by Rosalyn Eves
The griffin landed beside us, dropping Mátyás in a crumpled heap before him. Svarog snapped his fingers, and a richly carved cart—a chariot, really—appeared out of the gloom, drawn by three horses. Svarog lifted an unresponsive Mátyás into the vehicle, then mounted up, driving the horses before him.
What spell had Pál cast? He had not released Mátyás’s spirit. A Lucifera’s telekinesis, moving Mátyás like a puppet to trick us into thinking Mátyás was whole?
I wanted to go to Mátyás; I wanted to run across the field to Noémi, but Vasilisa held me fast. She wrapped her arms around my waist and hoisted me into the air. When I began to struggle, she whispered, “I’ll break every bone in your body if you fight me now, and I’ll enjoy doing it. You don’t need to be intact to be useful.”
I stopped fighting. Below us, Chernobog slammed his shoulder against Hadúr’s raised shield. Lightning still crackled along the horned god’s raised wings, evidence of Hadúr’s last attack. A fireball lit just beside Hadúr, and his attention slid, only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. Chernobog slid a pronged pike beneath Hadúr’s shield and through his copper breastplate.
Hadúr dropped his sword and stumbled back, gasping. The ground opened beneath him, earth slurping at his legs, then sides, then neck, as though it were a living thing of insatiable appetite. When only Hadúr’s head remained visible, Chernobog sauntered toward him, twirling the war god’s sword through his fingers. Cracks radiated from the ground where Hadúr struggled to break free, but I did not think he had enough time.
I closed my eyes before I could see the sword come whistling down.
The last of the ancient Hungarian gods, a casualty not of war but of treachery.
Disaster upon ruin upon calamity.
From this vantage, I could see Noémi, spread like a doll on the floor of the wagon. Hunger rocked her body as she had once rocked his, her blood staining his clothes as his had once stained hers. A cry rolled out across the night, of longing unfulfilled, of a devastation that threatened to unknit every muscle binding my bones together. I had known that Hunger could draw desire with a breath; I had not known he could also do its inverse, that his grief could drive despair like a poison through my blood.
The night air skirled past me, cold and sharp. Chernobog sped ahead of Vasilisa and me on velvet wings, still crowing about his victory. Vasilisa did not once look back, though she must have felt Hunger’s unfurling.
But I did. I craned my head back until I could see nothing of the blue light hanging beside Noémi’s body. I watched until darkness swallowed all my friends.
I knew what Hunger’s grief meant.
Noémi was dead.
After a prison of stone, my body was a strange thing: flaccid and soft, vulnerable. I felt as though I might lift off the earth at any moment, untethered. I’d been trapped in the rock so long that time had begun to blur and morph, and then at once I was free, my spirit drawn irresistibly to my body, a compass pointing north.
Only…my body did not seem entirely to fit me, like a favorite pair of shoes left behind on a long vacation that no longer know the swell and shape of one’s feet.
I tried to sit up, but the muscles in my stomach did not want to cooperate, and so I lay on the ground, gasping like a beached fish. Where was I? Brightness burned against the horizon, and I turned my head away from it, the light stinging my still-sensitive eyes. The air swirling around me was cold, bitter with frost and winter wind. Not in the caverns, then. Dawn?
“Hush,” a woman’s voice said, light fingers stroking my shoulder. Not Anna or Noémi. A thin warmth seeped from her touch, radiating from my shoulder through my body. I could feel some of the strength returning to my arms and legs, and after a few moments I pulled myself upright. My stomach muscles gasped and strained at the effort, but they did not betray me, as they had before.
I blinked, the spots of light and dark in my vision finally cohering as I adjusted to the growing brightness of morning. Thin, gruel-like clouds smeared the winter sky above the horizon.
Two people sat watching me—the pale-haired woman, Vasilisa, and Pál Eszterházy, who was some sort of cousin to me, but I’d never bothered to untangle our precise relationship. He’d never merited that much of my time. Maybe I should have paid more attention.
