All furious panic, I hurl myself to the nearest door and pound on it rudely, then stand back, chest heaving. After a few moments, the door lurches open, ancient springs squealing. A squat woman blinks at me from the threshold, a gilt-edged book shoved under her arm.
“What’s the meaning of this?” she demands—angrily, and I don’t blame her. I must look half-mad in my wolf cloak, tunic still stained with red juice. I force my numb lips to move.
“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say. “Is this his house? Do you know—”
The woman lets out a chortling laugh and slams the door in my face.
It all happens too fast for me to feel any way about it. My mind hardly registers her rebuff before my legs are carrying me to the next house. I hear Gáspár slide off his horse, and by the time the second door clatters open, he is right behind me.
“I’m looking for Zsidó Zsigmond,” I say, before the man can speak. “Is this his house? Do you know where he lives?”
The man has long curling black hair, laced through with threads of gray. When he opens his mouth I see that one of his teeth has been set in silver. I reach for the coin in my pocket, ready to hold it up like some mute, useless offering.
“We are all Zsidó here, girl,” he scoffs. “Zsidó is the name the Patritians gave us, so they wouldn’t sully their Patritian mouths by speaking in our tongue.”
And then he closes the door without another word. Knees quaking, I turn slowly toward Gáspár. A flush of red goes through my face, my throat tightening with a coil of shame and anger.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand. “Did you want me to look a blundering simpleton, some insipid wolf-girl you dragged out of the woods to civilize?”
For a moment, Gáspár doesn’t reply, only stares at me with a tight mouth. There’s a familiar glint of misery in his eye.
“I thought you knew,” he says finally. “I didn’t realize how little you’d been told about the Yehuli and how they live here.”
I don’t want to hear any more. I turn on my heel, cheeks still burning, and march up to the next house. Paint is peeling off the wood in long tongues of red, and something that looks like a silver scroll is hammered to the door. It’s stamped with more Yehuli letters that make my eyes water and my mind glaze over, like staring at a bleary shape on the horizon.
Another woman opens the door. She has chestnut hair braided neatly as a string of garlic, her eyes wavering between green and hazel. I can see rough, vague mirrors of my own features in hers—the reddish tint to her hair, the pointed nose, the small, worrying mouth—and in that suspended instant I manage to convince myself that I have found my father’s house, and that she is an aunt or a cousin or maybe even a sister.
“Is this Zsigmond’s house?” I ask, voice squeezed tight with hope.
The woman shakes her head, sadly.
“Not on Shabbos,” she whispers, and then closes the door.
Her rebuff needles through my numb resolve. I have to draw in another quick breath to keep from whimpering, though I know Gáspár sees the anguish on my face. He reaches toward me, gloved hand open, and then abruptly draws back. The clear retraction of his kindness nearly unravels me. I held him so fast and so close and with such desperate fervor that he will never touch me again, like when you pluck an apple too soon and it rots before you can eat it.
When I reach the next threshold, I no longer hear Gáspár’s footsteps behind me.
The man who answers the door is young enough to be my brother, but I can find none of my features in his. He wears an odd white hat, almost like a woman’s bonnet, and it skews sideways, the string come loose behind one of his ears. He gawks at me for several beats before relenting to my reedy voice and wide, desperate eyes.
“Please,” I say. “Do you know where I can find Zsigmond?”
The boy’s face goes wan. “Didn’t you hear? Zsigmond was taken to trial outside of the king’s palace. Nándor had him arrested, for working on the Patritian holy day.”
I charge back into the procession of festival-goers as the storm clouds churn and roil overhead. Once there, I am swept up in a current of pedestrians, shouldering from market stall to market stall. Saint István’s feast must be the biggest market day of the year. People stream around me, coins clenched in dirty fists, arms curling around loaves of bread and long coils of smoked sausage. My poor, jostled mare kicks out her hind legs and topples a stinking bucket of trout heads to the ground, eliciting a curse from the fishmonger. Someone is selling fat sacks of red paprika, and the smell of it cuts through everything else, stinging like salt in a wound.