“Are you doubting my aim?”
“No,” he says, lifting his gaze to mine. “I don’t doubt you, wolf-girl.”
My skin prickles, and not with cold. We eat our meal in silence, but I find it difficult to stop from staring at him. I am remembering the line of his body against mine, the sweep of his suba over me, the brace of his arms around my waist. Once I would have flinched at his proximity, or perhaps considered how easy it would be to slide my knife into his throat. Now I have to blink and grit my teeth and wheedle myself into thinking of him as a Woodsman at all.
Gáspár falls asleep first, turning his back to the flame. Even without seeing his face, I cannot stop imagining his sacrifice. The heated blade, the flash of metal, the blister of pain and the flowering of blood. It makes my throat tighten and my stomach roil. And yet for all I blanched at the gore of the Woodsman code, hadn’t I relished the tale of Csilla cutting off her arm and shearing her hair and burning her face to be made into ?rd?g’s monstrous, powerful consort?
I think about Katalin, too, pressing my face into the mud, telling me I belonged as close to the Under-World as I could get. Later, when the fun of her cruelty had worn thin and she and her friends abandoned me, I crawled into a thicket and let my cheek rest in the dirt. I pretended I could hear ?rd?g rumbling beneath the earth, like Csilla had. I wanted to hear him calling to me. I wanted to hear him telling me I belonged somewhere, even if it was the cold realm of the dead.
If I cannot be Vilm?tten, my belly bright with Isten’s star, perched in the highest tree branch, perhaps I can be something else. Perhaps I can be the favored of another god.
My whole body trembles as I unsheathe my knife. The metal is a lambent mirror that holds the firelight. I grip the hilt in my left hand, angling the blade over my littlest finger. I don’t think I have the strength or the stomach to take my whole hand, and besides, I need both to string my bow. My pinky is what I will miss the least, but then I wonder if that is the right attitude for a sacrifice.
I tear off a scrap of my tunic and ball the fabric in my mouth. Then I raise my hand and bring my knife down with all the force that I can gather.
Before anything else, there is the splinter of bone, the spurt of blood. A wine stain laps at the blackened logs. The pain arrives later, with a bolt that leaves me dizzy and breathless. I bite down on the fabric, muffling a scream. Across the fire, Gáspár shifts, but doesn’t wake. My eyes are stinging hot with tears.
Vision rippling, I lift my hand. There is a knob of bone protruding from my palm, like a smooth white stone. Where my finger was is rimmed red with gore, skin as ragged as the hem of an old skirt. And then there is my pinky, a slip of warm flesh in the snow. It looks so singular and pitiful, something that a hawk might snatch up and pick clean for a scant midwinter meal. That thought alone undoes me. I bend at the waist and retch.
When I have finished, I wipe the bile from my chin and straighten my back. The pain has started to ebb, leaving me raw with curiosity and desire. I expected to feel the sacrifice in my throat and my belly, like a swallow of good wine, but I only feel woozy, sick. Csilla didn’t retch, or at least that wasn’t part of Virág’s story. Who knows if she did or didn’t. I clench the remaining fingers of my left hand, knuckles cracking.
In Virág’s story, she plunged her face into the flames without a beat of hesitation. I reach forward, letting the fire nip at my fingertips. It hurts, but not enough to make me pause. And my skin doesn’t smolder or burn.
Now a more palpable curiosity is unfolding inside of me. I stretch my hand again, and the flames leap back as I do. I reach until I’m touching the ash-eaten logs at the base of the fire, and then it goes out, so quickly and suddenly that I gasp, as if it’s been doused with water.
My skin prickles like a thousand bee stings, but there are no raised bumps of blistered flesh. The pain only exists somewhere unreachable inside me. And all that’s left of the fire is the acrid curl of smoke.
It’s a swoop in my stomach, a terror I can feel in the soles of my feet, like standing at the craggy edge of a cliffside. The other girls’ magic doesn’t work like this. They forge metal in just their empty hands; they make fire without wood or flint. They stitch new skin over old wounds. But they are touched by Isten, the creator, who never once answered my prayers. Perhaps all this time I should have been praying to a different god, the one that smothers green spring under winter snow, the one that bleaches black hair white and carves deep wrinkles into skin. The god that demands human flesh, not spilled goose blood or silver laurel crowns, for sacrifice.