Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

I shook my head. Vasilisa might not be kind to me, but she would not kill me. At least, I did not think she would. But Emilija—Vasilisa would let her wolves tear the girl apart and enjoy doing it. I didn’t like the girl, but she was only doing what she believed to be her duty. She didn’t deserve to die for it.

  The kestrel screamed once, and Vatra shot across the field. Emilija whistled sharply, but the horse did not heed her. Her dog stood alert at her side.

  Emilija swiveled slowly, squinting into the near darkness. “Who’s there?”

  No answer.

  Then, some distance away, a faint howling.

  The Dalmatian barked in answer.

  Much nearer, a second howl pierced the sky. Then a third.

  “We should run,” I said again. “These aren’t ordinary wolves.”

  Emilija set her lips. “I don’t run.” She untied her cloak, letting it fall at her feet, and lifted her gun from her belt.

  I could not help admiring her bravery, even if it was foolhardy. That did not mean I felt the same. Everything in me screamed to run, but I was still tethered to the tree. I prowled around the leash, looking for a weakness in the knots. There was none: as Emilija had said, she was a good soldier.

  Behind me, a shot sounded. I whipped back around; Emilija held the still-smoking gun, efficiently reloading it. One of the lead wolves had fallen back, limping, and the others hesitated around it for just a moment before leaping forward once more. Emilija fired again. This time, the wolves did not pause, and the two nearest her sprang at us.

  I could just see Vasilisa, a pale smudge in the gathering shadows.

  Vasilisa might spare Emilija if I surrendered. But could I go back to their camp and submit to being used as a weapon?

  I had to get free. Maybe a Fire spell, to burn the ends of my leash. I tried to find that quiet center I had used to cast the Lumen light in the river, but my thoughts were too chaotic to settle. The wolves prowled closer.

  Faster than I could track, Emilija exchanged her gun for the saber at her side. The sword flashed down. One wolf, then a second, fell back, and Emilija retreated toward me, still swinging her sword. Her dog darted forward, snarling and biting at the nearest wolves. One of the wolves caught him by the throat and forced him down. Emilija shouted.

  How was Vasilisa controlling them? The way the wolves obeyed her instinctively, without spoken commands, suggested a spell.

  And spells, I could do something about.

  I closed my eyes, ignoring the high, frantic pounding of my heart, trying to forget how vulnerable I made myself. I felt for a spell, for that faint suggestion of scraping along my bones. Nothing.

  I opened my eyes again. Emilija was still holding her own against the wolves, though she was visibly tiring. The Dalmatian lay on the ground, its sides heaving red. Three of the wolves had abandoned Emilija and her dog and were now slinking toward me.

  Vasilisa drew closer, her face glimmering like a shard of bone in the moonlight, her sharp teeth bared in a grin.

  Her mockery fed a lick of anger. I shut my eyes again, determined.

  This time I found it—the thin, almost insubstantial line of her spell, linking her mind in a kind of mesh to the wolf pack. I plucked at the main line of the spell, just as a tremendous weight nailed me against the ground, nearly jerking my arms from their sockets as the leash pulled taut.

  My eyes flew open. Gold-brown eyes, lined in black, met mine. Hot, sour breath burned against my cheek and neck. It won’t hurt me, I told myself, trying to recapture the thread I’d dropped on impact. Vasilisa only means to capture me.

  Then the wolf’s teeth tore into my left shoulder, and I screamed. Emilija shouted back, her own tortured echo. Pain lanced through my arm, burning away my focus. I flung up my bound wrists, an instinctive move to protect my face, just as the wolf’s powerful jaws closed across my right forearm.

  Vasilisa’s laugh echoed across the still plains.

  The pain was unmaking me, unraveling my thoughts, undoing my will to stop Vasilisa.

  Is this how I die?

  I gritted my teeth against another scream as the wolf began worrying at my arm and sought for Vasilisa’s magic one last time. I concentrated on the pain, allowing it to fuse my souls together as it had under Vasilisa’s tutelage in my sister’s drawing room. I reached for the intersection of threads I had felt earlier.

  A blast of fire barreled over me. The wolf fell away, howling, and I collapsed back on the ground, the air seared from my lungs.

