Yet, when Nándor does pause in front of us, he scarcely seems to glance my way at all. Instead, he wraps his arms around Gáspár.
“Welcome home,” he says, voice muffled against the fur of Gáspár’s suba.
Gáspár says nothing. He is rigid inside Nándor’s embrace, his brother’s mouth hovering far too close to the bruise on his throat. A weight settles on my chest, my breathing short and quick. Gáspár disentangles himself as soon as he’s able.
“This must be the wolf-girl Father wanted,” says Nándor. He clasps his hand under my chin, his long fingers stroking down my cheek. “She’s rough-looking, like all wolf-girls, and a bit plain-faced besides.”
His thumb curls over my lip. I cannot look anywhere else, trapped in his bewitching viper’s stare. I think of biting off his thumb, like I did Peti’s ear. I imagine watching him scream and fumble for his missing finger amidst the spray of blood and the stuttering pain. But it is precisely that stupid, vicious instinct that will get me killed faster.
Still, I jerk my chin away, my four fingers clenching.
“You know that Father wants his wolf-girls unharmed,” Gáspár says, smooth-voiced and princely again, the same tenor to his words that always made me bristle and scowl. His eye reveals only a quick glimmer of unease.
“I also know that Father wants his wolf-girls silent and cowed,” says Nándor. He blinks toward me. “You’ve charged into the palace courtyard in the midst of our Saint István’s Day celebration, looking every inch a barbarian, more wolf than girl. Tell me, what do you care about the fate of this Yehuli man?”
I could kill him. Or, at least, I could try. ?rd?g’s threads twitch around my wrist. But even if I succeeded, if he burned up like a lightning-struck tree under my touch, I would not escape the city alive. And what then? Keszi would be punished for my crime, and so would the Yehuli as soon as the king figured out I was one of them.
In this moment I am nothing at all to this brilliant would-be prince, worth less than the muck on his boots—and yet whatever I do next will decide the fate of two peoples, a whole village and every house on that long gray street.
My mouth opens mutely, then closes again. After all the weeks I spent upbraiding Gáspár for his deference, the easy way his knees buckle and his head bows, I realize that he is, in fact, cleverer than me. What kind of idiot bird pecks at its master between the bars of its cage?
A terrible fear settles over me, heavy as my missing wolf cloak.
“Very well then,” Nándor says. “We deal with wolf-girls the same way we deal with Yehuli merchant scum.”
And then the crowd is chanting, screaming, spittle foaming in their open mouths. I am reminded of the black snapping jaws of the wolves that skulk around Keszi, on the deepest, coldest winter days, watching and growling and waiting for someone to wander too far into the woods.
I waver between shrinking back and leaping forward, and in that manic, seizing moment of indecision, I manage to meet my father’s eyes over the broad sweep of Nándor’s shoulder. They are as blank as two tide pools at midnight, no starry pinprick of recognition in them. I am staring at a stranger. I am going to die for a man who doesn’t even know me.
Gáspár’s voice arcs over the din. “The wolf-girl is Father’s prize. He’ll be the one to decide what to do with her.”
But Nándor only raises a beckoning hand. The Woodsmen descend, all at once, like a murder of crows coming down on a corpse. Everything that follows, I see only in flashes: a billowing black suba—not Gáspár’s—and the metal glint of an ax. Nándor’s incandescent smile. My spooked mare charging the crowd, sides heaving, whinnying through her flared nostrils. A Woodsman’s gloved hand jams against the back of my throat, forcing me to the ground, my hair grazing over the filthy cobblestones.
I look up again, with difficulty. Nándor is pacing toward my mare, making hushing sounds. She stills, letting him place one hand on her muzzle, and the other on her broad neck.
“What a lovely beast,” he murmurs. “Her coat is pure white. There are no other horses in our stables with such a coat. I do appreciate a unique, unblemished beauty.”
A Woodsman’s ax slides between my shoulder blades. “Where shall we take her, my lord?”
If they call him lord, I wonder, what do they call the king?
“Where we take all the wolf-girls,” Nándor says, his voice hitching with impatience.