“Can he fight?” Pál asked.
“He can stand,” Vasilisa said. “I do not think he should attempt holding a gun or a sword. The Healing is only a spell—it’s not true healing, and the strength it grants will wear off eventually.”
“Here, boy,” Pál said, addressing me. “Can you shift?”
“I daresay,” I drawled. “But I’m not in the mood to oblige you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vasilisa said. “We’ll know soon enough.”
* * *
The praetherian army moved out with the dawn, a great regiment of creatures. With Vasilisa, I watched as the front line thundered past: gnarled mountain giants; a bull-headed minotaur; a phalanx of tree-men, their bark-skinned arms wrapped around one another; a pair of stonelike guta, their inhuman strength palpable even at a distance.
They were followed by creatures fleeter but no less terrifying: the jointless shadows of the fene; a group of samodiva, their glamours shimmering around them, flames trailing behind them like wings; a pale-faced Fair One, her lips already stained dark with blood. Though some held weapons and some did not, all were deadly.
They streamed past in dizzying numbers.
When the foot soldiers were well under way, a second wave sprang to the sky: gold-and-black-banded dragons; griffins; a winged unicorn; a battalion of helmeted Valkyries, riding flying horses.
Beside me, Vasilisa began shifting: her slim figure broadened, her limbs grew denser. Her lovely, unlined face seemed to collapse in on itself, wrinkles spreading like ink across parchment. The cloud of pale hair darkened and thinned, until only a few scraps clung to an age-spotted scalp.
I pulled away in surprise, and Vasilisa misread my movement.
“I repulse you, do I?” she asked, cackling. “Good. I feared my pretty face wouldn’t be enough to strike terror into the hearts of men. Behold me in all my glory.” She cocked her head to one side, considering me. “Do you know me now, boy? Your cousin never did.”
I stared at her, my eyes running over her stooped shoulders, the wiry hands, and the curving nails. I caught at scraps of memory, stories told by my nurse, and tried to fit them together. She looked like a witch from a fable, a tale told at bedtime to give children nightmares. But she wasn’t just a tale, she was the original nightmare.
She rattled a pair of items in her pocket, the mortar and pestle she always carried. The fragments of memory knitted together. “Baba Yaga,” I said.
“Smart boy,” she said before stepping forward to wrap her arms around me and lift us both into the air. As we rose, she said, “I’ve got you spelled, as before. Try to shift and I’ll let you drop to your death in my magic net.” She laughed again, a sound like bones grinding together. “And off to war we go.”
From the air, I could see the puszta unrolling beneath us. The praetherian army spread across it, an irresistible tide. Beyond them, I could see more lines of soldiers, reaching to the horizon and heading west. Whose soldiers? Surely not ours, or they’d be marching to meet us or away, but not parallel. How much had I missed in my rock tomb? Was the war nearly over or just beginning? And my friends—where were they now? Were they safe?
We flew for a long time—a dozen or more miles, as the crow flies, though much more slowly, always keeping pace with the armies marching below us. We flew until the sky was dark with smoke and the horizon was lit by flashes of gunpowder, the ground rocked by cannon fire and magic spells.
We set down just as the first wave of praetherian soldiers crashed into the human soldiers. The screams carried clearly across the open plains
.
“I won’t fight with you,” I said.
“Won’t you?” Vasilisa—Baba Yaga—asked. “You are not quite human yourself, táltos. How do humans who know what you are look at you?”
“My friends do not care.”
“Ah, but I do not ask about your friends. Your friends are mostly outsiders: Anna, the Turkish boy, the lidérc. I mean the others, the same ones who have driven the praetheria out of their towns. When they see you, do they see a Luminate soldier, using a magic they understand? Or do they see a monster, a dragon with a hunger as deep as the world?”
I flinched, and she laughed.
