by Rosalyn Eves
The room reeked of unwashed beasts and blood and the onset of rot. I struggled upright again, my pulse beating a painful tattoo in my throat. A voice sailed over the crowd, words in a language I did not understand, words with an alien cadence and heavy with age.
The clamor in the room cut off. The silence in its wake was so absolute, my breath roared in my ears.
I blinked and the creatures were gone, winking out of existence as suddenly as they’d come.
My stomach clenched tight as I processed this.
Hunger was gone—and with him, all the creatures.
So much for my promised army. I pushed back at the fear crawling through my belly. I could not despair yet. I had to find Grandmama and Noémi. I had to get to Buda-Pest.
I had to tell Noémi that Mátyás was dead.
My fingers gripped the cross he had given me, its points digging into my palm. Blinking back the tears stinging my eyes, I pressed forward. Dark flashes swarmed my vision. For a moment, I could not move until the pain became bearable.
I stumbled toward the doorway, one hand over my nose and mouth, swallowing against the burning in my throat. My hand smelled of blood and roses—Mátyás’s blood—and I was sick all over the floor.
After wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I forged onward. A human body lay on the floor near a shattered mirror. I picked my way toward it, trying not to look too closely at the ovine corpses. My head throbbed.
The sightless eyes staring at the arched sky were familiar, though they were no longer framed by spectacles. I crouched and smoothed Herr Steinberg’s eyes closed. Though he had tried to kill me, I could not hate him. He had only sought to do what he believed was right.
As I had.
We were both killers at heart—blood the terrible price of our beliefs. I scrubbed tears from my cheeks. The ache in my body was growing, a throbbing mass threatening to splinter me apart.
Another scan of the room confirmed there were no other human bodies. My shoulders drooped a little with relief, and I pushed my way free of the bloodstained room.
The corridors of Eszterháza seemed endless. The pounding in my head kept gleeful time with the shuffle of my feet as I mounted the stairs. I passed through the china room. All the lovely Sèvres vases and Dresden china were shattered on the floor, ground to powder by the passage of cloven and padded feet. Every room was empty. No creatures crouched in the shadows—but Grandmama and Noémi and János were still missing.
I pushed myself up another flight of stairs, my mouth dry. Noémi’s room was empty. And mine. I headed toward Grandmama’s.
“Anna?” The voice behind the door was faint, but my heart lifted with relief. They were here.
I pressed on the latch, and the door slid open. Noémi and János flanked the canopied bed, Noémi’s vizsla circled by her feet. Grandmama lay upon the bed, her arms across her chest.
“Grandmama!” I said, rushing forward as fast as my pain-racked body would carry me.
“Wait—” Noémi said, but it was too late. I flung myself onto the bed beside Grandmama, and one of her arms slid down to her side. Something about that boneless movement made my heart seize up. She was so very still, her face pale as candle wax. The hand curled by her side was cold to my touch.
“Noémi?” My voice cracked. I pulled away from the bed.
“I’m so sorry. She was struck. When I got to her, it was too late.” Noémi wiped tears from her cheeks.
“We brought her here to wait for you.” János’s voice was ragged, grieving.
I dragged my eyes from Grandmama’s pale profile to Noémi’s face. Something was wrong with her eyes. They weren’t tracking right. A bright, angry burn spread up the side of her face and fanned across her nose and eyes. Her eyebrows were gone, and her eyelashes.
“Noémi,” I said again, my eyes leaking. “You’re hurt.” She could not heal herself: few healers could hold a spell through the pain of healing. The fire in my bones was spreading, a lake, an ocean of pain. Grief washed over the fire, threatening to swamp me.
So many dead. Herr Steinberg. Lady Berri. Grandmama. Mátyás.
Noémi brushed aside my concern. “I cannot see, only bits of light and shadow, but I will live. Is the Binding broken? We heard a horrible screeching, and there were…things…in the hall, claws dragging and clicking. They’re gone now.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering why the affirmation felt more like failure than victory. I needed to tell Noémi about Mátyás, but my throat kept closing around the words. The room dipped suddenly. No. I struggled to hold on to consciousness, using the pain to focus. “The others?”
