Gáspár gives a laugh, humorless and short. “Because, unlike you, I care for others besides myself. Your people, pagan and Yehuli both, would be damned in the meantime. And I would leave my father to die in my absence like a coward.”
“Maybe you should care for yourself a bit more, then! Your father has earned none of your unbending loyalty,” I say sharply. “You are a wiser and gentler and more courageous son than he deserves.”
We both fall silent then, wind scuttling through the branches. My face heats with the feeling that I have confessed something I ought not have confessed, not when we are robed in a hundred years of boiling hatreds and both staring down the end of his brother’s blade. Gáspár draws in a breath, and I brace myself for his response, but he only lets it out again, wordless.
“If I were you, I would leave him to die,” I say, just to fill the unbearable silence, though even as I do, my chest tightens. Virág’s face, Boróka’s face, even Katalin’s face float up at me. If I succeed in finding my father, it means I will never see them again.
“I know,” Gáspár says, quietly.
And then neither of us can bear to say any more. Gray-washed evening light is falling through the tree cover, the path before us quilted with planks of sun and shadow. My vision is glazing over the endless thatch of trunks and coils of bramble when I see something move behind the trees. A flash of white skin among the evergreen leaves—something small and mortal-looking.
I glance at Gáspár, his eye flashing. In our shared second of silent indecision, a cry rings out from the brush. It is a human cry, and that makes our choice for us. I dig my heels into the horse’s flank, and my mare bolts through the tangled bramble. The pounding of hooves on the ground tells me that Gáspár is close behind.
The chase ends as quickly as it started. The figure has stopped inside a copse of willow trees, lithe branches swaying in the scant breeze, their fronds gossamer as a widow’s mourning veil. I jerk the reins and my horse skids to a halt.
There is nothing inhuman about her, I realize with a long breath of relief. No red-clay skin or unseeing white eyes. In fact, it’s very apparent how human she is, because she wears no clothes at all. A curtain of dark hair falls over her breasts, its color stark against her ivory skin. The soles of her feet are black with dirt.
I only notice her eyes as I slide off my horse. They are bluer than any eyes I have ever seen, bluer than Katalin’s, which inspired one of the village boys to compose a keening ballad in their honor. As children Boróka and I had cried ourselves laughing about that preening youth, even as we both tacitly wished he would sing about our eyes.
These eyes, though—there would be no songs written about their beauty, only their haunting pull. They are spangled bright with tears, even though her lips are a pale unfeeling line. Bewildered, I try to marry the anguish in her gaze with the pitiless cut of her mouth, like knitting together the hides of two different animals. Gáspár’s boot steps fall on the ground behind me.
“What’s happened, miss?” he asks, reaching out one gloved hand to bridge the space between us and the girl. “Why are you in the woods alone?” He leaves unsaid the question of where her clothes are, but I can tell by the pinking of his cheeks that he has not managed to entirely avert his eye.
The girl lifts her head, almost shyly, settling her bright-blue eyes upon me. For a moment I’m stunned in the path of her gaze, like a deer catching a hunter’s downwind scent, even as my heart clangs in my chest. She turns to Gáspár, and her stare roots him there too.
Then she speaks. It’s not a language I recognize; it’s not even that old Old Régyar. I don’t think it’s a language made for human ears. It sounds like leaves rustling in the wind, or the ice of Lake Taivas fracturing beneath my feet. Words spill out of her mouth as her lambent blue eyes water, and I realize that we were both terribly wrong—she isn’t human either.
Her colorless lips curl into something that resembles a smile.
Trembling, I reach for my knife, but my fingers won’t move the way I want them to. My gaze is tethered to her, and I can’t pull it away. She speaks again, the crackle of flames in a dying hearth, and I hear Gáspár choke something out. It sounds like my name, though I can’t be sure.
She moves toward me in a flash of white, pale lips parting. Inside her mouth is red and berry-bright. I don’t notice her teeth, rows and rows of them, slender and sharp as needles, until they are on my throat.