A murder of crows tracks us from overhead, their cries glancing off the ice and echoing for miles. Tuula hums two lonely notes of a song I don’t know and the crows descend, grasping the fur of the dead reindeer in their grizzled talons. They glide up again, the flutter of their wings like a staggered heartbeat, and lift the reindeer up to the threshold of Tuula’s hut. When the crows depart again, they leave a gift of obsidian feathers, snatched up quickly and swallowed by the wind.
Tuula mounts the rope ladder, then looks back at us expectantly. I stand with my boots planted in the snow, jaw set. I’m not sure how wise it is to follow her back into the bear’s den, but the empty plain spools before me for miles, blisteringly white. I remember closing my eyes against the fist clench of cold and not expecting to open them again. Better to face the bear, I decide, and wrap my hand around the first rung of the rope ladder.
I’m not sure what I’m expecting when we reach the top. Tuula offers us food and she doesn’t try to wheedle the ax from Gáspár’s grasp. She feeds Bierdna hunks of reindeer meat by hand, pink and raw, blood dampening the fur around the bear’s mouth. Its incisors are gleaming like slender arrowheads in the firelight.
Gáspár doesn’t touch his food, and he doesn’t speak either. He stares into the hearth, his good eye angled away from me.
I half expected him to try to refute Tuula’s story. Perhaps he thought we were both doomed and it mattered little whose heartbeat faltered first. I have very nearly convinced myself of this when my traitor body turns toward him and my traitor lips part and whisper, “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for your gratitude.”
It’s the same thing he told me so many days ago in the woods with Peti, and it makes me twice as angry now. “Is it another black mark on your soul, to save a wolf-girl’s life? If I’m made to stomach any more of your pious glowering, I’ll start to wish you had left me to drown.”
“No,” he says curtly, without meeting my eyes. “Leave it alone, évike.”
The beats of my name are like three pulses of light: quick, moribund. I blink and they have vanished. For a moment I think I imagined him saying it, imagined him calling me anything but wolf-girl. But I know I didn’t imagine his body pressing along the length of mine, all those nights on the ice, or the heat of him as we slept in the cloister of roots, breathing soil. My only imaginings are what scroll across the insides of my eyelids: my hand on the column of his bare throat, thumb brushing the blade of his collarbone. I only allow my most prudish dreams to surface now. Anything more will make my stomach curl black with shame.
If ?rd?g were anything like the Prinkepatrios he would rescind my newfound magic, like a hawk snatching up a mouse, for thinking of a Woodsman this way. I look down at my right hand, bereft of its littlest finger, and feel his threads tighten around my wrist.
Gáspár is examining his own wrist, the soft stretch of skin where his cut had been. The memory of his confession makes my heart quicken, even more when I remember the vow I made in return.
“How many days until Saint István’s feast?” I ask, my voice more uncertain than I want it to be.
Gáspár rolls his sleeve back down, still facing away from me. “Too few.”
Tuula is watching us with lidded eyes as the bear licks her hand clean, its shoulder blades as huge as boulders. Its ear twitches, like it’s trying to rid itself of a fly. Seeing the beast cowed like that, demure as a house cat, makes an idea take root in my mind. Tuula splayed a reindeer on its belly with just the touch of her hand, and summoned a murder of crows with two notes of a nameless lullaby. What would it take, I wonder, for her to call down something bigger and more reticent?
Something luminous with the gods’ magic?
I am opening my mouth to speak when the door clatters open, letting in a vicious squall and another girl with it. She is bundled in reindeer fur, hood pulled up over her head.
The bear lurches to its feet, snuffling around the hem of the girl’s cloak. Out of habit, I reach into my pocket for my knife before remembering that it was taken from me. I find my coin instead, and clamp my fingers around it. Beside me, Gáspár stiffens, reaching for his ax.
“Szabín,” Tuula says, rising. “Our guests are awake. évike and Gáspár—”
The woman—Szabín—flicks off her hood, but she doesn’t stop to greet Tuula. Instead, she crosses the room in one long stride and drops to her knees in front of Gáspár. As she does, her cloak flaps open, revealing a loose brown tunic and the cord of a necklace. Its pendant, a sheet of metal hammered into the shape of a three-pronged spear, gleams with firelight in its grooves and edges.