The Wolf and the Woodsman

by Ava Reid

The trees have to be tied down by sunset. When the Woodsmen come, they always try to run.

Great opening !!

The light of the setting sun filters through the patchy cathedral of tree cover, dappling her face. Tears are pearled in the corners of her eyes.

The author loves using "cathedral" as an adjective, but it never quite fits for me.

The wind picks up, carrying the voices of the other girls toward us, as silvery as the bone chimes hanging outside of Virág’s hut.

Miss Reid, why are you doing this to me? How does bone make a "silvery" sound? 😑

The trees have a tendency to uproot themselves when they sense danger, or even when someone ruffles their branches a little too hard. Once, a girl accidentally set fire to a sapling, and a whole copse of elms walked off in protest, leaving the village exposed to both wind and Woodsmen.

Cool 🌲

Listening to the rain drum against the reed roof as summer storms snarled through the tree branches, counting the beats between rumbles of thunder. I remember the particular curve of my mother’s cheek, illuminated in the moments when lightning fissured across the sky.

Before doing his great deeds and making deals with gods, Vilmötten was a bard, wandering from town to town with his kantele strapped to his back, hoping to make enough coin for bread and wine. That was the part of the story I liked the best—the part where the hero was just a man.

My horse trots forward to join the Woodsmen where they stand at the edge of the woods. Their long shadows lap at our village like dark water. As I approach, I hear a fluttering of leaves, a whisper on the wind that sounds almost like my name. More likely it’s my wishful imagination, hoping for even a word I could believe was a farewell. The trees do speak, but in a language we all stopped understanding long ago, a language even older than Old Régyar.

Here the trees do not abide by the laws of the gods, to change with the seasons or to grow straight up, slender branches straining toward the sky. We pass trees in their full spring display, lush with verdant leaves and needle-thin white flowers, and then trees that are rotting and dead, blackened all the way down to the roots, as if they’ve been struck by vengeful lightning. We pass trees that have grown twisted around each other, two wooden lovers locked in eternal embrace, and then others still that bend backward toward the ground, as if their branches are aching toward the Under-World, instead.

“The Érsek is the highest religious authority in Régország,” Imre says, preempting me, “and the king’s closest confidant. Király és szentség, royalty and divinity. Think of them like twin pillars that hold up the kingdom.” I would rather not think of them at all.

😂

Ezer Szem means thousand-eyed. If you stare long enough into the darkness of the forest, eventually something will stare right back.

The Nietzsche rewriting!

He and his blade have both been honed for killing pagan girls like me. He closes the space between us in three long strides. I imagine the trajectory of his ax—the arc it would have to follow to meet my throat. But perhaps I can better estimate the danger by looking in his eye. It’s angled downward, lashes casting a feathery shadow across his cheekbone.

~~Dangerous and pretty MMC~~

A pitiful dawn creeps over the forest, the pinks and golds of sunrise strained through the dark latticework of tree branches and bracken, squeezing out their color. All that reaches me is a bleached yellow light. It falls on my shaking hands, nicked with tiny scratches from palm to fingernail, and the splatter of dried bloodstains on my wolf cloak. It falls on the captain, turning his black suba silvery with dust motes. It falls on Peti, his chest rising in fits and starts, every breath a violence.

Peti doesn’t reply. His eyelashes give a limp, moth-wing flutter.

“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.

the Prinkepatrios has no vices, and it would be blasphemy to even suggest such a thing. 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?

When he turns and I see only the untarnished half of his face, it’s almost regal, the kind of profile you might find on a minted coin. I imagine that if he lived in Keszi, Írisz or Zsófia might drag him down for some furtive coupling by the riverside, and he’d come back with a sheepish, knowing smile on his swollen lips. But I can’t see the left half of his face without wondering morbidly what lies beneath the black patch, and how he ever summoned the strength to pluck out his own eye like a crow picking over a corpse.

The Black Lake stretches all the way to the horizon, wisps of fog hovering over its surface like steam hissing out of a pot. Beneath the mist, it glitters darkly under a white sliver of moon, the reflection of the stars speckling its surface. It looks like a pool of night, and I almost believe I could dip my hand into the water and pluck out a jewel-bright star for myself.

