“Leave her alone,” Boróka says. “None of you should be so cruel, especially on a Woodsman day.”
In truth they’re no crueler than usual. And, of course, they’re right. But I would never give them the satisfaction of admitting it, or of even flinching when they enumerate my failures.
“évike doesn’t have to worry on a Woodsman day, does she?” Katalin’s smile is white and gloating, a perfect mirror of her wolf’s. “The Woodsmen only take the girls with magic. It’s a shame none of her mother’s skills are in her blood, or else we might be rid of her for good.”
The word mother burns worse than blue flame. “Keep your mouth shut.”
Katalin smiles. At least, her mouth does.
If I think hard about it, I can almost feel sorry for her. After all, her white cloak is given, not earned—and I know how ugly a seer’s duties can be. But I don’t care to show her the sort of pity she’s never shown me.
Boróka lays a hand on my arm. Her grip is reassuring—and restraining. I tense under the pressure of it, but I don’t lurch toward Katalin. Her eyes, pale as a river under ice, glint with assured victory. She turns to go, her cloak sweeping out behind her, and írisz and Zsófia follow.
Hands shaking, I reach for the bow on my back.
The rest of the girls spend their days honing their magic and practicing swordplay. Some can perform three skills; some have mastered one exceptionally well, like Boróka, who’s as useless at fire-making or forging as I am, but can heal better than anyone in the village. Without even the feeblest glimmer of the gods’ magic, though, I’m relegated to hunting with the men, who always eye me with discomfort and suspicion. It’s not an easy peace, but it’s made me a mean shot.
It doesn’t come close to making up for being barren—the only girl in Keszi, our village, with no aptitude for any of the three skills. No blessings from Isten. Everyone has their own whispered theories about why the gods passed me over, why none of their magic pooled in my blood or grafted white onto my bones. I no longer care to hear any of them.
“Don’t,” Boróka pleads. “You’ll only make everything worse—”
I want to laugh. I want to ask her what could be worse—would they strike me? Scratch me? Burn me? They’ve done all that and more. Once I made the mistake of swiping one of Katalin’s sausages off the feast table, and she sent a curtain of flame billowing toward me without hesitation or remorse. I sulked around the village for a month afterward, speaking to no one, until my eyebrows grew back.
There’s still a tiny bald patch in my left brow, slick with scar tissue.
I notch the arrow and pull back the bow. Katalin is the perfect target—an impossible mound of snow in the gold-green haze of late summer, bright enough to make your eyes sting.
Boróka lets out another clipped sound of protest, and I let the arrow fly. It skims right past Katalin, ruffling the white fur of her wolf cloak, and vanishes into a black tangle of briars.
Katalin doesn’t scream, but I catch the look of sheer panic on her face before her fear turns to scandalized anger. Though it’s the only satisfaction I’ll get, it’s better than nothing.
And then Katalin starts toward me, flushed and furious under her wolf’s hood. I keep one hand steady on my bow, and the other goes to the pocket of my cloak, searching for the braid curled there. My mother’s hair is warm and feels like silk beneath my fingers, even though it’s been separated from her body for more than fifteen years.
Before she can reach me, Virág’s voice rings out through the woods, loud enough to startle the birds from their nests.
“évike! Katalin! Come!”
Boróka thins her mouth at me. “You might have just earned a lashing.”
“Or worse,” I say, though my stomach swoops at the possibility, “she’ll scold me with another story.”
Perhaps both. Virág is particularly vicious on Woodsman days.
Katalin brushes past me with unnecessary force, our shoulders clacking painfully. I don’t rise to the slight, because Virág is watching both of us with her hawk’s wicked stare, and the vein on the old woman’s forehead is throbbing especially hard. Boróka takes my hand as we trudge out of the woods and toward Keszi in the distance, the wooden huts with their reed roofs smudged like black thumbprints against the sunset. Behind us, the forest of Ezer Szem makes its perfunctory noises: a sound like a loud exhale, and then a sound like someone gasping for breath after breaching the surface of the water. Ezer Szem bears little resemblance to the other forests in Régország. It’s larger than all the rest put together, and it hums with its own arboreal heartbeat. The trees have a tendency to uproot themselves when they sense danger, or even when someone ruffles their branches a little too hard. Once, a girl accidentally set fire to a sapling, and a whole copse of elms walked off in protest, leaving the village exposed to both wind and Woodsmen.