The letters vanish, as if with his finger he erased them, and then the coin does, too—fading to silver and then rusting into nothing. Just like the blade of the king’s sword, becoming dust in my hand. I look up at him, palm now empty, gaping.
“How did you do that?”
“When something is no longer true, it is no longer real,” Zsigmond says. “When we write something in our letters, it’s a way of making it true, and therefore making it real. When we erase it—well, you saw what happened. If you learned our letters, you could do it too.”
Virág, I think, would call it magic. Gáspár and the Patritians would call it power. I close my fingers over my empty palm, no longer feeling the coin’s absence. There’s only the phantom feeling of Zsigmond’s hand on my arm, its steadying pressure. The memory of his coin and the king’s sword, both splintering—our abilities twinned, if not our faces. Hope fills me soundly, like something bright beaming at the end of a dark road, washing all the shadows.
“If I knocked on your door,” I ask slowly, “would you answer?”
Zsigmond meets my gaze. The purple bruise throbs on his shoulder, and my wolf cloak suddenly feels heavy draped over my arm, but in that moment all I can see is him nodding at me, him saying, “Yes.”
Chapter Sixteen
After Lajos escorts my father from the castle, he takes me to one of the small rooms inside the Broken Tower, that long white scar furrowing the charcoal sky. The Broken Tower is the oldest part of the castle, the stones blanched by a hundred years or more of harsh weather, and once it was the fortress of Saint István’s grandfather, the chieftain of Akosvár. Old blood is dried into the floor—I can smell the memory of slain cattle and livers curdling on altars. The Patritians do no such rituals now, of course, but the Broken Tower has been left to crumble under the weight of its shameful, silent archive. The stones in the walls are loose behind the headboard of the bed; I prod one and it clatters to the ground. There’s a cold hearth in one corner, and a single window, the glass marbled with rainwater.
“Am I trapped here?” I ask with a hollow laugh. “Am I allowed to leave?”
“Of course,” Lajos says brusquely, not answering my question at all, and then he lets the door slam shut behind him.
What would be the point of locking me away? The king wants me to serve him. He has enough mute and toothless wolf-girls, fettered by their deaths, watching him narrow-eyed from the Under-World.
I sleep only in short bursts, the night seamed through with dreams. Purple and green miasmas, the chuff of smoke and the jangle of bone chimes. I dream of the turul in a golden cage, its feathers shorn, my arrow lanced into its naked breast. I dream of pine trees in the snow. Gáspár’s face, his lashes daggered with frost, his chest bare under my hands. When I wake, it’s to the clanging of my own heart, and a honeycomb of light on my cheek. The window glass is yellow and bright.
There’s a ringing in my ears, like someone has been striking an anvil inside my skull. With a shake of my head I banish the dreams, but Gáspár’s face lingers a moment longer, conjuring a jolt of want between my legs. I stoke the hearth, fists clenched, and when I manage to catch a spark I sit back on my heels, letting out a breath.
I have survived the worst things I thought possible: being taken by the Woodsmen, cowering in front of the king. Now I must make some shape out of the unimaginable after, measure my new life by its margins and limits. I retrieve Katalin’s wolf cloak, my mother’s braid still tucked safely in the pocket, and stow it inside the trunk at the foot of my bed. Gáspár’s scolding has left its mark on me—I won’t invite more danger by wearing the cloak within Király Szek.
Sometime during the night, a serving girl must have come and left new clothes for me. A simple dress of plum silk, stiflingly tight in the arms and the bust, with sleeves that pool open like two wailing mouths. I make my own adjustments, tearing off the excess fabric with my teeth, and splitting a seam inside the bodice so I can breathe easily while wearing it. As I dress, I imagine Katalin’s delicate sneer, the mocking gleam of her lambent blue eyes. She’s no proper táltos yet, but her prophecy came true all the same: I look every inch a Patritian, a moon-faced servant to the king. I look no fiercer than Riika. I search for my father’s coin, to steel myself, but then I remember that it’s gone, turned to dust by my father’s Yehuli magic. Thinking of Zsigmond soothes me by some small measure anyway.