The old king is holding something else in his left hand, its shape distorted and bulging around his curled fingers. It takes me a moment to recognize that it’s a human heart.
“The heart of the chieftain of the Wolf Tribe,” Nándor says. “He had them dismembered, and their body parts nailed to the gates of the fortress in his newly united city.”
I almost want to laugh at such an artless attempt to frighten me. “I know the story. Every boy or girl in Keszi hears it first at their mother’s breast. You can’t think you can spook me with tales of hundred-year-old atrocities. A wet nurse could tell me worse.”
Nándor doesn’t rise to my challenge, but his eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly, like night edging up onto the horizon. The next statue is carved of darker marble, but it grasps and holds the early-morning sunlight, making the king’s cheekbones gleam like twin knives. This man has no sword, but in his outstretched hand he grasps an iron pendant, identical to the one Gáspár wears, engraved with the Woodsmen’s seal.
“Bárány Tódor,” Nándor says. “Conqueror of Kaleva, he founded the Holy Order of Woodsmen. But you’re quite familiar with the Woodsmen already, aren’t you?”
I sense a hidden jest in his voice, something that means to carve a deeper wound. My stomach quivers with uncertain trepidation. Nándor’s face was so close to the bruise on Gáspár’s throat. His hand was on my lips. I wonder if he has managed to trace a line between the two, and what he will do with that realization, if he has. Nándor watches me expectantly, as though he can see me turning the idea over in my mind.
I decide not to give him the satisfaction of a reply. Instead I stare at Tódor’s statue, studying the way his ivory fingers hold the pendant like a hawk’s talon clutched around its unfortunate prey. The carved outline of the turul is hardly visible, obscured by Tódor’s marble thumb.
“He was made a saint too,” Nándor goes on, eyes still narrowed. “In every way, he was his father’s son.”
This time I cannot resist a jape of my own. “Was he a true-born son?”
The lovely pink color drains from Nándor’s face, and it’s his turn to say nothing. For a moment I worry that I have damned myself further, but I don’t think there is much I could do to make Nándor loathe me more. He wanted me dead when I was mute and lowing under his father’s blade, and he still wants me dead now, when I am snarling back at him and showing all my teeth.
He stares at me blackly for a moment, and then moves on without a word.
The next statue is of Tódor’s eldest son, Géza the Gray. Géza’s statue depicts him as an old man, small and stooped, leaning heavily on a cane and half swallowed by his dark robes. But this one is all wrong—Géza was never an old man. He lived only to early middle age before succumbing to the same fever that later killed his son’s Merzani bride, Gáspár’s mother. Virág told us the stories of Régország’s kings with great reluctance, each word a bitter warning.
“Géza was a weak king,” Nándor says quietly. “He forgot the divine mission of his father and grandfather. He let the country make peace with its heathen enemies, and even arranged the marriage of his son to a Merzani apostate. It is a blessing that he died before doing more damage than he did.”
Géza’s statue is a murky gray, precisely the same color of the clouds when they bunch and gather before a storm. The void of his sainthood seems obvious, somehow, like the pall of a sunless day. “If Géza was such a terrible ruler, why mount his statue here, beside your precious heroes?”
“Because it serves as a reminder,” says Nándor, “of what we must not let our nation become. You were there at Saint István’s feast, wolf-girl. Surely you can see that the people of Király Szek want to live in a Patritian kingdom, just like our neighbors east and west.”
“If only the whole kingdom were comprised of just your admirers,” I say.
Nándor’s smile returns, with a sharper edge this time. “There was no kingdom of Régország before the Patrifaith, wolf-girl. You understand that, don’t you? There was only a loose handful of tribes hacking each other to death on the Little Plain, scarcely able to even understand the accents of their enemies. If you and your pagan brothers and sisters even dare to call yourselves Régyar, you must acquiesce to that point, or else you ought to scrub our language out of your mouths and go back to garbling the old tongues of your blood chieftains.”