by Rosalyn Eves
While I stood beside the Lady, gaping, a great golden falcon dropped from the branches above to land on the Lady’s shoulder. She murmured something to it, and the bird launched itself back into space. I frowned after it. In all the time I’d spent in crow form, I’d never seen anything like it. It gave off the faint electricity most living things did to my táltos sense, but its thoughts, if it had any, were closed and remote.
“My turul bird,” the Lady said, seeing me watch the bird.
The same bird of legend that had led Álmos and Árpád into the Carpathian Basin. I shivered, unnerved by the sense that my world had somehow gone beyond any reality I had previously understood.
The Lady helped me into a chair that looked as if it had grown from the living wood of the tree. She glided across the floor to where a pair of greyish women no higher than my waist buzzed back and forth before a ceramic stove. The Lady returned with a tray bearing a single cup of steaming broth.
All at once I was ravenous. “Eight months and all I get is one measly bowl of broth? I didn’t think heaven was so stingy.”
“You cannot eat too much. You have been mostly dead for months. Your body will need to remember its functions.”
I took the wooden cup in both hands. “And how do I know you don’t mean to poison me?”
She lifted one fine eyebrow. “I would not have gone to the effort of bringing you back if I meant to kill you.”
Why had she gone to this effort? I drained the cup, refusing to let unpleasant thoughts spoil my first food in ages. The hot liquid lined my throat and settled in my stomach. I had almost forgotten how deeply pleasurable food could be. Not that I intended to show the Lady that.
“Don’t you have anything else?” I asked.
One of the grey women appeared beside the Lady with a tray. The Lady glanced down at the flaky, golden pastry, then at me. She sighed. “Very well. You may have this one, since Csilla made it just for you.”
I bit into a pastry stuffed with sweetened cheese and moaned. “Now this,” I said, closing my eyes in ecstasy, “was worth dying for.”
Had it not been beneath her dignity, I would have sworn the Lady rolled her eyes.
After I had licked the last of the pastry crumbs from my lips, the Lady rose to leave. “You need rest,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. “Tell me why you’ve brought me here. What you want from me.”
She shook her head. “There will be time for that later, when you’ve rested.”
“I don’t need to rest. I’ve just slept for eight months.”
As we spoke, the grey women wrestled a mattress onto the floor. One of them brought another mug of liquid—not broth this time, but some kind of herbal concoction.
“Drink it,” the Lady said.
“Tell me why I’m here first. The longer you avoid my question, the more horrible I suspect my fate must be.”
“Drink,” the Lady said again.
I took one sip, hoping to placate her, but the liquid was so bitter I spat it out again. “What is that?”
“Something to help you sleep.” And then, as though I were a recalcitrant child, the Lady took the cup from me and pinched my nose until I gasped for breath, then poured the hot tea down my throat.
Almost at once a pleasant kind of haze fuzzed over my mind, dulling my anger before it could take root and setting my vision swirling. I sank down, and the grey ladies carried me to the bed, where I slept.
*
I woke sometime later, woozy and faint, spots of light dancing outside my vision. When I managed to pull myself from the mat, I found I was alone. I dragged myself across the floor, pausing by the chair to catch my flagging breath, and peered out one of the small windows. The leaves still gleamed from the light of an invisible sun. Beyond them, caught in fractured glimpses as the wind stirred the branches, the stars still tumbled through the sky. How high was this tree? And how far should I have to walk to reach the end of the branches, or fall to reach the ground?
Questions whirring through my head, I leaned back against the wood of the wall, my fingers absently tracing the unnatural smoothness. Almost, I could imagine a slow heartbeat of the living tree thrumming against my hands.
Then memory descended, and my hands slammed against the wood: the Lady had resurrected me—and then drugged me rather than tell me why I was here.
I’d be damned if I’d stay under those conditions.
I started across the room, then froze. Perhaps I was damned. This did rather smack of some cosmic joke.
Then I shrugged. Damned or not, I couldn’t stay here. I needed to get home to Noémi and János.
The easiest way down from a great tree, I reasoned, was flying. I closed my eyes, reaching inward for the memory of a crow, my favorite of all the forms I took. I started to shift, imagining my bones thinning and lightening, feathers sprouting from my fingertips, my legs rejointing to my hips. Shifting well took practice and concentration—I had to hold the shape and feel of the creature firmly in mind. The first time I shifted, I had sent Noémi screaming back to our nurse: I had tried to take the form of our family dog but had wound up as a mass of fur and teeth—I’d forgotten to imagine the bones.
This time I stopped midshift, my fingers only just beginning to fuse into bird wings. Something was wrong. The memory didn’t feel right. Or rather, the memory was right enough, but I couldn’t quite access it. Like an invalid trying to walk after months in bed, I could only grasp the recollection of shifting, not the deep-down muscle memory that powered my movement.
My stomach began growling: one downside of shifting was the tremendous energy it took. I was always hungry.
I paced the confines of the small room, wondering if the weakness were my own, a side effect of dying, or if it had something to do with the bitter tea the Lady had made me drink. I supposed it did not much matter—either way, I would need time. Time for the effects of the tea to wear off; time for my body to finish healing.