I remember how the fire roared to life in front of the captain, so sudden and sure. Any wolf-girl would have marveled at such a fire, easily as impressive as the work of our best fire-makers. We would have called it power, magic. They called it piety. But what is the difference, if both fires burn just as bright?

Its gray-green skin is pulled taut over its spine and rib cage, the bones close to breaking through. Its head dangles perilously on a scrawny neck, black tongue unfurling over a row of blade-sharp teeth. Its tongue lolls on the ground as the creature crawls toward me on all fours, hissing and groaning. Its eyes are not eyes at all. They are twin clusters of flies gathered on its gaunt face.

Spoomky.

To any other wolf-girl, it might have been a great insult. But what do I have to thank the gods for, besides short winters and the green promise of spring? My perfunctory faith hasn’t prevented Virág’s lashings, or Katalin’s vicious taunts, or stopped the Woodsmen coming to take me.

"Perfunctory." Author uses this word quite a bit — all throughout her bibliography as far as I can tell. Not sure it quite fits everywhere she uses it.

“The king is very interested in pagan legends,” Gáspár says. There’s a heaviness to his voice. “This one in particular.” “And why is that?” “Because he craves power more than purity, and he wants a way to win the war.”

That the king employs them as tax collectors and financiers and merchants, the sorts of jobs that Patritians consider sinful, only deepens that loathing. In the eyes of the pagans, the Yehuli are traitors, slaves to the Patritian tyrants, and willing ones at that. Katalin’s words ribbon through my head, years and years of bitten slurs. Your blood is tainted, that’s why you’re barren. Isten would never bless Yehuli scum. You were born to lick the Woodsmen’s boots.

content warning for antisemitism!

His voice catches when he says Merzani. I wonder, with a prickle of guilt, whether the epithet “black prince” has more to do with his Woodsman garb, or with the stain of his Merzani blood. I wonder if he ever touches the contours of his own face, trying to find some memory of his mother in them, and feels equal parts relieved and distressed at the result. We kept no mirrors in Keszi, but I would spend hours kneeling at the riverside, watching my reflection crease and wrinkle like it was an embroidery on silk, puzzling over whether my nose belonged to my mother or my father, and what it would mean either way.

There was no answer that didn’t hurt to swallow. I almost tell him that, before I remember that he’s no friend of mine.

I choke down a noise of derision. “But the Prinkepatrios has no compunctions about kidnapping wolf-girls. And binding me to a dying man, making me hear every gasp of his pain—more cruelty that doesn’t require absolution.” “That was Ferkó’s idea,” Gáspár says, gaze lowering. “Not mine.” “Then you’re cruel and gutless.” My face is hot. “Do you always let your men guide the swing of your ax?”

Ha!

Before he can say a word I snatch up Ferkó’s bow and quiver, swinging both onto my back. Their familiar weight is a comfort, like a song I will never forget.

“They were monsters,” he says flatly. “Some Woodsmen call them lidércek. It doesn’t matter. There’s no use giving a name to evil.”

What? Lol

His cold, superior tone rankles me, especially after all the prattling about the blackness of his soul. “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.”

Yes! Tell him!

“He rewards us with salvation.” Gáspár’s face is stony, but there’s a hitch in his voice. “Not that you would understand such a thing.” “I’m glad I don’t,” I reply, skin itching angrily. “I’m glad I don’t live my life at the mercy of a god who takes body parts from ten-year-old boys.”

And after listening to all this, I want to laugh at their Patritian fairy tales. Humans don’t need some shadow-demon to tempt them; we are imprudent enough on our own. Even Isten and the gods are driven by greed and lust, prone to snatching stars from the sky and ravishing maidens by the riverside.

“There is nothing more to tell,” Kajetán says, dipping into a bucket of well water with a rusted tin cup. He lifts the cup to his lips, drains it, and goes on.

Reid’s characters are always using rusty things to eat/drink with. 😬

“Either way, it’s no good arguing with every breath. The nature of a bargain, regrettably, is that we belong to each other.” He flushes a little as he says it, and inside my boots, my toes curl. Gáspár chooses his words carefully and crossly, the way I would comb the trees outside Keszi for the largest and least-bruised apple. I wonder why he has chosen these words now. Perhaps he is only being as wretchedly reasonable as ever, but still my mind stammers around the thought of us being bound together.

