by Rosalyn Eves
Holdas stopped abruptly, snorting.
A wave of evil slammed into me: toe-curling, stomach-curdling, throat-pinching. I’d never felt anything like it.
The other horses seemed to sense it too, halting behind Holdas and pulling uneasily at the reins.
“What is it?” Bahadır asked, peering across the plains before us.
Whatever it was, I couldn’t see it yet, only feel it. I unholstered my gun, and saw Ákos do the same. “This way,” I said, nudging Holdas forward.
The tightened muscles beneath my legs told me Holdas was not happy with me, but he complied.
A few more feet, and I could see what I had not seen before: a mass like an old seamed rock, shadows shifting and eddying around it in defiance of natural laws of light. Beneath it, something very like a human hand, lifted in supplication.
My blood froze.
A shot cracked beside me, and I whirled to see Ákos, his face set in unnaturally grim lines. The monster shifted—not rock so much as ancient and massive, lengths of corded arms and legs uncoiling as it rose. Guta, I thought, the name lining up with stories my nurse had told. It turned slowly and spotted us, and the whole world seemed to halt.
Even the wind stopped.
The monster stepped forward, and the earth trembled. I could feel the shock even through my horse. Another step, and the guta picked up speed, barreling toward us.
Ákos and Bahadır were both firing now, but guns weren’t going to stop this.
I cast my animal sense out, shaking awake the rooks nesting nearby, the roosting falcons and cranes, calling in all the hunting owls.
The birds flew in across the puszta, an avian cloud gathering strength as it came.
The monster was closer now: I could see its eyes, black and curiously unreflective.
Hurry.
Ákos’s horse reared back, throwing the bandit to the ground and charging briefly forward as it arced away. But the monster was faster, intercepting the horse. It wrapped its massive arms around the terrified animal, and the loud crack of bones shattered the night. The guta dropped the horse and lumbered forward. Only a few meters of prairie grass stood between it and Ákos, already scrambling back to his feet.
I reached for the monster, trying to calm it, but I couldn’t penetrate its mind. Beneath me, Holdas screamed a challenge. I yanked my attention from the monster, narrowly preventing my horse from charging the damned thing. The birds were almost here.
Bahadır bent in his saddle, extending his hand to his friend. “Come!”
“No!” Ákos shouted. “Run!”
Bahadır hesitated, and Ákos slapped the rump of Bahadır’s horse. “Go!”
The horse took off. The redheaded bandit whirled back to the monster, a handful of steps away.
Now.
The birds descended like a curtain—a shrieking, cawing whirlwind of feathers. The guta swung at them, and I felt a gut wrench as his blows connected, knocking my birds from the sky.
Eyes. At my command, the birds converged on its head. The guta howled, an unearthly shriek that battered the air, and began its lumbering run. Away from us, thank St. Cajetan.
I reached out and hauled Ákos up behind me. We swerved wide around the guta, toward the lump of a human body.
The man was clearly dead, his face smashed in. Ákos swallowed hard.
I didn’t want to touch the blood-soaked, misshapen body. But I couldn’t leave him either. After Ákos was done being sick in the grass, we hefted the body over Holdas’s saddle.
The guta was almost out of view now, the birds still swirling around him. I told them to release the creature when he was far away from any habitation, and we began walking back to camp.
“The King of Crows,” Ákos said, looking at me and carefully avoiding the body. When I didn’t answer, he added, “I won’t tell László.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Ákos snorted, then we headed after Bahadır.
Minus the rare monster attack and illicit activity, being a bandit was very much like revisiting my student days in Buda-Pest: long periods of waiting about, enlivened by cards, gossip, and too much to drink. A great deal of talk about women, but scant evidence of prowess in the form of actual women.
Most days László would send a few men to scout along the major roadways crossing the puszta. If they spotted anything promising, they raced back to camp and we plotted the ambush. The road from Debrecen to Buda-Pest was generally the most lucrative, though not the only one we’d hit, as László insisted we vary our routes. We didn’t stop coaches every day either—sometimes nearly a week would pass between holdups.
“Predictability,” László said, “is the sin of small minds. Besides being likely to get us killed. If the soldiers can’t catch us, they can’t hang us either.” A week or two into my stint with them, we moved camp, this time to a slightly larger farmhouse with a barn. The farmer was gone, visiting his son in Buda-Pest for a few weeks, so László had commandeered it.
Some days we were unsuccessful: sometimes the scouts failed to report the presence of Luminate magicians (László refused to engage magic, seemed to have an almost pathological fear of it). Sometimes the armed guards were stouter than they looked, and we’d retreat empty-handed.
Most times we were successful enough. Fekete László had built a fearsome reputation that worked to intimidate fat, blustering merchants and elderly travelers. For younger women, he took to sending me with Ákos.
Such was the romance of the highwayman that a handsome young betyár could relieve a coach of its valuables with very little effort, and every sign of pleasure on the part of those being robbed. Only a day or two earlier, Ákos and I had stopped a carriage with a trio of women. The mother had passed out from shock, but the daughters fluttered with excitement.
The younger daughter pulled her gloves off slowly and slid a seed pearl ring off her finger. She held her hand out, the ring in her palm. As I reached for it, her fingers closed around the ring.
