The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

I’ve long given up on any of them loving me, but I still ache at how easy it is for them to hand me over.

He doesn’t speak like a brute with an ax. His voice is measured, and his words have an easy eloquence. A particularly clever soldier, I decide. But a soldier all the same.

The nature of a bargain, regrettably, is that we belong to each other.”

Beneath our feet, the ground is dusted with a faint layer of early frost, the black earth still bleeding through. It’s as if Isten blew on a great frozen dandelion, and its downy seeds scattered throughout the pine forest of the Far North.

You think the Woodsmen are righteous, but you’re the one who tried to cut a man’s throat because his villagers made some callow slights about the pagans and the Yehuli.

That is not why she did it?? sure it pushed her over the edge But he was a MURDERER OF CHILDREN

I think of him so often I would recognize even his silhouette if he were only a painted shadow on the wall.

Fires are burning in the windows of the houses like lighted eyes, and the smoke that wreathes out of them is curled like a beckoning hand. There are no doorways, just black holes in the sod that remind me of gaping mouths.

I would have considered how easy it would be to put a knife between his shoulder blades while his back was turned. Now I am looking only at the way that water clings to his lips, almost iridescent in the late-afternoon light, delicate as drops of dew.

I held him so fast and so close and with such desperate fervor that he will never touch me again, like when you pluck an apple too soon and it rots before you can eat it.

His eyes are gentle, his voice low, and I allow myself to believe in that moment that by our he only means the two of us, here in the dungeon, together.

trying to wring the small bits of humor out of a mostly humorless life.

We are all, in this moment, part of the same constellation: dozens of stars clustered in identical terror.

“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.”

for stories that didn’t make me flush with apology for daring to speak them. For a man who kneels with my name on his lips.

“Silly, isn’t it? Virág told me I should be ready to do anything for Keszi, to die for my tribe. You were part of my tribe. A wolf-sister.” She tries out the word, chewing on her lip. “I should have tried to protect you too.”