I watch as his body gives its last spasms, limbs jerking and then going still. His head lolls to the side, eyes open and terribly blank, like two pale shards of glazed pottery. His beard is flecked with blood, black maggoty clumps of it, what he coughed up as he died.
Hands shaking, I push myself to my feet. Though the wound on my throat is leaking, I can hardly feel it now. Everything is blunted, numb as a whetstone.
“Gáspár,” I start, but then I can’t think of what to say. His face is drawn, his chest heaving. Kajetán’s blood is a wine stain across his dolman, dyeing the leather something darker than black. I can only watch as he drops to his knees and lays a hand over Kajetán’s forehead, brushing his eyelids shut.
In the end, the villagers make Gáspár their hero. They stitch together their own story when they see blood splashed against the calfskin wall of the tent, Gáspár’s ax in Kajetán’s chest, and the doll and the berries on the ground. Eszti’s mother, a young woman with a snarly dark braid hanging to her waist, holds her daughter’s stick-and-mud toy to her chest and weeps. The other villagers gather around Kajetán’s stiffening body.
“We must bury him,” Dorottya proclaims. “And we must elect a new headman.”
Na?vely I assume the villagers will vote for her. But then I remember that, bereft of magic, these Patritian women are only meant to carry children on their hip and darn their husbands’ tunics. The villagers huddle together, speaking in hushed tones. When they finally break apart, it’s a man named Antal who has been chosen.
His first order of business as headman is to dispose of Kajetán’s corpse.
“No ceremony,” Antal proclaims. “No grave.”
Outside, the coil-furred dog whines hungrily.
The villagers push through the flap of the tent, but before I emerge, there’s a cry so loud that it twists in my belly like a knife. Gáspár hurries forward, shoving through the crowd, and halts in front of the hearth.
The fire has gone out. Perhaps it died with Kajetán, smoldering to its ashen end as he lay bleeding on the floor of his tent. There’s only blackened stone and the stick sculpture of the Prinkepatrios’s three-pronged spear. All around me, the villagers are falling to their knees, sobbing and whispering prayers. Under the white sickle of the moon, their faces look pale as bone.
I wait, but Godfather Life does not deem the villagers worthy of his mercy. The hearth stays silent, cold.
“We must have fire!” someone wails. “We’ll freeze without it!”
Gáspár shifts suddenly. From my vantage point, I can see only a sliver of his face, but I know from the slope of his shoulders and the slowness of his pace that Kajetán’s death is weighing upon him already, another black mark on his soul. I am too ashamed to meet his eye, to face the anguish I have caused him with my temerity.
He kneels beside the bed of burnt logs and clasps his hands together. “Megvilágit.”
A small fire blooms in the hearth, its flames murmuring, low. Not nearly enough to keep the whole village warm through the winter. I shoulder through the crowd until I am standing as near to him as I dare.
Gáspár clasps his hands again, brow furrowed. “Megvilágit.”
The flames crest higher, waving and blue now, like waterweed as it ripples along the lakebed. It’s only a bruised shadow of the bonfire that crawled over the logs before, hurling its light for miles.
Gáspár turns to me. “évike, give me your knife.”
I’m too dumbstruck to refuse. My knife—his knife—which I snatched back from Kajetán’s cold fingers before the villagers thundered into the tent, is still befouled with blood. I hold it out to Gáspár and he takes it, blade first. All around the villagers have hushed, lips pursed, waiting.
Staring down with consummate focus, Gáspár finally removes his gloves. He rolls up the sleeve of his dolman to reveal a raised grid of scars along his wrist, ribbons of white against his bronze skin. My breath catches in my throat. It takes him a moment to find a clear spot. When he finally does, he draws my blade across his arm with a gasp, his blood splattering onto the stone.
Fingers shaking, Gáspár lets the knife fall into the grass. He clasps his hands together once more. “Megvilágit.”
The fire bursts into the air with such ferocity that Gáspár leaps back as fingers of flame snatch at his suba. Sparks dapple the immense blackness of the sky. The sound of the villagers’ relief is as loud as the prairie wind.