Perhaps it’s close enough to swindle a Woodsman, but that’s where the similarities end. I’m short and thick-limbed, while Katalin is willow-tree tall, her narrow shoulders shooting up like a proud, thin trunk all long fingers and delicate wrist bones. Her skin has a milky translucence, the blue veins faintly visible, like a webbed leaf shot through with sunlight. My hair is—was—a reddish brown, as if my mother’s russet mane had been wrung out like water and sieved down to me, my eyes a murky green, my mouth small and scowling. My nose and cheeks are perpetually pink, and there’s a grid of whiskery scars across my chin from running face-first into a thicket.
I expect to see her preening, glowing. But Katalin’s lovely face looks as horror-struck as mine. In this moment only, we are perfect mirror images of each other.
Charlatan, I want to say. An hour ago you wished I would be taken.
I reach down to touch the braid in my left pocket, but it brings me no comfort this time.
“évike.” It’s Katalin’s voice, small and hushed like I’ve never heard it before. I watch her in the mirror, but I don’t turn around. “I didn’t mean—”
“You did mean it,” I say, my jaw clenched. “Or else you’re a liar. What’s worse, a liar or a monster?”
She doesn’t answer. I expect Virág to reprimand me again, but even she is silent now too. Zsófia’s singing has trailed off, the last note of the melody still yet to be hummed. In the quiet space left by her unfinished song, I hear it—the sound of hooves on the ground.
The villagers are gathered into neat rows, backs straight and chins held high as they stare into the mouth of the woods. Women and girls in front, men and boys behind. All blades are sheathed, all arrows held flush in their quivers. The mosquito-flecked evening settles over us like thick linen. Virág leads me through the very center of the crowd, parting the girls in their pristine cloaks. The women and girls all have two faces—the wolf’s and their own. Their human faces are schooled into masks, stoic and silent, and even the youngest know well not to shiver. But as I pass between them, their lips purse and their eyes widen. Boróka lets out a tiny gasp, and then claps her hand over her mouth. I can hardly bear to look at her.
And then I can only look at the Woodsmen.
They step forward, through our cowed and impotent trees. Four of them, on obsidian horses, each mount’s breast branded with the seal of their holy order. Each Woodsman wears a dolman of finely embroidered silk, and over it, a black suba, the same shaggy woolen cloak favored by herders on the Little Plain. It almost makes me want to laugh, to think of the Woodsmen as humble shepherds. They carry no swords, but there are great steel axes hanging at their hips, so heavy it seems a miracle that they don’t topple sideways off their horses.
How did my mother feel, when she saw the horrible glint of those axes?
Three of the Woodsmen have close-cropped hair, mangled scalps visible beneath the tufts that grew back scraggly and uneven. As boys, they grow their hair out long, and then cut it on their eighteenth name days, the same day that the king puts the axes in their hands. They burn all their long hair in a bonfire, sparks and awful smell shooting up into the night sky. It’s their sacrifice to the Prinkepatrios, and in return, he promises to answer their prayers.
But real power requires more than hair. My gaze travels to the fourth Woodsman, whose hair is longer, curling in dark ringlets against the nape of his neck. A leather patch is drawn over his left eye. Or the hole where his eye should be.
Only the most dedicated and pious boys part with more than their hair. An eye, an ear, a pink sliver of tongue. Their littlest fingers or the tips of their noses. By the time they’re men, many of them are missing tiny pieces.
Every muscle in my body is coiled like a cold snake, tensed with a thousand unmade decisions. I could run. I could scream. I could stammer out the truth to the Woodsmen.
But I can imagine what would happen if I did: those axes swinging through the crowd, slicing through flesh like shears through silk, bone crumbling into pith. Blood dyeing our wolf cloaks red. I remember that my mother went in silence, without tears in her gaze.
I touch her braid in the left pocket of my trousers, the gold coin in my right. I had just enough time to take them before Katalin swapped her cloak for mine.
The one-eyed Woodsman leans close to his compatriot. I can scarcely hear the words he speaks, but they sound something like: “Bring her.”
“Igen, kapitány.”
For all my newfound bluster, my heart is still pounding a frantic beat. I lean close to Virág, my voice a low, furious whisper. “This won’t work. They’ll figure out I’m not a seer. And then they’ll come back for Katalin, or worse.”