Vilm?tten was not a warrior. He was only a bard who had been granted the favor of the gods. He wondered how he might slay such a creature, with nothing to his name but a five-stringed kantele, which made music, not war. Isten told him he must forge a sword.
“But how?” Vilm?tten asked. “I have no steel to melt, and no skills as a smith. Besides, what kind of blade could slay such a monster?”
“The sword that you make with the blessings of the gods,” Isten replied. And then he clipped off one of his fingernails and let it fall to the Middle-World below. It was thick and heavy as steel, and carved with the magic of the father-god himself. And because the nail had been a sacrifice, death lived inside it also.
Vilm?tten had the power to make fire, thanks to the star he had swallowed. While he worked, he sang. He sang a song of battle （the words of which have been forgotten, or maybe just forgotten by Virág）。 When he finished his forging, the song ended too.
Vilm?tten’s sword looked like nothing special. It had a bronze hilt and a silver blade. But when he held it up to the sky, a bright flame burst across the length of it, as if someone had struck the blade with a piece of flint. He slew the dragon with his sword, cutting off all seven of its heads in one swing. The sword was coveted across all of Régország and the lands beyond, but when Vilm?tten sailed away to the realm of the gods, the sword was lost.
I have no gleaming sword forged from a sliver of Isten’s nail; I have only my own untested magic, and Király Szek is filled with a thousand dragons, all of them men in disguise. Still, I let the words twine silently through my mind, as if I might make a weapon of them. Virág’s stories never comforted me when I was sitting at her hearth, knees pulled to my chest, aching with the labor of her chores and chafing under Katalin’s cruel stare. Now so many miles from Keszi the familiar words gird me like battle mail, and it seems like a trickster god’s mean joke: that I should yearn for her solace only as soon as I have forsaken it. I reach for my mother’s braid, red as a fox’s pelt and smooth from all my years of stroking. I wonder if Gáspár has kept any relic of his mother. I wonder if I will ever have a chance to ask him.
I draw my hand to my lips, still swollen with the memory of his touch, and then urge my horse forward after him.
Two miles out of the capital, the sky ceases to be blue.
We stand on a small hill outside of Király Szek, wind bris tling past us. A mass of seething clouds is gathered over the city, thick and low-hanging, lush with unshed rain. It casts the city in a grayish half-light, almost like the murky reflection of the real Király Szek rippling on the surface of a lake at dusk. It almost comforts me, that black mantle of storm clouds. Maybe a torrent of rain will come down and wash the festival-goers out of the streets.
If Gáspár takes particular notice of the looming clouds, he doesn’t comment on them. I let my gaze sweep across the horizon, ambling over the palace belfry and down again to the sloping roofs of the houses. The city is an earthwork, banked with mounds of soil to fortify it against a siege, but I can see even from a distance the beginnings of a stone wall around the old wooden barricades, higher in some places than others. It looks like a project recently undertaken, perhaps in anticipation of the Merzani army. The élet River gashes the city in two, a shock of silver-blue cleaving east from west.
The outer layer of the city is a scruff of farmland, squares of yellow wheat alternated with tracts of green and red paprika plants, each pepper gleaming like a ruby scythe. A long black road daggers through the farmland, terminating at the main city gate. And, of course, because it’s festival day, the road is glutted with travelers: devout men and women making their pilgrimage on foot or on horseback, slogging toward Király Szek to pay tribute to the memory of the nation’s first Patritian king.
A braid of fear and anger coils in my chest, burning like an old scar. Gáspár leads me down to the road, where we join the throng of Patritians, all a chaos of protests and muttered prayers. Their eyes glint from their dirty faces like knifepoints, bright and sharp, gazes fixed toward the gate and the palace that knuckles over the old wooden walls. None of them seems to notice that a wolf-girl has entered their procession.
“You have certainly chosen the most treacherous time to arrive in Király Szek,” Gáspár murmurs, and I hear the bridled worry in his voice. “There is no worse day to be a wolf-girl in the capital, when Patritian zeal reaches its fever pitch.”