Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

  It was Whitsunday, the seventh Sunday following Easter, though apart from the extra touches of red flowers and birch branches at the altar of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, no one seemed to mark it but me.

  “This time last year I had only just arrived in Hungary,” I told Noémi. “Do you remember the dreadful stories you told to frighten me?”

  She laughed. “Oh yes. How I hated you when you first arrived: rich and spoiled and utterly oblivious. I meant to terrify you. Did I?”

  Her stories hadn’t, but that night I had seen shadows that were not shadows crawl between trees.

  That night I had met Gábor for the first time.

  That night everything about my life had begun to change.

  “Only a little. I’m made of sterner stuff than that.”

  Noémi hugged my arm. “I’m glad. And glad I was wrong about you too.”

  A flash of red caught my eye and I turned. Some distance back, a pair of Dragović’s soldiers stood beside the road in their distinctive uniform: a short brown jacket with red braiding, white trousers with blue-and-white stockings, wide yellow sashes over which hung a curved ornamental sheath and a long pistol with an inlaid butt. Though the night was warm, both wore their distinctive red hooded cloaks, from which they drew their name: Red Mantles. The soldiers’ heads hung close together in conversation. One, to my surprise, was a girl, her dark hair in two neat braids. She saw me looking at her and glared, one hand going to the hilt of the knife she carried at her hip.

  I felt her eyes burning into my back as I walked away.

  I forgot about the girl-soldier as we reached the fete. A loose perimeter had been marked with gauzy fabric strung between wrought-iron posts, gold lights playing around the gently swaying wall. A pair of uniformed footmen greeted the guests as they approached, allowing the Luminate and the wealthier merchants entry but turning others away. Those turned away lingered in the roadway, watching us enter and murmuring, or roamed along the margins, staring with wide eyes at the spectacle beyond.

  An arched bower of wisteria just beyond the footmen welcomed us into the fete. Someone—an Animanti, probably—had crafted smaller flowering vines to weave in and out of the wisteria, resulting in a profusion of delicate colors and floral scents. Silver bells sounded on the early night breeze. WELCOME TO A NIGHT IN FAERIELAND, proclaimed a banner over our heads.

  “Oh,” Noémi breathed, and I smiled. My cousin had a distinct weakness for pretty things.

  The first of the faerie “realms” we came to was a dazzling world of colored glass. Some Luminate charm (Lucifera, probably) set glass beads of all shapes and sizes hovering independently in the air, and they danced around us, forming and reforming an impossible variety of patterns. Tiny Lumen lights followed the glass, giving the impression of walking through a rainbow.

  A few paces farther brought us to Titania’s bower, cunningly illusioned so the flowers—cowslips and bluebells and daisies—stood higher than our heads. I put out my hand to one of the bluebells, and my fingers slid through the illusion. At the center of the bower we found Titania herself, accompanied by a page in silk robes with a short, feathered turban on his dark curls.

  I froze. Titania was not, as I had expected, some Luminate woman spelled to look more fey. She was, in fact, praetherian—tall, attenuated, her tan skin gleaming under the enchanted lights, and gossamer-thin wings beating at her back. Fine silver shackles strung with bells hung on her wrists, chaining her to her bower.

  I swallowed against sourness in my throat.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her. “Are you all right?” The inanity of the question struck me as it left my lips. She wore chains. She was not all right.

  She did not answer me, only looked through me with clear silver eyes—eyes so limpid and sad I began to ache in sympathy. I knelt, inspecting the chains, but there was no enchantment on them that I could break, and when I tugged at them, they did not give.

  “Anna!” Noémi said. “What are you doing?”

  “She shouldn’t be here.” I tugged at the chain again.

  “You don’t know her situation. Perhaps she’s been hired to be part of the tableau,” Noémi said, though she sounded uncertain.

  “Miss!” a man in a dark suit shouted, jogging toward us. “Please don’t touch. You’ll disturb the creature—and the other guests.”

