by Rosalyn Eves
“Nearly.” I began ticking off concerns on my fingers. “Papa says spell-binders used to die because they burned up too much of their own magic. If magic returns to individuals, how will you stop that?”
“Better training,” she said promptly. “And your Papa and others have begun to theorize alternative ways to hold magic so it is not as dangerous.”
“What happens to the Circle if we break the Binding? To Luminates?”
“Nothing so very dreadful. I imagine the Circle shall have to relinquish some of their authority, but I cannot see that as a bad thing, though I am one of them. And the Luminates shall go on as they always have—only they shall have to share magic with others, which may force them to open their ranks. Also a good thing, in my opinion.”
Lady Berri must have read my doubt in my face, for she laughed. “Come now. What else?”
Well, then. “If I help you, do you swear you can keep me safe?”
The humor vanished from her round face, and she leaned forward, her gaze sharp. “I swear it. I am powerful enough to face anyone the Austrian Circle might choose to send against me.”
I released a long breath. “Very well. Show me the Binding.”
Her eyes grew round. “Show you?”
“I know the Binding exists in a realm other than ours, but there must be dimension to it, if it holds magic.” And monsters. “I need to see what it is you want me to break, and what I shall release in breaking it.”
“There’s nothing to release,” she began, “only magic…”
“Herr Steinberg swears there are monsters. And I…I spoke with them inside the spell at Sárvár. I want to be certain I am not unleashing something terrible on the world.”
Her mouth creased with vexation. “If you saw something in that spell, they were only illusions, meant to deter people from the spell. The stories of monsters were only ever that—stories.”
“They did not feel like illusions.”
She grunted. “Very well. I believe I can build a Portal spell that can let you cross into the Binding, though it shall take some time to set up. Will that satisfy you?”
“A spell? Are you not worried I shall break that as well?”
“As to that, I have an idea. You’ll simply have to trust me.”
I nodded. “Will the Circle know we have touched the spell?”
“If anyone is paying attention. But members of the Circle touch the Binding spell all the time, to refresh the wards on it and strengthen the barriers. I doubt it shall be marked. And I shall take steps to ensure no one is watching us.”
Our talk turned to idle pleasantries. I finished my tea, and Lady Berri stood, shaking crumbs from her capacious lap. She put her arms around me, and I stiffened for a moment before relaxing into her softness. She was comforting in a way my mother had never been. “You’re a good girl, Anna. Don’t be afraid. I shall call for you tomorrow evening.”
I did not sleep much that night. My dreams were threaded through with nightmares. Images from my past: the golden-eyed man at Sárvár with the burning touch, the pale strangeness of Herr Steinberg’s hands when he threatened to kill me if I tampered with the Binding. Worse still, nightmares of my future: a city overrun with creatures thirsting for blood, as Herr Steinberg warned; a world scoured bare by a sudden onrush of magic; the pain in Gábor’s eyes when he realized I had disregarded his warnings.
I woke panting. Had I made a mistake? No, not yet. I would do nothing until I had been inside the spell, until I knew unleashing the magic from the Binding would do no harm—or at least, less harm than good.
In the morning, a letter arrived from James. It was only a handful of lines wrapped around a new novel, Jane Eyre by Currer Bell, but I hugged the letter to me. I have not much time to write as I am busy studying. I am determined to be first in Latin and history. And I must say, that magic bauble you sent me is top-notch. The other boys are impressed that my spells are beginning to hold, though my tutor is puzzled at how I accomplish them. Still, I think I can keep him suitably flummoxed till the term is over. Yours, James.
I wondered what James would think if he knew my evening plans might lead me to entirely remake the magic he studied at school. Then I shuddered, and pushed the thought away from me. If I overthought what I was to do, I would lose my nerve.
I watched globes of lamplight spin past me as Lady Berri and I followed one of the main arterial roads away from the city. Pest was full of the thin darkness of early evening, the sun only a remembrance of light above the Buda hills. A pale-eyed man stood beneath one of the lamps, watching our carriage as it rattled past.
