I glance down at my own woolen cloak, brow furrowing. But Virág isn’t looking at me.
“My cloak?” Katalin clutches the collar of it, right near the curve of the wolf’s open mouth, suspended in an immortal howl.
“Yes. And go fetch a forger.”
Virág is already rifling through the salves and tonics on the shelf. With a flustered nod, Katalin hurries out of the hut, leaving her beautiful white cloak pooling on the dirt floor. The sight of it jolts me from my stupor; I snatch it up and hold it up to my cheek, but it feels wrong, as empty and bodiless as a ghost. My mouth tastes like metal.
“Virág, what are you going to do?”
“The Woodsmen want a seer,” she says, without looking up. “Keszi cannot spare one.”
I don’t have time to wonder at her words. Katalin bursts through the threshold again, Zsófia behind her. When she sees me—holding the wolf cloak too—she sucks in a haughty breath, pinched nose flaring. I want to believe that Katalin brought Zsófia just to spite me, but she really is one of the best forgers in the village.
“You must have known it all along,” Katalin says wretchedly. “You must have known they wanted a seer.”
“I suspected,” Virág admits. “But I couldn’t know with certainty. I also thought they might perish on their route. I thought perhaps the king would change his mind. But a vision is a vision. Now we don’t have much time.”
I open my mouth to say something, anything, but Virág’s fingers jerk roughly through my hair, smoothing the knots and tangles. I let out a feeble noise of protest. There’s a slow panic seeping into my belly.
Virág uncaps a small vial and pours its contents into her hands. It looks like white dust and smells sickly sweet. She works the mixture into my hair as if she were kneading dough for fried flatbread.
“Powdered asphodel,” she says. “It will turn your hair white.”
“Surely you don’t expect the Woodsmen to be deceived by a bit of dye,” Zsófia scoffs.
My stomach twists, sharp as a knife. “Virág . . .”
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at me. She turns to Zsófia, instead.
“The Woodsmen are not expecting Katalin,” she says. “They are merely expecting a seer. Still, you will need to forge some silver.”
With an enormous, persecuted sigh, Zsófia leans over and begins to sing—too quietly for me to make out the words, but I know the tune at once. It’s the song of Vilm?tten. Before doing his great deeds and making deals with gods, Vilm?tten was a bard, wandering from town to town with his kantele strapped to his back, hoping to make enough coin for bread and wine. That was the part of the story I liked the best—the part where the hero was just a man.
It’s the same song that my mother used to sing to me, cocooned in the safety of our shared hut while thunder and lightning skimmed across the black summer sky. Before I became Virág’s reluctant ward.
Before the Woodsmen took my mother from me.
I’ve only felt fear like this once. It comes back to me in flashes, the memories I’ve buried down deep. My mother’s hand, slipping from mine. The dull gleam of her gray cloak as she vanished into the woods. The lock of hair she’d pressed into my palm, mere moments before she left me for good.
I try to cry out, but the sound gets strangled somewhere in my chest, and comes out a half-formed sob.
I don’t care that I’m weeping in front of Katalin and Zsófia. I don’t care that Virág might lash me for it; I don’t care that this is precise, damning proof of what a coward I really am. All I can see is my mother’s face, bleary in my fifteen-year-old memory, fading, fading, fading.
Virág grabs hold of my chin. Through the rheum of tears her mouth is set, her eyes hard.
“Listen to me,” she snarls. “We all must do what we can to keep the tribe alive. We cannot allow the king to have the power of a seer. Do you understand?”
“No,” I manage, my throat beginning to close. “I don’t understand why you want to march me to my death.”
Virág lets go of me with a sharp breath, defeated. But the next moment, she’s thrusting a small piece of polished metal toward me. I stare at my own face within it, slightly warped by the curves of the forged mirror. Katalin’s face hovers behind my own, two polar stars in the darkness of the hut, our hair gleaming like new frost. Mine is not quite white—more of a dingy gray, sooty as liquid steel.