“Gone. After your uncle killed Herr Steinberg, they fled,” János said.
No caged thing loves its captor. Had that been a warning? The creatures I’d released swarmed the edges of my vision. “And Pál?”
János shook his head. “Gone too. He left just after the Circle fled.”
“Did he know about Grandmama?”
János didn’t answer, and I wept. For Grandmama, whose son left as she lay dying. For Pál, whose rearing by the Circle had warped something fundamental inside him. For Mátyás.
Noémi turned her unfocused eyes toward me. Her fingers curled and uncurled on Oroszlán’s fur. “What now, Anna? Where is your army?”
I could not breathe. Grief and despair were like a massive stone crushing my chest. “No army. I broke the Binding and freed them—and they vanished. They didn’t keep their word. And, oh, Noémi.” I stopped, sucked in air.
She waited, her hand stilling on Oroszlán. Her skin puckered around her eyes, blistering near her temples, and peeling in bare red patches on her cheeks. I would not let myself look away. Whatever injuries she had sustained, they were on my behalf. Noémi’s vizsla, uncharacteristically solemn, thumped his tail against the floorboards.
I said, “Mátyás followed us from Buda-Pest. He flew into the Binding as a crow.”
The hope in her face slashed at my heart.
“Mátyás escaped? Where is he?”
I pulled the cross from my neck and pressed it into her hand. “He helped me break the Binding. But he—” I stopped abruptly, swallowing hard. “We needed a blood sacrifice. I could not be the sacrifice and break the spell.”
Noémi’s fingers curled around the ornament. Her blue eyes flickered and flattened. “He is gone, then?”
“The szegény lad,” János whispered.
“He wanted you to know he loves you.” Tears burned hot trails down my cheeks.
I waited for Noémi to shout at me, to blame me. Instead, she sat silent, shrinking into herself. I shifted away from the bed, kneeling beside her, and put my arms around her. She melted into me, shaking. Oroszlán laid his head in Noémi’s lap.
“How did he die?”
“He was stabbed.” I rubbed my hand against my sleeve. Noémi could not see the dried blood there, but I feared she might sense my omission: I stabbed him.
“Where is his body?”
I saw Mátyás’s eyes again in memory: dark with pain but steady before they closed, and then the wall of roses hiding his body as the world collapsed. “I couldn’t bring him out. One of the creatures pulled me out before I could reach him.”
Silence stretched between us, thick and tangled.
Noémi broke the quiet. “Mátyás sacrificed himself?”
“Yes,” I said. “He wasn’t like your father after all.”
And in a shadowed room beside my grandmother’s body, we sat and wept together. Outside, the rain fell, thin drumbeats against the roof. I was vaguely conscious of János leaving, of him returning later with cups of tea.
At length, I wiped my eyes. “I have to try to save the others. I must go back to the city.”
Noémi put her hand on mine, her cold fingers curling around my scratched palm. “We must go back. We must save the others. You don’t have to do this alone, Anna.”
Her quiet assurance brought tears once again prickling the back of my throat. We was a sma
ll word, a tiny one, but its meaning was infinitely expansive.
János cleared his throat. “Beg pardon for disturbing you, but there is something you need to see.”
The seam in the corner of the Sala Terrena was scarcely visible against the mottled pink marble of the walls, barely noticeable above the ruin of the room. I had not seen it when I rushed from the room after returning from the Binding, but János had.
“I found it when I came down to inspect the damage.”
“Where does it go?”
“A drawing room someplace. I can’t tell where.”
I peered through the slit, and my heart thumped. I recognized the burgundy chairs, the Turkish rug, and the faint scuff against the molding where Mátyás had kicked the wall.
Grandmama’s drawing room in Buda-Pest.
Home.
Pál had left it for us. Why? Perhaps it was his kind of apology. Or perhaps it fed into some larger plan of his I could only guess at.
