by Rosalyn Eves
I shot upward, ignoring Richard’s frantic grab at my sleeve. “Why? So you can abuse your power as the Luminate have done before? Tell me what crime these poor creatures have committed other than existing. If you and yours had been enslaved for nearly a thousand years, you also would long for freedom.”
Voices rose in protest, but I brushed them aside. If some of the praetheria had killed children, hadn’t we done the same to them—hadn’t we precipitated it? I could not condone the killing, but humans had to share that blame. “You don’t know what you ask. The Binding was a dangerous spell—it was forged in blood and broken in blood. Its existence poisoned society, created gaps and divisions where none should have been.”
All the eyes in the room were pinned on me, a mixture of contempt, derision, and amusement. For a moment I could not seem to breathe, the room fading before me and Mátyás appearing in its place, his eyes steady on mine as I drove a dagger home. No. We could not repeat that.
I took a slow, shuddering breath and found Gábor, seated unobtrusively at the back of the Hungarian delegation, watching me with clear eyes. His quiet intensity calmed me, and I plunged onward.
“You decry the praetheria as empty, soulless killers, but some of them have been my friends. It’s true that some of them may be evil—but so too are some humans. And yet we do not lock up all of society as a result. Do you know how your Dr. Helmholz found his results? By capturing and murdering praetheria who had done nothing to him.”
Richard was standing beside me now, his hands on my shoulders, trying to turn me from my seat and propel me from the room.
“Do. Not. Touch. Me.” I don’t know what Richard heard in my voice, but he dropped his hands as though stung.
“Beast lover!” Dragović shouted, turning to the room at large. “She’s been tainted by their faerie glamour. She’s no one, nothing. We should not listen to her!”
My anger burned white hot.
“You think because I am a girl, I am weak. Because I speak for those who are given no voice here, my voice should matter less. You are wrong, on both counts. I am not weak.” I focused on Dragović’s soul sign, a narrow red dragon crawling about his collar. “Has no one told you who I am? The archduchess herself called me the darling of Hungary—and do you know why? Not because I set a prison full of men free, though I did that. Not because I helped spark a revolution, though I did that too. But because I broke the Binding. I made a bargain with the praetheria, and an army followed me out of the spell and destroyed the finest soldiers Austria could throw at us. I am not afraid of you.”
I paused for a moment, feeling the buzz of small spells all across the room. With that fine inner sense for magic, I reached across the room and snapped the thin line of the spell holding Dragović’s soul sign in place. As a shocked hum of conversation swelled across the room, I closed my eyes and tugged one by one at all the narrow threads of magic filling the room. Two dozen soul signs disappeared in a blink—and the illusion of hair from the heads of at least two elder statesmen. As each spell broke, I caught the tiny release of magic, my fury helping me focus.
Tiny daggers of pain started at the base of my skull, but I was not done yet.
“I have sacrificed too much already for the praetheria to be free—you will not re-enslave them. If you try, I will break whatever spell you set against them and turn it against you.” I released the gathered magic in a rush, letting it take its own shape, and a wind rushed around the room, tearing at hair and scattering papers like fall leaves.
I swept an angry glare across the room, and most of the men recoiled from my stare. The sense of power filling me then was immensely satisfying.
What you could be, Anna Arden…This. Confident, powerful—even terrifying. But I wasn’t frightened.
This is what I was meant to be.
The shocked quiet lasted only a moment before the archduchess’s clear voice cut across the room. “Well, that was an impressive little stunt. I think we are done here today.”
Her chilly tone doused some of my indignation, and fear settled in its place. What had I done? I had blurted out my secret about the Binding and threatened the most important men and women in Europe.
And for what?
A middle-aged man I did not know charged across the room toward me.
“Do you know what you have done, you minx?” His accented German was thick with fury. “My family has lost the magic we have held for centuries. What arrogance, what arrant selfishness, to think you could arrange the world to suit only yourself. Your father ought to beat you.” He spat at me, the cold globule striking my exposed collarbone, before Richard urged him away.
A crowd had surrounded us now, shouting at me, shouting at Richard, calling me names so filthy my ears burned, suggesting I be whipped, beaten, hanged, and worse. I did not know where to look. No one had ever dared speak to me so before. I rubbed the spittle away with a handkerchief, but my fingers lingered on the spot. Some invisible protection had been stripped from me, and I was naked, exposed, in its absence.
This was not at all how this scene was supposed to play out. In novels, when heroines finally make a stand against evil, it falls before them.
Lord Ponsonby spoke to Richard over the din. “This is a bad business. You’d best send the girl back to England!”
Being sent back to England was mild compared to the suggestions currently being hurled at me. I caught Gábor’s eye across the room: he looked nearly as anguished as I felt. But he couldn’t reach me. The press of bodies was too great.
The crowd pushed closer. I’d thought the Congress made up of civilized—if self-interested—men. But there was nothing civil in the faces surrounding me, nothing genteel in the hands reaching for my sleeves, shoving me back against Richard. I couldn’t breathe.
A pair of soldiers shoved through the mob. “Miss Arden? You’re to come with us.”
