I will die here, I think, just like Elif Hatun, deaf to the threats whispered in her ear. Something in me hardens at the thought, all my fear and humiliation congealing into blustery courage. I crumple the note in my fist and hurry down the halls, through the barbican, and out toward Yehuli Street.
Chapter Seventeen
Zsigmond’s house is nothing like I expect. In fact, half of me is still thinking of him as a Yehuli man, and wondering what sort of house a Yehuli man would live in, while the other half of me thinks of him as my father, and my mind paints its own misty imaginings of what sort of house my father would live in. I wonder if I will ever think of him as my father, a Yehuli man. A Yehuli man who is my father.
There is only one room, with a bed and a hearth and a table with chairs. It is not entirely unlike Virág’s hut, but Zsigmond’s things are finer, merchant-crafted rather than homespun. Wrought-iron candle stands with carved ivy clambering up the length. A woven tablecloth embroidered with flowers and leaves that has no moth-eaten edges. The familiarity of it chills me rather than comforts me. I realize for the first time that I want Zsigmond to be different from anything I have known before. A new father for my new life.
“Thank you,” I stammer out, clenching and unclenching my fingers as Zsigmond stokes the fire. “I’m sorry it’s so late. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
The fire crackles pleasantly, tongues of flame licking at the blackened stone. Zsigmond stands, brushing ash from his knees, and says, “You did. But I asked you to come, and I never told you when, so I should have known to expect you at any hour of the day.”
I blink at him, shoulders still raised around my ears. It only now occurs to me how much I am braced for scoldings and lashings, flinching at the slightest change in pitch or the sudden tense of a fist. But Zsigmond looks at me steadily, his thick brows pulled together with concern rather than consternation.
“I need your help,” I say, encouraged by his gentle face. “Someone left a note for me, in the palace. I can’t read it.”
A breath goes out of Zsigmond. I think I hear relief in it. I realize that he, too, has been bracing for something worse.
“Let me see,” he says. And then, almost as a second thought, “évike.”
Hearing him say my name melts some of the ice in my belly. I reach into the folds of my skirt and retrieve the scrap of parchment, now bunched small and tight, no bigger than an acorn. I try to smooth it flat again before I hand it to him, but even I can see that the ink has run into a bizarre cartography, a pattern that is no pattern at all. Zsigmond squints at it anyway, holding the note up to the candlelight, ink darkening the pads of his thumbs.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment. “I can make out a few letters, but the rest is too smudged.”
I nod, a burn rising in my throat. “Thank you for trying.”
Zsigmond nods back at me. He puts the parchment down on the table, and like a lunatic I almost laugh at the absurdity of it: my note on his table. Me, standing in my father’s house, shorn of my wolf cloak, looking into his eyes. As a child it would have seemed a more impossible dream than seeing my mother again, or than gleefully watching Katalin pecked to death by a thousand crows. I hoarded those unfathomable dreams as I did my braid and my coin, polishing them in my mind like a mirror, seething, waiting.
“Do you remember her?” The words tumble out of my mouth almost without me willing it. “My mother.”
Zsigmond’s face creases. The corners of his mouth pull down, and I can hear him swallowing. For a moment I think, with no small amount of alarm, that he might cry.
“Of course I do,” he says. “You must think I’m a monster, or at least an especially cold and callous man. You must have wondered why I never came back for you, or why I never tried to stop them from taking Magda.”
Hearing him say it conjures an old pain, the oldest pain I know, and it makes me as mean as a limping dog.
“Yes,” I say, venom lacing my voice. “I did wonder why my own father seemed not to care for me at all.”
Zsigmond is silent, gaze faltering. I am glad, just for a moment, that I have cowed him. I have spent so many years coaxed out of my own pain, half convinced that I had no right to feel it. Afraid that even that would be taken from me, and the memories that came with it.
“I named you, you know,” Zsigmond says finally. His voice is tight, small, as if someone has wrapped a tender hand around his throat. “évike. It means ‘life,’ in the Yehuli tongue. I went to Keszi every year for six years in a row, and spent seven days with Magda every time. It doesn’t amount to very much, and none of my family or friends here in Király Szek could understand why I was so taken with a woman that I seemed to scarcely know at all, and whose life was so different from mine. But in truth, it only took one day for me to know that I loved her. And I did love her.”