by Rosalyn Eves
I told them of Pál’s proposed trade, how we might get Mátyás back.
“Is this trade part of the praetherian plan of attack?” Görgey asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Hadúr said. “I would be loath to lose either of you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a loss,” Bahadır said, speaking for the first time. “We can use this.” He blushed under the combined scrutiny of the generals, just as I had, but continued undeterred. “We can send you into the praetherian camp armed with something that looks innocent but can prove destructive. A kind of Trojan horse.”
Gábor’s eyes lit with interest. “What did you have in mind?”
“A chemical compound of some kind. The praetheria will be watching for iron weapons and for magic. Hmm…does anyone in camp have a Bologna stone?”
The generals looked mystified. Gábor spoke up. “It’s a stone that glows after being exposed to sunlight: some people use it for light in the absence of magic. Or for luck.”
Guyon said, “I think there is one such among my troops. I’ll ask.”
As Hadúr set everyone to a task, Gábor turned to me. “The praetheria would not go to so much trouble if they meant to kill you. We will get you back, I swear it.”
There are fates worse than dying. Gábor looked worried enough that I did not voice the words, only squeezed his hand reassuringly before he left with Bahadır to find a Bologna stone (though what they meant to do with it, I had no idea).
My heart quailed from the task before me, but I could see no way around it, only through. Surely the others carried fear with them in equal measure as they set about their work. I took a deep breath to steady myself, then went to find Noémi and warn her of the trade to come.
* * *
The village was quiet when I approached. A pair of self-appointed sentries along the western edge nodded to me as I rode in. Clouds scuttled across the sky, revealing and then concealing a half-moon, alternately lighting the frosted landscape and plunging everything into shadows.
I found the house where Noémi had taken Mátyás, tied my horse near a watering trough behind it, and then slipped inside. Mátyás was asleep beside the fire, and Noémi sat in a chair near him. I halted on the threshold.
Noémi wasn’t alone. And it wasn’t the kind widow who owned the cottage sitting beside her, but Hunger.
I watched as Noémi ceremoniously handed Hunger an empty basket. He took it from her and inspected it, and I nearly betrayed my presence by laughing at the stupefied expression on his face.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Have you been gone from Hungary so long that you’ve forgotten?” Mischief glinted in Noémi’s eyes. I hadn’t seen that look on her face in a long time—I could forgive Hunger nearly everything for bringing that light back to her eyes. “A village girl can reject a courtship by presenting her suitor with an empty basket.”
Hunger looked up, an answering gleam in his eyes. He set the basket aside and moved his chair closer to Noémi’s. The laughter faded from her face. “Do you mean it?” he asked.
“It’s only a folk custom,” Noémi said, playing with her fingers. “I can’t very well reject a courtship that has not been offered.”
The gleam in Hunger’s eyes deepened. He took one of her hands and lifted it to his lips, pressing a kiss on each knuckle. I knew I should leave, but I could not find the will to move. “I’ve offered you that courtship in a dozen different ways, a dozen different words. Each time you said no.”
“How could it be a true courtship when I was kept imprisoned by you, by the other praetheria? How could I possibly say yes, when I might always wonder if I’d said yes for love or because I felt driven to it? It was not fair of you to ask me.” Noémi did not draw her hand away, despite the sharpness of her words.
Hunger huffed a soft laugh. “My truth teller. You are right, of course. I should not have asked you then—I should not have held you prisoner so long. You were a convenience at first, a way to draw Anna and Mátyás to our cause. And then, by degrees, I began to see that I did not want you to leave, that I would make any excuse to be near you, to see you, even if I wronged you with those excuses. I was afraid I would lose you—and when the war began, that fear was replaced by a deeper one, that you might be hurt, even killed. You were safer in the caves.”
“You should have let me go,” Noémi said, but she did not seem truly angry, and with her free hand she brushed the curls away from his forehead, then rested her palm against his cheek. “I could have given you my love freely, had I been free.”