The lamps fell away abruptly. We passed a ring of factories, windows lit red by the fires within, smoke still rising from chimneys. Then the city was gone, swallowed into a maw of darkness, and the countryside spread out before us.
“I shall open a portal for you when we arrive,” Lady Berri explained. “Not your typical Portal spell, from one known location to another, but more of a gate.”
“And how shall I get out again?” I was only beginning to realize the enormity of what I’d committed to—entering an unknown spell, with no real security I’d return. Lady Berri seemed unworried, so I clung to her confidence.
“The portal will remain open. Just don’t get lost—I’m not certain I can hold the gate open if I come in after you.”
We pulled up at last, and Lady Berri climbed out, her flickering fingers summoning a Lumen light. In the pale blue glow, a hill rose gently before us. “Attila’s Hill,” Lady Berri explained. “A ley line crosses near here; the ground has historically been sensitive to magic. My spell should be stronger here.”
She began climbing the hill, and I followed, alternately lacing my gloved fingers together and releasing them. When we reached the crest, I glanced back at the carriage, gleaming faintly in the starlight.
Lady Berri paced a circle around the top of the hill, muttering under her breath and waving her arms in the intricate pattern of a master spell-binder. Something shifted, the quiet air around us taking on an almost sentient quality. I shivered and rubbed my arms. The night was not particularly cold, as the day had been gloriously warm, one of those fall acts of defiance against encroaching winter. But there was something in the air that made me think of cold things: of midnight gusts of wind, ice in my washbasin on January mornings, snowfall at New Year’s.
When she had finished, she beckoned to me, pulling a small flask from a pocket in her gown. “Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“A bit of wine, laced with laudanum. It should calm your nerves enough for you to enter the gate without breaking it.”
I swallowed, choking a little on the bitterness of the drug. Within a few moments, a curious sense of well-being settled over me like a wool blanket on a cool night.
A tiny smile curled across Lady Berri’s mouth. She handed me a thin knife and directed me to stand in the center of the roughly trod sphere.
“Go on, child. The spell won’t hurt you.”
I thought, a bit fuzzily, that I ought to be worried by the implication that the spell could hurt someone else, but nothing seemed to dent the calm spreading through my blood. I lifted my chin and stepped into the center of Lady Berri’s spell.
The night swung around me, as if the earth itself was moving. I dropped to my knees, wondering if Lady Berri had miscalculated the dosage of laudanum. But instead of coming up against dried grass and hard-packed earth, my hands and knees encountered a fragile resistance that tore away almost immediately. I plunged through the flimsy barrier.
I fell down into darkness. Stars tumbled, burning across the sky, and then winked out. In my veins, fire blazed up and then froze.
I screamed—and hit the ground. When my stunned vision cleared, I found it was daylight. My fingers, closing around the earth beneath me, found a light, springy substance, and when I lifted my hands, they were full of violets, their tiny, imp-dark faces winking at me.
I sat up. Flowers carpeted the
earth around me. With a growing sense of wonder, I pushed myself to my feet. Violets spun out in a circle, reaching to the edge of the mound where I stood before giving way to impossibly green grass speckled with daisies and bleeding hearts and chrysanthemums, with cheerful disregard for seasonal rules.
At the base of the hill, I spied a pathway winding away into a wood of thin-branched trees lifting leaves like silver pennies to the sky. Beyond the wood, the spires of a city soared into the blue vault of heaven. The Binding was nothing like the dark, closed world of the way station in the bathhouse at Sárvár. Rather, it was something out of a fairy tale.
Long ago, and far away, over forty-nine kingdoms, beyond the Operentsia Sea, beyond the glass mountains, and beyond that to a kingdom beneath a pearl sky…so Grandmama’s tales had always begun. My heart spiraled upward, and I hummed under my breath as I headed toward the city. After all, a city implied people, perhaps creatures.
The road was smooth beneath my feet. I reached the shadows at the fringe of the wood when a voice interrupted me.
