by Rosalyn Eves
My eyes stung, my throat grew tight. But I could not indulge in tears. Not here, not yet.
Screams tore across the sky as Mátyás lumbered forward. Cannons fired at him, but the cannonballs bounced harmlessly off his skin. An Austrian mechanized monster lifted into the air, droning toward him, and he batted it out of the sky. It fell, crumpled like a scrap of paper.
I had never seen Mátyás’s transformation into a dragon, though he and Gábor had told me of it. I had thought they were exaggerating.
They weren’t. He was terrible and beautiful, as all great beasts are, and I could not see any sign of my cousin inside him.
“Ah,” Pál said, rubbing gloved hands together. “It is time.”
The look he turned on me was measuring, indifferent, and the cold air nipping at my cheeks seemed to coat my insides as well.
“Time for what?” I asked, stalling.
“For your part, and mine.”
“I do not see how I have any part in this.”
“I know your gifts better than you know them,” Pál said, his ice-blue gaze never leaving mine. “Who told you that you were chimera? Who told Vasilisa what you might do? Who sees the future scrolled out as clearly as a historian might see the past?”
What had he seen of my future? It was one thing to suspect oneself a failure, or perhaps a monster. Far worse to have suspicion confirmed. And what if it was neither of those things? What if his vision showed me as I had so long yearned to be: powerful, important, heard?
Pál must have read something of my thoughts in my face. “Let me show you something.”
He pulled a small ornamented mirror from a bag at his side, and breathed on it, so that steam covered the surface. Tiny specks of frost dotted the edges.
Shapes began moving beneath the fogged glass. Emilija first, standing with her women soldiers before an army. Of the standards waving above the army, I recognized three: the black and yellow of the house of Hapsburg, the red and white of Croatia, and her father’s own flag. Emilija faced her father’s army. A gout of Luminate fire erupted around the women, and when the smoke cleared, only one still stood. She was not Emilija.
I saw Bahadır die, pinned on a long pike, in company with a group of Hungarian soldiers, surrounded by Russians they had meant to surprise. The lidérc, carrying a green banner emblazoned with a gold ash, caught between an Austrian soldier and a green-skinned troll. She would not have named either her enemy, but that did not stop them from killing her, one firing a gun as the other brought down a metal-studded cudgel.
Another ripple. When the fog cleared again, it was Gábor’s face mirrored back at me, his eyes gone cloudy, his cheeks spattered with blood.
“Stop,” I said, pressing my hands against my stomach. “I don’t want to see any more.” But terrible as the images were, I could not look away. These deaths, of people I loved, deserved a witness.
The mirror moved farther afield, to giants roaming through the streets of Vienna. One stopped before the Hungarian embassy. A woman ran out, cradling a child: Catherine and Christopher. The giant stomped his massive foot down.
Another ripple, and London materialized: my parents, cowering together in my mother’s sitting room, a woman with a cloak of crow wings and a bloody sword raised above them. James, sitting at his desk at school, his cheek on an open book as though he were sleeping, a spear protruding from his back.
I dropped to my knees and vomited. After wiping my mouth, I demanded, “Is this true? Or only an illusion to scare me?” Pray God, let it only be an illusion.
“How do you think this war should end?” Pál asked. “Your friends are outmatched at every turn. There is no way in which you win. No way except mine.”
My shoulders sagged. How could I have hoped, even for a moment, that there would be any other ending to this story? My friends and I had been powerless to change the trajectory of the war, though we had tried. Had we been other than what we were—older, more educated, more connected, more powerful—could we have changed anything? Here, on the brink of failure, I was haunted by questions.
I thought I knew what it was like to feel powerless, to see all of society arrayed against you. I’d known it when Herr Steinberg closed in before the Binding broke, when I had no assurance I was doing anything other than bringing death upon us.
I’d felt it standing before the archduchess, when all my will was not enough to keep her soldiers from dragging me away, when all the moral right I could claim was not enough to keep her from pronouncing a sentence of death on my head or a lifetime of captivity on the praetheria.
But this powerlessness was absolute: I had no conviction of right to carry me through, no hope that something better than I might outlast me. No hope that my friends might succeed where I had failed.
Was it because I was the wrong age and the wrong gender to have a real voice? But Joan of Arc had been only a girl. Queen Victoria had been only a girl when she ascended to the throne.
Perhaps it was some failing unique to me. Some flaw in my makeup…my chimera blood.
“And what is your way?” I was not curious, only resigned. A cold, colorless voice fading into a landscape of frost.
“It’s better if I show you. You’ll need spirit sight for this, that same sense you use to distinguish spells. Sometimes it’s helpful to close your eyes, so that the physical world does not interfere with your spiritual sense.”
I closed my eyes, but there was nothing, only the dull red of the inside of my eyelids. Even my inner sense for spells, which felt magic as a buzzing along my bones, seemed blunted.
“Here, let me help you,” Pál said, putting a hand on my elbow. A light stream of magic fizzed through my body, and my eyes flew open. I shook him off, my heart thumping.
