Before my chagrin settles on me, the door to my room swings open. I am caught between exhilaration and fear, half hoping it’s Gáspár and then chiding myself for such a silly desire, when more likely it’s an assassin or a murderous Woodsman, ready to mutiny over the king’s recent bargain. As it turns out, it’s something worse than either one. Nándor stands in the threshold, wearing a pale-blue dolman and an exceedingly pleasant smile.
“Wolf-girl,” he says. “Will you come with me?”
His tone is cool and polite, his expression open, his eyes glassy and bright. For a beat, I imagine he could be any man, with no ice in his heart and none of my father’s blood on his hands. He’s so lovely I can almost believe it. But Katalin is beautiful, too, and so is the frozen lake before it fissures under you.
“Don’t you knock?” I ask, curling my four fingers into my palm.
“Does a farmer knock on the barn door?” Nándor tips his head. His voice is so light, I hardly register the insult and when I do, my face heats. “Of course not. Now come with me.”
“Why should I?” I bite back. “So you can torture me like you did Zsigmond?”
“I haven’t tortured anyone. The Yehuli man was guilty. I punished him accordingly.”
“Not guilty by the king’s laws.”
“Guilty by the law of God,” Nándor says. “Without the Prinkepatrios, we would have no kingdom at all, and no earth to walk on, for that matter. The least we can do is abide by His proscriptions.”
It was easy enough to laugh off Gáspár’s pious ramblings when it was only the two of us in the woods, and even easier once I knew the feeling of his body against mine, the sweet taste of his mouth. Now, in the heart of the capital, pressed flush by all these Patritians, his words flood me with cold.
“You can’t hurt me,” I say. “I’m under your father’s protection.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Nándor says. His lip quirks, carving its crooked dimple. “You look as sweet and pretty as any Patritian girl now. I only wished to give you my favorite view of our glorious capital.”
I try to imagine what Nándor’s favorite view could be: Perhaps the place where Saint István nailed his hearts and livers to the gate? The place where he slaughtered the pig before my father? I think of Zsigmond’s boots trampling all that stinking flesh, tangling in the entrails, and draw in a harsh breath.
“I have no interest in anything that interests you,” I tell him.
“But you are interested in protecting the king,” Nándor says keenly. “You swore as much when you made your oath. You could never hope to succeed in your goal if you don’t understand life here in the capital.”
He is most certainly trying to trick me, but he’s also right. I feel like his gaze has swept right through me, swift and clean as a scythe. He has none of Gáspár’s stiff courtly rhetoric, his prince’s dour oration. He sounds more like Katalin, forever devising new ways to beautify her cruelties, to code them for my ears alone, slipping her insults right under Virág’s nose. And, like Katalin, he shows no sign of relenting.
“Fine,” I say. “Whatever awful thing you want me to see, it can’t be worse than what you’ve done to Zsigmond already.”
Nándor beams. A knot of fear and revulsion makes my lip curl as I trail him through the castle’s winding halls, narrow and viperous, until they bear us out into the courtyard. All traces of his demonstration have been erased, buried as if under a layer of clean snow. There’s no blood soaked into the cobblestones, no vapor of rot lingering in the air. All I can think of is the frozen lake, sealing itself so neatly over my head. Nándor leads me farther down the courtyard, his neck as lithe and pale as a swan’s under the feather of his auburn hair.
Finally, he stops. Following the line of the castle is a row of marble statues, surveying the courtyard like cold sentinels. If I caught them out of the corner of my eye, I might really have believed they were human soldiers after all. They are etched in remarkable detail, as if drawn up out of the earth by Isten himself.
“This is Saint István,” Nándor says, gesturing toward the largest. “The first true king of Régország. He united the three tribes and banished paganism to the furthest reaches of the country.”
Saint István’s statue has been carved from marble of purest alabaster. His long cape tumbles to the ground behind him, the folds draping and crinkling like water, frozen in a moment of cold, immaculate suspension. The sword he holds in his hand is real—a simple thing, only a bronze hilt and a silver blade, speckled with rust. It must be King István’s actual sword, or else they would have replaced it with something shining and new.