  “Why is she chained?” I asked. “Can’t you let her free, if she must be here?”

  “The chains are only a precaution against her glamour. Now move along, young ladies, there are others here to see Titania.”

  Noémi and I moved on reluctantly. My cousin gripped my arm as I glanced behind to see “Titania” watching me, those great eyes unblinking.

  The third realm we entered was grimmer, better suiting my mood. Here the trees seemed heavier, darker, and a low laugh echoed out from them, raising the hairs on my arms. Leaves bobbed on the wind, swirling together to form a shape that was almost a man, then blowing apart. I nodded reluctant approval: the juxtaposition of the dark and the light seemed very Shakespearean to me—Titania in love with an ass-headed Bottom, Puck dancing with the fairies.

  “Anna, are you sure this is part of the fete?” Noémi asked.

  A shadow moved between the trees, and I peered into the gloom. A tawny-bodied creature with the head of a boar roared, black wings flexing behind him, and I stumbled backward, releasing my hold on Noémi. A creature very like that had charged me at Eszterháza, after I’d released the praetheria from the Binding spell.

  The boar-man sprang forward—only to catch against his own chains. He shook the chains at me, and I realized the strange guttural gurgles might be laughter. I shook my skirts, patted my hair, and pretended I had not been nearly frightened out of my wits. Noémi cowered behind me.

  Three tiny light-flecked creatures flew past me. One of them snagged the hair I had just straightened, yanking it hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I watched them flit away, and a chill slid through my stomach.

  Those praetheria, whatever they were, were not chained as the others in the fete were.

  Whitsunday.

  Noémi had told me once that creatures from folklore were more powerful on nights like this, when the Binding stretched thin. Even if the Binding was gone, praetherian power was not. I remembered the shadow-on-shadow sleekness of the fene that had chased me a year before and shivered. Who had thought it a good idea to mimic a faerie kingdom on such a night?

  “We should go,” I said, turning back to Noémi.

  But Noémi was gone.

  The rest of the fete had disappeared, swallowed up by the heavy-limbed trees surrounding me. I could hear the noise of the party—the laughter of children, the tinny jangle of bells, the murmur of voices—but they were distant, as through a veil or a wall.

  Illusions, I thought. Whose?

  I spun around, studying the trees and shadows around me. Even the boar-man had vanished. The wind hissed through the branches, and the grasses stirred at my feet.

  Then I saw it: a praetherian more tree than creature, with dark eyes that glimmered in the dusk, crouched around the roots of a tree.

  “Mine,” it said, watching me intently.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You,” it said. “Mine.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said firmly but politely. I turned to leave and found that my feet were rooted to the ground. Grasses snaked across my shoes, anchoring me. I met the creature’s eyes. They were flat like mud. “Let me go. Please.”

  “Mine,” it said again.

  It was like arguing with a small child.

  “I am not yours. And my friends will be looking for me.” As if to underscore my words, I heard Noémi’s voice in the distance, calling my name. “Here! I’m here!” But my shout seemed muted, as if it met a hidden ceiling and bounced back.

  “Mine.”

  “You’ve got to let me go. There will be trouble if you don’t.” Forcing myself to calm—telling my
self that this ridiculous creature could not mean me harm—I tried to concentrate on the spell it was using to hold me. I closed my eyes, extending that peculiar second sense, something I had not consciously done since I had broken the Binding. There.

  The spell buzzed dully. My shadow self skittered inside me, angry and frightened. For a fleeting second, I was inside the Binding again, holding the magic of that spell-world for a fire-filled moment before Mátyás died.

  Shaking myself, I shoved the fear down and concentrated on the anger, using it to funnel my focus, and plucked at the spell. A faint resistance, then a snap, and my right foot lifted.

  “MINE!” the creature roared, and, with a slurping sound, my left foot sank into the ground, all the way to my ankle.

