The falcon dies slowly, pooling pink at the floor of its cage like a baby bird in its nest, made small again in its death. Tears come streaming down my cheeks. Nándor tosses the knife to the floor, where it clatters against the blood-slick stone. He lifts his chin to the heavens and to the Upper-World.
“Let the old ways die,” he says, “and the false gods with them.”
Chapter Fifteen
Amidst the murmurs of approval, the tear-stricken prayers, Nándor turns and fixes his eyes on me. They are terrifying in their two-toned blue, pale and bright as quartz glinting out of a cave mouth, as if the ice has never left him. Lajos gives me a cruel jab with his ax, and I stumble forward in front of the dais, in front of Nándor, on my knees. Voices hum in my periphery, as nasal and oblivious as insect wings. I try to pull out a word, a phrase, something small enough to bite down on. Monster, from one woman in a white box hat. Heathen, from a man in a smoky-gray dolman. From a dozen more: justice, justice, justice. Godfather Death will have me slit open like a crow on an augur’s workbench.
“Your people cry for justice,” Nándor says, looking to his father. “Will you answer them?”
The king stares at him for a moment. But instead of nodding assent, he says, “Come here, my son.”
Shoulders slackened, Nándor returns to his place at the table, but I catch the corner of his mouth puckering, almost turning to a frown. His finger strokes along the edge of his empty plate. I remember that Gáspár said he would make a move against his father at Saint István’s feast, and I find myself measuring the distance between Nándor’s hand and his knife. Not that it matters very much—I will be dead before I witness any monarchs falling.
“Gáspár has brought this wolf-girl on a long journey from Keszi,” says the king. He pauses, wiping his sweat-dewed forehead. “She is not a seer, I am told, but she may prove to have strength in one of the other three skills.”
Some of the nails on the king’s crown are cracking, yellowing. Eventually they will sliver into nothing, and he will need more warm wolf-girl bodies when they do.
“Father—” Nándor begins, but the king holds up his hand.
“Bring me a lump of coal and some kindling,” the king says.
The Woodsman with the missing ear vanishes for a moment, and then comes back laden with coal and wood. I only recognize him now as the same Woodsman from before, the one who spoke with Gáspár: Ferenc. He drops the wood in front of me, scowling, and then grabs my hand and pries it open, pressing the coal into my palm. Disgust carves long furrows into his cheeks and brow.
“Now, then.” King János draws himself up, blinking down at me. “Show me what magic your gods have granted you. Light a fire with this wood.”
The king has brown eyes, not blue, and his face is nearly as ugly and aged as Virág’s, but I could swear in this moment he looks like Katalin, dangling death over my head while demanding the impossible.
I pick up one of the pieces of wood and run my finger down the splintering length of it. I do it twice, three times, until the king makes a disgruntled noise and shakes his head.
“Not a fire-maker, evidently,” he says. “Then take that coal, wolf-girl, and turn it into iron or silver.”
The coal is still clenched in my four-fingered hand, blackening the rivulets of my palm. King János has seen pagan magic before; he has watched a dozen wolf-girls cower before him this way, like cattle on an auction block, squirming to prove the value of their deaths. And so I start to sing, softly, just loud enough for my words to reach the king’s long table.
“First came King István, his cape as white as snow,
Then his son, Tódor, who set the North aglow,
After there was Géza, whose beard was long and gray,
Finally, King János—
And his son, Fekete.”
I watch Gáspár as I sing it, my gaze unflinching, daring him to look away. He has his arm around his younger brother, fist curling into the fabric of the boy’s green dolman. There’s no subterfuge on his face, no pretense of courtly indifference. His eye is gleaming with anguish, but still he doesn’t speak. I wonder if he will think of kissing my throat when I die, remembering how he ran his lips so gently over the same skin that flowers open under his father’s blade.
When I finish the song, the coal is still sooty and black.
“No talent for forging,” the king murmurs. “Well, perhaps you’re a healer, then. Woodsman, come here.”