Gáspár’s gaze lowers, torchlight leaving his eye. For a long moment there is only the sound of water dripping from the mold-slick walls, and, more distantly, another prisoner’s chains rattling. Bastioned inside my wolf cloak, I wrap my arms around myself, like there is something that needs to be held from breaking apart, or breaking out.
“I’m sorry,” Gáspár says finally. And it is his refusal, this smallest of betrayals, that hurts worse than anything.
He sweeps out of the dungeon, his suba gathering a patchwork of shadow and light, leaving me alone.
I can’t tell how many hours have passed when another Woodsman comes for me, but I have already resigned myself to dying. He’s the same Woodsman from the courtyard, with a bald head like a bruised peach and a mangled, half-missing nose. Beside him is a slip of a girl, shaking and thin as an icicle, laureled in her homespun servant’s clothes. She stares at me meekly over the rim of a bucket, her halved face like a white moon rising.
“You’re the worst I’ve seen yet,” the Woodsman says.
I don’t know if by worst he means ugliest, or if by worst he means filthiest, or if by worst he means wickedest, or if perhaps it is all three. I scarcely have the energy to curl my lip at him.
“Lajos, don’t rile her,” the serving girl protests. I can tell she is not concerned with wounding my feelings, merely afraid that I will lash out at her in my rage. I can hardly blame her for that: I must look worse than I smell, and I feel like something chained and hunted and hungry.
“Wolf-girls aren’t capable of being hurt, Riika,” chides the Woodsman. “They’re soulless things, no gentler or wiser than the animals they wear.”
But Riika is still staring at me wide-eyed. She has a Northerner’s name and a Northerner’s blanched complexion, as pale as a peeled apple. It’s a long way from here to Kaleva, and I feel sorry for her in spite of myself—mostly sorry that she has been given the unfortunate task of wrangling me.
“It’s a waste of water to wash her,” Lajos says. “But it would be a great insult to the king, to present her to him in such a state.”
I consider wounding him, killing him, but it’s a fleeting thought. It won’t help me escape, and it will only prove how loathsome I am to those who already loathe me. I sit still and silent in my cell as Lajos flings open the door and Riika approaches me with no more bravery than a skittish wood mouse. I can almost see whiskers twitching.
“Please,” she squeaks out. “He’ll be furious if you don’t . . .”
She sets the bucket in front of me and then scuttles behind Lajos’s back. I dip my hands in, watching motes of dirt flake off my fingers and drift through the water like dead flies. The water is cold enough to sting, but I scrub my cheeks and my nose and even the grime caked behind my ears. Why not die with a pink, shining face?
Did my mother have a chance to clean her face before they killed her?
There’s a bone-toothed comb for my tangled hair and a new tunic made of bristly wool that I know will be too small and too tight, so I shake my head. Riika chews her lip and looks like she might weep, so I put it on anyway, blinking numbly as a seam splits up my thigh.
“You don’t look like a monster,” she whispers, almost to herself.
I think about how many times I woke, sweating and screaming, from nightmares about Woodsmen with gleaming sharp teeth and claws beneath their black gloves, and wonder if good Patritian girls like Riika have dreams about wolf-girls eating them.
“Let’s go,” Lajos says shortly, prodding me with the blunt edge of his ax.
This time, no one pulls a hood over my eyes as Lajos leads me barefooted out of the dungeon. We turn down long hallways that curve as wickedly as viper tongues. Small square windows wink star-glutted light—in the time I’ve spent in the dungeon, evening has withered into night. Finally, an arched doorway opens like a scowling mouth, bearing us into the Great Hall.
Feasting tables have already been laid out with cooked swans, their necks curling like white-gloved hands and their beaks still intact; a whole roast boar gumming a green apple, its side split open to reveal a stuffing of dried cherries and link sausages; two enormous pies molded to resemble twin crowns; bowls of red-currant soup the color of a lake at sunrise. Gáspár was right—there’s no peasant fare here.
The Patritian guests rise as I enter, whispering like a sibilant tide. The women all have their hair covered, in headscarves or rheumy veils or silly boxed hats, and each man wears a silk dolman, cinched at the waist with a woven belt of red. The men in Keszi wear the same embroidered belts to ward off demons from the forest, who confuse the red with blood and think their would-be victims already dead, and I want to laugh seeing these pious Patritian men wearing them, too, until I realize I am the evil thing they are trying to keep at bay.