Even more so when I feel his breath on my cheek. “Why do you still wear the wolf cloaks?”
“When the first Woodsmen chased the Wolf Tribe into the forest, most of them died,” I reply. My voice is thick with sleep, each word a labor. “The men were warriors, so the king’s soldiers killed them. It was only the women and children left. The soldiers thought that they would be eaten, or die of hunger and cold, but they didn’t. Their wolf cloaks kept them warm, and they built their villages in the safety of the forest.”
“That’s why . . .” Gáspár murmurs.
“That’s why it’s the women who have magic,” I finish, blinking into the filmy dark. “That’s why we pray for nothing so much as we pray for more baby girls to be born.”
Gáspár is silent for so long that I wonder if he’s fallen back to sleep. When he does speak at last, his words shiver along my throat. “You are an oddity, then.”
“That’s an awfully kind way of putting it.”
“Maybe it means you can be closer to our god,” he says, “because you’re further away from your own.”
“You mean I could cut out my eye or my tongue and have power just like you?” I reply, though in this half-dreaming state, I can’t truly be cross with him.
“If you really believed it. Saint István was born a pagan too.”
“That’s the problem,” I tell him. “I never really believed I belonged in Keszi either.”
Or perhaps no one in Keszi had let me believe it. Katalin with her merciless gaze and her mocking chants, the other villagers too terrified or scornful to meet my eyes, and even Virág, who saved me out of pity but never loved me—how could I hope to perform their magic when they all thought I was better off dead? Isten guided their hands as they forged or healed or made fire, but the threads of his magic that laced their wrists would never move my own. Every mean word or blistering stare, every time Virág’s reed whip licked the back of my thighs, made my threads fray and fray until one day they snapped.
“You do,” Gáspár whispers. His voice ghosts softly over my skin, breath dampening my hair. “At least, you seem as true a wolf-girl as I am a Woodsman.”
The tree roots hold us in perfect suspension, like a body in a bog, untouched by the erosion of time. I open my mouth to reply, tasting soil and moss, but my eyelids are heavy and sleep snarls me back down into oblivion. When I wake for good the next morning, in the quiet aftermath of the snowstorm, I decide I must have dreamed it all: his gentle words, the warmth of his body around mine. But more than once, I catch Gáspár looking at me in a funny way, as if he has some sort of secret I don’t know.
Chapter Eight
We survived the snowstorm with little harm done to us, but in the three days since then, winter has truly come to Kaleva. The squirrels are bunkering down in their tree holes, bellies round and full. Foxes are shedding their russet summer coats in exchange for an ivory camouflage. The foul-tempered geese have long since gone, leaving the tree branches silent and bare. Beneath our feet, the snow has frozen into a slippery sheet of ice, too perilous to maneuver on horseback. We take our horses by their leads and walk instead, my toes clenched tightly inside my boots.
Half of me hopes to see a flash of flame-bright feathers dart across the gray sky, and the other half hopes that the turul never appears. I often glimpse other birds of prey, hawks and falcons circling the forest, eyes trained on their quarry. When I see them, I raise the bow, tracing their path through the clouds. I can’t shoot, though. The birds are too lovely and noble to die by my hand, and they would make a pitiful meal anyway. I would feel no glory in their deaths.
Gáspár’s eye narrows each time I lower the bow, but he doesn’t say a word. Like me, he must be silently hoping that when the time comes, I find the strength to loose my arrow.
Even without the snow, it’s terribly, unfathomably cold. The sun glowers behind a milky layer of clouds, too surly to show its face. When night comes, the clouds knit together like Isten’s great furrowed brow, ominously swollen, threatening another storm. I’m not sure if we’ll survive the next one, but I don’t voice my fear aloud. We’ve gone too far to turn back now. There are so many miles of snow and forest and prairie flatland between Keszi and me, the interminable distance that makes my eyes water when I think of it. I never imagined I would be this far from home, and with only a Woodsman at my side. Each step forward and our twined fate hardens, as unyielding as steel.