “No, I’m not.”
“Do you have an ounce of magic at all?”
“No, but—”
“Then the old woman is the one who lied to me.” Gáspár shakes his head. “What greater insult than to send the king the only wolf-girl he would have no use for?”