Meanwhile, what could I do? Already, restlessness stirred through my blood, making my legs twitch.
I examined the contents of the room. Aside from the mat I had slept on and a pair of chairs growing from the floor to one side of the room, there was only a little iron stove, a cupboard with plain earthenware plates and cups, another cupboard with eating utensils and a few knives. I ate what little food I could find—a half dozen pastries—and entertained myself for twenty minutes by rearranging the contents of the small kitchen, imagining the shrieks of dismay from the grey ladies when they discovered my work.
Then I strolled out the door of my new cage. Seven different branches split off from the main trunk, circling around the room where I slept. I chose one at random and began walking, slowly at first, then more confidently as the last of the tea-induced dizziness receded. But when I had walked out so far I could no longer see the main trunk, and the branch still extended endlessly before me, a wave of lightness prickled across my scalp. I’d always had a good head for heights (a necessity, if one makes a habit of taking avian shapes), but this—this was beyond anything in my experience, and I had the disorienting sense of a world turned upside down, my entire perspective wrong.
My legs trembled beneath me, and I realized I had been unwise to come so far, so soon. What would happen if I fell? Could I die more than once? Or would I simply lie beneath the tree, crushed and burning with agony? I’d rather not find out.
I took a few more steps and my legs buckled, dropping me to the bark below, my muscles contracting in pain and exhaustion. I don’t know how long I lay on the branch before the Lady found me: the sun did not seem to shift, but the wind played endlessly across my face, whispering maddening secrets I could almost grasp. The Lady picked me up as easily as she might a child, and this time, when she pressed the bitter tea on me, I didn’t fight it.
*
Now that I had awoken from my death-sleep, my body had more or less accustomed itself to night and day rhythms. Four more days—at least, four mo
re periods of extended wakefulness punctuated by sleep—and I had regained most of my strength. In the hours when the Lady was gone and the grey ladies were not twittering about the small room, I took to walking down the branches. I never did reach the end, but I no longer collapsed in the middle either. Birds wheeled and shrieked along the branches: a pair of turul birds, a flock of cuckoos, a banded hoopoe like the ones that had so entertained Anna when she had first seen them near Eszterháza. I broke off a twig and threw it at the hoopoe, which flew away in a burst of color.
On the fifth day I had gone some distance out when I heard ringing overhead. Not the light tintinnabulation of bells, but a heavier clanking, of iron striking iron. A forge, I thought, though building a firefed forge in the top of a tree seemed like willful self-destruction.
Curious, I tried shifting again. I’d tried several times since first discovering I couldn’t—each time I seemed to make it a little further. This time my arms formed nearly entire wings, and my face narrowed into a familiar corvid shape, but my bones were still solid, and no amount of beating my wings managed to lift me off the branch.
I shifted back, shaking my wrists and fingers (the aftereffects of bone fusion were never quite comfortable). My heart shuddered, readjusting to its new size in proportion to my own body. My stomach tried to eat itself again.
The grey ladies had returned, murmuring to each other in their own language. They flapped their hands at me when I came in, but I ignored them, rummaging through one of the cupboards for the remains of my breakfast bread. The bread was dry in my throat and light in my stomach, but it would have to do.
When they had gone, I collected four small but sturdy kitchen knives. I used twine to attach a pair to the bottom of my boots, and pulled on thin leather gloves I had found in one of the cupboards, wondering as I did so what use a goddess might have for them. Grasping a knife in each fist, I stabbed the knives into the tree, alternating as I climbed and using the knives on my boots to help stabilize myself. The tree made a strange kind of groaning noise as I did so.
My arms were still not back to their full strength, and my legs ached from the unfamiliar posture. I gained enough height that the fall back to the previous level might break my neck and stopped, arms trembling.
This was absurd. I peered into the foliage above me, but a profusion of small branches obscured everything, and I had no idea how much farther I would need to climb to reach the next level—if there was a next level.
The wind shifted the branches again and I caught a glimpse of something gleaming like copper.
Curiosity giving me added strength, I pulled myself upward. Just when I thought I could go no farther, when I would have to risk sliding back down the trunk because my arms would no longer hold me, I reached another branching of the trunk.
I hauled myself up onto the branch and collapsed, aches pulsing through every part of my body. I took three long breaths, pulled off my boots with the knives attached—then stared. The green leaves of the lower level gave way to coppery leaves that shimmered as the wind shook them, as though summer had abruptly turned to fall. But when I touched the nearest leaf, it was not the dry, brittle husk I expected. It felt, in fact, like a thinly pounded sheet of metal.
Something about this tickled my mind, like I ought to remember why there was copper at the top of the world tree. But nothing in my life had made much sense since awakening after dying, so I shrugged and circled around the trunk of the tree. Here, as below, seven branches sprouted off the main trunk. But unlike the level below, there was no room cunningly carved into the living wood.
A steady pounding sounded nearby, the ring of metal against metal, punctuated by intermittent silence. Since caution has never been one of my operative virtues, and curiosity my besetting sin, I followed the noise to a low, sturdy building set in the fork of three branches.
