“I only did it because I can’t survive the North without you, and my soul will suffer for it,” Gáspár snaps. I can feel his shoulders rising, muscles coiled. “If I die before confessing the sin to the érsek, I will join Thanatos for an eternity of torment.”
I almost laugh at the gravelly tenor in his voice, his supreme certainty. “How can you be so sure that you won’t join ?rd?g in the Under-World, instead?”
“Your devil is nothing more than an illusion cast by mine,” Gáspár says, voice smooth now. This is only more of his courtly rhetoric, practiced and repeated. I roll my eyes.
“？rd?g isn’t a devil. He even has a human bride.”
He scoffs. “Just like a wolf-girl to want to wed a monster.”
“Csilla wasn’t a wolf-girl at all,” I tell him. “She was like the girls in your Patritian stories, sweet and pretty, but with a cruel mother and father. She lived by a swamp, and her parents sent her out to catch frogs for dinner, even though she didn’t have a net. Csilla hunted the frogs anyway, but her hand got caught in the mud and it hardened. Try as she might, she couldn’t get it free, and she resigned herself to death. Then she heard a voice, low and rumbling, from beneath her.
“‘Whose white hand is reaching into the Under-World?’ ?rd?g asked.
“Csilla told him her name, and begged him to help her. But ?rd?g said, ‘Your hand is lovely. You must have a lovely face to match it. If you die here in the marsh, you can come to the Under-World and be my wife.’
“Csilla gripped ?rd?g’s hand tightly. It was like holding on to a piece of winter birchwood, hard and inhumanly cold.
“‘I may die here in the marsh,’ Csilla said. ‘But before I do, my skin will grow pale and pruned. My lips will turn blue, and my nose will fall off from the cold. I will join you in the Under-World then, but I will no longer be beautiful.’
“‘That is true,’ ?rd?g said. ‘I can feel your skin beginning to wrinkle already.’
“‘Give me a knife,’ Csilla said. ‘I will slit my throat and die while my face is still lovely and my skin is still smooth.’
“The marsh water bubbled beside her, and a bone-handled knife floated to the surface. Csilla took the knife in her free hand. But rather than slitting her throat, she reached down into the mud and cut off her trapped hand at the wrist. When she was free, Csilla ran from the marsh as fast as her cold legs would carry her. She could still hear ?rd?g rumbling in protest, holding her severed hand.”
“Spare me your pagan myths,” Gáspár says, but his eye is alight with reluctant, half-damned interest.
“？rd?g didn’t give up so easily,” I go on. “He came to Csilla two more times after that, first as a fly, and then as a black goat. Both times she tricked him again. First, she used her own golden hair to trap him in a spider web. Then, she burned half her face with hot coals, so that she would no longer be beautiful, thinking that ?rd?g would leave her be.”
“And did he?” Gáspár asks, quietly.
“No,” I say. “You said yourself he was a monster. And a monster needs a monstrous bride.”
The story of Csilla and ?rd?g is one of Virág’s favorites, but I always hated when she told it, because the other girls would take the opportunity to pelt me with sticks and mud and try to tear out my hair, telling me I was no better than ?rd?g’s hideous consort and that I might as well join him in the Under-World. It’s different to be the one to tell the story, and I find it fills me with an unexpected warmth, like a hot coal in my cupped hand. Through the knife-thin slits between the tree roots, I can only see narrow diamonds of white.
“Are those the sorts of tales that pagan mothers tell their children to lull them to sleep?” Although Gáspár’s voice is only lightly scathing, hearing the word mother come out of his mouth makes me go stiff with fury.
“I told you—my mother was taken by the Woodsmen when I was ten,” I say coldly. “Virág was the only one telling them. Besides, I thought you might enjoy this one. Since you Woodsmen are so fond of severing limbs.”
Gáspár’s breath catches. I know it’s especially cruel of me to bring up Peti, but speaking of mothers opens up my oldest wound, making me as vicious as wolf with a thorn in its paw.
“I lost my own mother when I was eight, wolf-girl,” he says. There is the whetted edge to his voice again, wielding the revelation as meanly as a blade. “You don’t need to enlighten me about that particular pain.”