“My life is worth much less than yours,” I snap. “If it now belongs to you, then you struck a poor bargain.”
Gáspár draws a breath. “If only it were just your life. I’ll remind you that you staked the future of your whole village on this bargain, trusting me to protect it from my father’s wrath. If you fail, their lives will be forfeit too.”
His words crackle over me like lightning. Once my rage abates, I’m flushed with shame. He’s right—I’ve done a terrible, stupid, selfish thing, binding myself and my people to this prickly Woodsman. My gaze wanders to his ax, and I think how it would look cleaving the soft column of Boróka’s throat. I stare down at his hands, wrapped up in their black gloves, imagining that they were the hands that dragged my mother into the forest’s open maw. Worse, though, is the truth: that I might have summoned Keszi’s death omen myself.
“Fight your own monster, then,” I bite out, tearing away from him. “Hunt your own rabbits, and uphold your own silly oath.”
I don’t care how futile my words are, or how petulant my voice sounds. I trudge back toward the village, dead rabbit swinging from my fist, and don’t look back. If Gáspár calls after me, I don’t hear him.
It takes the better part of an hour to reach the cluster of tents. My mortified anger is welling up in me like a knot of unshed tears. The dog with coiled fur nips at the hem of my cloak, whining. It has so much fur that I can’t find its eyes, just its black twitching nose. A scrawny sheep bleats at me nervously, as if it can’t tell the wolf on my back is dead. The silver-gray cows chew their cud, oblivious.
My hands are meant to be bound, but Kajetán is nowhere in sight, so I impale my rabbit on a stick and hoist it over the fire. I stand several paces back, arm crooked across my brow, and still the light and heat make my eyes water. Such a fire will keep the village warm through a whole winter on the plain, where, at night, it can grow as cold as Kaleva. I feel a prickle of satisfaction when I remember that this is the Prinkepatrios’s holy fire, and now it’s being used to fill a heathen’s belly.
I crouch outside of Hanna’s hut to eat my rabbit, tossing the dog its liver and shriveled purpling heart. I pull apart the greasy dark meat with my hands and swallow the gristle without chewing. I’ve even sucked the marrow out of rabbit bones before, in the middle of one of our leanest winters, but I’m not quite so desperate now.
When I’m finished, I lick my fingers clean and take out my father’s coin. I’ve traced the symbols a hundred times, trying to make meaning out of their etched lines the way a hungry man might try to draw milk from a stone. There’s a profile of King János on one side, with his royal nose and exuberant mustache. I try to find Gáspár’s face in the gilt rendering of his father’s, but I can’t see any resemblance and then I’m vexed with myself for sparing it so much thought.
“Is that a forint?”
I look up with a start. Dorottya is standing over me, at least an arm’s length of careful distance between us. Her hair is tied back under a red kerchief. But she’s eyeing my coin with great interest, and I curl my fingers around it, throat tightening.
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m embarrassed to admit I’m utterly unfamiliar with the units of Régyar coin. Back when the king did collect tax from Keszi, we paid him in forged silver and rabbit furs, bundled onto the back of the Woodsmen’s steeds. “It’s gold.”
“Then it’s an arany,” Dorottya says, craning her neck at the coin. There’s a hopeful glint in her eyes that makes me equal parts suspicious and sad. “It’s worth two dozen pieces of silver, maybe more. I’ve only seen a gold piece once before.”
I glower at her, waiting for some vicious punch line. Waiting for her to accuse me of theft or some other pagan treachery. But she just regards me thoughtfully, cupping her chin in her hand.
“For a long time we had no coins here at all,” she says. “Then, some years ago, merchants from Király Szek came and bought up all our skins and blowing horns and wool. The merchants said they would buy all the wares that we had, but they would pay us in silver. So we had to wait until those merchants came back, because none of the other villages would take the silver, and they charged us more and more for their wares with each passing year.”
A quiet, ugly feeling simmers in my belly. “Were those the king’s merchants?”