  “Did you think I would not notice you tampering with my spells? I am not such a novice as that.”

  A grumbling roar filled my ears—probably the aftereffect of the spell. I tried to pull myself upright, gasping at the pain in my arms. Vasilisa knocked me back with another blast of her hellfire. It did not burn me as a proper fire would, but the heat was a force all its own. Emilija lay unmoving on the ground a few paces away.

  The wolves had abandoned us both to swarm at a tall, furred shape swinging massive paws in wild arcs. The wolves howled and darted forward and back, a strangely intricate and deadly dance.

  I squinted at the shape. I had seen a bear just before, part of a traveling circus. I thought they existed only in the northern mountains in Hungary, not here on the grasslands. But if mammoth wolves could follow Vasilisa, why not a bear? Though the wolves seemed to be fighting it.

  Vasilisa turned to the new commotion in irritation, sending an arcing crest of fire toward the bear. The creature howled, then seemed to blur and shoot upward, flapping out of reach of the second wave.

  Vasilisa stopped, lips pursed and eyes brightening. “A táltos? I thought your kind were dead. But two prizes for the cost of one? I will not say no.”

  Táltos? A sudden hope crushed my chest. But I pushed it aside, using Vasilisa’s distraction to grip the threads of the spell once more. One snap, then another, my shadow self gusting along the web of the spell like wind, breaking the fine control as it went.

  The wolves, which had been yapping at the crow flying above them, fell still. Waiting. As the last thread binding them snapped, the largest wolf whipped around and disappeared into the night. The others followed almost at once.

  I tried to catch the magic as the spell fell apart, but pain and hope made it difficult to concentrate.

  Vasilisa whirled back to me. “You stupid girl. Do you know how long it will take me to collect them again?” She flung her arms upward, her hair standing around her. Electric energy crackled along her skin, lightning barely sheathed in her bare hands.

  Terror spiked in me; then the world exploded in light and flame.

  *

  I lost time for a while. Electricity zapped through my body, a river of pain gathering momentum as it roared along my limbs. I could not see through the white pulse that had blinded me: my world had shrunk to the burning ache defining my body. I wasn’t a sentient being. I was agony, sharp and bright like a knife.

  My ribs constricted and expanded, the muscles of my chest working frantically, but I could not breathe. I gasped at air, and the fire flowed into my lungs. My heart battered erratically at my chest.

  I curled into a ball on the ground, the aching of my arm and shoulder blurring into the aching everywhere else.

  It was over.

  I couldn’t fight Vasilisa. Not like this. Whatever strength I had, she was stronger.

  Strange noises penetrated my self-absorbed agony: a heavy thud, the scream of a falcon, the cawing of a crow.

  Rolling onto my side, I tried to spot the crow—the táltos. It was impossible, I told myself. There might be other shifters in the world, now that the Binding had broken.

  And Mátyás was dead.

  The crow was gone, replaced by something shaped like a bear, but with fur that looked more scaly than ursine. This could not be Mátyás. From stories Noémi had told of him after his death, I knew that he could only take on small animals, and only those he knew from real-world study. This creature had walked out
of a storybook.

  The ground around the táltos erupted, vines snaking around its ankles. It roared and tore free, and new vines slithered after the old, stronger and thicker. The bear-thing stumbled, falling face-forward on the grass.

  I flinched, fighting the urge to crawl toward the creature.

  The táltos shifted again, a snake slithering free of the creeping vines. A falcon circling overhead dropped down before I could give warning, snatching the snake into the air.

  Something was wrong with my nerves. My body did not respond as it should; my lips would not shape the words in my head.

  Another shift by the táltos, this time midair, and a crocodilian shape was plummeting back to the ground, pulling the falcon with it until, with a shriek, the bird disengaged. A crow surged up from the great lizard just before it hit the ground.

  But Vasilisa had clearly been waiting for this. Before the crow could extend its wings a third time, she’d cast a net of stars all around it, a tightening noose that tangled around its wings until the crow fell.

  No.