“I knew another of your kind once. Not quite as you are, with your crows and your multitude of shapes. But a man who could become a dragon, a dragon who could become a man, a creature who forgot, over the centuries, which came first and where the line began and ended between being human and not. I think you have met him: he loved your sister.”
Hunger. A sudden terrifying moment of clarity: was this why Hunger had taken his name? That yawning need that overcame me in dragon form?
“Will your Eszterházy name protect you, if humans know the truth of you?”
I scarcely heard her: another ripple of understanding shook me. “Loved my sister? Did Hunger die of his wounds after all?”
Vasilisa shook her head. Her voice, when she spoke, was a gentle rumble. “Your sister. Noémi is dead.”
The cold air swirling around me seemed to harden, a rim of frost coating my eyes and nose and throat so I could not catch my breath. Noémi? Dead? Impossible. It was my epitaph that was supposed to grace a misbegotten headstone, not hers.
Here lies Eszterházy Noémi: She died a death not meant for her.
No. She must be wrong. My spirit shifted, still not quite comfortable in my body, and I had a peculiar double sense of being both within and without my own skin.
Vasilisa’s eyes were dark with something that might have been pity. “I am not wrong. Will you still fight against us, on behalf of those who caused your sister’s death? There are only a handful of people you love in this world: your sister is gone, and your cousin fights with us.”
She nodded and looked away, and I followed her gaze. Anna stood beside her uncle a hundred feet away, her face pale in the morning light.
Anna saw me looking and waved. “Mátyás! You must—” But her voice cut off, snatched away by a wind that sprang up between us.
“Let me speak with her.” About Noémi, about this strange changing war that I did not understand. How had Noémi died? I could not imagine that the Hungarian army would turn on her, not when her gifts of healing were so needed at the front. And yet Anna was here, fighting with the praetheria, as Vasilisa said. What had happened while I was locked in my rock cage? What changed?
“Later,” Vasilisa said. “Anna has a task that you must not disrupt, just as you have yours.”
“And that is?”
“To end this war.”
I turned to look at her full on. Her eyes, half buried in creases, were steady and calm.
“Not to fight it?”
“Do you think we want this fight? Do you think we rejoice in bloodshed? Once, maybe. They called me Baba Yaga, but a baba is only an old woman, and sometimes a midwife. Sometimes new life comes baptized in blood. I would see life at the end of this war, not death.”
“Then why bring the war at all?”
“Should we have let the Hapsburgs and the Congress send us all away? Should we have made ourselves weak so you could continue to live as you always have, ignorant, oblivious?”
“Of course not—”
“Your people were bringing us a war whether we wished it or not. If we did not want to be hunted down, we would have to fight. The only way to win a place for ourselves in your world is using your weapons: power, intimidation, blood. If we want to be taken seriously, we must show ourselves a threat.”
“But if you are seen as threatening, won’t that just confirm everything humans fear about you? They’ll simply combine armies to fight against you.”
“And so we must show ourselves too powerful to be taken down. We must show ourselves powerful enough that humans will be glad for a cessation of war, glad to give us the small boons we ask: a place of our own, to be left in peace. Even as we speak, the sisters of the Morrígan are bearing down on London, an army in their wake. Ireland is burning behind them. The Melusina are offering a truce in the midst of the civil war in France. Farther north, Fenrir has been released, and wolves ravage the northlands.
“We can draw this out, long and bloody. Most of your friends will die….Or you can help us and end it now.”
I frowned at her. “I thought you wanted to build a new world for the praetheria. I thought you wanted to make yourselves demigods.”
She raised one hoary eyebrow. “And where did you hear this? From us?”
“Anna said—” I broke off, trying to remember what Anna had said. The praetherian threat had always seemed so present and real.
“Because a thing is threatening does not make it evil. All we ask—and it is not so much—is a place of our own.”
I fell silent.
