“I beg your pardon,” Gáspár says. “We are travelers on our way to Király Szek. Could we trouble you for a meal? As soon as we eat, we’ll be on our way again, and we won’t ask you to show us more kindness than that.”
Anyone would be charmed by such a polite entreaty, and Gáspár is dressed in the Woodsman’s suba besides. The woman turns around slowly, a smile inching across her wizened face.
“Certainly,” she says. “My house is always open to weary travelers, and my gulyás is almost ready. Please, sit.”
The wooden chairs are a welcome relief after days riding on a saddle and nights spent sleeping against the hard, freezing earth. The woman stirs her cauldron, profile cast gold in the warm firelight. She has a sharp little nose and squirrel-bright eyes, which look almost squashed under the mudslide of her brow. She wears her hair long and loose, gray strands skimming the dirt floor.
She doesn’t look much like Virág, except that they are both old enough to be my mother’s grandmother, but the resemblance is enough to fill me with a low, skulking sadness. If all goes to plan, I will never see Virág again. I try to sit up a little straighter in spite of it, and do my best to emulate Gáspár’s deferent tone.
“My name is évike,” I say. “What’s your name?”
But the old woman doesn’t reply; she just keeps stirring the pot. Frankly, of all the things she could have done to evoke Virág, her ignoring me summons perhaps the greatest guilty nostalgia. The woman doesn’t seem remotely perturbed by my presence, bloodstained wolf cloak and all. Maybe her vision is going, and I look like a vaguely girl-shaped smudge.
“Have you always lived in Szarvasvár?” Gáspár asks. I wonder if he’s thinking about the seashells on the door.
“I have always lived along this riverbed,” the old woman says.
Closer now, the gulyás is even more tempting than before. She ladles two servings into bowls of hammered tin, lumpy with carrots and potatoes and thin strips of meat. The spices have dyed the broth red.
It hasn’t been long since we’ve eaten—two rabbits that I shot near where we found the circle of stones—but I am suddenly ferocious with hunger.
I lift the spoon to my lips. “What is this meat?”
“Mink,” the woman says.
But there are no minks in Szarvasvár. There are no minks anywhere south of Kaleva, now, because soldiers and missionaries from the south hunted them to extinction. Virág has a pair of mittens made of sleek brown mink fur, and I remember rubbing my hands across the surface of them, imagining what it might have been like to live in Régország before the Patrifaith beat down its doors.
I look down at the stew again, and I gag.
Coiled vipers and earthworms are writhing in a horrible knot. The edges of the tin bowl are greasy with mud and pitted with the corpses of fruit flies. Perched carefully on my spoon, a tiny gray toad gives a diminutive croak.
Ice in my veins, I turn to Gáspár. He’s lifting his own spoon to his mouth. I launch myself across the table and knock the spoon out of his hand, tipping both of our bowls onto the ground. The vipers go hissing and skittering across the floor, while the earthworms wriggle blindly in the dirt. The mud laps at the old woman’s skirt like dark water.
“What are you doing?” Gáspár demands.
I grab his chin and tilt his face toward her. “Look.”
The woman is not a woman anymore, or, rather, she never was one at all. Her hair is swamp grass. Her eyes are two smooth white stones. Beneath her dress and her apron, her skin has a sheen of red and hardness that was not there before; her wrinkles are lines that someone has etched into the mud of a dried-up riverbed.
“Come eat, children,” she says, in a voice like the sound of wind rasping through the cattails. “You’re tired. You’re hungry, and there’s plenty to go around.”
Suddenly, I feel very tired indeed. Gáspár slumps back down in his chair, eyelid fluttering under the weight of her enchantment.
My own eyelids are heavy, but through my lashes I can see the not-woman looming over me, hands outstretched. She has fish scales for fingernails that look iridescent in the firelight. Dirt is caulked under those nails, crumbling and black.
Her fingers curl around Gáspár’s throat, and I watch, trancelike, as his veins throb and darken, a poison threading down his neck and under his dolman. His chest heaves, and a blind panic knifes through the haze of her enchantment.