Dorottya nods. “I saw a man with a coin like that once, queer script and all, a Yehuli man. He wasn’t a merchant, though—he was a tax collector.”
It takes a moment for the weight of her words to settle on me. “You met a man with a coin like mine?”
“Yes,” Dorottya says, forehead creasing.
I can’t help the eagerness in my voice when I lean forward. “Did you learn his name?”
“No. He was a tax collector from the capital, that’s all I know. When he came, he took half our silver, and even a calfskin rug. The king keeps these Yehuli men like vipers in a sack, and then looses them all on us once a year.”
My hand closes in a fist around my coin. Her words have dredged up some strange hurt in me, but I don’t know if I have the right to feel wounded by slights against the Yehuli. “It seems like you should blame the king, for foisting his coins on you in the first place.”
“The merchants said that all of Régország’s neighbors are using gold and silver for their buying and selling now,” Dorottya says. “King János wants to follow their example and mint his own royal coins.”
I have never thought much of Régország’s neighbors, the Volkstadt to the west and Rodinya to the east. They are only more Patritians, with peculiar accents but the same pious loathings. While I am puzzling over what she has said, Dorottya takes her leave. She slips silently into a small throng of villagers who have gathered around the fire to warm their hands. Kajetán is not among them. I wonder what kind of headman stays inside his tent all day, swaddled in calfskins, while his villagers till the fields and tend to their anxious sheep. Likely the same kind who refuses the aid of a Woodsman.
Gáspár emerges from behind the pen of gray cattle, bow strung over his shoulder and his hands empty. His failure at hunting should bring me some sort of perverse joy, but my lips only purse as he approaches, like I’ve bitten into something curdled with rot.
“Did you cook the rabbit?” Gáspár asks, toeing the heap of tiny bones at my feet.
“Yes. It was good practice for my stint in the kitchens of Count Korhonen’s keep.”
“You are terribly stubborn,” he says.
“You aren’t much better.”
Gáspár inclines his chin. “Either way, it’s no good arguing with every breath. The nature of a bargain, regrettably, is that we belong to each other.”
He flushes a little as he says it, and inside my boots, my toes curl. Gáspár chooses his words carefully and crossly, the way I would comb the trees outside Keszi for the largest and least-bruised apple. I wonder why he has chosen these words now. Perhaps he is only being as wretchedly reasonable as ever, but still my mind stammers around the thought of us being bound together.
I sigh heavily, mouth quivering as I try to keep it from forming a scowl. “I suppose you’ll want me to feed you, then.”
I think he almost smiles, but he catches himself. A smile would look odd and terrifying on his face, like a wolf trying to dance, or a bear plucking the strings of a kantele.
“Was Dorottya berating you?” he asks.
There’s a note of concern in his voice, or maybe it’s only my imagining. “No, though she did have some venomous words about the Yehuli.”
Gáspár tilts his head. “I can’t see how she managed to guess at your bloodline. You don’t have much of the Yehuli look.”
“She didn’t. She recognized my father’s coin.” I stare up at him, remembering King János’s engraved profile, all dull-eyed and weak-chinned. Gáspár’s eye is bright and keen, his jaw as sharp as the edge of a blade. He must have more of his mother in him. “Is there a Yehuli look?”
“Many people say there is.” He lifts one shoulder, his gaze still on me. “Something in the nose, or the brow, perhaps. There were several Yehuli men at court, tax collectors and moneylenders. None of them had your nose or your brow, and certainly not your eyes.”
I blink at him. “My eyes?”
“Yes,” he says, curtly and with a hint of embarrassment. “They’re very green.”
My stomach quivers with the pulse of a thousand tiny wings. It’s an odd feeling, not unpleasant. “Is there a Merzani look, then?”
Gáspár goes silent. I wonder if I’ve pushed him too far, if this brief moment of peace will snap beneath us like a rope bridge over churning waters. After a moment, he says, “I don’t know. My mother was the only other Merzani I’ve ever met.”