My flush deepens at the word consort. Gáspár’s ear tips redden in turn.
“If only court politics were so simple,” he says. “Nándor has drawn half the population of Király Szek to his side, not to mention the Woodsmen and counts. If their imagined savior is killed, there will be riots in the square. And the first place the mob will turn is Yehuli Street.”
“What?” I wheel toward him, shock and fear like a sharp arrow in my chest. “You never said anything about that.”
Gáspár inclines his head, as if holding himself against my sudden fury. “I warned you that Nándor has roused more loathing toward the Yehuli, and he will do worse if he manages to take the throne.”
“Worse,” I repeat slowly. My throat is terrifically dry. “Tell me what that means.”
“The Patritian countries in the west have already begun to expel their Yehuli to Rodinya. I suspect that Nándor will want to follow suit—it would please the Volken envoys, certainly, to see a caravan of Yehuli trailing out of the city, and all their houses turned to ash.”
A fire heats my blood and rises into my cheeks, and then I am pushing myself to my feet and shoving through the door into the cold. The rope ladder sways beneath me in the dark, and I nearly trip off the narrow ledge trying to clamber onto it. Tuula calls after me, but the wind muffles her words. My boots crunch the frost below and I curl my fingers around the bristling rope, feeling it chafe against my palm. I exhale, my breath misting in front of me, some poor effort to keep my tears at bay.
My heart is thrumming so loudly in my ears that I don’t hear Gáspár coming down the ladder until he is already at my side. For one long moment, the wind unfurls across the empty plain and we both stare straight ahead in silence.
“I thought you understood,” he says at last. “Nándor and his followers want to purge the country of everything that is not Patritian, everything that is not Régyar.”
I had understood, but only in the vague way of what-ifs and maybes, like squinting at a blurry shadow-shape in the dark. I had made peace, as best I could, with what it meant to be a wolf-girl, to always fear that the Woodsmen might knock down your door and steal away your mother or your sister or your daughter. But I had not allowed myself to consider the other half of what I was: it hurt to hold, like an iron poker left to bathe too long in the hearth. I find the coin in my pocket and press my thumb along its grooved edge.
The wind brushes past us, blowing back my hood. I turn to gauge the look on his face: no furrowed brow, no narrowed eye, no hard, haughty mouth. His head is tilted, lips parted slightly. In the silvery moonlight, I can see the sweep of his dark lashes against his cheek. It is easy to imagine, in this suspended, silent moment, that all the Woodsman has leached out of him. He is only the man who held me in the husk of that huge tree. The man who dove into the frigid water to save me.
“If your mother were alive,” I ask, pausing to draw a shallow breath, “out there somewhere, would you ever stop looking for her?”
Gáspár blinks. After another beat of silence, he says, “No. But I would hope that she was out there looking for me too.”
“What if she didn’t know?” I press on. “What if she thought that you were dead?”
“This is sounding less hypothetical by the second,” Gáspár says, but his tone is gentle.
Hands shaking, I pull the coin from my pocket and hold it out to him.
“Can you read it?” My voice sounds thin, almost unintelligible in the wind. “There’s Régyar on it.”
Gáspár takes the coin and turns it over. I realize for the first time that his hand is ungloved, bare. “It only says the king’s name. Bárány János. I can’t read the Yehuli.”
“I could,” I whisper. “Once.”
I hear the shift in Gáspár’s breathing. “I thought you said you never knew your father.”
It was just a small lie, and I’m surprised he even remembered. I shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut as if I can will all of it back to me, half-forgotten memories pulsing like distant torchlight.
“He came every year when I was young. Virág and the other women didn’t like it, but he stayed with my mother and me in our hut. He brought us trinkets from Király Szek, and books. Long scrolls. When he unraveled them, they stretched all the way from the door of our hut to the hearth in the corner. He started teaching me the letters, alef and bet and gimel . . .” The memory winks away from me, but I swear I can hear old parchment crinkling. “There was a story of a clever trickster queen and a wicked minister, and when he told it he gave the minister a silly, pinched voice, so he sounded like an old woman with a stuffed nose.”