“You’ll make good use of it?” she asked. “It has sentimental value.”
I grasped the bare hand and kissed the closed fingers. She gasped, pink flooding into her cheeks. “If it has such value, you should keep it. Surely you have something else you can spare?”
Cheeks still burning, she pulled a small coin sack from the reticule beside her. I kissed her hand again, and she giggled.
Guessing from the cloudy expression on the older sister’s face that she was feeling neglected, I made a show of kissing her hand as well.
Ákos mocked me as we rode away, kissing his fingers to me. “You kiss like a king.”
I grinned back at him. I’d far rather kiss a pretty girl’s fingers than fire a gun at her. “I do try. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
*
Summer rains kept us trapped inside the farmhouse for nearly a week in late June. We played cards, mostly: twenty-one and whist, piquet and trente et quarante. Sometimes dice. After four days of this, tempers were running high.
Following a lengthy losing streak, László flung out of the farmhouse into the drizzle. One of the other men chased after him, trying to soothe his temper. Varjú, my adopted crow, cawed from the roof of the barn.
The rest of us continued to play in silence. I watched the door warily, waiting for László’s return and subsequent eruption.
But when the door at last burst open, László was smiling. “We’ve found some rare sport—come and see!”
Cards fluttered unheeded to the floor as the others burst up and out the door. The rain still fell, but few of the men paused for a wool mente. I ignored them, certain that whatever László thought “rare sport” would be deathly uninteresting to me. I didn’t move, even when harsh shouting floated out from the nearby barn a few moments later.
This was none of my business.
The door banged open again, and the men tramped back in. László and another of the men wrestled something sma
ll and dark between them. It was squat and manlike, with a furry, bearded face and deep-set eyes. Sentient too, as I could feel nothing of its thoughts like I could with animals.
I didn’t recognize the language it was shouting: something Slavic, at a guess. But it was clearly a language, and the monster was equally clearly terrified.
“Here,” I said, standing. “Let the poor thing go. It’s done nothing to you.”
“But see,” László said, poking the creature in the back with a stick and setting it howling again. “It speaks! We want to see if it will dance as well.”
The men pushed the heavy wooden table against a wall, clearing a narrow space in the room. László flung the man-creature onto the floor and pulled a whip from his belt. He cracked the whip just beside its feet, and the praetherian shot up, jumping from one foot to the other. The men roared with laughter. Ákos, his freckles standing starkly against his pale skin, bolted from the room. After a moment, Bahadır followed.
I stayed, my frown lowering. Why hadn’t these creatures sense enough to stay away from László and his ilk? And why must I inevitably end up involved? Walk away, I told myself. Leave them to their game.
Instead, I heard myself say, “That’s enough. Whatever this is, it wasn’t set on earth for your amusement.”
László’s face turned ugly. He sent the whip snaking in my direction, so I had to jump before it lashed against my boots. “Perhaps you want to take its place, Matyika?” He used the child’s diminutive of my name as if it were a curse word. “The praetheria aren’t human.”
I took a long breath, exhaling through my nose. My palms tingled, my fingers already curling into fists. Don’t be a fool, I told myself.
Too late.
I marched onto the floor, sweeping the creature behind me. Its matted fur, when my hand brushed against it, was chilled. No doubt it had only hoped to wait out the rainstorm in the barn.
“You’re out of line, boy,” László said, the whip sizzling through the air toward me. By now the others were crammed up against the wall, as far from the reach of the braided leather as they could get.
I flung up my arm to block the whip, and let it coil across my forearm. I gasped at the sting, then shook it loose. The second time László let fly, anger got the better of me. I caught the end of the whip and whispered a word. At once the long cord shifted, the braid smoothing into scales, the wooden handle in the bandit’s hand elongating into a deadly and elegant snake head. The snake hissed, fangs bared, and László dropped it.
“Shit!” László shook his fingers as the snake slithered across the floor and disappeared through a crack beneath the door. His eyes narrowed at me. “You’ve been holding out on us, demon spawn.” He glared around the room. “Everyone, clear out! And get that hellish creature back where it belongs. Matyika and I are going to talk.”
The other bandits fled. I crouched down so that I was eye level with the creature. “I don’t know if you can understand me, but I’m sorry for what’s been done to you. I’d suggest you get away. Find somewhere safe, far from humans.”
The creature nodded, as if he understood the gist of what I was saying, if not my actual words. He put his palm, curiously naked in contrast to the rest of his furred body, against my cheek. It was shockingly cold, so cold it sent prickles of pain across my face, radiating down my spine.
But then the creature was gone, scrambling through the doorway, disappearing into the wet grasses and brush of the puszta.
I turned back to face László.
“I don’t like liars,” László said, folding his arms across his chest. Rain dripped from the eaves outside the window.
“Well, you never particularly liked me, so that’s fair,” I said affably. “I’m happy to move on as soon as the rain clears.”
“Not so fast. I could use someone with magic.”
I rubbed my hand where the whip had stung it. “I’m afraid my abilities aren’t for sale.”
“You don’t know what I’m willing to offer. Double your share.”
