by Rosalyn Eves
He twisted his head to meet me, and instead of teeth closing around exposed flesh, a gleaming horn caught my stomach, ripping upward. He tossed me on the ground, where I curled around my wound, the shock sending me back into my human form.
Blood gushed across my skin, steaming in the frigid air.
I was weakening, not just from blood loss. The flesh and blood I’d consumed that morning in dragon form had long since burned away; my stomach, where it did not sting from the gaping wound, was knotted around itself in a hunger nearly as fierce.
Why had the Lady believed my táltos skills might save the world? Truth was, my skills were a damned poor substitute for actual strength in battle. My animal persuasion, my dream-walking, my shapeshifting—none of that would save me.
That left only the dragon.
I’d nearly lost myself to the dragon three times. Bahadır and Anna between them had brought me back the last time: would a fourth time prove mastery or my final undoing?
I didn’t have much choice. As a rock erupted from the ground beneath my already injured hip, I shifted upward, the ravening hunger rising with me.
A whirlwind of dust and stone gusted up around us, cutting us off from the others. Chernobog hurled a dagger at me, but it bounced harmlessly off my scales. Shadows like smoke slithered around the two of us, branching off from Chernobog’s shadow. They slid up my scales, burrowed between my teeth. They called to the hunger inside me, and it swelled in response. As the hunger grew, the edges of my awareness fuzzed.
No. I fought against the shadows, but they were insidious and everywhere. Chernobog swung a sword at me, and I barely managed to parry it with my claws. The bloodlust followed the hunger, whispering how exquisite it would feel to feed that lust. But if I lost myself now, I did not trust myself to possess wits enough to win this challenge—or to come back to myself when it was over.
What had Hunger said about owning this shape? The dragon was born of the World Tree, called into being to protect it. It was in the branches of the tree that I first found this form. The tree was still some distance from us, perhaps thirty miles, too far to see, but I could feel its presence as a kind of steady thrum in the earth beneath me. Hadúr had said once that the roots stretched for miles below the puszta. Did they stretch this far? I dug my claws into the dirt, trying to concentrate on the tree as I parried another of Chernobog’s attacks. There. I could feel the root system, nearly invisible filaments stretching through the puszta, resting beneath my feet. I drew on that grounding, a slow rush of warmth washing through me, and the shadows fell away.
The horned god hissed, his wings unfurling behind him as he lifted into the air. I matched his movement, my heads darting forward at once. Two of the heads caught at a wing, tearing a long rip down the center. Off balance, Chernobog fell, hitting the ground with a thump that shook the plain.
I dove, landing on top of him and pinning him down.
The earth opened around us, a deep fissure. As we tumbled down, the fissure sealed over us. I knew a moment of panic as the darkness enveloped us; in response to my slackened vigilance, the hunger nearly overwhelmed my awareness.
I pushed back both the fear and the hunger, thrusting my heads forward to slash and bite, my claws to cut and gouge. Chernobog reciprocated, his claws scrabbling for purchase against my scales.
We seemed to fall a long time. Molten earth spouted up around us—called by a lord of the underworld? The heat against my skin manifested as pressure: it didn’t burn, not yet, but if we were to be surrounded by the stuff, it might cut off my breath, burn my throat, sear my lungs.
With heads and claws, I seized Chernobog and pulled him toward me, beating my wings as much as I could in the cramped space to slow my fall. Two heads grasped his horns, and the centermost head closed around his throat. His pulse pounded between my teeth, a siren call to my hunger. His claws scraped against my exposed neck and my belly. I ignored the spreading pain.
For a heartbeat, I hesitated. If I answered that hunger now, what did it make me? A hero? A monster? Vasilisa’s words flitted through my head, that a wolf is not a monster for having teeth and claws. And Hunger’s: you have to live inside the hunger. Let it goad you without destroying you.
