by Rosalyn Eves
The pieces began to fall together, like a pair of dice joining in exquisite unity. “And you think somehow that I can stop this?” I shook my head. “I’m no fighter.” I was a shapeshifter. My gifts lay in misdirection and animal wizardry.
In any case, I was better at disappointing people than delivering them. If I managed to do something heroic once, it was by dying. The odds of that happening again were about the same as landing a royal flush when you’d staked your entire fortune.
As a betting man, I couldn’t take the bet. I’d wind up broke. Or broken.
“I can teach you,” Hadúr said.
I shook my head. “I’d sooner die again.”
Never one to waste a good exit line, I spun around and began shifting to crow form. I couldn’t quite finish the transformation—the bones were still too heavy, and something about the shape of the wings seemed off—but I flung myself off the branch anyway, my wings flapping wildly.
What followed my abrupt launching was more a fall than flight, but my wings caught enough air that I didn’t break anything on impact with the level below, though I suspected I’d have some pretty bruises. Branches whipped at my face as I fell, copper and crimson giving way to green. I took a moment to catch my breath on landing before shifting back, then stumbled naked into my room.
The grey ladies buzzed around the kitchen when I returned, sifting through drawers in some distress.
I pulled on some trousers before speaking. “If you’re looking for the knives, I left them at Hadúr’s doorstep.” This was the first time I’d said anything to them—they’d never spoken directly to me, and I was not certain they’d understand.
They must have caught something, because they left abruptly, and I was not surprised when the Lady showed up a few moments later.
“Well, you have managed to upset everyone you’ve encountered today.”
“I aim to please.” I rubbed at a welt on my cheek, wondering at the magic that allowed me to reshape every cell in my body but still carry injuries with me into a new form.
“Hadúr says you’ve refused to help us. May I ask why, when we’ve gone to so much trouble to bring you back?”
“You did not ask me if I wanted to live.”
“Everyone wants to live.”
“My father killed himself.”
“Were you trying to die, then, when you flew into the Binding after your cousin?”
“No, I—” I stopped. There was something holy about those moments before I died, before Anna abandoned me, that I could not talk of, even to the Lady. I had never felt so sure of anything in my life as I had then, when I knew I would not die my father’s death: a failure and a disappointment. My death had meant something—and the Lady had taken that away, no matter how well-meaning her efforts. “It was for a good cause. I wanted my friends to live, for Hungary to be free.”
Those grave, deep eyes studied my face. “We, also, want Hungary to be free, for your friends and family to live. The Four are watching Anna—they will use her if they can. Destroy her if they cannot.”
“Is she still in Hungary?” I’d thought her parents might have fetched her back to England by now.
“In Vienna. Your sister is there too. The Four have converged on the city, along with the heads of most of the states of Europe, for a Congress to determine the fate of the praetheria.”
“Hadúr mentioned the Four. But I don’t understand their aim.”
“The Four were already powerful inside the Binding. But since its breaking, there has been a great deal of unrest among those who were bound. Some wish to live their remaining days quietly, as they did before the Binding. Others wish to resume their old places of power, worshipped and feared by humans. And still others, including some of those who lived peaceably with humans before they were trapped, taught their children to hate those who bound them.”
She paused for a moment, her narrow hands at her temples as if her head hurt. “After so many years in the Binding, feeding our energy into human magic, we are much weakened. Our connection with this world is tenuous at best. Hadúr and I have come here, to the world tree, which was our origin site and our ancient home. As the roots of the tree grow firmer in your world, our strength will return.
“But not all praetheria have an origin point, a place that links them to the human world. And grafting roots is a slow route. The Four and those who follow them are not so patient. The fastest ways to reground ourselves in your world are blood-born: baptized by death, or baptized by birth. War—or marriage. Humans have shown themselves disinclined to marriage, so the Four have chosen war.”
“Do they have names, these Four?”
She hesitated again. “Naming gives things power I do not like to give. But you might know them by their roles: Death, Conquest, Hunger, War.”
I heard echoes of catechism in those roles. “But that’s apocryphal. What can they mean by it?”
She made a face. “They have an abysmal sense of humor. They mean to bring on an apocalypse. To grow strong on human blood and human death, and remake the world for their own. I want you to stop them.”
I held the silence between us for a long beat. “And what if I do become this táltos? What will this cost me? The people I love? Breaking the Binding spell cost my life.” I thought a moment, then amended, “Should have cost my life.”
The Lady’s Madonna face was grave. “People will die in your name.”
My blood ran cold. “If what you claim is true, suppose I try and fail. What then?”
“Then a great many people will die. You cannot fail.”
My anger mounted, white hot. “Why are you laying this all on me? I already died. I gave my whole damn life so that you could be free of the Binding spell. I didn’t ask to come back. That was supposed to be my redemption—and now you want me to earn it again?”
“It is much easier to die a hero than live one.” The Lady’s eyes were heavy and sad.
“Do you think I do not know that? But this—I’m not the person you want. I’m not particularly smart, nor courageous, nor strong. My magic allows me to shift, but generally only into creatures my own weight or smaller, and the animal persuasion I have hardly seems enough to stop an apocalypse. You want someone like William, who can inspire an army. Or Gábor, who has the brains to lead them.”
