It was stupid of me to speak without remembering: Gáspár is the son of King János’s Merzani queen, the foreign bride he wed to stave off a war with our southern rival, much to the distaste of his courtiers. She died almost two decades ago of some ghoulish fever, and war between the two nations began with the first toll of Király Szek’s mourning bells. Of course, no one thought too kindly of the heir she left behind, his blood blackened with the lineage of the enemy.
I feel such a sharp, sudden sadness it’s as if someone has stuck a knife between my ribs. With some difficulty, I shift to feel the braid in my pocket. When at last I do speak, my voice sounds odd, distant. “Do you remember her at all?”
“Not very much.” Each word is a huff of white. His shoulders slacken against me. “She couldn’t speak Régyar well. She spoke Merzani to me, but only when no one else was around to hear.”
“Every day I think I’m remembering less of my mother than the day before.”
The confession is out of me before I can even think to muzzle myself. Before I can think of how this Woodsman might turn it into a weapon.
“So do I,” Gáspár says, after a long moment. “Olacakla ?are bulunmaz.”
I furrow my brow. The words are similar in their cadence to Régyar, but for all their unexpected familiarity, I can’t understand them. “Is that Merzani? What does it mean?”
“‘There is no remedy for what will be.’”
The adage hangs in the air, a sibilant constellation. My chest aches. I wonder what kind of Under-World life he had in Király Szek while Katalin and her friends were rubbing dirt in my face and burning off my hair.
Blue light trickles in from the narrow spaces, a silken evening streaming through the roots and the storm. “It’s not the same. You have a father still.”
Gáspár tilts his head. “So do you.”
I have to wriggle my hands into my wolf cloak to find my coin, caught between our adjacent bodies. When I do, I grip it tightly despite my trembling fingers. “Maybe.”
“More so than the other wolf-girls, I hear.”
The girls in Keszi do have fathers, of course, but only in the way that flowers have seeds which sprouted them. Faceless village men who might briefly catch their eye and then look away, flushing and guilty. Courtship is limited to furtive romps in the woods or private dalliances by the riverside. Mothers raise their children alone.
I don’t like thinking of it. It reminds me that our lives in Keszi are structured around survival, and extraneous things—love—are to be cut off like a fetid limb. The way Csilla left her arm behind in ?rd?g’s marsh, or how I was carved out of Keszi too. All the village men feared that I would pass my barren bloodline on to a child, and so they were careful, when we coupled, to never risk making me a mother.
It makes me flush to think of coupling when I am pressed so close to Gáspár. But now I can only see the whorls of his dark hair, his long and regal nose, and the delicate curve of his jaw, shadowed with stubble. Once I coupled with a boy from Keszi, and his bristled face left a rash of red along my throat and chin. Sourly, I remember the girl from Kajetán’s village, stroking Gáspár’s cheek. I wonder if he imagined kissing her. I suspect he is far too grim and pious to think of me the way I have been thinking of him. He smells of pine and salt, not so terribly different from the men I’ve lain beside. I wonder if he is as ticklish behind the ear, or if his hair is as downy on the nape of his neck.
The snow piles over our tangle of roots, soft as distant footfalls. The blue evening has winnowed away, leaving only the slenderest planks of moonlight to illuminate our small hollow. That pale light lacquers to Gáspár’s profile, making him look softer and younger than his twenty-five years, and hardly like a Woodsman at all.
I lean back against the weave of roots, damp with snowmelt, my hair tangling in garlands of moss. My head is so close to Gáspár’s that I think our cheeks might touch and I wonder how I will sleep at all. I needn’t have worried too much about it. As soon as I close my eyes, the world shudders away.
It’s still dark when I open my eyes, in that bleary place between sleeping and waking. I’ve shifted in the night, my cheek pressed to the mangle of wood and moss. Gáspár’s body is a warm crescent around mine, my back against his chest. I half convince myself I must be dreaming: clutched in this cradle of roots, Gáspár’s arms braced over me like a reed roof, everything seems hazy and unreal.