Gáspár meets my gaze, his black eye pooling with moonlight. He runs a hand through his dark hair, the same hand that grasped my hip like he could not bring me close enough. His face is so hard that, for a moment, I am almost ready to believe it was nothing but enchantment after all, just the red juice in our mouths. But when he speaks, his voice is thin with anguish.
“What would you have me do?” he asks. “You have already ruined me.”
Chapter Thirteen
Near where the élet River finally snakes through Király Szek, the land smooths and flattens, and green grass turns flaxen where it marks the edge of the Great Plain. The Great Plain swallows up nearly all of Akosvár, and the capital, too, the wide, fertile grassland that the Merzani are currently trying to conquer and burn. But there are no enemy fires burning on the horizon, just the dark swell of our shared silence, almost tangible. Neither of us has spoken in nearly two days.
My anger fizzled early, and in its absence, there came a pall of despair, all my blustery certainty withered like a stalk of wheat. The silence has given my mind the chance to run its worried circuit, returning only a hopeless augury: I have damned myself entirely, having chosen to walk right into the arms of the enemy. And our encounter with the creature has cost me even the meager protection of Gáspár’s proximity. He walks several yards ahead of me, showing me only the back of him, his shoulders stiff under his suba. When we reach the city, I suspect he will leave me for good.
My belly fills with an embarrassed, lurking hurt. I should not be mourning the loss of a Woodsman’s goodwill, or thinking hungrily of his touch. Pagans don’t have a ritual of repentance like the Patritians do, a cheek-to-the-floor confession, but I was always made to pay for my mistakes in other ways. Now I almost wish for lashings, or to be tasked with Virág’s most odious chores. I wonder if there is a Yehuli way of killing your guilt and burying it. Perhaps I will learn soon.
Or perhaps I will be dead first. Gáspár stops suddenly, his horse’s tail bridling. I come to his side slowly, the way one would approach a dog that was keen to snap. Seeing his profile, amber cast in the midday sunlight, makes my stomach clench like a fist. There is still a bruise on his throat in the shape of my mouth, stubbornly violet.
“What is it?” I manage. My voice is hoarse from disuse.
Gáspár’s gaze lifts, but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes. I remember the way my thumb brushed across his cheekbone, my lips against his eyelid. I wonder if he is thinking of it too. His jaw is set hard, and when he speaks, it is with a Woodsman’s steel edge.
“This is your last chance,” he says. “Turn back and spare yourself.”
He has done all he can to keep his words from betraying concern, his eye cold and unflinching. But I have seen enough of his dogged pretense to recognize it, the calculated falsehood of his ambivalence. I know the way his mouth tastes now. I have heard him moan into the shell of my ear.
“I’ll turn back if you will,” I say. “I’ll go back to Keszi and face my lashings if you flee to Rodinya and find some amiable lord to shelter you. How is that for a bargain?”
Gáspár doesn’t reply, and I didn’t expect him to; he turns away from me and spurs his horse onward, following the line of the river. I urge my mare slowly after him, face burning. It is the memory of tenderness that wounds me more than the desire. I have desired many men who had me brusquely and were afterward too ashamed to meet my eyes. But I have never wanted to kiss their wounds, or bare to them any of my own. I had thought myself truest when I was skinning baby rabbits and seething with vicious hatreds, but perhaps that tenderness is true too. I wonder how tender I might have been, if I had not lived cowering under the threat of Virág’s reed whip, forever menaced by Katalin’s blue flame.
But that matters little now. I ought to slough off any tenderness like old dead skin. It will only leave me soft-bellied and spent when we reach Király Szek. The river churns beside me, the foaming crests of the waves iridescent when they catch the sunlight. Gáspár has gone so far ahead that I can scarcely see him now, unless I raise a hand to shield my eyes and squint against the glare.
I have never deserved less to wear the wolf cloak over my shoulders, but a memory rises in me anyway, stinging and sour, like a swallow of saltwater. If Gáspár were speaking to me, I would tell him one last story: Once, Vilm?tten did slay a dragon—not the one who loved a human woman, I don’t think. But this dragon was a man with seven heads, too, and he rode into battle with full mail on the back of an eight-legged horse.