The soldiers led me, not unkindly, from the hall to a small sitting room on an upper floor. Richard followed closely behind. Once we were inside, the soldiers took up position just outside the door.
I paced back and forth before the window, watching the other delegates escape the building and wishing I could join them. The air inside the room was only marginally cooler than the warm air outside, and wisps of hair stuck to the sides of my cheeks. How could I have been so foolish? Why hadn’t I kept a better leash on my tongue?
Richard was silent for a very long time, sitting on one of the chairs and tracing patterns on the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “I don’t need to tell you that your behavior today was reprehensible. A young lady of quality to set the Congress by its ears! Had you no thought for me or for your sister, for the damage your behavior—not to mention your claims—might do?”
I had rather he shouted at me.
“Did you in fact break the Binding?”
I nodded.
He dropped his head in his hands. “God help us.”
Hesitantly I said, “I am sure Lord Ponsonby and the others will not blame you for my actions. You were not in Hungary when it happened. How could you have known?”
Richard lifted his hands and looked at me for the first time, his blue eyes piercing. “I am not so worried about the cost to my reputation as I am about the danger to my family. To your sister—and to our child.”
For a moment I could not speak. “Catherine is expecting? Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She did not think you cared to know.”
I turned away from Richard, wrapping my arms across my stomach. Had my behavior in Vienna suggested I was so self-centered as that?
“I would never hurt Catherine’s child.” I saw again the almost translucent limbs of the praetherian baby and shuddered.
“Can you swear, with such a power as yours, that you have never inadvertently hurt someone?”
I returned the only answer I could: silence.
Before Richard could say anything else, the door swung open. The archduchess, followed by Dragović.
Archduchess Sophie sat in a high-backed chair and gestured to the one facing her. “Please sit.”
I sat.
“Your behavior today was most unwise, Miss Arden,” the archduchess said. “Your defense of the praetheria was to be expected, but you might have kept the Binding out of it.”
I gaped at her. “You knew?”
She brushed at an invisible speck of lint on her skirt. “Let us say I strongly suspected. Our intelligence network is not completely useless, and after your little trick at my garden party I was virtually certain. But now that you have made a public announcement, we shall have to do something about it. About you.”
“She broke no law,” Richard said.
“In a strictly legal sense, this is true. There was no law made prohibiting breaking the Binding, because no one thought it possible. But social custom is a powerful rule, and Miss Arden violated that expectation. She upended a significant social order. She must be held accountable.”
“She is a British citizen,” Richard said, and I realized that, in his quiet way, he was trying to defend me. “Queen Victoria should decide her punishment, if punishment is needed.”
The archduchess tapped a finger against her cheek. “Very well. There are a few things about the Binding that still bear investigation, but I give you permission to make plans to send her back to England. In the meantime, I strongly suggest you keep her confined at home. I will not be responsible for what angry Luminate might do to her.”
*
Catherine was hovering in the entryway when we returned. Studying her now, I could see the curved line of her stomach, almost hidden by her corset. “You are late! I expected you this half hour past.”
Richard dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I am sorry we made you anxious. I will tell you everything later. Perhaps you can have a tray sent up to Anna’s room? She will be staying there some time.”
Catherine turned wide eyes on me. “Anna?”
My throat was tight. “Richard told me your news. I want you to know I am very happy for you. And I’m sorry. For everything.”
I fled to my room and lay down on my bed, flattened by the weight of all I had lost that morning: Richard’s and Catherine’s trust, any possibility of helping the praetheria at the Congress, my secrets.
I did not cry. I was afraid once I began, I should never stop.
Catherine came midafternoon with Ginny and a tray with tea. Ginny set the tray down and disappeared, and Catherine sat on the bed beside me. Her hand brushed my hair lightly, and then withdrew, as if she were not certain of her actions.
“Richard told me. I am sorry. I know this is not what you wanted.”
I tried to smile. “I won’t be your burden much longer. You must be happy about that, at least.”
Catherine frowned, tucking her hands around her stomach. I had not realized how often she did that. A baby. A wonderful and terrible change in her life.
“You must not think you are a burden.” A smile ghosted her face. “A pestilence and a pain, but you are my sister and I have been more glad to have you here than not. And I—I think you have been very brave, to chase what you think is right despite everything.” She gripped my hand and kissed it before slipping out of the room.
*
I stared at the words on the page, the letters blurring together as my eyes lost their focus. Late-morning light illuminated a small patch on the windowsill and the fringe of my book as I sat on the window seat.
“A visitor, Miss Anna,” Ginny said, poking her head around the door. “It’s Mr. Gábor.”
Questions of why he was here and why Catherine had allowed him entry would have to wait. I paused before my mirror only long enough to pat my hair down and pinch my cheeks. I clattered down the stairs to the drawing room and found Gábor there with Catherine, both of them conspicuously not looking at the other.
“Your friend has come to say good-bye,” Catherine said. “I thought, under the circumstances, it only fair that he say it in person.”
My heart stuttered. “Good-bye?”
