Lajos takes me down to the dungeon again, where they are keeping my father.
I retrieve my wolf cloak from my old cell—it’s damp and filthy, the wolf’s teeth blackened, as if by soot—but I don’t put it on. It feels wrong to wear it, after what I’ve done, like a dress or a doll that’s been outgrown. I drape it over my arm, instead, the wolf’s head hanging limp and its eyes particularly glassy. No one stops me as I move in and out of the cells. Lajos doesn’t lift a hand. My oath to the king has armored me, but even better than that, my display of magic has clearly cowed him. I could turn his ax to nothing in my hand. He watches me like a carp at the end of a fisherman’s line, openmouthed, and flinches whenever I make an abrupt move. He looks the way I have always wanted the Woodsmen to look: afraid. Lajos seems nearly old enough to have taken my mother.
My father is in the very last cell, a great distance from my own. Maybe he was there all night, same as I was, the two of us curled like mollusks against the wet, dirty floor, oblivious symmetries of each other. The thought chills and heartens me in equal measure. A bad memory shared between two people carries with it only half the pain. Now my father is drawn up neatly on the far left side of his cell, legs crossed at the ankle, face angled toward the dank ceiling. When Lajos unlatches the door, he doesn’t leap to his feet. He only looks at me oddly and blinks.
Staring at him now, even in the grizzled torchlight, I can see his features better than I did in the courtyard. His eyes are a warm brown, keen and bright, drawing what little light there is and holding it. His nose is proud and almost regal; I think he would make a fine profile for a minted coin, between that and the stubborn triangle of his chin. His lips are thin and terse. His hair is thoroughly grayed, which disappoints me—I wish I could see whether it was the same chestnut hue as my own. Zsigmond seems to chafe under my probing stare, his shoulders rising around his ears.
“Who are you?” he asks.
Suddenly my mouth goes as dry as cotton. I can’t think of how to answer him, so I reach into the pocket of my wolf cloak, fumbling for my coin, and hold it out to him, fingers quivering.
Zsigmond rises to his feet, unsteadily. When he reaches me, he takes the coin with such delicacy that not even the pads of our thumbs touch. I try not to feel deflated by his balking gingerness. He watches me with one eye, and with the other, examines the coin in the scant torchlight.
Finally, he says, “Where did you get this?”
“You gave it to me.” My voice doesn’t have half the certainty I want it to. I wonder if he’ll believe me at all. “Well, you gave it to my mother, and then she gave it to me.”
“Are you Rákhel’s daughter?”
Some name I don’t recognize, a woman I don’t know. My stomach hollows.
“No,” I say, “I’m yours.”
Zsigmond looks at me, long and hard. He is not much taller than I am and I can see one blue vein on his temple throbbing as he stares, reminding me, with a bitter start, of Virág. I chase the thought from my mind. His bushy brows draw together.
“It’s not possible,” he says. “I had a daughter once, true, but . . .”
“She’s not dead,” I whisper. “The Woodsmen came to Magda and they took her, but Virág—she saved me.”
“Virág?”
I blink, baffled that he has caught onto her name, that this is the part of my story he has picked out. “Yes, the seer. She has white hair and twelve fingers.”
When I was twelve or thirteen, I decided I hated him, my faceless father, who had cursed me with his alien bloodline, and I made up some story in my head that he hadn’t tried to stop the Woodsmen, being a Yehuli slave to the king and all. If Virág had been able to press me with more of her superstitions, I might have believed that a trickster god has decided to punish me for my perverse thoughts, and now Zsigmond will only see me as a faceless girl, never his daughter. That sneering sort of justice is seamed through all of Virág’s stories. Even still I feel wretched with guilt, especially when Zsigmond’s face crumples like someone’s used-up handkerchief.
“évike,” he says. “I remember now. We named you évike.”
I want him to say something like I told your mother once that I loved that name and all three of its rough sounds, but he doesn’t. He only frowns, his chin quivering.
I should ask him about my mother. I want to know if our memories will mirror each other’s, like the real moon and its reflection on the dark surface of a lake, but I don’t. A more selfish question rises to my lips.