The footprints lead us away from the circle and toward a tight grove of oak trees. Their leaves are brown, dead, curling like Virág’s ancient reed roof. The trunks have the same circle etched into them, and their roots are fetid and black. The smell of spoiled meat blows past us.
“Shall we investigate, kapitány?” Ferkó asks, drawing his ax.
The captain is silent as he glances around the grove. He turns his head fully to either side, so he can examine it all despite his missing eye. For a moment, his gaze lands on me, and my stomach turns into a cold, dark pit.
“No,” he says. “Let’s move on.”
By the time we stop for the night, I have planned my escape seven times.
Leap off my horse and disappear into the trees before the Woodsmen can think to stop me. Cut the rope around my wrists on a sharp rock and flee back to Keszi. Pray to Isten that the Woodsmen die in the forest somewhere and never come to find me. Pray the king doesn’t decide to punish all of Keszi for my ruse and burn our village to the ground like his great-grandfather, Saint István, did to the rest of the pagan tribes.
I would rather stare down the awful rotted heart of the forest than face the Woodsmen and their axes. I know it makes me a coward, and perhaps also a fool. But my mother’s fate is a flitting bird I refuse to follow. I can’t swallow the thought of the Woodsmen killing the little part of her that’s left in me, the facsimile of our shared blood.
We are finally allowed to camp in a small clearing, gridded by a copse of birch trees, their pale skin half-shed. Spirals of birch paper are littered in the dead grass, and there is still the faint but unmistakable scent of meat left out too long in the sun. Peti and Ferkó scout the area for safety, axes drawn. I can’t help but eye the bow and quiver on Ferkó’s back, muscles twitching with deep-rooted memory. I will never shoot an arrow again. Imre collects logs and dry leaves for a fire, and sets them on the ground in front of the captain. I stand pressed to my mare’s flank, wrists still painfully bound.
The captain removes his gloves and clasps his bare hands together. For a moment I think he might start to pray, and want to turn away in revulsion. But he only utters a single word: “Megvilágit.”
He says it almost as if it were a question, or a polite request, the same deferential tenor to his voice that shocked me before. And then a fire roars to life in front of him.
I cannot help the sound of alarm that slips out from between my lips, nor the accusation that follows it. “I thought Woodsmen decried all acts of magic.”
“It’s not magic,” Imre says, stoking the fire with a birch-striped tree branch. “It’s faith. The only powers we have are what Godfather Life gives us. We ask, and He answers.”
“Does he always answer?”
A shadow darkens the captain’s face.
“He rewards loyalty,” says Imre. “The more devotion you prove, the greater powers He grants you. I don’t think He has ever refused a request from the érsek.”
I meet his gaze, shivering, wanting to ask who the érsek is but not sure I can risk another question.
“The érsek is the highest religious authority in Régország,” Imre says, preempting me, “and the king’s closest confidant. Király és szentség, royalty and divinity. Think of them like twin pillars that hold up the kingdom.”
I would rather not think of them at all. There’s no place for wolf-girls in such a kingdom. As the captain’s fire burns, I remember all the times I tried to light one of my own. How many hours I spent hunched over Virág’s hearth, desperate to will a weak little flame onto my fingertips. Virág would stand above me, arms folded crossly, repeating the same adages that had never done me any good before.
“In order to perform the skills, you must know the origin of them,” she’d said. “Do you remember the story of how Vilm?tten first made fire? Late one night, Isten tossed a star out of the sky. Vilm?tten watched it fall down to the Middle-World and sink into the sea. He dove into the water after it, hoping to rescue the star and win Isten’s favor. When he reached the bottom of the ocean, he saw that the star was bright with blue flame, even underwater. He could not hold it and swim at the same time, so he put the star in his mouth and swallowed it. And when Vilm?tten returned to the surface, the star was still breathing inside him, and he could summon fire without a flint.”
“I know the story,” I had snapped. “I just can’t do it.”