And then, without my willing it, another flood of images comes volleying up. I think of Gáspár’s arms braced around me inside the damp tree hollow, roots holding us in that timeless suspension. His soft, weary voice in my ear, the pine-salt smell of him. Him diving into the ice after me, and putting his own cloak around me even as he froze. My stomach folds with shame. I’d told him how much they all loathed me, how they wanted to leave me to be eaten, even confessed the awful secret of my waning grief: that sometimes I couldn’t remember my mother at all. I sheathed my claws and hid my teeth for him, and now he wants me to go soft and toothless back to Virág with her reed whip, and Katalin with her fire, and all the other villagers with their pitiless gazes.
Anything I can think to say feels abysmally stupid. So I turn away from Gáspár, away from Tuula and Szabín and the infernal bear, and trample through the snow, toward the lake’s pale, unblinking eye.
The way Virág’s story goes, Vilm?tten left his home for Kaleva, nothing but his kantele strapped to his back. He traveled for so long that he found himself no longer in the Middle-World, the mortal world, but in the Under-World, ?rd?g’s kingdom. All around him he saw the souls of the departed, dead of illness or old age or grievous injury, their skin black and fetid, worms writhing in the sockets of their missing eyes.
No mortal had ever traveled to the Under-World and returned. Vilm?tten knew that. But he began to pluck his kantele and sing, a song so beautiful that it moved ?rd?g, the god of death himself, to tears.
“You may go,” he told Vilm?tten. “But you can never return.”
And so Vilm?tten was allowed to enter the Middle-World again. But later, when he fell down and cut his hand on a sharp rock, he saw that the cut was not bleeding. The skin had stitched up again in an instant, tight as a drum. Vilm?tten looked at his reflection in a lake of ice and saw that all his wrinkles had been smoothed, the gray on his temple dyed black and new. He was young again, and no wound or fever could harm him. ?rd?g, the god of death, had given Vilm?tten the gift of life.
The story is the origin of the other girls’ healing magic, only they are not quite as immaculate as Vilm?tten. Their hair still goes silver and their skin still creases with time, just slower than others’。 Slower than mine. And the healing takes something from them: I have seen Boróka’s face grow paler and paler as she worked, sweat pearling on her brow, and afterward she was so tired she slept through two sunrises without waking. It almost seemed like it aged her, the work of her magic eating away at the years of her life.
As I skid across the lake, toward the dark mound of Tuula’s hut in the distance, I stare down at my hand with its missing finger. I remember closing my fist over the fire, watching the flames die beneath my touch, and it occurs to me: if the other wolf-girls can make fire and I can snuff it out, it means that perhaps, where they heal, I can hurt.
I’m too afraid to wonder what it will take from me. I clamber up the snowbank, panting hard. Just past her hut, Tuula’s reindeer move in blurs of silver, like clouds drifting. Their antlers are bone grails, holding cupfuls of sky. They are still nosing the ground absently as I approach, their sleek flanks rising and falling with their breath.
The threads around my wrist go taut. I reach my four-fingered hand toward the nearest reindeer, and I almost hesitate. My intent wavers for a moment, and then snaps back again, like a scale righting itself after the weight is lifted. I splay my fingers against its flank, feeling the soft give of its fur.
Moments whip past me, wind snarling. And then the reindeer rears its head and grunts and bolts away from me, but not before I see the burned mark on its side, a red blister in the shape of my hand.
The rest of the herd startles with it, bucking down the plain. I let them shoulder past me, waiting for the repercussion. Waiting for what I have done to echo, for it to reverberate in my ear like a plucked bow string. Nothing. I wait and wait, and I don’t realize that I’m crying until I feel the tears freezing on my cheeks.
If it were so easy as that, I could’ve had power long ago. If I had known, I would have lopped off my finger in a heartbeat. I would have killed all of Katalin’s blue flames, and I would never have lowed for any of Virág’s lashings. I feel like a guileless child that I had to wait for a Woodsman to teach me what it meant to sacrifice. That I hadn’t understood the stories of my own people until I’d spoken them aloud myself, with Gáspár listening.
My people. Katalin would have snatched the words right from my mouth.