Oh no, not the curling toes. 🙄

“Something in the nose, or the brow, perhaps. There were several Yehuli men at court, tax collectors and moneylenders. None of them had your nose or your brow, and certainly not your eyes.” I blink at him. “My eyes?” “Yes,” he says, curtly and with a hint of embarrassment. “They’re very green.”

👁 👁✨👀

His voice is perfectly flat, as if the answer is a groove well worn. “I have the wrong complexion for my father’s tastes. One of the counts proposed that I spend a year indoors to see if that improved my prospects.”

😬

I think of my own fumbling trysts by the riverside, of the men and boys who slipped their hands between my thighs and then begged me not to tell anyone, please, after we were both sweat-slick and panting.

“That’s all I’ve been taught, Woodsman. My entire life. To endure their slights and swallow my loathing. Did you agree with the count who told you to stay indoors, or the courtiers who turned up their noses at you? If you did—well, you must be the stupidest prince who’s ever lived. 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.”

Ok, this is a wildly out of pocket thing to say to an abused person.

The tree roots hold us in perfect suspension, like a body in a bog, untouched by the erosion of time. I open my mouth to reply, tasting soil and moss, but my eyelids are heavy and sleep snarls me back down into oblivion. When I wake for good the next morning, in the quiet aftermath of the snowstorm, I decide I must have dreamed it all: his gentle words, the warmth of his body around mine. But more than once, I catch Gáspár looking at me in a funny way, as if he has some sort of secret I don’t know.

For so long his missing eye horrified me—I’d thought it was a testament to his piety and hate. Now I consider perhaps it is a testament only to his desperation. If I’d been a passed-over prince, shackled by the shame of my foreign bloodline, sneered at in the palace halls, forever bathed in the golden light of my perfect brother, wouldn’t I have taken a knife to my own flesh too?

Growth 🌱

Later, when the fun of her cruelty had worn thin and she and her friends abandoned me, I crawled into a thicket and let my cheek rest in the dirt. I pretended I could hear Ördög rumbling beneath the earth, like Csilla had. I wanted to hear him calling to me. I wanted to hear him telling me I belonged somewhere, even if it was the cold realm of the dead.

I wonder how Tuula managed to haul the firewood up the ladder, much less our unconscious bodies. She’s as short as I am and far leaner. I don’t even try to contemplate how the bear got up there.

Yeah. With no mention of a pulley lift this is completely immersion breaking.

No matter his moments of cruelty, we all were desperate for his favor—he had the oddest way of doing that. Marjatta said he could make a chicken bat its lashes at him while he carved it up for supper.”

“It seems ill fitting for someone who shares their bed with a Juvvi to curl their lip at me. Do you take off your pendant before your coupling?”

Just past her hut, Tuula’s reindeer move in blurs of silver, like clouds drifting. Their antlers are bone grails, holding cupfuls of sky.

The figurative language is getting so distracting.

“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.”

Now that he’s angry at me I am a wolf-girl again, and I ought to think him only a Woodsman. I should wring his kindnesses out of me like water from my hair. I should forget that he ever fell asleep with his arms around me, and think only of finding my father. 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.

‘You are the one who brings decay to plants and flowers. You let frost lay upon the earth. You make my people grow white hair, and make their skin fold with wrinkles. You let them bleed, and you let them feel despair.’ “‘Yes,’ Ördög said. ‘All of these things are true, and I am all of these things.’ “‘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.’

I can’t get it off him without pulling it over his head, so I reach for my knife, instead. I draw a long slit down the front of his shirt, cleaving the leather in two. It opens like black petals over his bare chest.

" It opens like black petals over his bare chest. " Author, please! You don't need to make *every description* into a simile. 😩

Having spent so long being afraid, sublimating myself to the magic of the other wolf-girls, this sudden fearlessness is like a song that begs for singing, the words and the melody bubbling up in me boldly, loudly.

These similes. 😬

If I let my mind wander long enough to consider so many grisly possibilities, fear will wither me up like a wildflower that has been cut and I will walk into one of the sod houses and wait for the soil to close over my head.

I might have to drop this book. Every simile is taking me out and this is becoming a chore.

I think of my trysts by a different riverside, the one near Keszi. Mostly quick and shameful, my knees in the dirt so our eyes would never meet, sometimes brusque enough that it bloodied the insides of my thighs.

Bloodied?! Wtf