Noémi had already died in this war. For a moment, I was frozen, trapped by old memories: Noémi at Christmastime, giving me all her candies from the tree until I was sick with the excess of sugar. Noémi, shrieking as I left frogs and salamanders in her bed. Noémi, mothering me when I had no one left to do so.
Noémi. I swallowed an unaccustomed tightness in my throat.
Surely it was better to end this war, before more lives were lost in the long, bloody unraveling.
Vasilisa continued, “It is not enough for you to fight with us. Your tricks and shapes can be useful, yes, but they are not powerful enough to end this. You must take your táltos shape, the dragon that guards the World Tree.”
“You can’t want that,” I said. “In that shape, I’m beyond control—mine or anyone else’s. I might kill you and the armies that follow you.” Monstrous. The word echoed in my head.
“As to that, I have some experience with dragons. I think I can help you control your hunger.” She set a hand on my shoulder, surprisingly heavy, given the fine bones and sagging skin. “Because a wolf has sharp teeth and instincts to kill does not make it a monster—it makes it a wolf. An old woman with a gift for witchcraft is not a monster, unless she chooses to base her craft on blood magic.” Her smile was tinged with irony. “A táltos with a deadly shape is no monster, unless his choices make him so. To kill to end a war: is this monstrous? Some might call it merciful.”
She had come uncannily near my own thoughts. I shivered a little in the cold air.
I had shied away from being the táltos the Lady asked of me, because she could not promise that I would not lead men and women to their deaths. Vasilisa did not ask that fatal leadership of me: she asked me only for myself. I might live or die, I might bring others to their deaths, but I would not be haunted by the deaths of those who followed me.
“And besides,” she added, more prosaically, “your human body is dying, all those weeks untended by your spirit. The dragon form can heal all that.”
Still I hesitated. The arguments Vasilisa presented were logical, compelling. I wanted to believe her. But there was something I was still missing. How had Anna come to join them?
“And Anna?”
“Your cousin has always sought to end this war. When she found that the human generals would not listen to her, she came back to us.”
I scratched my chin. That did sound like Anna.
Vasilisa sighed. “You make this decision difficult, but it is not so hard. It is what your sister would want—for you to heal, for you to live. As a healer, she would want this war to end quickly: a nice, clean wound, not a long tear that invites infection.”
She
was right. Noémi would want me to do what I could to end the war. A little death and destruction now was better than a prolonged devastation. “Very well,” I said.
I bowed my head and closed my eyes. I could not see the World Tree from here, but I could sense its power, its roots stretching deep into the soil of the puszta, grounding an old magic into this world. That magic called to me, even as I let myself fall into that familiar form, even as my body sprouted upward, even as a moment of bright agony cleaved my head apart, seven snaking necks branching from my trunk.
The ravenous hunger was back, driving me even as the shift took hold. A need as deep as the puszta was wide, a chasm as endless as the sky.
As a child, I sometimes pictured the end of the world, as a speculation to while away a rainy afternoon or after listening to a particularly vivid sermon on the book of Revelation. The scene before me now—winged beasts descending from the sky, a field black with smoke, grasses red with blood—echoed those old visions and amplified them with details I had not thought to imagine: the way the wind carried the smell of burnt flesh, the cold prickle of snowflakes falling from a deadened sky.
My cousin, shifting into a seven-headed beast.
He did not quite fit the biblical account: he was black, not red, and bore no crowns—an irrelevant detail that my brain seized upon as if it were somehow important. As if it might somehow make sense of the destruction before me.
As if, by concentrating hard enough on minutiae, I might forget that Noémi was dead.
Noémi had always reminded me of her biblical namesake, the Naomi who had inspired such loyalty in her daughter-in-law Ruth: full-hearted, faithful, hardworking. Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
Noémi. All those shared days and nights at Eszterháza, in Vienna, in the caverns among the praetheria. She had been the best of friends. She had been my sister. And I should never see her or speak to her again.
