Matyi lifts a shoulder, taking a slight step to the left. Perhaps my enthusiasm has made me seem more frightening, my smile showing the edges of my teeth.
“Some people say that my father’s marriage was never legitimate,” Matyi mumbles, cowed by my smirk. “Because Elif Hatun never made her proper conversion.”
“Gáspár’s mother?”
He nods.
I think of what Gáspár told me about his mother, a crumbling pillar in her palace quarters, eroded day after day by the tide of a thousand foreign tongues. Had she held on to her faith in mute stubbornness? Or had the Régyar words tumbled right out of her when she tried to take her vows, like a mouthful of rotted teeth? I wonder if that’s what has cursed Gáspár more than anything: the legacy of his mother’s quiet rebellion.
The rasping of wood goes silent for a moment, and I turn my gaze back toward their fight. Their swords are pressed together, faces close as they push and push, each trying to make the other crumble. It is Gáspár, finally, who falters. He lets Nándor’s blade slide off his, and though he steps backward, clearly yielding, his brother doesn’t hesitate. He strikes a blow to Gáspár’s blind left side that sends him stumbling back across the courtyard. Nándor’s sword waves like a war banner.
“A well-fought battle,” Nándor says, letting his blade clatter to the ground. His auburn hair is exquisitely tousled, as if the wind took to it with gentle fingers. “But I can hardly feign surprise at the outcome. Monsters are one thing, Gáspár, but men are a far greater challenge. You’ll need both eyes to fight your mortal enemies and win.”
“You’ve made your point,” Gáspár says sharply. Under his black dolman, his chest is heaving, and I feel a traitorous tug of affection. “At least Matyi saw a demonstration of proper swordsmanship.”
At the sound of his name, Matyi dashes toward his brothers, casting me one last, glowering look of deep mistrust. I watch the three of them in tense silence, the wind carrying the smell of ash from someone’s hearth and hot paprika from the marketplace, wondering if it’s possible that no one else saw what I did: that Gáspár let his brother win.
It’s late by the time I finally return to my room, the sky as glossy as black silk. I have endured a dinner with the king, a small feast, during which he hosted two emissaries from the Volkstadt, both wearing brilliantly colored satins with ruffled collars that looked like the plumages of exotic birds. The king tried desperately to ply them with wine and food and flattery, while they appeared mostly bored for the duration of it, and spoke brazenly to one another in their own language. The Volken tongue sounded lyrical by turns, as if they were reciting riddles and rhymes, and then became abruptly harsh, too strange and guttural to imitate. But by the end they still offered the king a thousand men each to help fight the Merzani invaders, and the king smiled and smiled even though he had a red-currant seed stuck in his teeth. Nándor looked disappointed by the outcome, and I couldn’t see why. Perhaps he had hoped for more men, or for a better deal that didn’t see us losing gold and silver, because the king had then quickly agreed to lease them some of the mines in Szarvasvár, which is on the border with the Volkstadt anyway.
My mind wandered, and I stole far too many glances at Gáspár, trying vainly to draw his gaze toward me. Our weeks together taught me to read his scowls and frowns, how to tell real anger from flushing pretense, how to coax gentleness from him as if with a needle, his smiles as rare and precious as blood drops. Now his expressions are more indecipherable to me than the words of the Volken men preening at my elbow. But Gáspár scarcely even looked up from his plate, lips purpling with the stain of wine.
When the Volken men pulled out a contract for the king to sign, I glanced over at it, but it was only ink splashed on a page. The king might have been signing the whole country into bondage or selling me off to the Volken emissaries, and I wouldn’t have known until they were fitting me with chains.
And then, after all of that, I find a note tucked under my door.
It’s a short message, and the ink is wet, fresh. It blackens the pad of my thumb when I unfold it. I can’t even read who has signed it, if anyone at all. My mind tries desperately to constellate the loops and lines, but staring at it makes me want to cry like a child.
It must be Nándor, I decide. His earlier warning in the courtyard hadn’t stuck, and he wanted to intimidate me further, or perhaps only punish me for daring to hold my ground against him, for smiling blithely at his barbed words. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes and then fall onto the page in hot splashes, thinning the black ink to a rheumy gray.