  This táltos might not be Mátyás, but it did not deserve to share my fate. I closed my eyes again. The warm summer air played across my injuries. Vasilisa’s spell was a bright spot behind my eyes, and I stretched toward it, closing invisible fingers around it and crushing the web of the spell. This time I caught the escaping magic, shaping it into a spear as I had once before in Vienna and thrusting it at Vasilisa.

  If I had not meant the spell before, I meant it this time. Every bit of fear, pain, anger, and betrayal honed the point of the spell and aimed it at her heart.

  She screamed, the net of stars bursting into a thousand blooms of light. The crow shot toward her, throwing massive bear arms around her before it had finished shifting. I heard bone cracking. Vasilisa shrieked again, her voice reaching a crescendo of agony.

  A flash of light, and the bear-creature released her.

  “We are not finished here!” She sprang into the air, her arms flung wide, and flew off, a pale shooting star against a dark night.

  The edges of the bear wavered again, the great beast preparing to fly after her.

  “Wait!” I called. “Stay, please. Help me.”

  I tried to move and found my nerves were responding again, if slowly, as though the signal took a very long time to reach them. I fixed my eyes on the bear and lifted my still-bound wrists, my arms trembly and weak as a newborn colt.

  The bear melted down, revealing the táltos.

  Revealing a boy.

  A tall boy with broad shoulders, brown hair, and a mole beneath his left eye.

  The round cast to his cheeks was gone, replaced by a hollowness that made him both older and strange. A boy I hadn’t seen in ten months. A boy who had died—I thought—at my own hands.

  For a moment I could not remember how to breathe. Or how to speak. My heart jumped erratically in my chest.

  Then: “Mátyás?”

  A familiar dimpled grin. “You cut your hair.”

  A potent mix of exasperation and affection bubbled up in me, and I laughed, a movement that made all my injuries burn.

  I registered, finally, that he was naked—an unfortunate side effect of shifting. Mátyás seemed to realize this at the same time, because he gave a strangled yelp and snatched Emilija’s discarded cloak from the ground nearby.

  I tried to push myself upright, gasping at the sharp twinge of pain. But by then Mátyás was already running toward me, the cloak making an awkward shield around his waist.

  His hug crushed the breath from me. I did not mind—what were a few aches to having Mátyás back?—but I must have made some pained sound, because his arms loosened. He sat back.

  “You’re hurt,” he said. Blood still oozed from my forearm where the wolf had gnawed on it.

  “And bound,” I said, holding up my wrists again.

  “Right,” he said. He touched the leather braid, and it became dried grass, fragile enough that when I pulled my wrists apart, it broke.

  I looked at Mátyás. He looked at me. Abruptly we both began to laugh, as though the grass braid were the last thread holding us apart. And just like that, we were Mátyás and Anna again—as if I had not killed him, as if he had not somehow returned from the dead.

  *

  Mátyás helped me stand, and I stumbled forward until I was beside Emilija, rolling the girl onto her back. Great gashes marred the smoothness of her cheeks, and she bled still, sluggishly, from cuts across her shoulder. A few inches to the right, and her throat would have been sliced wide.

  There were other dark spots of blood along her arms and her stomach, but her chest rose and fell, and my frantic fingers brushed against a faint tattoo of a heartbeat beneath her jaw. “She needs help,” I said.

  Mátyás was already kneeling beside me, carefully ripping a swath from the bottom of Emilija’s shirt. When he was finished, he handed me the wad of cloth. “Here. Hold it against the wound. Gábor and the others should be here soon. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Gábor?” I repeated. After an evening full of shocks, I could not process this. “But he was looking for the King of Crows. How did he come to find you?”

  Mátyás’s blue eyes held mine. Oh. A burble of laughter escaped me. “Of course.”

  Gábor is coming. I will see him soon. I held that knowledge to me like a warm stone in a cold bed in winter. Then I turned my attention back to my cousin.

  “But how did you come to be here? How are you alive?”

  And as I tended to Emilija, and Mátyás gently picked up the wounded Dalmatian to lay at his mistress’s side, he told me. How the Lady had rescued him and brought him back. How his táltos gifts had changed after his rebirth.

  “I am still not entirely certain how it works,” he said, “but I can travel in my dreams. We were already on our way back to Vienna to find you and Noémi, and I dreamed of you. I saw you sleeping near a river, a girl in soldier’s gear”—he nodded at Emilija—“watching you. We figured you were in danger, so we came. I may have flown ahead of the others.”

