“He must be hiding away in his tent,” says Dorottya. She knifes her narrow body through the crowd. “Someone go fetch him.”
“I’ll go,” Gáspár offers, stepping forward with altogether too much eagerness. I can tell he is desperate to leave our conversation behind. “I must tell him that I failed to find the monster.”
He dips his head shamefully, and I feel a tug of guilt, regretting my own petulance, my needling. He might have found the monster after all, if I hadn’t laughed at his hunting and pestered him with my stories.
Gáspár doesn’t invite me along with him, but I don’t want to be left alone with these Patritians, so I follow anyway. Their eyes are bright as embers in the dark, reflecting the fiery light, and their gazes trail me in a line of heat. I touch the braid in my right pocket, then the coin in my left, squeezing what little comfort I can from the ritual.
“What sort of leader leaves his people to worry like this?” Gáspár mutters as we make our way to Kajetán’s tent. “The least he could do is show his face in a time of strife.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t want to be a leader at all. Kajetán seems terribly young to be the headman of a village, even a small one.”
“But he is their leader,” Gáspár says. “And so he should act with honor.”
I roll my eyes at the simple Patritian line: right and wrong, and the intractable divide between them. I can’t deny there’s something appealing about its directness. If only it weren’t so difficult to be right in the eyes of a Patritian, and so very easy to be wrong.
Gáspár opens the tent flap, and we both step through. Kajetán’s hearth is silent, his bed cold. As Gáspár murmurs a small fire to life, I walk over to the wooden table, where the bucket of water sits beside his tin cup. The bucket is nearly full, but it has a strange look to it, a thickness that water shouldn’t have.
As I lean over to examine the water, the table wobbles. I frown and peer down. There’s a small hole in the dirt floor of Kajetán’s hut, and one of the table legs has lodged there.
“What are you doing?” Gáspár demands. “Don’t rifle through a man’s things like a common thief.”
I ignore him. The hole is small, and black as the inside of a well. I stick my hand inside, up to the wrist, and wriggle my fingers until they catch hold of something. When I pull my hand out, what I see turns my veins to ice.
Abandoning his principles, Gáspár peers over my shoulder. “What is that?”
“It’s a doll,” I say.
A little girl’s stick-and-mud doll, with a scrap of wool for a skirt and yellow plain grass for hair. The doll has no eyes or mouth, just a mute, unseeing mud face.
“Why would he have a doll?” Gáspár says. “Why would he hide it?”
I reach back into the hole. This time, my fingers close around something smaller, with more give. A handful of dark berries. Their violet juice colors the creases of my palm.
There’s another color with it—a deep glossy red, almost black.
I drop the berries to the ground. They leave a streak of blood across the dirt. I look up at Gáspár, and when I see the horror that’s come over his face, I know he understands too.
“What do you think you’re doing, wolf-girl?”
Gáspár and I turn in perfect synchrony. Kajetán is standing at the opening of his tent, his face more flushed than before, freckled with broken blood vessels. His eyes have a wicked, colorless gleam.
“It’s you,” I whisper. “You killed the little girl. Eszti.”
“Yes,” he says.
“And Hanna. And Balász.”
Gáspár reaches for his ax. “Then you’re not only a weak man. You’re a monstrous one.”
“Why did you do it?” My voice is hoarse, my throat burning. “Why did you kill your own people?”
“I don’t have to answer to pagan scum,” he says, but there’s none of the same spite in his voice—just a low, resigned loathing.
“Then answer to a Woodsman,” Gáspár spits. “Answer to your god.”
“You should know better than anyone that our god demands sacrifice, Woodsman. You might as well be asking after your missing eye.” Kajetán gives a short, bitter laugh. “Winters on the plain are barren and long. Many would have perished anyway. It’s true, we have little dry wood to keep the fire going, but flesh and bone do just as well.”