Still woozy, I reach for her, but my limbs are stiff and too heavy. I fall out of the chair, collapsing on my hands and knees in the dirt. Gáspár slumps in his seat, eye shut. The blackness in his veins is pulsing, and I can smell the green rot of blighted wood and it reminds me of Peti dying and I nearly retch. With great effort, I reach for her ankles, sturdy as twin oaks beneath the fringe of her white muslin dress.
Witches don’t bleed, of course. There’s no skin to blister. ?rd?g’s magic does its work anyway: a chunk of her leg breaks off in my grasp, like the handle of a clay pot. The not-woman releases Gáspár and stares down at the wound, blank pebble eyes narrowing in impossible shock.
She reaches for me, hobbling on the crooked stump of her leg, and then I reach for the other one. Another piece of her comes away in my hand, staining my palms with red dust. She crumples, and as she falls to the ground, her clay fingers close around the hood of my wolf cloak. She smells like pond water gone green and stagnant in the summer heat. Hunks of her crumble over me, a shard of cheek and the nub of her thumb. I grasp her by the wrist and don’t let go, until the roughhewn bits of her are scattered across the dirt floor.
My cloak is dyed crimson with clay-grime. I cough and splutter, pushing myself to my feet, still dizzy with the ebbing of the witch’s spell. Gáspár is slumped and motionless, tarry blackness pulsing in his veins. I drag myself toward him, but then I feel a pull in the opposite direction. I turn. There’s a green vine nosing out of the dirt, and it has laced itself around my ankle.
Fear closes around my heart. For the first time since killing the witch, I look around the house. The roof is not thatched with grass at all. It’s hair. Human hair. The jars on her shelves are teeming with earthworms and red-bellied snakes, tiny toads and plaintively buzzing flies. In one of them I swear I see a pink wedge of tongue, still wriggling.
I force myself forward, nails scraping through the dirt, against the tug of the vine. Its thorns are goring through the leather of my boot. As the weariness sloughs off me, I manage to turn and tear the vine from its root, then scramble toward Gáspár and loop his arm over my shoulder. He feels impossibly heavy—even as I lift him and stagger toward the door, I worry that I’ll collapse before I reach it.
The knife-slit of light ahead is narrowing. At first I think it’s a trick of my hazy mind, but then I feel the dirt under me roiling, rising. The sod walls are shrinking in on us, so tight and close that my lungs fill with the scent of damp soil and I can scarcely breathe. No, not shrinking.
Swallowing.
Strung limp over my back, Gáspár gives me no help. My vision ripples and blurs.
I barrel through the threshold just before the sod roof caves in on us. Through the snarl of weeds and dirt, I hear the wind chimes pealing out our exit—only they’re not seashells but finger bones, all cobwebbed up in black thread alongside a small child’s skull. When the house crumples, the bones ring with their own demise.
All the fires in the other sod houses have gone out. A wind sweeps through, blowing yellow hair off their roofs. I collapse to the ground, Gáspár rolling limp onto his back. His eye is still shut and wind shivers into the hollow of my ear and I want to cry out, the way I did for seven days and seven nights after my mother was taken.
Tamping down the urge to weep, I tug at the collar of Gáspár’s dolman, trying to see how deep the poison has gone. His chest is still rising and falling, only more slowly now, with more beats between each breath. With mounting panic, I loose the gold buttons down the front of his jacket, fingers sweeping through the fur lining. Underneath he wears a chemise of black leather, blood-slicked.
I can’t get it off him without pulling it over his head, so I reach for my knife, instead. I draw a long slit down the front of his shirt, cleaving the leather in two. It opens like black petals over his bare chest. His veins are dark as pitch, cobbling in an inky swell over his heart. My four fingers close into a fist, and I realize with a flood of helpless anguish that my newfound magic will do him no good: all I can do is hurt.
I kneel over him in the dirt, hands shaking, a sob rising in my throat at how I might as well be the same girl I was when I left Keszi, impotent and weak, and then suddenly the blackness starts to recede. The way the witch’s enchantment waned from me slowly, Gáspár’s veins return to green. That cobbled murk over his heart quivers and fades. And when his eyelid flutters open again, I have to steel myself so I don’t start weeping, this time in relief.