Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

  Ákos flipped over the final card. A five.

  Thirty-five.

  I didn’t hear what László said, though I watched him scoop the money and the ring into his pocket. I stared at the scarred table and scattered cards. I’d given László my word: I was committed to whatever idiocy he planned.

  Here lies Eszterházy Mátyás. He took a gamble and lost.

  “Anything?” Ákos whispered beside me.

  I shook my head.

  We’d been in position for what felt like an eternity, though was probably only a little more than an hour, waiting with our horses in a tiny thicket of trees providing some of the only cover in this part of the puszta. Behind us, the grasslands rolled out to the horizon like a scroll. Sweat trickled down my spine, and I rubbed irritably at my nose. Holdas shifted restlessly beneath me.

  “Here they come,” Bahadır said, edging beside me as we watched the first of the iron-banded box wagons roll into sight. The guards surrounding the wagon wore mostly black, their guns held tight in their hands. They scanned the road before them and the surrounding plains.

  I groaned inwardly. These were no poorly paid and bored security guards. They were trained, professional, alert. An older woman sat on the wagon box beside the driver, her hands tucked in her lap. I would bet a year’s wages that she was Luminate.

  We watched the first carriage pass, then the second. The third was our target. I couldn’t see the fourth, which meant the first part of László’s plan had gone off without a hitch, and the fourth carriage had been delayed on the road. Our first task was to separate the wagons, then attack. Ahead of us, another group had staged an artful accident with the youngest of our troop, relying on the guard’s compassion to at least slow the wagon.

  Our turn.

  “Now,” I said, reaching out with my mind. Obligingly, the horned viper I’d found earlier slithered up onto the road, hissing. Simultaneously, a flock of starlings burst from the brush nearby, wheeling through the sky in a vast, synchronized sheet.

  The horses reared up, tangling their leads and backing the carriage off the verge, just as we’d hoped. The driver swore and clambered down from his perch, rushing to inspect any damage to the wagon. The two guards jumped down as well, going to the horses’ heads to calm them.

  We waited for a moment, scanning the road for signs of reinforcements. Nothing. The guards on the previous carriage hadn’t yet noticed the accident—or if they had, they weren’t stopping.

  The starlings dipped low over the carriage, spooking the still-tangled horses and occupying the guards. Even the magician was distracted, her hands moving in a complicated Wind charm to blow the starlings off course.

  That was our signal.

  We charged the road. Ákos dropped the coachman with a well-placed blow to the head. The first guard swung his gun at me, but I grabbed the barrel and shifted it to a snake in his hands, just as László had suggested.

  The man screamed and threw his hands in the air. I charged the wagon where the magician and the driver sat. The woman was a bigger threat—but if she was like most Luminate, she couldn’t perform magic without her hands free for the ritual. I grabbed her ankle and a bit of her dress with it, and as she began muttering a second spell, I shifted the fabric of her dress so vines sprouted from the lace at her wrists, curling and thickening as they grew, weaving a dense mesh that trapped her fingers.

  A shot fired, nearly hitting my ear. Damn. I’d forgotten the driver.

  A second shot answered the first, and the driver tumbled from his seat. Ákos stood beside me with a still-smoking gun.

  Bahadır rounded up the four victims: two guards (one unconscious), a driver (bleeding sluggishly from a shoulder wound), and the lady-magician (spouting words no proper lady should admit to knowing). He bound them together with rope, and then we waited for László to find us.

  A cloud of dust on the road ahead of us resolved into two of the guards from the second carriage riding our way. Someone must have spotted that the accident wasn’t entirely accidental. Behind them, the second carriage was laboriously turning around in the road, following after its guards.

  Three bandits on horses raced across the fields toward the road. One of them—I guessed László—raised his gun and fired. The coachman toppled off the second wagon, and the horses sprang forward, running unchecked toward us.