“Calm down,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I’m merely amplifying your own ability to see.”
He left unsaid the fact that he could force me—his magic and physical strength were both greater than my own—but it hung between us anyway.
I closed my eyes again, gritting my teeth against his magic. I took a deep breath and blew it out between my lips. A touch calmer, I focused outward.
And, abruptly, there it was: the whole of the battlefield laid out before me in glimmering lights and threads, a weaving of such complexity and loveliness that it eclipsed any previous idea I might have had of beauty. Like sunrise, shafting through dew beaded on a spider’s web—magnified a million times. Like light on the curl and foam of waves, the opalescent hue of an ocean breaking across a shore, everything beautiful and bright and dark all rolled into one.
A memory stirred, of a hazy summer afternoon and Gábor and his sister Izidóra trying to teach me to sense magic in the world around me. Was this some of what they saw?
The memory sent a savage pang through me, an intense longing for Gábor and, a beat later, for Noémi, who had helped me hide those secret meetings. But that same longing set the vision trembling, and I pushed it aside.
“What is this?” I asked.
Pál’s grip on my elbow tightened. “You know that magic comes from the energy of soul stuff: all of the living world is woven together by threads of power. Creation, time itself, all the names we give to the physical world to shape our understanding of it—at their core, they hold magic. We can follow these threads forward in space, as we do now, or forward in time, as I did when I showed you your friends’ fates.
“But we can also follow these threads backward in time: neither time nor space are linear in the ways we usually understand them.”
I kept my eyes pinched shut. “It’s lovely, but what does it have to do with me, with this war?”
“Skilled magicians manipulate this field of magic all the time, whenever they cast spells. Most can only sense a few of the lines and weaves, those pertaining to their particular expertise. Elementalist”—his fingers dug into
my elbow as certain threads and lines lit up in turquoise and green—“Coremancer”—the greens faded, replaced by pinpricks of purple across my inner vision. “Most can’t hold this complexity in their heads, so they do not even try. They simply call up what they need through their spell rituals and their will.”
“But you can hold it,” I said.
“As can you,” Pál replied, “with my aid. Some of that skill is in your blood. Some of it is chimera—the extra soul stuff inside of you makes the task less arduous for your other senses.”
“If magic happens when people shift these lines,” I said, “what happens when I touch something?” The vision still shimmered before my closed eyes, but I caught my breath, afraid that even by breathing I might unwittingly destroy something.
“Creation is of a much tougher warp and weave than you fear. It takes skill and training to manipulate those lines and patterns, as you should know. You cannot destroy it by brushing against it. Or by breathing.”
And there it was again: the subtle, intrusive reminder that I could not keep him out of my head. I shivered, and the vision wavered.
I opened my eyes, blinking at the frosty landscape before us, and pulled away from Pál. Mátyás was only a dark smudge in the distance now, though the terror following in his wake was almost palpable.
“In the normal way of things, magicians draw from the weave only a little at a time, their power spread more or less evenly across the world. But war…war wreaks a splendid destruction. All the working and unworking of magic, concentrated on the battlefields. So much death and release of soul energy, violating the regular rhythms of birth and death. All of this destabilizes the weave, weakens its connections, making it easier to rework, to change the fabric of space and time. Why do you think prodigious social change is so often precipitated by violence? I know this; the praetheria know this. Their new world will be birthed by blood and broken spells.
“But it does not have to be so.” He caught my elbow again, turning me to face him. “I have made no secret of my ambitions, not from you. In another life, I should have been born to rule, my Luminate gifts my divine right. But in this world, I was only a secondary child of a secondary family, and I could not carve my way alone. I needed this war to destabilize the weave of creation so I could shape it, needed praetherian support to secure you and drive our world into this war.”
I ran my tongue across my lips, my mouth dry. The moisture froze almost at once. How fitting that the world should end in ice. “Why should you need me, if your gifts are so great?”
“I cannot undo spells without great effort—but you can. If you can unmake a spell, you can unmake a moment in time. You can remake the world.”
A rhythmic pounding sounded in my ears: I could not tell if it was cannon fire from the battlefield or the blood suddenly thrumming through my head.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
He ignored me. “Think of it. We could go back only a few generations, set an Eszterházy on the Austrian throne instead of a Hapsburg. Such a small change, and I would inherit an empire. You’d be born to power too—you’d have the voice you’ve always wanted. We could set the praetheria free from the Binding, just as you did, but take steps to see that they are integrated into society, not barred from it. We could prevent this war entirely. Your cousin Noémi need not die—nor my mother.”
Grandmama. An old ache flared like a bruise against my heart.
“You cannot know that. If you change one thing, you risk changing everything.”
“I’ve spent years reading the patterns of the future and the past,” he said. “I know precisely what changes to make. Fewer than a dozen small breaks in the pattern, and we can build the world you’ve always dreamed of. A safer, fairer world.”
“This cannot be what Vasilisa and the others meant for you to do when they let you lead me onto the battlefield.”
