The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid

Author:Ava Reid [Reid, Ava]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781473582637
Google: ttD2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-06-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

“Évike.”

I wake to the sound of my name and to Gáspár standing outside of my cell. He has my cloak draped over his arm, the wolf looking limp and more dead than usual. I wipe the grime from my face and stand, knees quivering under me.

“I brought this for you,” he says, holding my cloak through the bars.

In the oily gleam of lantern light, his face looks cleaved in two: one half dewed in gold and the other cached in darkness. His good eye is shadow-drenched, so I have to read his expression by the clench of his jaw, the white line of his lips. Torchlight leaps off his ax blade, glinting wetly.

Very slowly, I take my cloak from him. I search its pockets, but my knife is gone.

“I had to take it.” His voice is sharp enough to scythe through the bars. “I can’t worry about you trying anything so abysmally stupid again.”

“How utterly noble of you.”

My words glance off him like arrows off a steel breastplate. He doesn’t shift. My braid and my coin are still inside the pockets, but they feel leached of their warmth. When I run my finger along the grooved edge of the coin, all I can think about is my father’s blank-faced stare and the alien shape of his nose and mouth. We could have passed each other obliviously in a crowd.

“Have you finished with all your snarling outrage, then?” Gáspár asks, and not kindly. “I told you what would happen if you came to the city. If you provoked Nándor.”

“You were planning to bring me anyway!” I burst out. “If your men hadn’t been killed, if you hadn’t figured out I wasn’t a seer, you would have brought me right to your father’s feet and let him do what he wished to me. When did you begin to have compunctions about seizing girls and trussing them up for the king like sheep to the slaughter? Was it after you knew the taste of my mouth, or after you felt the shape of my body under my cloak?”

I expect it to rattle him, and it does, but only for a moment. A grit of his teeth chases the flush from his cheeks.

“If I wanted you to die, I would have let Peti kill you. I would have let you drown under the ice. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you from tearing into Nándor’s false trial,” he says. “I could have left you to Miklós and Ferenc. If they weren’t bound by oath to serve my father, do you know what they would have done to you?”

Hearts and livers on the city gates. I think of the crowd closing in around me, the spittle foaming in their open mouths. My five-fingered hand curls around the iron bars. It doesn’t matter how sharp my claws are; I can’t cut a thousand throats.

“You’ve not an ounce of good sense,” Gáspár goes on, in his pinched-nose prince’s voice. Despite everything, I can tell a part of him relishes the opportunity to castigate me.

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