  The guards returned the fire. László bent low, riding nearly sideways on his horse, in the plains style, with the horse’s body shielding him from gunshot. The third man gave a gurgling cry and then slid under his horse, dropping onto the field.

  I needed to help. But shifting to something monstrous enough to stop the guards would only frighten the horses further.

  I reached out again, a calming, soothing brush. The guards’ horses stopped beneath them, and when the guards tried to spur them into flight, the animals twitched and bucked and it was all the guards could do to stay in their seats. By the time the horses quieted, Ákos and Bahadır had joined László, and the guards surrendered.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “First carriage got away—our men weren’t fast enough, and the guards shot them. Two dead, one wounded. The last carriage is on its way now.”

  As he spoke, I glanced down the road and saw that he’d reported truly: two of our bandits were riding on the seat of the fourth wagon as it trundled down the road.

  “Now we see,” László said, rubbing his hands together, “what kind of treasure it is we’ve won.”

  One of the bound guards spat on the ground. “I’d not open the carriage if I were you.”

  “Why? You hoping to keep the gold for yourself?”

  “It’s not gold.”

  László shot the man in the leg. “Don’t lie to me. Give me the keys.”

  The other guard, eyeing his companion’s bleeding leg nervously, tossed the keys to László.

  Something inside the wagon slammed against the walls, shaking the entire frame. I froze, glancing at Ákos, who looked equally horrified. László didn’t pause. I’m not even sure he noticed. He fitted the key to the lock, then wrenched the door open.

  That moment is etched in my mind: the blue sky arching above us, the wind hissing through the grass, the sweat matting my shirt to my back. Normal things, normal sensations. Nothing to hint at what was to come.

  László opened the door, and the world seemed to explode.

  Women spilled out of the wagon. Young women, their limbs long and lithe, their faces so lovely it burned to look at them, their hair every shade of fire: most were the yellow white of a fire’s heart, but also deep red embers and the faint blue you sometimes get at the bottom of a candle flame where the fire meets the wick.

  For a moment we all stared dumbly, our mouths open in shock. Whatever treasure we had anticipated, it was not this.

  Then a kind of hunger burned through my body, sizzling across my brain and wiping away whatever thoughts I’d had.

  A wave of pleasure crested through me, so intense I saw stars for a moment. Then I lunged forward, my only conscious thought to reach the women before someone else did. I narrowed in on one, a tall, queenly thing with orange hair and eyes that danced. I would give her everything—my body, my heart, my soul, my life—and it would be worth any cost. Even pain at her hands would be better than the most exquisite pleasure of anyone else’s touch.

  The men we’d bound together were moving too, snarling at each other as they struggled despite their bonds to reach the women. Even the magician was trying to shout spells. One of the guards tripped, falling to the ground, and the others screamed and kicked at him. The other guard freed a knife from his boot, and as I stumbled past them, he slashed through the ropes that bound them together. Freed, he turned the knife on his companions, stabbing the Luminate woman in the throat and the driver in the eye before springing toward the wagons.

  Blood sprayed my arm, tiny pricks of heat that wakened a horror somewhere deep inside me. Varjú swoo
ped around my head, cawing anxiously at me. The flutter of feathers distracted me. Dimly I registered that the horses were mostly oblivious of the turmoil the women had unleashed, and some instinct in me responded.

  I shrank down, my arms spreading into black wings. In crow form, I fluttered to the top of the wagon. The strange frenzy bled away from my brain.

  The carnage rocked me. A heist that had been mostly bloodless (excepting the men László had shot) had somehow turned into a bloodbath. All the guards but one were dead, and that one now knelt before a blue-haired maiden, offering her his bloodstained hands. She grasped them, licked the blood from them with a delicate pink tongue, and smiled.

  At least two of the bandits were dead, and László was limping, blood streaming from a wound in his thigh and another in his shoulder. One arm clamped around his gut, and I suspected he might be wounded there too. But two of the girls danced around him, brushing their fingers through his hair, across his black mustache, and his face quivered with ecstasy. Their movements seemed to grow stronger and more sure as they danced, fire flickering along their brightening hair. László wavered for a moment, then dropped to his knees.