This close, the sound was distinctly that of a forge, though only a fool would operate a forge in a flammable tree, miles away from any buyers.
I stepped forward and rapped at the door.
The pounding stopped. A moment later the door swung outward, and I had to scramble backward to avoid getting whacked in the nose.
A man stood in the doorway, built like an old tree himself: his powerful, broad chest forking into equally powerful limbs. His face had the dark, craggy look of a weathered oak. He wore his black hair long, a pair of antlers snarled into the hair like a crown.
“I’m not selling,” he said, and yanked the door shut.
I knocked again.
He opened it. “Do you have a death wish, boy?”
“I’ve already died.”
He blinked at me, his eyes seeming to focus. He scanned me, taking in my bare feet and the rough shirt and trousers the Lady had left for me. “You must be that boy the Boldogasszony rescued. Come in, then.”
I followed him into the forge, where a sword lay half-finished across an anvil, the tip still glowing red. While I watched, he thrust the tip back into the coals until it burned yellow-white, then set it on the anvil again. Plucking up a blunted hammer, he began tapping along the flat edge of the sword.
When he’d reached some unspecified point in the process, he looked at me. “Know how to wield one of these?” he asked.
“I know the basics.” I’d never held anything heavier than a rapier for fencing, but really, how hard could it be?
The man set down the hammer and lifted a pair of swords from the wall. Nodding at the door again, he said, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
I walked out onto the relatively flat area before the forge, stripped off my gloves, and took the sword he held out to me. The weight nearly pulled my arm from its socket, and I narrowly escaped dropping the blade on my bare foot.
The execrable smith was grinning openly at me now. He’d called my bluff, and he knew it. “Tell me again how much you know about swordplay.”
I cursed him, dredging up every insult I could think of. He only smiled.
“Well then, show me.” He held the sword out before him as though it were a natural extension of his body.
I lifted my sword and brought it screaming down toward his. Before I could even connect, he’d whipped his sword away and smacked me on the cheek with the flat side. I reeled back, my left hand flying instinctively to cover my cheek. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of my mouth. I twisted to look behind me: I still had a meter or so to spare before I’d topple off the branch. Good.
We sparred for a couple of minutes longer—just long enough for me to feel precisely how much better (and stronger) my opponent was. He whacked my other cheek, presumably so my face could be uniformly red and stinging, then disarmed me.
“I suppose you enjoyed that?” I asked.
“No,” he rumbled. “You’re a pitiful excuse for a swordsman, much less a táltos.”
I froze. When I was alive, before, I had told only a handful of people what I was. Even among the Luminate, true táltos gifts were rare—rarer still in the last century and a half since the Circle had begun limiting Luminate gifts to a single order. No one had ever been able to explain to me why my gifts worked as they did, and after a while I had stopped asking. People looked at me differently when they knew what I was, like they expected something of me.
Like they expected a hero.
My mouth twisted. I wasn’t a hero. Whatever I’d done for Anna, dying for her to break a spell, it had been the impulse of a moment. Something I’d thought vaguely would save my friends and redeem all my failures.
I had not expected to wake up from it. What did you call a martyr who lived? A lucky bastard? Or a sucker?
“Why do you care?” I asked. “What does it matter to you that I am pitiful or not?”
“You’re táltos. You have a gift powerful enough that not even the Luminate Circle could constrain you. Dying and being reborn has only made you more powerful, a true shaman.”
“I didn’t ask for this.” My hands clenched.
“
You were born with a destiny. As táltos, it is your duty to warn in times of danger, to protect your country.”
He would not be telling me this unless he wanted something. They always did. “And Hungary is in danger? I thought that was the whole point of my dying—to break the Binding and help free Hungary from Austria.”
He shook his head. “Austria is only a small part of Hungary’s worries. Already the Croatian armies mass against her. The Romanians and Wallachians will not be far behind. Then Austria will sweep in, like a crow searching for carrion, and the Russians will come. All these are only human worries—Hungary has survived such before. But the Four are waiting for these human armies to destroy each other.”
“Who?”
“Four leaders who emerged among the creatures who were bound. They want to reclaim their former glory.”
A fene egye meg. Maybe Anna and I should have thought things through a little more. I remembered the golden-eyed man who had helped Anna stab me. Was he one of those four?
“Why do you care? Such petty human battles won’t touch you here.”
“I am Hadúr—the Hadak Ura,” the smith said.
The Lord of Armies. The ancient Hungarian god of war. My frustration evaporated, giving way to something irritatingly like awe. I squashed an impulse to drop to my knees before him. Whatever he had once been to Hungary, he had been imprisoned for nearly a thousand years. I did not owe him worship, or fealty.
The smith continued, “Hungary was given to my brothers and me to protect, and we failed when we were bound. My brothers did not survive the Binding. Only the Boldogasszony and I remain.” A ripple crossed his face that might have been sorrow—or humor. I didn’t really speak deity. “If Hungary does not exist, who am I?”
