“I’m sorry,” I say, though it scarcely seems enough. “For all my stupid slights. You only deserved half of them.”
Gáspár doesn’t laugh or smile, and I didn’t expect him to, but his jaw unclenches, just a little bit. “I understand why you won’t spurn your newfound power, whatever it is. Witch or wolf-girl, I am with you. There’s scarcely more than a week until Saint István’s festival, and we can’t turn back now.”
He sets his gaze upon me, and for the first time, I see only the eye that is, black and blazing, and don’t wonder about the grisly scar where the other one was. Tiny tremors of pain are ribboning from my absent finger, down my hand and up my arm, odd and phantasmal. I open my mouth to reply, but then I look up.
Without noticing, we have walked into a different kind of forest. A forest like Ezer Szem, where every rustle of leaves sounds like whispered words and every footfall on the ground might be the circling of a monster. My hand is on the trunk of a tree as broad as a merchant’s cart, and when I narrow my eyes to try to glimpse the top, my head spins and I stumble back, dry-mouthed.
“This is it,” I whisper. “The turul—it’s here.”
“How do you know?”
But I can’t explain it. Perhaps I am a witch after all. Gáspár presses the flat of his gloved hand to the trunk, like he’s feeling for a coded message on the bark, something etched and eternal.
The ground trembles under our feet. The tree starts to shake, too, scattering dead needles into the snow. Our horses rear, whinnying, and the reins of my white mare slip from my fingers.
As our horses gallop away, the trees around us stir like restless giants, uprooting themselves from the earth. With each tree that twists itself free, the ice splits open, revealing dirt beneath, the bruised memory of spring. The wrenching sound is so terrible that it drowns out the wind, and as the trees move, the lattice of their branches obscures even the slenderest piece of dusky sky.
A fat pine tree lumbers toward us, gruesome with knots and lichen. I leap out of the way, skidding on my knees in the snow. When I look up, Gáspár is holding out his hand. I take it, and he hauls me to my feet. The moment I’m upright, he lets my fingers fall from his grasp and without another breath we start to run.
I sprint as fast as I can, my hair and my white cloak streaming out behind me. Through the tangle of branches, I can just barely see the blur of Gáspár’s black suba. As I run, I look back over my shoulders, trying to dodge the trees that hurtle past, or risk being crushed in a snarl of roots and filthy snow.
We burst through the tree line, my heart clanging like a blacksmith’s anvil. The pine forest gives way to an open plain, miles of icy flatland skimming all the way to the horizon. I realize only then that the ground is no longer trembling; there’s no whip of branches around my face or roots flinging out to snatch at my ankles. The trees have stopped at the edge of the valley, needles rustling as they hunker down again, planting themselves back into the earth.
I turn to Gáspár, clutching the stitch in my side. “Why did they stop?”
“I don’t know.” His chest is heaving beneath his dolman. “They were chasing us.”
My throat is too tight to reply. I know now, without a prickle of doubt, that when King Tódor conquered the Far North he only managed to restrain its ancient magic, not snuff it out entirely. The Holy Order of Woodsmen will have many more years of bitter work to do, if they aim to erase Kaleva’s magic for good.
“At least we haven’t been trampled to death,” I say when I find my voice again, letting out a tremulous laugh. “I was hoping for a nobler demise.”
As soon as the words fall from my lips, the ice splits with a sound like nearing thunder.
I stare down in horror at the seismic crack, stretching perfectly from one toe of my boot to the other. We’re not standing on solid, snow-dusted earth at all. We’re standing on a frozen lake, blue-black water seething beneath the cloudy mantle of ice.
Slowly, I raise my head to look up at Gáspár. I manage to meet his gaze, as horrified as mine, for only half a second before I am plunged into the freezing water.
Without a beat, the ice closes over my head, knitting itself back together and sealing me under. I’m too shocked to move, too shocked to even feel the cold. Gáspár pounds on the other side, his fists cracking tiny fissures into the ice, but it’s not nearly enough.
Then my lungs begin to strain. The shock that kept the cold at bay is gone, leaving only frigid terror in its wake. I kick wildly to keep myself afloat while I beat my hands against the ice, each impact blunted by the torpid water.