  Ákos advanced on Bahadır with a sword. Bahadır’s hands were empty, and he seemed oblivious to the threat, his whole attention focused on the praetheria.

  The smart thing would be to leave now: to leave Laszló and the surviving guard to their fate, to wing off across the puszta and never come back, to let the women disperse into human settlements as they pleased.

  But I’m not particularly good at doing the smart thing.

  I watched the women for a moment longer, studying their supernatural grace. The orange-haired woman I’d spotted earlier moved to the second wagon with a key. She unlocked the door, freeing more of her sisters. They embraced her as they sprang free, stroking her brightening hair, and something about the familiarity of that movement gave me hope. And an idea. The women were careful to avoid the iron bands around the wagon as they emerged, and it wasn’t until they were well free of the wagon that their brightness flared.

  I flew toward the orange-haired woman who seemed to be the leader. I shifted back into human form, tensing my entire body against the onslaught of desire. But I allowed myself only a moment in my own shape before grasping a bit of her hair and shifting again, this time assuming her mirror image.

  I concentrated on hair between my fingers, ignoring the otherworldly thrum of blood in my veins, the sense of the world itself as a thing bright and burning. I held the image of the iron bars in my mind and pushed it outward. Metallic grey began creeping up the fire-gold hairs, bleeding from roots to tips, until it encircled the woman-creature in an iron crown.

  I released the fistful of hair and the woman cried out, dropping to the ground. Her sisters gathered around me hissing, fire in their eyes. As their clawed fingers snatched at me, I shifted once more, sending iron bands snaking across my skin. The praetheria hissed louder and drew back.

  The woman before me was weeping in pain now, her hands fluttering toward the iron strands on her head and then jerking away.

  “I yield! I yield!” Her German had a coarseness to it, as though she had not used it in some time.

  “Call off your sisters. Tell them to contain their glamour.”

  She nodded, then whispered something in a liquid language that snagged at my heart, though I couldn’t understand the words.

  At once the brightness of the women dropped away, like a fire extinguished by a bucket of water and nothing is left but the smoke. The final guard stumbled to his feet, glanced at his bloody fingers and back at the still bodies of his companions. He was briefly sick in the grass before staggering away. Ákos dropped the sword he carried at Bahadır’s feet.

  I shifted back to myself and touched the iron band in the woman’s hair. It vanished, and she struggled to her feet, tears still tracing silver fire along her cheeks. Ákos stripped off the light wool dolman he wore and handed it to me without comment. I wrapped it around my waist.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Nobody important,” I said. “More to the point, who are you?”

  “My sisters and I are samodiva.” A breeze picked up, and the woman rubbed her arms, shivering. Gallantry briefly warred with modesty—should I offer her the dolman Ákos had just given me? Gallantry lost.

  “How did you come to be here?” Powerful as they were, I could not imagine what trick it took to capture them, though the iron had worked to keep them secure.

  “A foolish mistake. It doesn’t matter now. What will you do with us?”

  László said the carriages were intended for the Ottoman sultan. Were they a purchase, I wondered, or a gift? I might be looking at a thinly disguised assassination attempt. “You can’t stay here. But I can’t in good conscience release you either. You’d decimate every household in the puszta.”

  “We know the rules of your world. We don’t generally hunt humans. But we have been bound for many days without food, and we were hungry.” Her eyes flickered back to the bodies littered on the ground.

  I knew that kind of hunger, as though my stomach were an endless chasm and my whole body could not stretch thin enough to contain it. In fact, I was beginning to feel the start of that hunger now, the inevitable effect of shifting too much in close succession. Familiar heat rose to my head. In a moment I’d be too light-headed to concentrate well.

  “If I set you free, what guarantee have I that you won’t attack humans?”

  “We’ve no death wish,” the samodiva said. “We just wish to return home.” Her voice caught with a sigh on the last word.

