Matyi is staring openly at me, mouth slightly ajar. When he catches me looking back, he inches closer to Gáspár and whispers, “The wolf-girl is watching.”
“I know,” Gáspár says, and then adds quickly, “Her name is évike. She’s no danger to you.”
I resist the urge to bare my teeth and snarl, just because I want to prove him wrong. I’ve grown so weary of meager Patritian kindnesses with their ugly underbellies, like a gleaming handful of holly berries: they look sweet, but it will kill you to swallow them. If I am no danger to Matyi, it’s because I am a good wolf-girl, unlike the rest, or I am not a wolf-girl at all, and therefore nothing: just a ghost of a girl in a too-small silk gown.
Nándor strides toward them, an exuberant smile on his face. “Are you teaching Matyi the ways of the sword? Surely there’s a better tutor in all of Király Szek.”
Gáspár’s hand goes tense around his sword, creasing the black leather of his gloves. “I can teach a young boy with no prior training.”
“Do you really think you’re better with one eye than most men are with two?”
Even though I haven’t forgiven Gáspár, my throat still burns for him.
“I don’t know,” Gáspár says. I am surprised at the lightness in his voice, the almost playful quirk of his brow. “Why don’t we find out?”
And then he tosses his sword to Nándor, who catches it one-handed, arm arcing up over his head. He looks expectantly at Matyi, and the boy passes his sword over, face contorting with a bewildered, weary concern that seems better suited to someone three times his age. It’s hardly a surprise that Gáspár would best love a brother with the same scowling, humorless temper.
“Well, brother,” Nándor says, blinking giddily, “I am not most men.”
Their blades meet with a sound that reminds me of ice cracking under my feet. Nándor lunges forward, his sword wheeling wildly, as if he’s hoping to get in a jab on chance alone. Gáspár falls back, blocking each blow as they come, steady. All his clumsiness with the ax seems hazy and distant, and my face heats remembering the way that I mocked him for it. He fights like a real soldier now, steel-boned and iron-blooded, only leaning heavily to the right, his head turning back and forth to cover his blind side.
Nándor retreats, the sword whirling blindly at his hip. He leads with his right foot and leaps out again, aiming his blow at Gáspár’s left, where he struggles to see. Gáspár would call it a dirty trick, the low tactic of a man without honor. But I suspect Nándor would not think his honor imperiled by something as trivial as a play fight with a blunted practice sword.
Especially not if he won. Matyi has come to stand beside me, a safe distance from the scything of his brothers’ blades. His gaze travels anxiously between the fight and me, as if he’s trying to gauge which is the greater danger.
“You should take your brother at his word,” I say, trying to smooth the rough edges of my voice, trying to wring some kindness out of me, some deep-buried instinct for mothering. But when I look at Matyi I can’t see anything but a boy who will grow into a man, or worse, a Woodsman. “It’s your father who hurts wolf-girls, not the other way around.”
“Gáspár says you would have killed him.” Matyi regards me soberly.
It feels churlish and silly to argue with a child, but anger blackens in me anyway. “Your father would have killed me. And then Nándor would have taken his crown, and—”
“No,” Matyi cuts in, with a rigid certainty that makes him sound very much like Gáspár indeed. “That’s the pagan way, to have a king choose his successor, the way the tribal chieftains chose which son they wanted to rule when they were dead. I have a tutor from the Volkstadt who told me so. In all the other Patritian kingdoms, it’s the eldest son, the true-born son, who must rule by the law of God.”
My eyes dart back toward Nándor and Gáspár, the air gashed by their blades. I understand now why Nándor recoiled at once when he saw Gáspár in the crowd, why his presence alone seemed to make Nándor falter in his plans.
“So he’s a hypocrite,” I say, pleased by my own conclusion. “If he wants to claim the throne, he’ll have to acknowledge that there’s something right about our pagan ways, and wrong about his Patritian ones.”