“I am sorry,” Hunger said, raising his eyes to hers, and I caught my breath. I had never heard him apologize before: this golden-eyed sárkány with the indomitable arrogance of a dragon-turned-man. “I understand now that I have hurt you, and I wronged you.” He glanced at the basket, overturned on the ground beside him. “Am I too late, then?”
Noémi was silent for a long time. From a shelf near the fireplace, a clock spoke softly: tick, tick. The fire crackled in the grate. Mátyás’s chest rose and fell beneath a blanket.
“Not too late,” she said at last. “But it is the wrong time, all the same. When this war is over, when we are safe, ask me again.”
Hunger cupped his hand beneath Noémi’s chin and studied her for a moment. When she did not pull away, he leaned forward to set a kiss, petal-soft, against her lips.
Heat flushed my face, and I was not even the one receiving the kiss. How was Noémi still upright?
That brief flash of desire must have betrayed me, for Hunger swiveled around. “Anna!”
I stepped forward into the circle of firelight and told them why I’d come.
The trade was set for the following night, at an hour past midnight.
At dusk, Noémi and I drove a cart into camp, with Mátyás, unmoving, behind us. Gábor was already waiting for me.
“I have something for you,” he said, and I followed him to where trampled fields lay quiet beneath the gathering dark.
He fished in his pocket and removed a small polished stone with bands of brown and gold threaded through russet. “It’s a hope charm,” he said, holding it in his palm. “If you cup it in your hands and say ‘Hope,’ it should give you a rush of warmth. It’s a Coremancer spell I haven’t perfected yet, so I don’t think it will work above once, but I couldn’t let you go wholly alone into the praetherian camp.”
“It’s beautiful.” I took the stone from him, feeling the warmth of his fingertips brushing mine, and slid the stone into my pocket. But the new weight was a reminder of everything I’d been trying to forget. My breath caught. “I am not certain I can bear this,” I whispered. “I am afraid. I don’t want to leave you.”
“Then don’t go.” Gábor wrapped his arms around me, and I leaned into him, letting the tension that had been building in my body ebb out of me. “Mátyás would not blame you.”
“But Noémi will. I’d blame myself too. I have to go.”
A sigh, long and slow, escaped from him. “I know it.” He shifted his hold on me, so we stood facing each other. His eyes were bright. A sliver of moonlight danced along his cheekbones, caught against his lips.
I leaned up for a kiss. He caught my shoulders with his hands. “Wait. I want to say something.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been waiting for the perfect time and place—but I’m starting to see that there is no perfect time or perfect place. I might lose my whole life to waiting, and I’d rather have an imperfect happiness now than the hope of a more perfect one later.”
Snow began to fall, a sifting light as flour.
Gábor pulled me closer, erasing any space between us. His heartbeat matched mine. “We might neither of us survive this war. All we have is tonight. I offer you everything I have: my heart, my soul, my life, if you want it. I cannot give you the life you were raised to, but I think I can make you happy.”
I drew back a little, searching his face. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
He raised one shoulder, a lopsided shrug, and grinned at me. “If you want me to.”
“This is not the life I was raised to,” I said, gesturing at the fields around us. “But here I am.”
He tilted his head. “Is that a yes?”
I thought of Noémi, putting off her happiness with Hunger until the war was over. Until it was safe. But living itself was not safe: there were no guarantees given to any of us. “Yes,” I said, so there was no misunderstanding. Yes. It was a promise to myself, to our future, should we live to claim it. “But for now”—I lowered my eyes demurely—“I should like you to kiss me.”
I could feel his grin against my mouth as he complied. Then his kiss deepened, and it was not so much kiss as prayer, a sacred caesura in the infinite now that stretched between us.
Gábor spread his woolen mente on the ground beneath us, tugging me close, not as though I were something fragile but as though I were something infinitely precious. His touch grounded me, and despite the cold night I was warm and flushed, and exactly where I wanted to be.