“Has no one told you, child, not to wander in unfamiliar woods? Have you not read your fairy tales?”
I whirled around to find myself face to face with the man who’d kissed me inside the spell at Sárvár, his curiously inhuman eyes glowing gold.
I fingered the knife Lady Berri had given me and wondered, If I were killed in this dimension, would I be dead in the other as well? But the creatures would not harm me: they needed me too much.
Behind me, the wind sang through the trees. A glance over my shoulder revealed only the sun-dappled shadows of a quiet wood.
“Who are you?” I glanced at the silver manacles he still bore at his wrists.
A smile slithered across his face, transforming it into something unnaturally, painfully beautiful. “I have many names. Some call me Hunger. I bear other names too: Need, Want, Desire.” The smile slipped, as if he was unused to holding it for long. “And you are Anna Arden. I know you. I know your need.”
My heart thumped, a beat too hard and too fast. “I am not afraid of you.”
His eyes fixed on mine, and he laughed. “Of course you are not. But was it wise, my dear, to come into the Binding with drugs burning in your blood?”
“Is this the Binding? It looks like no spell I’ve seen.”
“Its like has never been cast, before or since. It is prison and sanctuary, world and shadow,” he said.
Riddles. “You asked me to break this spell. Do you know how?”
Those golden eyes kindled brighter. “The spell was bound with blood and will break with blood.”
More riddles. I ground my heel. “Speak plainly if you mean me to help.”
“You will have to sacrifice at the heart of the spell. You must pull the power of the spell into your own heart and let your heart break with it.” He tapped the turul necklace I wore, and I fancied I could feel the wings fluttering against my skin. “You will need blood.”
A breeze whispered across my neck, raising gooseflesh on my arms. “A blood sacrifice? Will I die then?”
“You shall not die. The spell-caster must live to hold the spell.”
I nodded, relieved. “Can you show me the heart of the spell?”
He bowed. One pale hand sliced through the air, inscribing a circle, and a giant sphere rose around us like a bubble raised in the kitchen sink when the maids did the washing.
I watched the ground fall away from me, my spirits lifting as the bubble rose higher. Once, as a child, after watching a goose launch itself from the surface of the pond, I’d tried to do the same. Instead of flying, I had nearly drowned. Catherine, who fished me out, intoned I would never fly—our family (Elementalists and Coremancers) hadn’t the right magic for it. Then I’d seen the great air balloons in London, and Mama forbade me to try them. But this soaring required no magic (at least, no magic of mine), and no one was here to forbid me.
I looked up from my inspection of the miniaturized world below me to find Hunger watching me with a curious expression, his cheeks hollowed and his eyes incandescent. The shadowy wood passed underneath us, cut by a silver strip of water. Past the trees, we flew over an open plain, an ocean of grasses waving in an unseen wind. A creature that seemed made of pure light gamboled across the grass, and delight sparkled through me.
We drew closer to the outer wall of the city, bastions of glass and fine-carved stone spiking into the sky. The sphere drifted lower. In a private garden, young women, each more beautiful than the last, danced to a faintly heard melody. Near the heart of the city, where a fountain spilled over gold-veined marble, a maiden sang to a reclining knight, her pale fingers tracing love runes through his hair.
Our sphere floated by the castle. Inside I glimpsed paintings of dreamscapes, stained-glass windows, and long, vaulted hallways filled with creatures in gorgeous gowns. In an airy room in the highest tower of the castle, imps twirled around a small laughing child. Every gurgle of laughter lifted the child into the air. In response, the imps kicked up their heels to impossible new heights, and the child’s giggles lifted it even higher. Everything was touched with wonder.
Relief swept through me: Gábor’s fears were groundless. Releasing these creatures into the world would harm no one.
And yet.
I glanced again at the silver at Hunger’s wrists. “Does the spell hold you here?”
“Yes.”
“If I break this spell, what will happen? Will you go free?”