It would take two days to ride to Buda-Pest by carriage—and the executions were set to begin today.
We would have to risk the portal.
I stepped into the seam of the Portal spell, my body tight with nerves, anticipating a trap. I exhaled slowly, willing myself calm. Faint heat prickled my skin, and then I was across. A fine layer of silt covered everything in the drawing room, dust blown in through the broken windows.
A heartbeat later, Noémi was beside me. János stayed in Eszterháza with Grandmama’s body. Later, when this was over, I would have to return to fetch her for burial. But I could not think about that now.
I had to save Gábor.
Pál had abandoned us; so had Hunger with his army. I was not entirely certain what to do now: Find Petőfi and beg him to help me? Or march to the prison and demand the Circle release my friends? After all, I had destroyed their Binding. I was a woman to be reckoned with.
Or, more likely, a woman to be thrown in the prison and executed with the rebels.
My ignorance pressed down on me like a weight. I did not know what had happened to the Circle in the wake of the broken Binding. Were they confused, anxious, vulnerable? Or already regrouping? When I had envisioned challenging the Circle before, it had always been with allies: Mátyás, Lady Berri, William. We would pit our strength and confidence against their confusion.
But Noémi and I were the only ones left, and Noémi was injured.
Lady Berri and Papa believed that a broken Binding would return magic to everyone with the ability to wield it. By that logic, some of the Circle ought to be weaker, as not all Luminate could have a strong innate ability, just as not all people could sing well. And if individuals were the source of their own power, as Papa believed, that would place additional limits on the Circle’s power, as they could not draw from the endlessly renewing Binding.
Would it be enough?
The enormity of what I had done snatched my breath away.
When I could breathe again, I gripped Noémi’s hands and led her into the hallway and down the stairs. We found Ginny in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. After hugging us both and exclaiming, she pressed tea on us, and while I gulped mine down—too hot, too fast—she told us, “There’s rebels fighting up on the hill near the castle.”
My heavy heart lifted a fraction. Maybe something could yet be salvaged. “And the prisoners? Are they still alive?”
“I don’t know. I think so.” Ginny eyed me uncertainly. “But, Miss Anna, the fighting. You can’t go up there. It’s dangerous.”
I laughed, not unkindly. “To be safe, I might have stayed at home.”
Noémi and I thanked Ginny for the tea, and I led Noémi from the house. The street was carpeted with squares of paper like a printer’s snowfall, the leaflets slowly turning to paste in the grim October rain. I scooped one up and read it aloud to Noémi, who helped me translate the Hungarian.
Rise, Magyar, your homeland calls!
The time is here: now, or never!
Shall we be slaves—or free?
This is the question. Answer it!
This was Petőfi’s work. I was certain of it. The rebels on the hill must be his as well. He had raised an army through the alchemy of words.
A dozen paces away, a young girl in peasant dress, her hair covered by a kerchief, stood in the middle of the street and flickered on and off like a lantern. She laughed with delight.
Though a dozen errands pulled at me, Noémi and I crossed the street to her. “How are you doing this?”
The glow in her face came and went. “I don’t rightly know, miss. Lady. I was midway through my morning chores, and something felt different, like someone had set a charge in me. Then I found I could do this. It’s like magic, isn’t it?”
The Binding breaks. Already, non-Luminate were feeling the effects: no longer barred by the spell, a girl in the street could draw magic into her soul and channel it. “It is magic,” I said. “But promise me you won’t try a larger spell without help. You could get hurt.”
“I won’t, miss,” she promised, and then turned her attention back to her hands, relighting and then extinguishing them, over and over again.
There would be work to do later, training all these new magicians. But it was not my work.
Half a block from Grandmama’s house, we hailed a hansom cab. The driver took us as far as the river.
“Sorry, miss.” He touched his cap. “But if there’s fighting, it’s no business of mine. Nor of yours, I should think.”
Ignoring his unsolicited advice, I thanked him and paid him.
