“The journey to the capital takes half a moon at best,” Virág says, oddly serene. “Enough time for visions to change.”
Her words hurt worse than a thousand lashes. I want to ask why she bothered raising me after my mother was taken, only to throw me up as a shield against the Woodsmen at the first opportunity. But I can’t say any of that with the Woodsman approaching. And then it occurs to me, terribly, that perhaps I’ve answered my own question: I was raised like a goose for the slaughter, just in case this moment ever came.
The Woodsman stops his horse mere inches from where I stand and looks down, eyes passing over me as if I were a piece of livestock fettered for auction. “Is this the young seer?”
“Yes,” Virág says. “Five and twenty years old and already half as skilled as me.”
My cheeks flush. The Woodsman glances back at his captain, who gives one swift, curt nod. Of course he wouldn’t ask her to prove it; only a fool would try to cheat the Woodsmen. Then he says, “Get her a mount.”
Virág grabs hold of the nearest girl, a young healer named Anikó, and gives her a hushed command. Anikó slips through the row of villagers and disappears. When she emerges a moment later, she’s leading a white mare behind her.
The Woodsman slides off his own horse. From the satchel on his hip, he produces a small length of rope. It takes me a moment to realize that he means to bind my hands.
Were my mother’s hands bound, when they took her? I can’t remember. I’m shaking like a sapling in a winter storm. The Woodsman bends over slightly as he binds me, and from this vantage point, I’m struck by how young he looks, younger even than me. Not more than twenty and the king has already made him a monster.
When he’s finished, he takes the mare’s lead from Anikó and draws the horse over to me. It’s clear that I’m supposed to mount her, but my hands are tied and my knees feel too weak to support my weight.
“Get up, then,” the captain says, sensing my hesitation.
My gaze sweeps across the clearing until I meet his eye. It’s as black and cold as a new-moon night.
I’m stunned by how quickly the fear floods out of me, leaving only loathing in its wake. I hate him so much that my breath catches. I hate him more than Katalin, more than Virág, more than I ever hated the fuzzy idea of a Woodsman, just a dark shape in my worst dreams. Even though I know he’s not nearly old enough to have done it, I hate him for taking my mother away from me.
None of the villagers move as I scramble clumsily onto the mare’s back, trembling as if I’ve been wracked by a vision myself. I can’t help but scan the crowd, searching for tearful eyes or grieving mouths, but I only see their impassive masks, pale and blank. Boróka alone looks like she might weep, but her palm is pressed over her lips, fingernails carving bloody crescent moons into the skin of her cheek.
I’ve long given up on any of them loving me, but I still ache at how easy it is for them to hand me over. I’m a good hunter, one of the best in the village, even if I can’t forge my own arrowheads. I spent years doing Virág’s drudgery, even if I muttered curses the whole time, and I killed and cleaned half the food on their feast tables.
None of it matters. Without a lick of magic to my name, the only thing I’m good for is a sacrifice.
Now mounted on the mare’s back, I grip the reins with numbing fingers. Zsófia styled a section of my hair, grudgingly, into a dozen tiny, intricate braids as thin as fishbones, while the rest hangs down my back, newly white. The wolf cloak sweeps over my shoulder, and I remember all the times I yearned to have one of my own. It feels like Isten playing his cruelest joke.
“Come on,” the captain says, voice sharp.
And that’s the end of their visit. They come, they take, they leave. Our village has paid its tax—a cruel, human tax—and that’s all the Woodsmen want. The cold brevity of it all makes me hate them even more.
My horse trots forward to join the Woodsmen where they stand at the edge of the woods. Their long shadows lap at our village like dark water. As I approach, I hear a fluttering of leaves, a whisper on the wind that sounds almost like my name. More likely it’s my wishful imagination, hoping for even a word I could believe was a farewell. The trees do speak, but in a language we all stopped understanding long ago, a language even older than Old Régyar.
I meet the captain’s pitiless gaze. I don’t look back as my horse crosses the threshold from Keszi into Ezer Szem, but the trees shift behind me, knitting together into a lacework of spindly branches and thorn-limned vines, as if the woods have swallowed me whole.