And then, suddenly, he stops.
I hardly have time to react before he pushes me away. I stumble backward, his name hanging off my stupid, gaping lips, while Gáspár puts his hand over his mouth, shoulders rising and falling in heated silence.
Just like that, the fog lifts. My vision swells and I can see the grid of trees behind him, the lacy veil of willow branches and their faint susurration. Moonlight beams down through the canopy, washing the whole clearing cold and white. The edges of everything are sharp again, and my blood is ice.
“It was an illusion.” Gáspár’s hand drops from his mouth, revealing the stain of juice on his chin, drying dark in the cool moonlight. “Some enchantment of that creature.”
My mind tries to close around the possibility, memories fluttering like the wind among dead leaves. I remember my fear turning to want as quickly as the sweet juice pooled in my mouth, like a sickly poison that fevered my blood. Perhaps it was the echo of the creature’s enchantment, lingering after her death like some scent on the air, before the breeze carried it away. My gaze travels to where her body had been. There’s nothing left but a desiccated jawbone, porous with accelerated time.
But it had only loosened me, like good wine. My brain and body had been my own, my recklessly roaming hands and the traitorous pulling between my thighs. Senseless and shameful, but I can’t shake the ebbing of my desire even now, the juice still stinging my lips.
“Do you think some dead creature has the power to move your mouth and tongue?” I ask, choking on a laugh. “Perhaps her poison put the thought in your mind, but you were hardly some limp little puppet. In fact, limp might be the very last word I’d use—”
“Quiet,” he snarls, his face as red as I’ve ever seen it, eye narrowed and coal black. He fishes his patch off the ground and fixes it around his head again. “If you speak of this to anyone, they’ll only call you mad.”
The ice-edged cruelty to his words makes my breath catch. I watch as he pins his suba back on and picks up his ax. With his jaw clenched and his eye angled away from me, he looks every inch a Woodsman again, the same dark shape that once appeared only in my most terrible dreams, and certainly never in my lustful imaginings.
“And how does this add to the tally of your sins?” My voice is shaking, tunic still slung low across my collarbone, baring one of my breasts. I pull it up again, flushing, as the sting of his rejection begins to settle. “When you bow at the feet of the érsek, will you ask Godfather Life to forgive you for kissing a wolf-girl? What about all those nights you spent holding her against the cold? There was no dead creature to move your limbs then.”
His fingers curl around the handle of his ax. For a moment I think he will raise it against me, even after all of this, the miles we’ve put behind us, our frigid days in Kaleva, after he blackened his soul to save my life. But Gáspár only looks at the ground and then shakes his head.
“It was enchantment,” he says again. “Why are you clamoring to convince me otherwise? You’re a wolf-girl; I’m a Woodsman. You said before that I was no more than a monster to you. This is a shame for us both to share.”
What little reason his words have is lost in the boil of my rage. Hearing him speak like the silver-tongued prince again, with his rigid courtly eloquence, sends me to the bitterest, meanest place I know. I scarcely hesitate before opening up my most ancient wound again, so I can make him share in its hurt. “I’m no true wolf-girl. You’ve known it since that night on the Black Lake. I’ve already turned my back on my village—I’m not some dumb, struck dog who runs back to its vicious master for another lashing. And you’re no true Woodsman, either, except for your blushing piety and your slavish dog’s devotion to the father who only ever showed you the end of his blade.”
Gáspár flinches, but it is not enough to make me regret the cruelty of my words. I rub the red juice from my lips and try to will down the hot coil of tears in my throat. Perhaps I wanted to kiss him to prove how little I cared for my people, for my mother’s braid in my pocket, her life ended by some Woodsman at the behest of his father. Perhaps I wanted to forget that between here and Király Szek I am not pagan, not Yehuli, only some stupid girl with her hand in both pockets, finding comfort in cold, dead things. Maybe I wanted his touch to erase me.
Or perhaps I wanted the opposite: maybe I wanted his kiss to give me shape, to see how my body transfigured under his hands. I don’t know who I have been with him these past weeks, indulging every perverse instinct, killing fat, slumber ing rabbits and openly professing to loathe my own people. My most spiteful self, and perhaps my truest.