“Not enough.”
“Triple, then.”
I thought how I had run from the Lady for asking too much of me. I was good at running. It was staying to disappoint people that I struggled with. I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’ll be leaving in the morning. And don’t worry: I won’t betray you. I’m not a cheat.”
“Hmm,” László said, as though his mind were already elsewhere. “Well, you needn’t decide at once. Think on it.”
There was nothing to think on, but I nodded, and László stalked out of the farmhouse, heading back toward the barn.
*
László seemed unusually agitated that night as we ate our gulyás stew, cooked over coals in the kitchen. Instead of eating, he picked at a bit of bread and paced the room, weaving around the closely packed betyárok as if he did not see them.
After we scraped away the last of the stew and piled the dishes in the washbasin for some unlucky soul to wash later, László spoke.
“My friends,” he said, waving his arms expansively at the company. “My band of brothers. We’ve been through hard times together—and good times. I’ve been lucky to call you my friends as well as my men.”
Ákos and I exchanged a look. It was unlike László to wax grandiloquent. What was he building toward?
“We’ve won ourselves a reputation on these plains. People know not to cross László the Black. But I’ve a task that will win us a reputation all across Hungary, and beyond!”
Misgiving settled in my gut. A local reputation wasn’t a bad thing: it meant people were more likely to give up their goods without resistance. But a national, even an international reputation? That only meant the crown would be sending hussar soldiers after you, and soon.
Ákos said as much.
László waived his concerns aside. “If you’re afraid, you can stay behind. This isn’t a task for the fainthearted. I’ve gotten word from a reliable source that a very expensive shipment is coming this way. Bound for the Ottoman sultan—to be sent from Debrecen through Transylvania and across Turkish Wallachia.”
“What’s in the shipment?” I asked.
“Gold, most likely. Jewels, possibly. The shipment is contained in four wagons reinforced with metal locks. Three armed guards ride with each wagon.”
Ákos looked up in dismay. “We’d be outmatched. We can’t take on trained guards.”
“Of course we can. We’re good shots, all of us. And we’ve got something they don’t.” László looked at me.
St. Cajetan, grant me wit.
“If the shipment is so valuable, you can guarantee that a couple of guards are trained magicians. I doubt I could take them, even if I was willing,” I said.
“You can change a whip into a snake—surely you can do the same for their weapons.”
I wondered how exactly László thought that scenario would play out. I had to touch things to shift them—what was I supposed to do, walk up to a guard and say, Excuse me while I turn your firearm into a serpent? They’d shoot me before I got to the second guard.
“It doesn’t matter what I can do—I’m not doing it. I already told you I’d leave in the morning.”
A dismayed buzzing broke out between Ákos and Bahadır and some of the other men.
László’s eyes flicked over me. “You’re scared.”
“I’m not. Merely uninterested.”
“I can practically see your knees knocking together.” László’s sneer twisted his mustache. “And only a coward would leave his friends so easily.”
Bahadır’s tan skin was chalky behind his lurid scar. Guilt twinged through me. László didn’t care much whether or not the boy survived. Still, if I were gone, maybe László would give up this sudden obsession with an unobtainable shipment.
I shrugged. “They say there’s no honor among thieves. I’ve had a good run; it’s time to move on.”
“Care to wager on it?”
I froze. “What?”<
br />
László lifted his chin. “Play you for it. A game of rouge-et-noir, best of three. You win, and we let you go with that ring you’ve been wanting—even send you with some coin in your pocket to speed your way. I win, and you stay. Help us one last time.”
A curl of excitement stirred in my gut. Madness.
“All right,” I said.
*
Ákos acted as dealer, shuffling together several decks of cards at the head of the table. László and I sat on either side. Play was fairly straightforward: Ákos would deal two rows of cards, one “black” and one “red,” and the winner was whoever called the row with a total closest to thirty-one, but less than forty.
“Black,” László said, setting my father’s signet ring on the table.
That left red for me. I called it and set a handful of coins on the table opposite the ring.
The first hand was a draw, with both rows tying at thirty-four. The watching bandits made derisive noises and passed around a bottle of plum brandy.
“Black,” László said again.
Ákos dealt the cards once more, counting first the black. “Thirty-three,” he said, laying down the last card. Then he began on the red. “Twenty-seven,” he said, laying down a five. Four, I prayed, brushing my fingers against a silver filigree cross we’d taken during a raid. Another five in a pinch. Outside, my crow called in the trees. Wish me luck, Varjú.
Ákos set down a king. “Thirty-seven.”
László crowed and slapped the table. “Who’s king now, Matyika? Again.”
The third time, black went for thirty-six and red for thirty-four, and László glowered at the table. Ákos sent me a small, sideways smile. My heart thundered in my ears, energy pounding through my blood.
A fourth time. Black: twenty-two, twenty-nine, thirty-two. László slapped the table again. “Beat that, my crow king.”
I took a shallow breath. Another row of cards and I could be on my way, money in my pocket and my father’s signet ring back on my finger. Each red card laid sent my heart rate spiking. Eighteen. A queen. Twenty-eight. A two. Thirty. The silver cross dug into my fingers. I needed an ace to win.