The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

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.”

I hear Gáspár screaming, mutedly, from above.

He had taken off his cloak and used it to cover you. I knew that if a Woodsman had tried to give his life to save a wolf-girl, he would be willing to make peace with a Juvvi too.”

“I’m not begging you,” I say. With a sudden rush of feckless spite, I add, “Would you like it if I did?” I only said it to make him flush, and it succeeds. His ear tips turn pink, but his gaze is unflinching. “I suppose it depends on what you were begging for.”

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.”

“What would you have me do?” he asks. “You have already ruined me.”

“That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”

survival is not a battle that you win only once. You must fight it again every day.

“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’d rather have you as my wife.”

Gáspár lurches forward, the Woodsman’s knife drawing a line of blood along his throat. “Don’t touch her—”

“If there is anyone I would damn my soul for,” Gáspár says, “it would be you.”