Gáspár looks up, eye flashing. “What are you talking about?”
“If you’re trying to make me feel sorry about what I did, you’ve already succeeded,” I snap. “How like a Woodsman to let himself die of blood poisoning just to prove a point.”
“I’m not going to die,” Gáspár says, but his voice has a bitter edge. “And I have nothing to prove to a thankless wolf-girl.”
His words bank on my shoulders as coldly as the snow. “You’re angry I haven’t thrown myself before you in gratitude? I’m glad to not be Patritian kindling, but Kajetán was a monster. He deserved to die.”
“It’s not for me to decide that a man deserves to die.”
“Who better to decide than you?” Anger is coiling in me, after two long days of silent contrition. “You can conceal yourself in your Woodsman garb, but you’re still a prince.”
“Enough,” Gáspár says. There are fangs in his voice. “Kajetán was right—you’ll be the ruin of us both. You think the Woodsmen are righteous, but you’re the one who tried to cut a man’s throat because his villagers made some callow slights about the pagans and the Yehuli. Do they not teach wolf-girls that sometimes it’s better to sheathe their claws?”
My blood is pulsing, my cheeks so hot I almost forget we’re standing in the snow at all. “That’s all I’ve been taught, Woodsman. My entire life. To endure their slights and swallow my loathing. Did you agree with the count who told you to stay indoors, or the courtiers who turned up their noses at you? If you did—well, you must be the stupidest prince who’s ever lived. All that talk of quiet obedience is for their benefit, not yours. They don’t have to go to the effort of striking you down if you’re already on your knees.”
I can tell right away that I’ve pushed too far. My voice drops off, like a stone kicked down the cliffside. The wind bristles between us, howling. Gáspár’s face is hard, a shard of ossified amber in all the billowing white.
“And what did your clamoring get you?” he asks finally. “Kajetán would have cut out your tongue.”
I part my lips to reply, then press them closed again. I think of the scars striped down the backs of my thighs, and Virág’s reed whip quivering like the plucked string of a lute. I think of Katalin’s blue flame, her white crowing smile. I think of the forest knitting itself shut behind me, and Keszi vanishing from view. I had cried and screamed when the Woodsmen took my mother away, but that hadn’t stopped them either.
Swallowing hard, I reach for my coin and clamp my cold fingers around it. Nothing would have changed if I’d kept my mouth shut and my claws sheathed, except that I would have hated myself all the more. I might have even hated myself enough to take a blade to my skin, trying to buy my salvation with blood.
When I look at Gáspár again, my stomach turns in the silence. “Let me see your cut.”
“No,” he says, but there’s not much fire in it.
“If you die of blood poisoning before we find the turul, I swear to Isten I will kill you.”
Still, he hesitates, the wind beating his suba back and forth like laundry on a line. Then he drops from his mount. I slide off my own saddle and trod toward him in the snow.
The sleeve of his dolman is damp with blood. I roll it up carefully, my fingers trembling. One of my fingernails grazes his skin and Gáspár flinches, drawing in a breath. I try to focus on nothing but my careful ministrations, imagining that this is anyone else’s wound but a Woodsman’s.
The cut is small, but with the friction of his skin against the fabric of the dolman, it hasn’t been given a chance to scab over. I prod at it as gingerly as I can, and it weeps red. The flesh around the wound is raised and warm to the touch, which I know from Virág’s cursory tutelage is a bad sign.
A braid of fury and despair twines in me. “If I were a true wolf-girl, I could fix this.”
“If I were a true Woodsman—” Gáspár begins, but he falls silent before he can finish, his voice breaking like ice over the river. Something shivers in me, not even close to hate or horror. I tamp it down with ferocity.
With a deep sigh, I tear off a clean strip of fabric from my own tunic, then hesitate. I could let him die. I could be free of him without shouldering much of the blame for it, and then I could go home. But I remember the words he spoke to me on the Little Plain: We belong to each other. I can’t rail against this wicked bargain anymore; the animal has already been skinned. And I suspect the king would find a way to punish Keszi anyway.