That first night in the tree was a prologue, only I didn’t know it at the time. When our muscles are aching and the night has stitched closed over the wound of livid daylight, we build a fire and lie down several feet apart, our backs to each other. But always in the morning we wake huddled together beside the blackened wood, as if we’ve drifted across the ice in our sleep, bodies rebelling against the wind and the cold. Whoever rouses first quietly disentangles themselves, and then we pretend we haven’t spent the night pressed against each other for warmth. This is something we can agree on without argument, but the silent pact thrums beneath every word we speak, slicker and even more precarious than our first bargain.
Despite the cold we eat remarkably well, mostly because I have no compunctions about plucking squirrels and rabbits from their dens, where they are slumbering fat and defenseless. Gáspár sulks over my barbarity as I skin and gut my kills, but to his credit, he resists the urge to upbraid me.
“What will you eat at the Saint István’s Day feast?” I ask him as I fix the unfortunate squirrel on a spit, dreaming of green sunlight and sour cherry soup. “Chicken stew with egg noodles and warm fried bread . . .”
Across the fire, Gáspár snorts ruefully at me. “That’s peasant fare, wolf-girl. Nothing the king would be seen serving at his feast table. We’ll have visitors from the Volkstadt, and he’ll want to impress them.”
“Why would he want to impress them?”
“The Volkstadt has been a Patritian country for many hundreds of years,” he says. “So the Volken pride themselves on being holier than we are, and their envoys always sit uneasily at Régország’s court. They think we are barbarous, unrefined, and the king too lenient with his pagan subjects. My father is eager to prove them wrong.”
I almost laugh. “Too lenient? Is it not enough that we live in fear of his soldiers knocking down our doors and kidnapping our women?”
“Not for some. Not for Nándor’s followers.”
Hearing his name again chills me. Gáspár stares at the fire, unblinking, flames darting through the cold air like serpent tongues. It’s the first time he has spoken of his brother since that night by the lake, and nothing about the flat tenor of his voice invites further questioning. But I don’t care.
“And what has Nándor done to earn such feverish devotion?” I ask carefully. My squirrel is blackening on its spit.
Gáspár’s breath streams white in the cold. “He is charming and clever and overflowing with empty promises. He tells the desperate peasants everything they want to hear, and whispers to the courtiers and Volken envoys that he will rid Király Szek of its Yehuli scourge and cleanse the country of its pagans for good. The érsek has claimed he is Saint István’s true heir. And since the peasants and the courtiers and the Volken envoys believe him, it might as well be true.”
An old, familiar anger kindles in me. “So you’d relinquish your claim just like that? Because some stuffy officials and stupid peasants believe Nándor’s fairy tale?”
“I haven’t relinquished anything.” Gáspár’s voice is sharp, hands curling on his lap. “Nándor has power that you can see and touch; it’s not just a fairy tale. Without the turul, neither my father nor I can hope to match it.”
It’s his baldest confession yet. I let my squirrel drop from its spit. My gaze travels from his gloved hands to his face, that prince’s regal profile that I’ve seen close enough to count each of the delicate lashes on his good eye, to wonder about the softness of his lips. For so long his missing eye horrified me—I’d thought it was a testament to his piety and hate. Now I consider perhaps it is a testament only to his desperation. If I’d been a passed-over prince, shackled by the shame of my foreign bloodline, sneered at in the palace halls, forever bathed in the golden light of my perfect brother, wouldn’t I have taken a knife to my own flesh too? For all his grousing about my unabashed barbarity, Gáspár is braver and stronger willed than I have ever been.
The realization makes me regret at least half of my japes and my petulance. Flushing, I pass him the cooked squirrel, and he takes it with a steely nod. Overhead the sky is the color of forged iron, bristling with black clouds.
“We’ll find it,” I tell him, surprised by the certainty in my own voice. “I’ll kill it.”
Gáspár doesn’t reply. His eye is boring into the fire again.