The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

I would rather stare down the awful rotted heart of the forest than face the Woodsmen and their axes. I know it makes me a coward, and perhaps also a fool. But my mother’s fate is a flitting bird I refuse to follow. I can’t swallow the thought of the Woodsmen killing the little part of her that’s left in me, the facsimile of our shared blood.

“No,” I reply, taken aback. “Our gods don’t ask us for perfection.” Just as we don’t expect rhyme or reason from our gods. They’re fickle and stubborn and heedless and indulgent, like us. The only difference is that they burn whole forests to the ground in their rage, and drink entire rivers dry in their thirst. In their joy, flowers bloom; in their grief, early winter frost edges in. The gods have gifted us a small fragment of that power, and in turn we inherited their vices.

But how did a perfect being create something as imperfect as humans, so prone to caprice and cruelty? And why does a perfect being demand blood from little boys?

We would have called it power, magic. They called it piety. But what is the difference, if both fires burn just as bright?

“Do you call a hawk evil when it snatches up a mouse to eat? Do you call a fire evil when it burns your logs to ash? Do you call the night sky evil when it drinks down the day? Of course not. They are surviving, like the rest of us.”

I roll my eyes at the simple Patritian line: right and wrong, and the intractable divide between them. I can’t deny there’s something appealing about its directness. If only it weren’t so difficult to be right in the eyes of a Patritian, and so very easy to be wrong.

All that talk of quiet obedience is for their benefit, not yours. They don’t have to go to the effort of striking you down if you’re already on your knees.”

“‘How did you do it?’ Isten asked. ‘I did not create a world to rot or bleed.’ “‘But you did create me,’ Ördög said. ‘When you cut out a piece of your flesh to make the world, I was born alongside it. Creation can only exist alongside destruction, peace alongside pain. Wherever there is life, I will also be.’

“Would you let me destroy you, then?” “It would be just as well,” Gáspár says miserably. “I should be struck dead, for wanting you the way I do.”

I don’t know who I have been with him these past weeks, indulging every perverse instinct, killing fat, slumbering rabbits and openly professing to loathe my own people. My most spiteful self, and perhaps my truest.

His face is so hard that, for a moment, I am almost ready to believe it was nothing but enchantment after all, just the red juice in our mouths. But when he speaks, his voice is thin with anguish. “What would you have me do?” he asks. “You have already ruined me.”

“Maybe he’ll thank you for it.” My voice is hoarse, nearly inaudible. “Then he’ll never have to confess to his sin. You’ll have taken care of his shameful problem for him.” “I don’t think so, wolf-girl,” Nándor says. “I think that my brother will weep.”

You can’t hoard stories the way you hoard gold, despite what Virág would say. There’s nothing to stop anyone from taking the bits they like, and changing or erasing the rest, like a finger smudging over ink. Like shouts drowning out the sound of a vicious minister’s name.

“You’ve killed any part of me that was a devout and loyal Woodsman,” he says. There is pain threaded through his voice; I imagine the Prinkepatrios fading from his mind, like a moon paring away in the black sky. His hand shifts from my breast, closing into a fist over my heart. “This is all that’s left now.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll have me as your scullery maid after all.” Gáspár scoffs, but there is laughter under it. “I’d rather have you as my wife.”