“Kajetán,” Dorottya murmurs. A warning.
Gáspár takes a step toward the headman, who has risen to his feet. He lays a hand on Kajetán’s shoulder and says, “I have sacrificed much, to be as blessed as I am.”
And then I swear that he turns the scarred half of his face into the firelight. Kajetán meets Gáspár’s eye with defiance, but the bluster drains out of him quickly. His gaze drops to the floor.
“One night,” he mumbles. “But I want the wolf-girl bound.”
I won’t make the same mistake twice. When Kajetán comes toward me with a rope, I thrash and scream so loudly that they all freeze like frightened chickens. I’m glad to be spoiling Gáspár’s story, his assertion that I’m a particularly pliant wolf-girl, mute and malleable, a rare jewel among my kind. I don’t want to think of myself as apart from them, even if it’s all a calculated tale. I won’t let the Woodsmen take that from me too.
By the time they finally get the rope around my wrists, my cheek is bruised and I am still screaming curses. Gáspár is pale-faced with misery. Kajetán is seething. As Dorottya leads us to an empty tent, she is careful to give me a wide berth.
“This tent was Hanna’s,” she says. “Of course, it’s empty now.”
I try not to let the grief in her voice temper my rage.
“Thank you,” Gáspár says. “Your hospitality is deeply appreciated.”
“It’s quite small,” she says.
“It’s fine.” He gives her a tiny nod. “May Godfather Life keep you.”
“May Godfather Death spare you,” she replies, in the instinctive, visceral way of an adage oft-repeated. Then she ducks out of the tent, leaving Gáspár and me alone.
As soon as she’s gone, I turn my livid gaze on him.
“Get this off me,” I growl.
Gáspár regards me with pursed lips. The ghost of his smirk is still maddening me. He stands across the tent, arms folded, and says, “You’ll have to show a bit more repentance than that.”
“Repentance?” I lurch toward him; if my hands were unbound, I might have put them around his throat. “Don’t needle me with your Patritian nonsense, especially not after you’ve volunteered me to fight a monster.”
“You don’t have to fight it,” Gáspár says. “I doubt the villagers would welcome your help anyway.”
“As if you could do a lick of damage without my help.” I twist my wrists futilely, furiously. “You beseeched me to aid you in finding the turul by Saint István’s Day, and now you’ve happily agreed to linger for who knows how long in some nameless village, to fight some monster you can’t be sure even exists. What are you trying to prove?”
Gáspár’s brow draws down over his eye. “And what have you proven, wolf-girl, except that you’re precisely like the heathens that these villagers fear? Vicious, wild, ungoverned by morality or good sense? There’s nothing to gain by confirming everyone’s worst assumptions about you.”
Spitefully, I laugh. “There’s nothing to gain by trying to prove them false either. I could have been the most humble, abasing wolf-girl you’ve ever seen and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Do you think Saint István stopped to measure each pagan’s character before he cut them down with his sword? Do you think he cared how toothless their smiles were?”
Gáspár’s jaw sets, and he doesn’t reply. I think of the way his voice caught on the word Merzani. I wonder if he’s spent half his life with his belly to the ground, lowing to every man or woman who curled their lip at him. The thought mollifies me, dulling a bit of my blade-sharp anger.
“Will you please untie me?” I ask finally, teeth gritted.
I watch his shoulders slacken with a sigh. Gáspár crosses the tent in a single pace and begins to loose the rope around my wrists. “I’ll have to put it back in the morning, you know.”
“I don’t care. Do you know how hard it is to scratch an itch when your hands are bound?”
“I don’t, actually.”
I flex my newly freed fingers with a scowl. “Lucky you.”
The tent is small, cowhides and wool pelts heaped around a small hearth. Gáspár clasps his hands to light a fire, and it paints our murky, moving shadows against the tent’s calfskin walls. I lean closer, letting it warm my cheeks and my freezing pink nose.