“Who is ever truly free? We trap ourselves with bonds of our own making: duty, love, desire.” The last word hissed from his lips, and he ran a black, glistening tongue across them. “But if you mean, will we leave this place? Yes.”
My thoughts were tangled with unpleasant memories: the suffocating weight of my mother’s expectations, my painful rejection at Lady Isen’s ball in Vienna. Luminate society, much as I had longed for it, brought its own rules and limitations. James, trapped at Eton by those same rigid rules. Noémi held virtual prisoner at Eszterháza by her poverty. There were so many ways of being trapped in my world. This spell should not be one of them.
I began to ask another question, but the words were torn away and the bubble shattered into a million shards of brightness around me. Then I was falling, falling, and finally gasping on the winter-hard earth of Attila’s Hill.
Lady Berri’s round face bent over mine, her brow creased with concern. “Are you well, child? You weren’t supposed to be sucked in so quickly. Something else—something from the other side—was shaping the spell, twisting it away from me. I couldn’t let you stay in that other realm. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“I was in no danger,” I said, pushing myself upright. There was nothing in that world to harm me.
Except your own need. A pair of golden eyes rose in my mind, and I trembled.
Lady Berri looked away from me, her expression lost to the darkness. She said only, “I’m glad you were not hurt,” before loading me into her carriage and whisking me home again in silence.
All that long, dark drive I found myself reliving the spell-bound world in my mind. Something sharp lodged in my heart, and I could not shake the pain of it. So Eve must have felt after being thrust from her garden: exposed by her desires, tethered by her need.
“I must go back,” I said. “To break the spell, I mean.”
Rising elation bubbled up in me. I would go back to the Binding. I would break the spell, and nothing terrible would happen. I should be doing a good thing—perhaps a great thing, the most important thing I had ever done. Papa would be pleased, so would Mátyás and Karolina and the students at Café Pilvax. The thought of Gábor’s and Noémi’s disapproval dimmed my joy—but only a little. When the Binding had broken, they would see we were right.
Lady Berri nodded. “Good girl. Now I must study the Binding spell a bit more. This night’s work has shown me I am not as prepared as I ought to be, nor are you. I must devise counterspells to protect you, and we must plan how you are to b
reak the spell. Come to me again in one week.”
Grandmama’s palace was shrouded in darkness when I entered. I had told Ginny not to wait for me. I lit a candle and mounted the stairs. The sphere of light cast by the flame rose with me, my shadow long and wavering beside it. In my room, I set the candle on a small table near my bedside, shivering as my hands went to the buttons at my throat. The effects of the laudanum were fading, a heaviness replacing the euphoria that had burned through me inside the spell.
A deep voice spoke out of the darkness.
“Isten áldja meg a lelked!” God bless your soul. The voice was unfamiliar, the intonation eerily like a prayer one might say over the dying.
There was a man in my room.
Terror spiked through me, setting my heart racing and sending new energy into my exhausted body.
“Who are you? Why are you here?” My voice emerged high and tight.
A shadowy figure pushed away from the far wall. In the fitful light of the candle, his face was indistinct, framed by dark hair. I heard a murmured Latin phrase, followed by a flare of light.
The spell burst over me in a cascade of pain, stars dancing against my eyes, flame spouting down my back. Agony crackled through my heart. I was going to be killed—not by some half-forgotten beast in the Binding but by a Luminate assassin in my bedroom. Herr Steinberg must have sent him, to punish me for going into the Binding.
Lady Berri had not protected me after all.
Dark spots danced at the edge of my vision. I fought to breathe.
No.
I was not going to die so easily.
Everyone believed I could break spells. I would break this one.
Think, Anna.
What common thread linked my previous experiences breaking spells? I struggled against the blackness clouding my mind. I had been angry with Catherine at her debut, afraid when Noémi’s spell in the Romani camp brushed me, and in Sárvár there had been a longing so sharp and sweet I still ached with the memory of it. Somehow, that emotion was key. But I couldn’t feel anything now except pain drilling through my bones and a dullness where the laudanum had been. Tears leaked from beneath my closed eyes.