  Unable to keep my balance, I lost the thread of the spell and toppled over. Another snap, this one accompanied by agony blazing up my left leg. I cried out, my hands going to my ankle, now bent at an awkward angle. What could the praetherian want with me?

  I reached for the spell again, but the haze of pain in my head made it hard to focus.

  “Borevit!” A soft light stole across the clearing, and the wood creature flinched. Vasilisa followed the glow, her hands on her hips in an almost human gesture of impatience. A faint jingle of bells accompanied her. “Let the girl go at once. We’ve talked about this. When your master agreed to help Svarog, he agreed to abide by our rules. You are to leave the humans alone.”

  “Mine,” it said again, but weakly, and the ground released my foot.

  Vasilisa turned to me. “Can you stand?”

  I shook my head, and she knelt beside me, laying long, impossibly cool fingers on my swollen and throbbing ankle.

  “Don’t,” I said, abruptly sure that I did not want to be in her debt, though I could not have said why. “My cousin will be here soon enough. She’s a healer.”

  A shadow flickered across Vasilisa’s face. Her fingers tightened, and fire shot through my leg, followed by a wave of ice so bitter cold I choked on a scream.

  She stood, brushing her hands on her silvery skirt, before reaching down to pull me up beside her. Other than from a phantom ache, my leg was fine.

  The wood creature was gone.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A foolish mistake,” Vasilisa said. “Do you not recognize a faerie trap? That creature was one of Chernobog’s—in another ten minutes he would have sucked you underground entirely.”

  I swayed a little, picturing it: the slow suffocation, soil pressing around my chest, my face. The smell and taste of dirt my last memory.

  Vasilisa smiled, but her smile had a malicious edge. “Oh, you might not have died at once. He might have saved you for his master, and that would have been entirely worse.”

  “But he shouldn’t have been here—soldiers have patrolled Prater Park for weeks, and the others were all chained….” I broke off at the look in Vasilisa’s eyes.

  “And why should we not be here? You believe it is okay for humans to use us as decorations for a party?” She held up her wrist, where a pair of delicate silver bells hung. “In chains? When you treat us so, you cannot be astonished when we change the rules of the game.”

  I rubbed my arms, chilled despite the evening’s warmth. Vasilisa was not wrong. Between the humans and the praetheria, it was not the praetheria who should be ashamed of the night’s work.

  “Miss Arden!” An unfamiliar voice rolled across the grass, followed almost immediately by the dark-haired girl I’d seen earlier, one of Dragović’s Red Mantles. “Are you all right?”

  “She’s fine,” Vasilisa said. “She stumbled and I helped her.”

  The girl pressed her lips together as if she did not believe us. “You ought to be careful, Miss Arden. I do not like this fete, this flaunting of praetheria feels dangerous to me. There are things out there—” She stopped, her gaze flickering over Vasilisa and pausing for a beat on her bells. “You ought to choose your friends with greater care.”

  “I suppose I ought to thank you, but my affairs are not your concern,” I said, my cheeks heating.

  The girl tossed her head and whirled, the tips of her braids spinning out behind her, and marched away. Not far past her, Noémi and Catherine had spotted me.

  “She is right,” Vasilisa said. “You ought to be careful. And less stupid. You may be powerful, but where I am from, stupid is dead. If I had not come, you might have died. You must master your magic, if I have to teach you myself.”

  “You…what?”

  She pinched my chin. “Listen. I will not repeat myself. I will teach you to use magic, and not because I am kind or generous. I will teach you, because you and I both need that power.”

  She released me and vanished, and I was still rubbing my chin when Noémi and Catherine caught up to me.

  The invitation to tea came two days after the Whitsunday outing to Prater Park. Catherine read through it at once at breakfast, then shrieked, leading both Richard and me to spring from our seats to peer over her shoulder.

  “The archduchess has invited us to tea! At the Hofburg!” She held the invitation to her heart as though it were a small child, then turned to me with a sly look. “Perhaps her son has put her up to this.”