Catherine withdrew to a corner of the room, allowing us some privacy. Gábor stepped forward, hands extended as though he’d take mine, but then his eyes flickered to my sister and he dropped them. My own hands grasped empty air. We both remained standing.
“I’m afraid I have to leave Vienna. Kossuth has given me a mission and I cannot delay. I came to see that you were well—I was worried for you yesterday, until word reached the embassy that you were not kept at the palace, but allowed to return home.”
“They’re sending me back to England, to face Queen Victoria’s judgment,” I said, unable to keep a note of despair from leaking into my voice.
“Then I will pray for you, that the Queen be merciful.” Gábor’s beautiful eyes were troubled, and there was a rigidity in the way he held himself that made my heart beat hard and quick.
“Will you come back?” Will you find me? I swallowed the words before Catherine could hear them. What would happen to us, now that Gábor was leaving and I could not stay in Vienna? Could friendship and affection—even love—span so much distance?
“If I finish my errand before the Congress finishes, then yes, I will return to Vienna.” His voice lowered. “But that is not what you are asking, is it?”
I shook my head, and Gábor sighed.
“I have been thinking of this ever since I saw you in the garden with the archduke. We do not inhabit the same worlds. If our paths sometimes cross, it is only a trick of our orbits. Yesterday, when you rebuked the Congress, you were splendid—and perfectly at home. You belong to that world, filled with diplomats and movers of nations.”
You kissed me, I wanted to say. Were those kisses like candy, all sweetness and no substance? “I am about to be banished. I will influence no one when the Queen and my mother are through with me. I will be an outcast among my own class.”
Gábor shook his head, his eyes still intent on mine. “Maybe for a few years. But I know you, and you will not be restricted long. But if you pledge yourself to me, doors that are open to you now will be closed.”
Catherine had said the same, but Gábor’s words sliced deeper. “I don’t care.”
“Not for yourself, but if there are children? You’ve seen how my sisters and my brother and I are treated. Do you want that for your sons and daughters?”
My cheeks grew warm at the thought of having children with Gábor, and I looked away. “The world is changing.”
“Not quickly enough. There are other barriers too. Your family would not welcome me any more willingly than mine would you. My mother and grandmother want me to have a Romani wife. Could you turn against society and your family as well?”
I met his eyes again, though a prickly thorn had lodged itself in my heart. “Why are you making this so hard? None of this matters if we love each other. If you do not care for me that way, then say so. You do not need excuses.”
At once his careful façade cracked, and I saw the anguish in his eyes. “If I did not care for you, I would not be here. It is because I love you that I have to let you go.”
I forgot that Catherine was listening, forgot everything but the fact that Gábor was drawing away and I could not stop him. “I don’t want you to let me go! It is my life too—you do not get to make this decision alone.”
Gábor took a step back, his hands behind him as though he did not trust himself not to reach for me. “I’ve already made my decision.” He bowed once, then fixed his hat back on his head. “May God grant you every happiness.” His voice broke on the last word, and he left the room.
For once, Catherine did not say anything. As the room reverberated with Gábor’s absence, my sister simply folded me in her arms and let me cry until I had nothing left.
*
Two days later, just as I had finished pushing some uneaten toast around on my plate, Ginny scratched at the door.
“Miss Anna?” she said, opening the door to peer in at me. “You have a visitor
.”
My heart jumped, thinking it might be Gábor again, but Ginny shook her head. “It’s not your young man.”
“He’s not mine anymore.”
Ginny helped me pull a brush through my hair and twist it up into a simple knot. She made me change out of the gown I’d worn since the previous day and pinched my cheeks for some color.
I could not see that it mattered.
My visitor was familiar to me, though I had not spoken above a dozen words to Noémi’s austere uncle, the prince Eszterházy. He held a folded and sealed square of paper in his hands that he turned over and over again. Catherine sat knitting in a nearby chair.
When I entered the room, he smiled at me, though the gesture seemed forced. He held out the paper. “This is for you, from my niece.”
I felt only a flash of astonishment that he should carry out such a lowly errand, when he continued.
“If you do not mind, I should very much like to know the contents of that letter, Miss Arden. You see…Noémi has gone missing, and I am hopeful that she may have told you something of her destination.”
Noémi missing? I remembered how Noémi and Hunger had sat talking, their heads close together, and misgiving seized me. I took the letter and opened it.
Anna—
Perhaps I should not be writing this, as angry as I am, but I fear the words will burn me if I hold them in any longer. HOW COULD YOU? Hunger told me what happened in the Binding.
I nearly dropped the letter. No. After Mátyás died, Noémi had been my bulwark, more sister than friend. I had just lost Gábor. I could not bear to lose Noémi too. Why had Hunger told her? How could it possibly benefit him?
Hunger claims Mátyás’s death was necessary. I am not sure I believe him. In any case, why would you not tell me? Why have you lied to me all these months? I feel as though I have lost my brother again. I am certain I have lost you. You were never the person I thought you were.
You say Mátyás died in the Binding, but I cannot believe it. The dreams I have of him are too real, too vivid. That you tried to kill him, I am certain. But I do not think that is the end of it.