  I smiled at him, reaching with my free hand to touch his arm, to reassure myself that he was here. Real. Alive. Then my smile faltered. Noémi. “Mátyás, there’s something I—”

  A loud rumble interrupted me. “What was that?”

  “My stomach. I don’t suppose you have any food?”

  I shook my head. Anything we had was lost when Emilija’s horse bolted. “I’m sorry.”

  He sighed. “I suppose I’ll just have to wait.”

  “There’s more,” I said, and told him about Noémi, how she had gone looking for him and disappeared.

  Mátyás listened to me gravely. “A bad business,” he said. “Is this why you’re here on the puszta with a boy’s haircut and filthy clothes?”

  For so many months I had kept my secrets close to me, afraid how they would change things if people knew. But I did not need to keep any of them from Mátyás, and that in itself felt like a small miracle. I told him everything. How the archduchess had ordered my arrest and the praetheria had rescued me. How I escaped from the praetheria—and why.

  “We have to find Noémi,” Mátyás said.

  I nodded. “Yes. But there’s a price on my head, and the praetheria are still hunting me. Hungary is about to be plunged into war.”

  “I know,” Mátyás said. “Gábor wants me to go to Buda-Pest to meet Kossuth Lajos, who is trying to raise a honvéd army.”

  “I wish I knew how to stop the war. This is what the praetheria want—for us to destroy each other.”

  Now Mátyás nodded. “The Lady told me of the Four. She wants—wanted—me to help her fight them.”

  I stared at him. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  Mátyás waved a hand. “Four praetheria who lead the others. They’ve taken on curious names, out of Revelation or something. Death, Conquest, Hunger, War.”

  Hunger. And Vasilisa, I was nearly certain, though I did not know which n
ame she bore.

  “We have to stop them.” Though heaven alone knew how. “Perhaps the Lady can help us.”

  “She’s dead,” Mátyás said.

  His blunt words fell like stones, and I flinched. I remembered her touch, before I had gone into the Binding, like balm against a wound. I had believed in myself because she had believed in me. I blinked back the sting in my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I ought not to have put it like that. Only I’m still coming to grips with it myself. I think the woman who attacked you killed the Lady.”

  “Vasilisa,” I said. “Though I don’t think that’s her real name.”

  Emilija moaned then, and we abandoned the conversation to attend to her, but she did not wake. When we resumed talking, it was of other things. Mundane things. János. My family. I told Mátyás about going riding with Franz Joseph, and he teased me for my royal aspirations. This enforced stillness as we waited for Gábor and the others was oddly luxurious, allowing me time to explore questions and answers without rushing onward to another event or idea. I had never seen time as an indulgence before—it was always something to be spent, not savored.

  The “others” Mátyás had spoken of arrived—Gábor, of course, and an odd collection I had not expected. A soft-spoken boy named Bahadır. A flame-haired samodiva—Zhivka. A lidérc, whose appearance brought back my nightmares from my first night at Eszterháza, all those months ago. I remembered her grinning at me in the streets near Buda Castle during the fighting. If she had a name, no one seemed to know it.

  Their presence in Mátyás’s entourage was hopeful, a reminder that not all praetheria hated humans, a sign that it was not yet too late to forge a different future.

  Gábor cleaned Emilija’s wounds with fresh water and clean cloths, then he and Mátyás rigged together a kind of transport for Emilija behind Mátyás’s horse.

  While Mátyás and Bahadır settled Emilija and her dog into the transport, I followed Gábor to the river as he scrubbed his hands. The water burbled across the rocks, and I trailed my good hand through it, then splashed it across my heated cheeks.

  I had rehearsed many times in my head what I might say if I saw Gábor again. How could you? How dare you? But watching his tired, thoughtful profile in the moonlight, I found I no longer wanted to accuse him. Instead, I wanted to settle on the bank beside him and watch the stars in companionable silence. Or murmur under the cover of darkness until the sun rose—strange how the night that just hours before seemed full of terrors only seemed comforting, now that Gábor and Mátyás were here.