“Why didn’t you come back?”
Zsigmond gives me a level look, but his fingers clench white-knuckled around the coin. “I thought that you were dead. Taken with Magda, or . . .”
He can’t even say it. Hasn’t he turned the words over in his head enough to know how to speak them aloud, hasn’t the scene of my supposed death played on the insides of his eyelids for years and years whenever he lay down to sleep? My throat burns.
“No,” I say. “I’m here.” My gaze flickers to his closed fist. “My mother always said that you minted the coin yourself. Did you?”
“I did,” says Zsigmond. Something almost like relief darts across his face. “My father was a goldsmith and taught me the art. I worked for the king’s treasury council to create a new design for the coins made in János’s image. This coin was an early model, but it was never circulated. They didn’t like that it had Yehuli script, of course, even though I slaved away on the bench for hours. This must be the only one left in existence. The rest were melted down and recast in the mold of the king’s proper arany coin.”
That thread of bitterness in his voice soothes me more than anything else. I am almost willing to forget our mismatched features, the way he hasn’t reached out to embrace me. He speaks with the same indignation that I would, the same acrimony, and with no cowing deference. Katalin was wrong about the Yehuli, I think.
While he speaks, I notice that he rubs his left shoulder, wincing. A purple bruise fingers out from beneath the collar of his shirt, and my heart plummets into my stomach.
“What did Nándor do to you?”
“Nothing worse than what he’s done to others,” Zsigmond answers quickly, though his eyes narrow. “He likes to do his work on Shabbos, or on our other holy days.”
I almost want to laugh at the way he calls what Nándor has done work; it’s so dry and self-effacing, nothing like Virág’s theatric portents, her gloomy augury. I want to imagine that he would shake his head and roll his eyes at her dramatics, just like I always did.
“I hope you didn’t have to do anything too awful to win my freedom,” Zsigmond goes on, meeting my eyes.
“Only swear my fealty to the king,” I say, and offer a weak smile. Katalin would smirk endlessly if she heard me say it, knowing that I proved her right; Virág would glower and raise her lash, dismayed that I have proven her wrong. Zsigmond gives a bracing nod, neither disappointed nor shocked, and then lays a hand hesitantly on my arm.
His touch eats away at some of my oldest fears, narrowing the space between his features and mine. For so long I wanted our imagined resemblance to be the reason that I looked the way I do: short and solidly built, with hair that snarled around the teeth of Virág’s bone-handled comb, with small squinting eyes that watered in any weather, and a nose that always itched. I was embarrassed by the low sway of my breasts, the breadth of my shoulders. I wanted to throw my father up against their ugly words, his existence and our shared blood a justification, a shield. Now none of it matters anyway. I am miles from Keszi, and my father’s hand is braced around my elbow.
Silence begins to slip between us. Zsigmond lets go of my arm. Desperate to fill the silence, to hold him here, I ask, “What does the coin say?”
Zsigmond furrows his brow. “You don’t know how to read?”
He says it casually, curiously, and I can tell he doesn’t mean it to hurt me, but it does anyway, because it is proof that he doesn’t know me well enough to know what I do or do not know. What will hurt me and what won’t. I swallow hard and try not to reveal that it has wounded me at all.
“No,” I tell him, shaking my head. “No one in Keszi can read.”
“Not even Régyar, or Old Régyar?”
I shake my head once more.
“Well,” he says after a moment, “Király Szek will not be an easy place for you.”
I haven’t allowed myself to think that far, so preoccupied with my sudden freedom that I hadn’t yet imagined its consequences. Suddenly I can see my life stretching out before me like a road in the dark, limned with thousands of black trees and between them, so many seething yellow eyes. Király Szek is full of monsters, too, and they all look like men. I won’t be able to recognize them until their hands are at my throat.
“The Yehuli symbols . . .” I start.
“Yes, it’s in our alphabet,” he says, rescuing me from my incoherence. His eyes are gentle, his voice low, and I allow myself to believe in that moment that by our he only means the two of us, here in the dungeon, together. He turns the coin over to where the Yehuli letters show: three of them. “This is the word for truth, emet. What a thing is, the existence of it. And this”—he presses the coin into my palm, and then puts his thumb over one of the letters, obscuring it—“is met. Dead.”