Destruction was the flip side of creation. If Chernobog lived, he’d drive the praetherian armies to destroy everything I’d known and loved in the world. If he died…we might have a chance to create anew.
My jaws snapped shut, teeth piercing the pulsing vein, blood filling my mouth, my throat. The hunger blazed up again, and I nearly lost myself. There was a fierce bliss in this, abandoning sense and coherence to need. I rode the cresting wave of hunger, biting and tearing, until a wing brushed against one of the fine, exposed filaments of the World Tree roots.
I came back to myself: to the part of Mátyás that belonged to the dragon. Or to the part of the dragon that belonged to Mátyás?
Beneath my teeth, there was no pulsing blood to draw out my hunger. Chernobog was dead, or near enough.
I dropped his body, letting it fall to the fires below. Then I shifted one more time, to my old familiar crow, and flew up through the ravine, breaking the crust of the earth at the top like a hatchling erupting from its shell.
* * *
The Valkyries were fighting with other praetheria when I emerged.
I shifted back to my human self, shivering beneath the light fall of snow. Damn and blast it all. I needed to learn how Hunger shifted without losing everything.
The taller of the two, with long red braids, skewered an elfin man with deer antlers, then turned to nod at me. “You fought well, táltos.”
Her sister, with a cloud of dark hair around her brown skin, ran her horse against two squat, bearded creatures and added, “May all your fights be so prosperous. Should you die today, we will find a place for you in Valhalla.”
“Um, thank you.” I was acutely conscious that I was still naked, with no weapon to speak of, and two human soldiers were racing toward me. I tugged a jacket off a dead soldier and borrowed his saber.
The dark-haired Valkyrie blocked the soldiers while I wrapped the jacket around my waist.
My kingdom for a horse. I cast my animal sense out, looking for an unmounted beast. A moment later, a white horse cantered up to me. It bore no bridle, but it trotted straight to me and whuffled at my cheek. I froze. I knew this beast. It was Holdas, my own brute of a horse that I had thought lost long since, when I’d been captured in the Austrian ice caves.
I swung up, and Holdas whickered a greeting.
The red-haired Valkyrie turned a sly look on me. “Death comes riding on a white horse. Now I know for certain the world is ending.”
I laughed and raised my sword. “No, it’s beginning. Hajrá!”
I did not recognize Vasilisa when Hunger set down behind her: an old woman with exultation lifting the lines of her face, a pack of dire wolves before her laying waste to any soldier who stood against her. Then she turned, tossing a bolt of lightning into a knot of soldiers, and I saw the old woman I had carried out of a prison in Vienna. She shot green-tinged fire at us before Hunger’s forelimbs had settled on the ground. Hunger roared, his answering fire sending up a conflagration before us.
“Vasilisa!”
She fluttered her eyelashes at him, a grotesque mockery of a young girl’s flattery. “Yes?”
“We need to end this.”
“No, you need to end this. I need do nothing of the sort.” One of her wolves tore out the throat of a soldier, sending blood spraying across the accumulating snow, and she clapped her hands together.
“You let me escape,” Hunger said. “You encouraged Noémi to heal me when I might have died. I cannot believe that you truly want this war.”
“Why?” Vasilisa flung a small shower of rocks at us, and Hunger raised his wings over my head to protect me. “Because we are old
friends and I did not want to see you killed in such shabby fashion does not mean I want peace. You have grown weak and sentimental. This is what too-close association with humans brings.”
“I am not sure,” Hunger said slowly, his dragon voice low and rumbling, “that love, what you call sentimentality, is always weakness. I am coming to think it might save us. In any case, I have lost my taste for war. This one has cost me too much.”
I remembered his keening grief when Noémi died, and my heart contracted.
“These people do not love us,” Vasilisa said.
“We’ve given them no cause to,” Hunger said.
“And they have given us no cause to love them,” Vasilisa said, hurling a tiny starlike light at me. I did not dodge in time, and it lodged in my shoulder, sending a rippling pain through my body.