“You would not be entirely alone. Hadúr and I will help you, train you.”
My anger, never very enduring, sputtered out as quickly as it had flared. I knew the Lady meant well. But why wouldn’t she see that I couldn’t do what she asked? The best gamblers know when the cards are against them, when to lay their hand down and walk away. And my inner sense of risk was screaming at me—the odds were too great for the cards I held. I could never hope to match creatures like the Four, even with help. All I could offer would be false hope that would make my inevitable defeat that much worse, because the hopeful have more to lose. If I did what she asked, I would only lead thousands of people to their deaths.
I could not do it.
“I’m sorry.” I turned on my heel, feeling the Lady’s eyes on my back.
There was nowhere else to go in that small room, so I tromped along a branch outside, burning the miles of bark beneath my feet. I wished I could be the hero the Lady needed. Damnation, but I wished it.
I had no great illusions about myself. I could be charming, but charm is no substitute for conviction. My sister had charged all my life that my great failing was want of fortitude: I lacked the stomach to stick with things. In my life I had only ever succeeded at dying—and now I had not even succeeded at that.
And on this frail hope two ancient gods hoped to build their resistance? They must have lost their wits along with their strength in the Binding.
Perhaps the Lady was wrong. Perhaps she had misunderstood or misrepresented the aims of these Four.
I clung to this faint spark of hope as I walked. If I were William, desperate for a fight, I would take on her offer gladly. If I were Ann
a, sure in my own convictions, I would also answer yes. Noémi, my staid, practical sister, would urge caution. But my friends did not have to answer the Lady. I did.
*
For two days the Lady held her counsel and did not press me. I concentrated on improving my shifting and continuing to heal. If I did not mean to help the Lady, I could not stay. And if there was any truth to her stories, the least I could do was make sure Anna and Noémi were safe, and pass on the information to someone more responsible than me.
I think the Lady must have suspected what I planned, because for the next few days she was almost never absent from the tree-room, and when she was, it was never for long. On the third day she said, “Hadúr wishes to train you.”
My bruises had not yet faded from the last time I spoke with Hadúr. “No, thank you.”
She smiled. I did not trust her smile. “I will not force you, but I think you can be persuaded. Follow me. We have something to show you.”
My curiosity piqued despite myself, I followed her. If I died again, my epitaph would read: Here lies Eszterházy Mátyás. It was his own damn fault.
Outside the door, the Lady put her fingers to her lips and whistled, loud and sharp. A pair of falcons appeared, their gold-burnished wingspan broader than I was tall. Turul birds.
The Lady extended her arms, and the birds closed their claws around each one and lifted into the air. “Come join us. Shift.”
My last attempt at shifting had not gone well—and I’d never taken on a turul bird. I closed my eyes, picturing in my head the sharp beak, the proudly turned head, the immense sweep of the wings. But something about shifting into a holy bird felt faintly blasphemous, and I preferred crows anyway. They were smarter than falcons or eagles. I melted, my bones hollowing out, my fingers becoming feathers, my nose and mouth fusing into hardness. There was a rightness to the shifting that told me this time I’d succeeded.
Finally. A fierce satisfaction seared through me.
I launched myself into the air after the turul birds. For a moment, hanging suspended on the air, miles of nothing dropping away below me, I thought of escaping. But I did not think I could outfly both birds, and besides, I was still curious. We landed just outside Hadúr’s forge.
Hadúr was already waiting for us. As my wings settled into place at my sides, the corners of his mouth turned up. That should have been my warning.
Without a word, he launched something at me, a tiny pointed star still glowing red from the furnace. I squawked and fluttered upward, narrowly avoiding it.
Then Hadúr’s hands seemed to be everywhere, sending tiny stars flying after me like an ice storm, relentless and sharp. Cuts grazed my wings, my back, the sides of my head.
I shifted back into human form so I could find my voice. “Stop! If this is how you—” A pause while I dodged another star. “Mean to persuade me to help you, I don’t think you’re clear—” Another pause. “On the difference between persuasion and force.”
A star scored my side. I pressed my fingers against the stinging cut and dodged a pair of stars.
The Lady stood watching me impassively, her turul birds perched in a branch above her head.
“Stop! You’re going to kill me. Again.”
Hadúr’s grin widened. “I am not so poor an aim.”
This star caught me at the top of my thigh, entirely too close to my groin for comfort. Abruptly I was no longer bemused or afraid. I was angry, an anger that rooted itself in my gut and burned upward, like fire in a bush.
I shifted again, almost without thought. Black like a crow, but larger, swelling and splitting and stretching into a form as deadly as it was vast. If I had not been so angry, I might have been terrified: I’d never before been able to take a shape I hadn’t seen. I’d never taken the shape of a creature larger than myself. But there, in that moment, something about the world tree sang to me.
I could feel the humming along my bones, a force external to me nudging my body into a new shape, heads sprouting from my shoulders like mushrooms.
When the new shape settled, I shook and knew myself for the first time. A seven-headed dragon, like the one that guarded the world tree in my nurse’s stories.