  A girl with ember-red hair edged next to her. “I’ll stay as security. If you hear word of my sisters causing havoc, you can kill me.”

  “We can’t ask that of you, Zhivka,” the orange-haired samodiva said.

  “I’m not ready to go home,” the girl said. “I’d like to see more of the world. And…” She dropped her voice lower, stepping near to me. “I know who you are. I’ve heard the rumors: the King of Crows, hiding on the puszta and saving praetheria.”

  “I’m not anyone’s savior.”

  “But you are the King of Crows? I saw your crow form. And you saved a Fair One from a mob. We all heard the story.”

  How could they know that? The other samodiva were nodding now, their eyes alight with interest. I stepped back a pace, unnerved by their glowing intensity. “Glamours restrained,” I reminded them, and their glowing dimmed a notch.

  “All right,” I said, because my head was starting to buzz and I could not afford to show weakness before the samodiva. “You may stay. Your sisters should leave, though, before anyone else comes down the road.”

  The first samodiva nodded. “Not all our sisters are free.” As though that were a signal, the women seemed to melt away, running fleetly along the side of the road, flashing in and out of sight among the few trees spotting the roadside. Fire in the pasture, I thought, and knew a moment’s pity for the unwary guards manning the first carriage that had escaped us.

  I turned back to Bahadır and Ákos. The ground around them was strewn with bodies, including László’s.

  I supposed someone would have to bury them.

  I swayed.

  I needed to get away before I collapsed.

  “Ákos,” I managed. “Put the bodies of our men into the wagon, then bury the others. Bahadır, go up the road and see if you can find any wounded. If there are bodies, hide them.” The girl—Zhivka?—watched me, waiting. “You—stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Away, I thought.

  But I only made it to the other side of the thicket where we had hidden that morning before passing out.

  I woke to the tang of metal and salt on my tongue. I jerked upright, sputtering. A red-haired girl with cheekbones like a scimitar’s edge, curving and deadly, sat inches away from me.

  I scuttled backward, cursing, then wiped at
my mouth. My hand came away bright crimson. Blood. There was blood in my mouth.

  “What have you done to me?”

  “I have not harmed you,” Zhivka said, drawing her arms around her chest.

  “Then why am I bleeding?”

  “You fainted. Your pulse was very thin. You needed sustenance.” She held up a mottled rabbit, its neck slit wide, blood matting the fur on its belly.

  I gagged, bile and blood biting at my throat. She hadn’t been entirely wrong—the blood had given me some of my energy back, though I was still ravenous. I eyed the dead rabbit. I couldn’t eat it raw in human form, but my crow could. Though it probably wasn’t worth the energy of shifting.

  “Where are the others? I thought I told you to stay.”

  Her mouth turned down. “I did stay. For a little while. But it was boring. And lucky for you I did come. You needed my help.”

  “Fair enough.” I stood on shaking legs and whistled. Holdas came tromping through the brush, shaking his head. There was hard bread and a chunk of cheese in the saddlebag. I pulled it out and tore into the bread. Within moments, the food was gone, and I felt more myself, though still hungry.

  I glanced at the rabbit again. “Can I have that?”

  She smiled, and my heart thumped. Even without her glamour, she was devastating. I should have to remember that her looks were a weapon.

  I tucked the rabbit into the saddlebag and swung into the saddle, then pulled Zhivka up behind me. We rode back to the road to collect Ákos and Bahadır and a pair of wounded bandits who had been farther up the road and thus escaped the samodiva.

  “We buried the guards,” Bahadır said. “What do you want us to do with the others?”

  “Ask Ákos,” I said. I’d be damned if I took over for László.

  After a long, measured look at me, Ákos said, “Bring the wagon. We’ll take the bodies back to camp and send word to their families.”

  We followed directions and rode silently back to the farmhouse. As soon as we reached it, I built up a fire and stuck the rabbit on a spit.