Pál smiled, a curious half twist of his lips. “Not precisely. But if they failed to divine my true intent, that is their problem, not mine. What do you say to my plan?”
“What will happen to my family?” His future had shown them at the mercy of other praetherian armies.
“Where we lead, others will undoubtedly follow. We can ensure their safety.”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. I wanted that world. To have Noémi back, whole, alive, happy. And Grandmama too? I could undo their deaths, the deaths of all those men who died in the mountain ambush after I lost Gábor’s letter. In that world, there would be nothing to divide me from Gábor, nothing to threaten the people and places I loved. Where moments before I’d been nearly undone by powerlessness, my uncle was offering me a world where I would never need feel so again.
I looked at my hands, callused now in ways they had never been in my life as a lady. My hands—like myself—were ordinary now, not remarkably pretty, not exceptionally smart, not unusually brave or strong.
But I could be extraordinary.
I could take the power Pál offered and undo the order of the universe. I could remake my world.
For one breath, I let myself imagine this. I let myself feel what it might be like to know myself unmatched, to hold the heart of history in my hands.
But only for one breath, because how could I be sure of Pál? I did not believe he could wield that much power without being corrupted by it. How could I be sure of myself?
“I’d have you to advise me,” Pál said gently. “I trust your heart. You would see to it that I did not step out of line—after all, without you, I cannot hope to achieve this. It would be your world as much as mine.”
But if I remade the world, it should be my world, not Pál’s.
The sudden, vicious possessiveness of the thought startled me and recalled me to myself. Such absolute power was dangerous: to me, to Pál, to everyone.
Much as I wanted a world that was safer, more just, it could not be my world. Or Pál’s. We’d been brought to this battlefield by people attempting to create the world in their own image, to benefit themselves and those like them. The Luminate had done as much, when they imprisoned the praetheria. The Hapsburgs had done the same, building their empire on the backs of Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, Serbs, and more. And even my beloved Hungary, when she declared independence, had done so at the expense of the Croatians and Romanians within her border. And now the praetheria threatened to do likewise.
It was the tendency of living creatures to do so: like gathering to like.
It did not mean it was right.
If I built a world in my image—no matter how just and splendid and fair I believed it to be—how could I know what weaknesses I had brought with me? I might make myself an archduchess—an empress, even—but at what cost?
I had broken the Binding spell without fully understanding what I did, and though I had brought good into the world with that decision, I had also brought pain. Whatever I hoped to become or do, I did not yet have the resources to decide the fate of my world.
Hadúr had said the war would not be won by a hero acting alone but by all of us acting together. I did not believe our peace could be bought singularly, either.
I could not do what Pál asked.
At that decisive thought, cold threaded my veins. Pál was watching me, his eyes inscrutable. What had he heard of my frantic spin of questions, my resolve? I thought of Noémi and tried to let that inevitable wash of grief flood my thoughts so Pál could not read them.
“All right,” I said, trying to buy time. “Show me what it is you need.”
I closed my eyes again, and Pál took my hand. I tried not to recoil from the feel of his bare fingers against mine. The glimmering lights appeared again and then began to spin as Pál pulled us back through time. He paused, a few moments later, and I watched as a knot of darkness brightened with a tiny flare.
“Noémi,” he said, and I wished he would ha
lt there, wished I could study how to unpick the threads that had closed off that brightness, so the flare would keep burning. Could I undo just her death and not the rest?
But he was already moving, spinning through days, weeks, months. I could not follow the pattern anymore; my head began to ache. If Pál could not rework the past without me, I could not do it without him, and the further back we traveled in vision, the more my certainty grew that it was not enough to refuse to help him—I needed to stop him.
One swallow did not make a summer, or one soldier a war, but a single soldier could perform the task before her. A single swallow could be glorious, carrying ribbons of light in her wings as she soared through the summer sky.
I weighed my options. I had the explosive mixture Bahadır had given me, but nothing at hand with which to detonate it. I could not physically overwhelm Pál. And if I tried to unmake anything vital, like his eyes, as Chernobog had tried to force me to do in that gruesome attack, Pál would catch me before I succeeded. I didn’t think he’d kill me outright—his plan rested on my ability—but he was not above torture. Or killing those I cared for. England was not far enough away to protect my family, not when Pál could make a portal as easily as breathe. And everyone else I loved was here, somewhere in the miles of puszta around us.
Worry made my thoughts dull and cloudy. I needed clarity—I needed hope. My free hand curled around the stone Gábor had given me, my lips shaping the word “hope,” so that Pál could not hear it. The warmth that flared through me was immediate and calming, and a memory stirred in its wake.
A few weeks earlier, after a particularly bloody fight, I’d spent the night beside Noémi in a field hospital, stanching wound after wound, some pouring more blood than the body could bear. She had told me how blood had to clot to slow its flow, to heal, but knots of blood could make their way through the veins of a recovering soldier and kill him just the same.
Blood was a vital element but not an obvious one. We might notice our heartbeat, pumping blood through our bodies, or the lift and fall of our lungs. But who thought of blood when it was safely wrapped inside one’s skin?