It occurred to me that though she was attacking, she was not trying very hard to kill us—and she was listening.
“You’re right,” I said. “We have treated you terribly. The Binding was a mistake, and we have only compounded it since you were released. But I—” A surging emotion choked my throat. “I released you in good faith. I wanted things to be better for you, for us. I failed—we all failed. I have lost people who were dear to me, whom I cannot get back. The praetheria have suffered losses too. But we can do better—all of us. Maybe we don’t deserve the chance, but we might come to. I witnessed for you when you asked me to, and it nearly cost me my life. I’m asking now: please, give us a chance to do better.”
“Please,” Vasilisa mimicked, her voice dripping scorn. “Your language is filled with such insipid words. No, we have already given you too many chances.”
“If you will not agree to stop fighting, then you leave me no choice.” Hunger dug his claws into the earth, and the ground fractured before him. “I formally challenge you, as one of the Four.”
Vasilisa froze for the barest second, then smirked. “You forfeited your spot among the Four when you died at the hands of a human. No, I will not accept your challenge.”
“You cannot refuse a challenge!” Hunger barked at her, sparks from his tongue dying tiny deaths on the grass before us.
“I just did. I did not save your life to kill you myself. Besides”—Vasilisa gestured at the fighting around us—“you have thrown your lot in with humans; you are scarcely praetherian anymore. And who should witness for us? Not your little friend here.”
She flung another of her tiny stars at me. This time, instead of dodging, I cast out and caught the thread of the spell, snapping it before it reached me. The energy dissipated in a small burst of heat. She tugged at the wispy hair clinging to her scalp. “Your pet human offers better sport than you.”
A pair of Vasilisa’s wolves sprang forward, teeth bared, and Hunger hurled himself at them, his wings stretched taut.
The moment Hunger moved from my side, Vasilisa waved her hands around the clearing, and a transparent bubble settled over the two of us. Hunger tore away from the wolves and threw himself against the faintly gleaming barrier, but it held.
His claws and teeth scrabbled fruitlessly at the shield, and even his dragon fire couldn’t mark it. The wolves snarled and slunk around the perimeter.
“What you could have been, Anna Arden, if you were not afraid,” she said sorrowfully. “You could have been remarkable, fighting alongside me. You could have held the world in your hands.”
“What do you want?” I asked, not taking my eyes off her, off the hands she held quietly before her.
Her eyes lit and she bared yellowing teeth in a fierce grin. “I want to see what you can do, before I kill you.” Her hands blurred with motion and a dozen sparks streaked through the air toward me.
I broke the spells fueling two of the sparks, but the rest latched onto me like so many electrified leeches: encircling my wrists, hanging from my throat, my thigh. Vasilisa gestured again, and each spark exploded, a miniature lightning storm that scorched the flesh beneath it and sent black stars streaking across my vision. Pain screamed through my body and my knees buckled.
Vasilisa cackled. “How can you fight me when you cannot even stand?”
I closed my eyes for a brief moment, trying to rally. My chimera souls roiled inside me, frantic and uncertain. I pushed them together, searching for the unity that would let me cast spells, but everything was so unsettled. Electricity crackled in the air near me, and I threw myself to the side, my eyes flying open.
The lightning left blackened veins on the ground, melting the light cover of snow.
I had faced Vasilisa before. The only time I had been mildly successful had been when I had used her own magic against her. As she began casting another spell, I braced myself. When the spout of green fire left her fingertips, I reached out to snag the spell. But instead of letting the broken magic escape, I gathered it to me, shaping it into a blade that I pushed back at her.
Another shock of green fire knocked the blade aside. “Better,” Vasilisa said approvingly. “But you cannot surprise me with a trick you have used before. Indulge me. Show me what you can do, and I will make your death quick. Painless.”