* * *
Midnight came too early. Noémi’s voice, cutting through the chill night air, dragged us back to the present. I stood, finger-combing my hair and tugging my shirt straight. The gesture seemed oddly irrelevant: what did it matter if I was untidy if I was surrendering to the praetheria? Gábor retrieved his mente from the ground and slung it around his shoulders, then offered me his hand.
He did not relinquish my hand when we joined the others, not until a horse was brought for me to mount. Then he lifted me into the saddle, his fingers lingering around my ankle. I smiled down at him, our secret joy rising like a balloon inside me. I pushed away the impending dread curling around the edges of my thoughts: I’d have to face the reality soon enough.
Bahadır brought me a metal canteen and a sachet of salt. “When you’re ready, add water to the contents of the container, and then the salt. The mixture will create a tremendous heat, enough to detonate gunpowder or anything explosive, without recourse to fire. But do not mix them before they are ready or they might injure you.”
I put the sachet in my pocket and hooked the canteen on my belt, feeling as though the contents might explode anyway, without water or salt.
Our group was small: me, Gábor, Hadúr, Emilija, and the lidérc. Noémi and Bahadır rode with the light wagon that carried Mátyás’s body. I did not see Hunger, who was still maintaining the fiction for Chernobog that he had died. I suspected he was somewhere nearby anyway. Where Noémi went, he generally followed.
The meeting place was some miles from the army’s campsite and the battlefield, a swath of puszta not yet touched by the war. Emilija had scouted the field earlier, to ensure that no hidden armies lay in wait. As we rode, the residual warmth of my time with Gábor ebbed away, leaving me cold and afraid.
Morning was only a few hours off, and the dawn it brought would be grim. The probable future scrolled across my mind: the Russians coming in a relentless wave, the praetherian army darkening the horizon like a tide of locusts, the few Austrian mechs launched against them crushed like children’s toys.
I shook myself. It was no good borrowing fear from something that had not yet happened. I had to stay focused. Make the trade for Mátyás…resist Pál…set off my explosive…escape. Ideally in that order.
The lidérc drew beside me as we rode. “Don’t be afraid, Anna.”
“How can I not be? I am giving myself to people who do not care for me.”
The lidérc shook her head. “I don’t mean Pál and the Four. Anyone with sense would fear the trade you are making. I have been watching you a long time. I saw a girl who was fearless, breaking the Binding spell. Now I see a woman who doubts herself, who bottles her gifts away as though they were a fire that would burn her. But fire is not always bad. A contained fire can do much good: it can warm a house, cook meat, bring light.” She reached out to touch my hand, an unusual gesture from a creature who kept to herself. “Don’t be afraid of your gifts. You do no one a favor by making yourself small.”
A flicker of warmth kindled in my heart at her words. I tried to hold on to it as we approached the field where four silhouettes made an uneven line across the starlit horizon: Vasilisa, Pál, Chernobog, and Svarog, the four-headed golden-haired god I’d last seen with the Russian tsar.
Dismounting from my horse, I patted its rump to send it back to the others. Noémi hung a Lumen lantern in the cart above Mátyás. She adjusted his blanket, then looked up and blew me a tiny kiss. Hadúr and Bahadır bowed, and Emilija offered me a military salute. Gábor made no gesture, only watched me with unblinking eyes, the weight of his gaze like a caress. I studied my friends, fixing the picture of them in my heart until I could not bear to delay any longer. I turned away and began to walk, and the lidérc fell in step beside me.
“You needn’t come with me,” I said.
“This is my choice,” she said. “Weeks ago, you asked me for my name, and I told you that you had not earned it. But I want to give it to you now, so you can face your battle knowing that I believe in you.” She paused, and I paused too, fixing my eyes on hers. “My name is Ildikó—for ‘battle.’ ”
Ildikó. She fell back then, letting me walk forward alone, but her name hummed in my ears, her gesture of faith bolstering my flagging courage.
For Mátyás, I thought, and did not let myself dwell on what would happen after the trade.
