Tuula’s hut is raised ten feet off the ground, straddling a quartet of oak trees that look like chicken legs, the way their roots are splayed into the frozen earth. We climb down on a rope ladder, which swings raggedly in the wind. I wonder how Tuula managed to haul the firewood up the ladder, much less our unconscious bodies. She’s as short as I am and far leaner. I don’t even try to contemplate how the bear got up there.
We haven’t gone very far from the hut when something begins to take shape in the distance, two mounds in the snow, like bleary thumbprints. I squint and squint against the snarling wind. As we approach I see a pair of horses, one black and one white, lashing their tails and snorting.
My wolf hood tumbles down my back as I turn to Tuula. “How did you find them?”
“It wasn’t easy,” she says. “Horses tend to resist my charms.”
I hold my peace about her charms.
Letting out a breath, I press my hand against my white mare’s muzzle. She snuffs into my palm, a sound of contrition, as if she’s trying to apologize for abandoning me. It surprises me how grateful I am to see her again, not just a relic from now-distant Keszi, but a means of escape, should I choose it. Tuula doesn’t appear to have a horse of her own. I find myself wondering how fast a bear can run.
Gáspár has his hand braced on his horse’s neck, but he’s watching Tuula with a tight mouth.
We continue across the plain, toward a black mass moving in the snow. We pace closer and I see that it’s not one mass but many, a shifting herd of reindeer with silvery coats. Their heads are bowed, chewing at the sparse tufts of grass that have speared through the frost. As Tuula approaches them their heads lift, limpid eyes following her in a dreamlike stupor. My skin prickles. Beneath his suba, Gáspár’s shoulders tense.
Tuula’s skirt blows out behind her, casting a dark shadow over the ice. She holds out her hand to the closest reindeer, and it saunters dutifully toward her, nosing her palm. Faster than an eyeblink, its legs buckle beneath it. The beast topples to the ground, its great coronet of antlers rolling unceremoniously in the snow.
“He’s asleep now,” Tuula says, still holding her gaze on its steel-gray ruff. “Woodsman, why don’t you make it quick?”
She returned Gáspár’s ax to him inside her hut, handing over the huge blade without a quiver of hesitation. It only made me trust her less. If she didn’t fear an armed Woodsman, she was either marvelously stupid or unfathomably powerful. Staring at the crumpled reindeer makes my mouth go dry.
Gáspár swings his ax with a determination and precision that surprises me. Until now he’s wielded it clumsily, hesitantly. Blood leaks in jagged rivulets down the snow, following the slight decline of the plain and pooling at my feet. It grafts onto the reindeer’s fur, limning each silver fiber, the way Peti’s blood hardened on my wolf cloak. Tuula reaches down to grasp the dead creature’s antlers, and realization floods me like a trough filling with rainwater.
“You’re Juvvi,” I say.
Tuula turns toward me slowly. “And what does it mean to you, wolf-girl?”
I only know what is threaded into Virág’s stories of heroes and gods, her blinkered histories. I know that when the first Northern scouts rode into Kaleva, they found the Juvvi already there, rows and rows of reindeer at their backs. They said the land was theirs, and that it had been given to them by the gods. As more Northern settlers trickled in, they resented the Juvvi for squandering the land, using it only for hunting and herding and fishing instead of farming. They pushed the Juvvi to the scraggly edges of the Far North, and then the Patrifaith pushed them even farther. Virág says that the Juvvi have a magic of their own, some boon from their gods to help them survive in this barren place, even when a series of Patritian kings tried desperately to snuff them out.
“It means you loathe the Woodsmen,” I say finally, raising my voice over the keening of the wind. “Why did you save us?”
Tuula’s gaze shifts to Gáspár, his gloved fingers curled rigidly around the handle of his ax. I see the familiar gleam of manacled hatred in her eyes, the lip curl of poison swallowed so many times. After a moment, she looks back at me.
“When I found you on the ice, I knew you would survive,” she says. “You were as cold as the Half-Sea in deep winter, but there was still color in your cheeks, and your breath was warm against my hand. He was scarcely breathing at all, and his lips were bone white. He had taken off his cloak and used it to cover you. I knew that if a Woodsman had tried to give his life to save a wolf-girl, he would be willing to make peace with a Juvvi too.”