He starts to climb down the rope ladder, and as soon as his feet touch the ice below I follow. I haven’t gotten far before I feel something snatch at my hood from above, and with a choked gasp I nearly slip from the rung. When my hood falls back I only see Szabín staring down at me, her lips pressed angrily, pendant glinting with a sharp and vicious light.
“Let go of me,” I bite out. “Or are we prisoners here?”
Szabín’s grip only tightens. “No Southerner has ever come to Kaleva without hunger in their eyes.”
I want to reply that being from Keszi hardly makes me a Southerner, but Szabín’s meaning is plain: to her, we are all Southerners. I steal a quick glance at Gáspár below, still holding fast to the ladder, and he looks back up at me in bewilderment.
“I’m already quite full of reindeer meat, thanks to Tuula,” I say, and smile as sweetly as I can manage. Szabín’s scowl only deepens. “What’s the use of renouncing your oath, sister, if you treat every pagan you meet with wariness and reproach?”
“You are the only one I’ve ever met,” Szabín says. She has the same muzzled disdain as Gáspár in the earliest days of our journey, when he alternated only between admonishing me for my barbarity and fretting over the state of his soul. “And you’ve done nothing to earn my trust.”
“I’ve done nothing to earn your ire either,” I say. The wind snarls past us with a renewed ferocity, shaking the ladder, and if Gáspár hadn’t been holding it from below I might have fallen. I have the odd, unbidden feeling that if I did fall, he would move to catch me. “It seems ill fitting for someone who shares their bed with a Juvvi to curl their lip at me. Do you take off your pendant before your coupling?”
My words are enough to unbalance her, to make her hold slacken at last. I wrench myself free, leaving a few hairs of my wolf cloak behind in her fingers, and hurry the rest of the way down the ladder. When my boots touch the snow I see that Szabín is still staring at me from above, her eyes narrowed, thin as gashes.
“What did she say to you?” Gáspár asks.
“Morbid Patritian dramatics,” I reply, voice short. Her words have pricked me in an unexpectedly tender place, or perhaps it’s only a deeper and older ember that she blew to life. Szabín is less a foe and more a fool, for believing that a Patritian could ever live in sated, happy peace with a Juvvi. Someone’s blade will swing between them eventually, or their own rages will burn Tuula’s hut to the ground. There is a small part of me that bristles with the knowledge that I am just as much a fool for ever finding comfort in the arms of a Woodsman. I turn up my hood again and face my gaze forward.
In daylight, the lake is as smooth as a polished silver coin, and the reflections of the dark trees are rippled on its surface. They are warped into something smaller and more comprehensible now, a tree I could have climbed as a child back in Keszi.
I step over their reflections as we walk, the ice groaning and creaking under our feet, but nothing breaks. I can’t even see the hole where I fell through, or the lacework of cracks. The ice has stitched itself back together like white silk over a black tear.
When we finish our crossing I could kiss the hard, solid ground in relief, even despite the ceaseless danger of the wood, thrumming as if with its own green-white heartbeat. Wreathed in fog, the forest is unchanged: there are the huge trees, lichen-thick and turned dark with snow melt, the frost glittering on each pine needle like strewn glass.
I remember the certainty I felt only a little over a day ago, some unnamable instinct flaring in my chest as I stared up at the tangle of branches, all knitted together like the weave of a basket, blue sky scarcely bleeding through. I feel none of that same certainty now. There is only Nándor’s name gliding through my mind, and the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days pattering after it like a hunting dog trailing its quarry. I press my palm against the nearest trunk, but if I ever did have some primal witch’s sense, it is gone now.
Despair looses in me. “I don’t know anymore. I thought the turul would be here, but now . . .”
Gáspár’s expression doesn’t shift; it’s as if my words have glanced off him. There is only the same hard look in his eyes, as if he had scarcely expected anything less. I don’t know why that, his disappointment, wounds me worse than anything.
Then, a flicker in his eye. “Do you hear that?”