Halfway between my friends and the praetheria, I halted. I would go no farther until the praetheria released Mátyás.
Pál began the intricate gestures of a spell, and I braced myself, half expecting a trap. But the bone-deep buzz of his spell passed harmlessly over me, and then someone shouted behind me. I turned to see Mátyás sitting up beneath the blue glow of the lantern. Noémi scrambled into the wagon to hug him. Pál had released Mátyás’s spirit, as promised.
A moment’s relief rushed over me, quickly sucked away by growing dread.
Time for my end of the bargain.
The walk across the remaining length of the field seemed weirdly both endless—as though I would relive that walk forever in my nightmares—and requiring no time at all. When I drew close, Chernobog stalked forward and grasped my arm, dragging me back to Vasilisa, who seized my other arm.
With her free hand, she gestured in the air, and a shape erupted from the ground behind Svarog: a griffin, its great wings raining dirt on our exposed heads. I didn’t know if Vasilisa had hidden it in the ground or merely conjured it. Perhaps it didn’t matter: the beast soared toward my friends, its flight both beautiful and terrible.
Another shout, and I squinted across the field. Mátyás had collapsed in Noémi’s arms, as limp and unmoving as he had been only minutes earlier.
I jerked my arms but couldn’t dislodge either Vasilisa or Chernobog. “What’s happening to Mátyás? Why are you attacking them?”
Neither answered me.
A golden light appeared to the left of my friends, a low, pulsing glow that seemed to hum across the open space. The lidérc’s lure. The griffin wavered, shifting its course to meet the light.
Svarog pounded a stave into the ground, and the earth trembled. In the distance, my friends tumbled like pins, and the lidérc’s light winked out. The griffin corrected course, winging toward Mátyás and Noémi. Hadúr launched himself into the air, a movement that was closer to flying than leaping, and swung his great sword at the winged beast. The griffin screamed at him and dodged, swerving around the war god to plunge toward Noémi, who stood over Mátyás’s body with a dagger gleaming in her hand.
The griffin’s talons slashed at Noémi, who cried out, then collapsed like a punctured balloon. Even from this distance, I could see the dark streaks furrowed across the bodice of her pal
e dress. The griffin crowed, a horribly echoing sound in the sudden stillness, and then it sprang aloft again, carrying Mátyás’s limp body by his arms.
Noémi. I nearly dislocated my shoulders trying to wrench free, but Vasilisa and Chernobog held me fast.
Hadúr knelt on the cold grass, his arms crossed on the hilt of his sword, the tip of the blade resting in the dirt. Why did he do nothing, when the griffin was carrying Mátyás away? But then the clouds overhead opened, releasing bolt after bolt of lightning. Hadúr stood and raised his sword. His copper armor drew the lightning, and he wrapped it around his blade as one might wrap wool around a distaff.
Then he pointed the sword at the griffin, and lightning arced over the beast’s head, creating a crackling barrier before it. The griffin shied back, and Hadúr leapt, catching its rear leg. Bahadır and Gábor ran forward to help him.
But the flying creature snarled and snapped his beak at Hadúr’s arm, and the god of war fell back to the ground with a thud. He shook himself, then sprang up once more, pounding toward us. His longsword glittered, still crackling with unused lightning.
The tight grip on my right arm loosened, and Chernobog thundered across the ground to meet Hadúr.
“Stop!” Gábor called, infusing his voice with all the Persuasion of his Coremancer gift. I froze. Beside me, Vasilisa stilled briefly. Chernobog hiccuped in his run, brushing through the compulsion as if it were a cobweb.
He collided with Hadúr as a continent might, with a bone-jarring crash that shook the world to its core. But my focus was not on them. I peered through the darkness, willing the activity around the wagon to resolve into something that made sense. My mind kept replaying the moment when Noémi fell, those terrible slashes across her body. Hunger joined Emilija and the lidérc, who were fussing over Noémi, and ice ran through my body: he would not have revealed himself unless something went calamitously wrong.
