Maybe it was only a matter of believing, like Virág said, and I had believed in the wrong thing. I can almost feel dark thread lacing up my wrists, pressing deep into my skin, like scars thin and dark with blood.
I hear Gáspár turn over and blink himself awake. After a moment of bleary fumbling, he murmurs a quiet prayer, and a ball of blue flame quivers into his cupped hand. He holds the fire so close that his face is soaked in sapphire light. It clings to the curve of his nose and his stubbled jaw. It pools on his lips, pressed with bewildered concern.
“What happened?” he asks, voice thick.
Very slowly, I arch my hand, slick with gore, above the coil of flame. Gáspár’s eye widens, taking in what’s gone from me, but before he can speak I let my hand drop on top of the fire, curling my four fingers over his, plunging us both into darkness.
A word hangs in the air between us, battered back and forth in the frigid wind. It remains unspoken, unacknowledged, and yet it’s as visible and tangible as the ice beneath our feet.
Boszorkány. Witch.
The wolf-girls of Keszi are sometimes called witches, but it is not what the word really means. Real witches are not human: their bodies are made of sculpted red clay; their bones are twigs and bog wood. They have wreaths of swamp grass for hair and sea-smoothed pebbles for eyes. They are as old as the land itself, and they answer to no gods.
We both know I’m not a witch. Gáspár has seen me bleed, felt my skin beneath his gloved hand, the way my flesh gave against his touch. But this is a different kind of magic, one that is not for survival, like the magic of the other wolf-girls. With their magic they can outlast the monsters of Ezer Szem, endure the harsh forest winters, stay guarded against the Woodsmen who want them dead. Their magic built Keszi. Mine would see it crumble.
Some other girl might have despised it. I can almost see Katalin’s delicate little nose wrinkling in disgust. But then I imagine closing my hand over her blue flame, the look of wonder and terror in her eyes before my fingers moved to her throat. My skin itches, black threads tightening.
Gáspár scowled and worried over my wound with as much prickly concern as Virág on her darkest days, every word laced through with grim judgment. When I fumbled with the bandage, he let out a deep, put-upon sigh and took the wrappings from me, winding them carefully around the gash where my finger had been.
“I’ll not hear another word about the Woodsmen and our masochism,” he said, brow furrowing.
I laughed at him weakly. “That seems fair enough.”
He hasn’t spoken since. As we press on against the wind, Gáspár watches me carefully, from a few paces away. Beneath his guarded gaze is obvious displeasure, but I can’t puzzle out its source. Perhaps he is horrified by my newfound magic. Perhaps it has reminded him of the intractable distance between Woodsman and wolf-girl.
His reproach bruises me more than I thought it would. After days of huddling together on the ice, after I searched the skies for the turul until my eyes burned and my feet throbbed, he is looking at me like I am nothing more than a pagan barbarian again, something unknown and unknowable, something feral and loathsome.
I skid across the ice until we’re side by side, matching my pace to his.
“You don’t understand,” I say. I’m not sure when I started caring whether he understands me or not. “Being barren in Keszi—it’s worse than being dead. They called me a Yehuli slave to the Patritian king. They told me to lick the Woodsmen’s boots. They wanted to get rid of me just as much as they—”
I manage to cut myself off before I reveal the truth, reveal Virág and wicked Katalin. I’m shouting to be heard over the wind, my eyes damp and tear-pricked.
Gáspár stops. He turns toward me in slow, careful increments, teeth gritted so tightly I can see the pulse of muscle along his jaw. He doesn’t speak.
“Maybe you think me more of a wolf than before,” I press on, heart pounding, “and less a girl. But you can’t look at me with your one eye as if I’m a monster for doing something terrible so I could finally have something of my own. You know what the price of power is. You know better than anyone. We’re the same now.”
The wind gives a blood-chilling widow’s wail. Gáspár stares and stares, black hair feathering across his forehead. Then he starts to laugh.
I stare back, blinking in bewilderment. If he was trying to diffuse my rage, it worked—I’m too baffled to be angry.