The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

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

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.”

There is no remedy for what will be.’”

I shake my head fiercely, as if his words are arrows and I can keep them from hitting their mark.

If it is a choice between drowning in the same river that has dragged me down a thousand times or walking into a pit of fire that has never burned me once, I will choose the flames and learn to bear it.

But I feel like a dog with its teeth in something, holding fast and hard, knowing it will hurt too much and maybe take my teeth out with it, if I let go.

Creation can only exist alongside destruction, peace alongside pain. Wherever there is life, I will also be.’

It’s hard to think that it took me so long to realize that the shape of our wounds is the same.

Perhaps I wanted to kiss him to prove how little I cared for my people, for my mother’s braid in my pocket, her life ended by some Woodsman at the behest of his father. Perhaps I wanted to forget that between here and Király Szek I am not pagan, not Yehuli, only some stupid girl with her hand in both pockets, finding comfort in cold, dead things. Maybe I wanted his touch to erase me. Or perhaps I wanted the opposite: maybe I wanted his kiss to give me shape, to see how my body transfigured under his hands. 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.

“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.”

I recognize the look in his eyes, despite all their snow-frosted sharpness. It’s the look of a child who’s grown too tall and strong to be cowed by his father’s whip, the look of a dog who has been lashed one too many times.

I’ve never felt so limp and miserable before, paralyzed by my love. This is the feeling, I think, that keeps mother deer loping after their feeble and defenseless fawns. A mad thing, really, that makes you so terribly attuned to mortality, to the soft places where throats meet jaws, to the hawks circling overhead and the wolves lurking just beyond the tree line. I lean over and press my lips to his hair.

I think of my own fleeting desire to see the Broken Tower crumble. But it would be a weightless gesture, a shout without an echo.

I feel a twinge of phantom pain go down the backs of my thighs, where my scars are a pale mirror of his fresh and lurid wounds.

Isten drawing up the dawn with one hand and painting midnight with the other.

I know that Gáspár is still here—I must believe he’s alive, until the moment that I see light drain from his eye—and if I leave him I will be as unmoored as a ship set loose with no captain, a compass point spinning on and on and never finding its true north. And I know that Régország will not be safe for anyone I love unless Nándor is dead, and his memory drowned out by the sounds of a hundred voices shouting.

For so long I’d thought my mixed blood a curse, blamed it for the absence of Isten’s magic. Watching Gáspár now, offering his traitor brother mercy, I think that blood cannot be either blessing or curse. It can only be.

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

Someday an archivist will shelve a book about the siege of Király Szek in the palace library, and it will document the lives lost, the ground gained, the treaties signed, and the maps redrawn. But it will not say anything about this: a wolf-girl and a Woodsman holding each other in the blood-drenched aftermath, and the clouds cleaving open above them, letting out a gutted light.

She thinks I am raising a generation of happy masochists, scarcely better than the Woodsmen. I reply that when summers are long and food is plentiful and mothers stay alive until their daughters are grown, no one will be desperate enough to lop off their fingers or their little toes. Besides, she is happy to try to argue her end; I will not stop speaking mine.