I hear Gáspár screaming, mutedly, from above.
I am going to die, I think, surprised by how calm the thought is when it comes over me. Without noticing, I have stopped my pounding and flailing. My body sinks deeper into the black oblivion, the weight of my sodden clothes pulling me down. Hazily I consider trying to slip off the wolf cloak, but then I think to myself that I’ll want it, wherever it is I am going. As I descend, I am faintly aware of the ice shattering overhead. Light bursts through the fractured surface in bright clear shafts before being obscured again as Gáspár dives into the water.
Roused from my bleary stupor I kick toward him, and his arm loops around my waist. My vision explodes with stars, a thousand hot, painful pinpricks, as he drags me back up to the surface. He grabs the handle of his ax, the blade firmly planted farther down the ice, and uses it as leverage to hurl me out of the water. He pulls himself up after me, and we crawl away from the hole. We don’t get far. After no more than a few moments we both collapse onto our bellies, panting, gasping. Every breath feels like I am swallowing nettles.
It’s a long time before I can speak again, and even after that, I can’t think of what I want to say. The water is freezing onto my skin, my hair, the fibers of my wolf cloak, like dewdrops on grass. I turn over to face Gáspár, my cheek against the ice.
“You only saved me because you couldn’t survive without me,” I choke out, thinking of his clumsiness with the bow and arrow. The humor of it seems so distant now.
Gáspár coughs up water and blinks. “Yes,” he says simply, as if he wants to scowl at me but can’t quite manage it now.
The sun is dipping low on the horizon, light dripping off the edge of the world. I try to keep myself wrapped in my cloak, but it’s soaking wet and colder than my skin itself. The chill has snuck into my marrow, settling against the hollows of my rib cage, too deep to exorcise.
“I want to go home,” I whisper. “To Keszi.”
There’s very little waiting for me in the village, save for Boróka and prickly Virág. But in Keszi there’s a warm bed by the fire, and now it’s so bitterly cold.
“I know,” Gáspár says. His hand slides across the ice and buries itself in my cloak. For a moment I think he’s searching for me, but then he pulls out my knife. His fingers tremble as he rolls down his sleeve, blade glinting against his bronze skin.
“No.” I reach out and grasp his wrist, feeling the raised grid of scars there. “Please . . . don’t.”
I can’t bear to watch him do it, even if it means there’s no guttering warmth. I grip his wrist tightly. It’s like holding on to a rigid piece of winter birchwood, impossibly cold.
“I’m sorry.” Gáspár’s voice drifts toward me, soft as an echo. “If I were a true Woodsman, or a true prince, I could—”
I can’t catch the rest of what he says. Through half-shuttered lashes, I stare at his face, his broken nose and dark eye, the frost pearling in his hair. He’s so beautiful, I realize, and if I had the strength I might have laughed at my belated revelation. I feel oddly peaceful when I look at him, and very tired.
If Gáspár speaks another word, I don’t hear it. A black tide rises and falls, pulling me quietly under.
Chapter Nine
When I wake, it’s to the smell of roasting meat. My cheek is pressed to a wooden floor, inches from a hearth. My wolf cloak has been removed, but I am under a heavy pelt of pale gray fur. The fine hairs of the pelt part easily when I run my finger through it, like a raft splitting river water. I don’t know of any animal with fur so soft.
I sit up slowly and find myself staring into the gleaming amber eyes of a bear.
I open my mouth and close it again, but no sound comes out. The bear’s hot breath clouds against my throat. Its eyes are as bright as tiny buttons stitched into the woolly mass of its head. After a moment, it turns slowly and lumbers away, paws thudding softly on the ground.
It pads across the small room to where Gáspár lies, tucked under an identical gray pelt. The bear noses his body lazily, and Gáspár sits up with a start. When he sees the bear, what little color there is drains from his cheeks.
The bear is rousing us. Is this typical bear behavior? I do not know enough about bears to say for sure. For a moment I wonder if the bear pulled us from the ice and brought us here to its hut, which it built with its big clumsy paws, and now it’s cooking meat over the fire to welcome its visitors. If there’s anywhere in the world that such a thing could be true, it’s Kaleva.