My mind raced. It had been Vasilisa who had told me months before that I could not cast spells unless I embraced who I was. Knowing I was chimera was not enough—I had to love that self too, the good and bad together. Did I?
Most days, I knew myself too well. I knew when I was cowardly, when I was hateful, when jealousy curdled in my gut. I knew when doubt colored everything, when I did not trust myself or my own mind. It was hard to love that girl, hard to see past her flaws.
My fingers curled around Gábor’s stone, still, improbably, safe in my pocket. If I could not embrace myself, perhaps I could borrow from others. I thought of how Gábor looked at me, seeing my shadows and loving me anyway. I thought of Noémi, who had been my friend, though I did not always deserve it. Of my father and James, who believed in me, even when I failed. Of the lidérc, who was funny and faithful and no monster, despite what her appearance suggested. My friends and family had shown me that you do not have to be perfect to be worthy of love. The best love was given as a gift, unearned.
Vasilisa clapped her hands together, and a ring of green fire erupted around me, constricting me even as I drew breath. The heat tore at the inside of my nose, scraped down my lungs.
I shut my eyes against the flame, twisting the thread of the spell so it snapped.
Who was I, when everything else had been stripped away? When I could no longer hide in smallness or behind any pretensions to greatness? I could feel my two souls pulsing inside me: two steady lights, human and monster both. And what was a monster, but something we did not understand?
I would not be afraid.
I called for my souls, and they came, rising in a twin wave, a wash of power that did not delineate where one began and the other ended. I drew on that magic, filling myself till every inch of skin tingled. An echoed memory of breaking the Binding spell flitted across my mind, but I pushed it away. I needed a true spell now, not merely a breaking.
Or did I?
Unmake this. The praetheria—and Pál—had not sought me because I could craft spells but because I could unmake them. I had broken the curse Vasilisa left for Franz Joseph in my kiss, though it had rooted deep in his heart. Pál had wanted me to unmake the weave of the world.
I could try to cast a spell against Vasilisa, who had a millennium of experience with magic to draw from.
Or…
Unmaking was not a dissolution of self but a transformation. Vasilisa’s identity came almost wholly from her magic: could I unmake that? An idea glimmered, but I had to ward off Vasilisa’s attacks while I prepared it.
When Hunger, Noémi, and I escaped from the caves, I had slowed Vasilisa by unmaking the snow falling around us, returning it to water. I did the same now, gathering the snow on the ground around u
s and drawing from the pulsing energy in my souls to send a thin veil of water whirling around her: a miniature cyclone that would hold her—I hoped—for just long enough. She hurled an impressive arsenal of curses at me; I ignored her.
Pál had told me I could not hold his vision of the world without him, but he had always underestimated me. I did not think I could follow the weave back in time as he had, but I did not need that. Only this moment. I closed my eyes, sending all the shared force of my twin souls questing for the weave that held the world together.
At first I saw nothing, only faint traces of light against my eyelids, and I began to despair. But then I caught a glimmer that was not remembered light, and I followed it to another thread of light, laid against it in a careful pattern, and then a third. And then the pattern was before me, not as vivid as it had been when Pál held it, but enough.
Vasilisa, standing before me, was an intricate knot of light weaves, her magic circling in and around the bright core that was her soul.
Unmake this. I tugged at one of the threads of her magic, and Vasilisa screamed. The weaves did not break at my touch, as casual spells did. Like the spell around Franz Joseph, they were tightly drawn together, with no give.
Fire rippled up my arm, and at the shock of pain, my eyes sprang open. I dropped the vision weave. Steam hissed in the air where Vasilisa’s water cage had stood. Where before she had been amused, now she was enraged. Her wispy hair stood on end.
I had only a heartbeat of time, if that. I scrambled to find the vision weave again, following the first trail of light until I could find a second, then a third. Though my arm still throbbed with pain, Vasilisa had given me an idea. “Adure,” I whispered—but I directed the fire inward, to the invisible plane where magic existed.