Noémi and I crossed the pontoon bridge, though it bucked and twisted beneath us. I gripped Noémi’s hands, and we slipped and lurched on the rain-slick boards, grim and determined. The silent pressure of grief accompanied me, pushing against my eyelids and stealing my breath, closing my throat when I tried to form words. But I hadn’t the time to do more than look at it askance, to shove the pressure aside and plunge forward.
We stumbled through the streets below Buda Castle. A ragged group of men and women clustered on the steep road before the palace gates, struggling with the Austrian guards. Smoke and gunfire filled the air.
Misgiving seized me. It was one thing to talk of braving the fighting, to imagine the smoke and fire like something out of a Turner painting.
It was something else entirely to stand on the streets, the cobblestones hard beneath the soles of my shoes, the smoke pressing thick against my nose, the taste of it bitter on my tongue. The gunshots echoed down the street and reverberated in my bones.
And the blood. I had not imagined there could be so much blood. I had seen pig killings in the village when I was young, how the blood seemed to go on and on and the pig twitched and twitched before it was finally still.
That was nothing to this.
This was the ruined castle in the Binding. The slaughtered sheep in the Sala Terrena.
A young man fell a half dozen paces from us, his jaw blown off. My stomach revolted, trying to fight its way free of my body.
Noémi made a small, anxious sound, her eyes fixing vaguely on the dead boy. “What is happening?”
I turned my eyes away from the corpse. “A boy was shot.”
“Does he live? Perhaps I can help.”
I tried to unsee the blood spatter across the stones, the glinting white of bone in raw flesh. “There’s no help for him.” A bullet winged past us, blasting brick from the wall beyond us. I pulled Noémi down a side street where we would be shielded from the fighting. “And there’s no time.”
Boys dead in the streets. Mátyás dying beneath a cracked vault of sky. Gábor. I couldn’t let him be added to the litany of dead and dying. My heart might shatter.
“We can’t go this way,” I said. The castle gate was narrow, and the soldiers still held it. We would have to fight our way through the rebels and then the soldiers to reach the prison, and we couldn’t do it.
“The Vienna Gate?” Noémi asked, referring to the northeastern gate lea
ding to the residential streets in the castle district, and the one closest to the prison where Gábor was being held.
“There will be guards there too, surely.”
“There might be another way,” Noémi said. “There are labyrinths under the castle, rows and rows of old connected cellars. There won’t be so many guards at the entrance, not with the fighting drawing them away.”
I tucked my arm more firmly in Noémi’s. We followed a road as it circled back around the castle hill. On the far side, away from the Duna, we began hunting along Lovas Street for an opening.
“Here,” I said, spotting a narrow wooden door set back in some kind of enclosure. I pulled the latch, and the door opened, groaning. I peered into the darkness, but I could see no sign of life. The chill air of the stony corridor wafted out toward us.
“I need light,” I said.
“Lumen,” Noémi whispered, and a light blossomed in her hand.
We walked into the labyrinth. The darkness seemed to close around us, and I knew a moment of panic. Here, buried under the earth, I had no sense of direction, no idea where we should go.
“This way,” Noémi said, tugging on my arm.
I followed. Our footsteps were muffled in the close air of the old cellars. When Noémi stumbled, I put one hand against the stone wall for balance and my fingers came away wet with water. A barrel stood empty in the corner.
Noémi continued forward, her direction sure.
“How do you know where you are going?” I asked.
She paused. “I’m not sure. It’s like the certainty of sunlight after a rainstorm. After the Binding—magic feels different to me somehow, Anna. A lit charge, like the girl said. As though I might heal, but do other things as well. I’m following the pull of the magic.”
The corridors sprawled all around us, other passageways reaching out to intersect intermittently, curiously shaped rooms periodically interrupting the narrow path we followed. Once, we passed a clump of frightened burghers, arguing about the best way out of the city, away from the fighting.
Just when I had begun to think Noémi was fooling herself with her surety, we came to some narrow stone steps. “Up,” Noémi said, and I helped her climb the stairs.
