“What are you doing?” Tuula demands. “Don’t humble yourself to a Woodsman.”
The revulsion in her voice is blatant, unbidden. Gáspár doesn’t flinch.
“He’s no ordinary Woodsman,” Szabín says. Her eyes are wide and beseeching, even as Gáspár looks down at her in his blank bewilderment. “May Godfather Life keep you, my prince.”
From across the room, Tuula makes a choking sound. Realization smooths the furrow in Gáspár’s brow, and he offers Szabín a hand.
“May Godfather Death spare you,” he says. “Do not kneel for me, Daughter.”
Szabín takes his hand and rises to her feet. When he lets go, her sleeve slides down her wrist and nestles in the crook of her elbow, and I can’t help but stare in horror: every inch of her skin is mangled pink and white with scar tissue, a hundred raised marks that make Gáspár’s blemishes look as innocent as a bramble’s needling. Tuula’s face is twisted with sorrow, not shock. Gáspár’s eye hardens.
Szabín quickly rolls down her sleeve to hide the scarred flesh, a blush deepening her exceptionally pale face.
“Forgive me, my prince,” she says to Gáspár. “I saved you, but I cannot serve you. I am no one’s Daughter anymore.”
Szabín sits down by the fire, her shoulders up around her ears and her hands folded in her lap. Unlike Tuula, she looks a true Northerner: her eyes are two pools of ice-melt and her hair is pale as wheat chaff, shorn close to her scalp. It’s almost like a Woodsman’s. There is something harsh and roughhewn about her face, something almost masculine. From behind or in half-light, I might have mistaken her for a boy. The bear rests its black nose on the toe of Szabín’s boot, eyelids drooping.
“I’ve seen you before,” Szabín whispers, staring at Gáspár. She must not have recognized him at first, when she found him on the ice, all pale and no scowl on his face. “You came to visit our monastery in Kuihta with your father. Back then, you had two eyes.”
“Things change,” Gáspár says shortly.
“Yes, they do. That was when I thought I could be a faithful servant to the Prinkepatrios. I prayed every day that I was in Kuihta, every hour. Supplicants came to us for healing—fevers and boils, shattered bones. They needed my blood for it. Eventually I grew weary of bleeding for others. I wanted something for myself.”
I can hardly bear to look at her now, knowing what’s beneath her robes. Gáspár pulls his suba tighter around himself.
“Yet you still wear his symbol.” He gestures to her necklace. “Do you still pray to Godfather Life? Does He still answer?”
“Sometimes.” Szabín runs her thumb down the length of the iron pendant. “But the moment I decided to run, there was a change. He still answers my call, but His voice is distant. It used to feel as though I was whispering in His ear, but now it feels as though I’m shouting to Him across a lake in the snow.”
I remember the way Gáspár’s spoken prayers failed him when he tried to light the fire on the Little Plain. Perhaps each step he took farther north with a wolf-girl at his side made the threads noosing him to the Prinkepatrios weather and snap too. The thought drops in my stomach, heavy with unexpected guilt.
“Kuihta.” Gáspár says the Northern word carefully in his Southerner’s accent, as if it’s an ember on his tongue. “That’s the monastery where my brother was fostered. Nándor.”
A shadow falls over Szabín’s face. “Yes. I knew him well.”
The air in the room shimmers, the way it does in the languid summer heat. There is a swell of silence that it seems no one wants to fill until Gáspár says, “You must have seen the moment that he began to make himself a saint.”
Szabín’s fingers curl around the prongs of her pendant with such rapid certainty that I can tell it’s an old habit, not quite shaken. “Every Son and Daughter in Kuihta witnessed it.”
“Then it’s true?” Gáspár’s voice is flat, but his throat bobs. “I always thought it was a story invented for the érsek’s pleasure.”
“No,” says Szabín. “I was there, that day on the ice.”
I look between the two of them, stippled with their Patritian scars. Tuula places her hand on the flat of the bear’s head, eyes narrow and sharp. “Just because we’re godless heathens doesn’t mean you can speak as if we’re not here.”