The throwing stars continued to fly at me unabated, but they glanced off my hide and dropped harmlessly. I felt, dimly, that if I continued to grow I might eclipse even the tree itself; I might soar up among the skies, and the heavens themselves would not hold me.
I stared down at the tiny specks of the Lady and Hadúr. From this angle I could see up into the silver and gold levels of the higher realms.
A deep hunger filled me. I wanted to open my mouth and devour the Lady and Hadúr, and beyond them the tree, down to its roots. I wanted to swallow the world, though even that would scarcely begin to touch this endless aching.
A cool, almost minuscule hand brushed my flank and brought me back to myself. I ratcheted back into my own body, pushing away the memory of that hunger as if it burned me. It had only been momentary, but it had been so endless, so all-consuming.
It terrified me.
When my eyes refocused, the Lady and Hadúr were smiling at me. Hadúr held no craft this time: his hands hung loose and empty before him.
“You see?” the Lady said delightedly, as if celebrating the accomplishment of a child. “Your power as a táltos has magnified immensely. Let us help you. Let us train you, and you can stand against anyone.”
But who should stand against me?
I could not meet her smile. That craving still reverberated in my bones. The shape I had taken was nothing I could have conjured before I died. My death had changed me, though how and to what extent, I didn’t fully understand. If becoming a monster is what it meant to embrace my táltos power, I would not save the world; I would slaughter it. It wasn’t the Four we needed to fear—it was me.
“No.” I took two steps back from them. “I won’t do this.”
I whirled around and flung myself over the edge.
The ground screamed upward. The shadow of the turul birds draped across me as I fell. No doubt the Lady had sent them to wrench me up at the last minute if my own stupidity prevented my shifting.
Stupidity was an unsatisfactory vice, and one I tried not to indulge in. I shifted midfall, my body narrowing down to that of a peregrine falcon, an occasional visitor to the Hungarian plains who could outfly even the wind. At some point in my plummet, the stars spinning around the world tree gave way to an ordinary sky: wisps of cloud and a pale wash of light betokening sunrise. The Lady had said the tree connected the Upper World to the human one, and a táltos could cross between worlds. Already, the air felt denser. My falcon shape drew in a full breath, and the familiarity of ordinary air sent new energy through my body.
I screamed once in defiance at the great birds still tailing me, then shot off. I didn’t look behind to see where the turul birds went: I could feel the distant trail of their life force as they winged back to the Lady. I soared across the puszta, my sharpened gaze snagging on a horned skull at the base of the great tree.
The Lady had said the tree was invisible to most humans, and from my nursemaid’s stories I remembered that only the most pure of heart had ever found the vast tree sprouting from a cattle skull. What did it mean, then, that I could see it now? Not, certainly, that my heart was pure.
I had died and come back, and something irreplaceable in me had changed. I was no longer entirely myself, but I didn’t know what I might be instead. Even for someone who was used to wearing different forms as casually as most people wear their clothing, this alienation was profoundly unnerving.
I remembered the ache of the monster’s hunger, and my wings twitched.
Somewhere in the field below me, a hare bounded across the grass. I nearly banked, to hurl myself at my prey. But I was human enough to know I could not stop now, so I flew onward, my wings pulling me past the silver ribbons of the Tisza and the smaller streams cutting across the puszta.
I flew pa
st the plains outside Pest, then over the miniaturized city, pausing to rest briefly in the hills beyond Buda Castle. There I shifted into human form to survey the damage from Hadúr’s attacks. The memory of the stars still stung, but I couldn’t find the scars on my arms.
That was new.
Always before, injuries had chased me from one form to the next—even after my death. What had I done, when I let the tree nudge me into dragon shape? Chilled by this new strangeness, I flung myself back into falcon form and threw myself at the skies. By late afternoon I had reached the curated woods around the palace at Eszterháza.
*
My first order of business was to find clothes. It was not so much that I minded being naked when I resumed human form, but other people seemed to.
My second was to find food.
I crept cautiously through the woods behind the palace until I reached the stables, where I supplied myself with a blanket. Long gone were the days when the Eszterházys had employed stable boys that I might filch clothes from. My horse, Holdas, whickered at me.
“Soon,” I promised. Wrapping the blanket around me with as much dignity as I could muster, I walked to the house.
I imagined the look on János’s face when he discovered I was not, in fact, dead. His eyes would widen with shock, he’d sputter, and then he’d well up—for all his gruffness, he was surprisingly softhearted. The image made me smile.
Someone needed to weed the courtyard, paint the trim, mow the gardens beyond the palace—and probably oil the hinges on the gate. I’d nearly forgotten the cacophony of needs at Eszterháza. St. Cajetan, but I loved the old place.
The middle-aged maid who opened the door to my knocking was a new one. She surveyed my blanket and obvious nudity beneath with disfavor.
“Master János is busy at the moment,” she said.
“I can wait for him.”
She pressed her lips together. “He will likely be occupied for a long time.”
“I don’t mind.”
“If you’ve come to beg money, we’ve none. If you’ve an issue for the magistrate, it’s the squire you should be seeing, not Master János.”