  I found that unlikely, particularly after the mull of things I had made at the Congress. But Catherine continued to fuss about the proposed tea until I was heartily sick of the topic. When she disappeared to make house calls after luncheon, I was profoundly relieved.

  I settled into a bronze chaise longue with a sigh, opening a new volume of poetry that had just arrived: John Stanyan Bigg’s The Sea-King. The early afternoon stretched blissfully empty before me.

  The epigraph, from Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, tugged at me: “her heart was full / Of passions which had found no natural scope.” How many women could claim such feelings? Noémi, with all her natural healing gifts, pressured into a society marriage with a man twice her age. Myself, with power I would not use and a voice I could not use. And what of Catherine’s passions for magic, her ambition to join the Circle? Where and how had she buried such longing?

  I brushed such gloomy thoughts away and read rapidly, devouring the story of a Norse maiden with a dark past and a darker obsession:

  Strange tales were told of that lady bright,

  And stranger of her pedigree;

  ’Tis said she would go in the stormiest night

  And sail about on the terrible sea:

  And lash the fierce waves when they mounted on high,

  To storm the gates of the ebon sky.

  So caught was I by the story that when the butler interrupted with a brusque “A visitor, miss,” the book tumbled from my hands onto the plush Turkish rug.

  “Says her name is Vasilisa,” the butler continued.

  The hair on my neck lifted. I ignored it and retrieved my book. “Please show her up.”

  The butler remained for a moment, eyebrows pressed together. “Are you certain, miss? The woman seems not entirely…safe.”

  What had Vasilisa said to the poor man? “I’m certain. I’ll come to no harm.”

  Vasilisa appeared moments later, sweeping her eyes around the room dismissively before settling them on me. Then she smiled. “You are nervous? Good.” She stripped off her gloves and set them on a side table. “Come here.”

  Eschewing a greeting as Vasilisa had, I set the book on the chaise longue and stood. “What are you doing here? What happened to your bells?”

  “They did not suit me at all.” She shrugged. “I hear it is customary to call upon friends.”

  I waited.

  “Fine. I am here to teach you magic, as I said. So you will not die in foolish traps.” She pointed a finger at a mirror framed by an ornate curl of roses and lilies. At her gesture, the gilt dripped from the flowers like blood; the lilies shriveled and morphed until the entire frame was crawling with worms and maggots. I shuddered, my heart thumping. Vasilisa waved her hand again, an
d the frame was restored. “You see? I will it, and it is so. As a human, your will is not so strong: you use rituals for such spells.

  “Magic comes from life force. Magic is not soul, but soul fuels magic. The stronger your soul, the stronger your magic. Humans are fools to think praetheria have no souls. It is because we have big souls, old souls, that we have such powerful magic. And you, because you are chimera, you have two souls. You could have great magic, if you were not afraid.”

  She knew what I was. She had said as much, when she first met me, but I had hoped she was mistaken. Mouth dry, I shook my head. “That hardly matters if I cannot cast spells. My souls repel the magic.”

  “But you have drawn on that magic before,” Vasilisa said. “When you broke the Binding. You used that boy’s own soul-magic as he died.”

  “Mátyás,” I said, choking. “He had a name.”

  “It is a pity humans forbid blood magic. The death of a soul can release great power, like the breaking of a very great spell,” Vasilisa said, looking cross. “Some of my finest work—” She broke off. “Never mind. Those were different times.”

  I dropped my eyes to the carpet so Vasilisa could not read them. There had been a hunger in her face that made me think Vasilisa would welcome a return of those different times.

  “Now, show me what you can do.” Vasilisa summoned a Lumen light, though hers glowed green rather than the usual blue. “Here’s a simple spell: break it.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to do this.” My spell-breaking was unpredictable, too destructive. I couldn’t use it for mere sport or because Vasilisa asked it of me. I could feel the spell, though, a faint frisson like scraping along my bones. If you were not afraid…Vasilisa’s words echoed, taunting, in my head.