Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

  The duke of Rohan has come calling again and asked for my hand, finding my poor eyesight and poverty no impediment given my family connections. Or perhaps he thinks I should be grateful. I cannot stay and marry him, so I have gone to find Mátyás. If my uncle brings this to you, tell him not to worry for me. Do not come for me yourself—I do not ever want to speak to you again.

  I refolded the letter, my fingers slow and precise as if that precision might give me some control over a life that seemed to be spinning rapidly out of my grasp.

  For so long I had guarded all my secrets, about the Binding, about Mátyás. Now, within a span of days, they had all been spilled.

  “Well?” Prince Eszterházy watched me closely, his brow slightly furrowed. “Has she told you where she went?”

  “She has gone.” I tried to swallow, but my throat closed up. “She has gone to find her brother. She does not believe he is dead.”

  “Her brother?” The prince was astonished. “I was sure she had sent word of some romantic elopement. A pity, since the duke would have made her a comfortable husband.”

  “Comfortable, perhaps, but not what she would have chosen.”

  “Then why did she not tell me? We are not fiends, to force her into a distasteful match.”

  “I do not know.” And the galling thing was, I didn’t. What other things had Noémi kept from me? What had I failed to notice in my crusade to save the praetheria? I knew she had been obsessed with her dreams of Mátyás. Why had I not tried harder to stop her—or told someone what she believed?

  “Does she say where she has gone?”

  “No,” I said. “She may have gone to Eszterháza, to see her uncle.” Noémi was competent enough, but to travel alone seemed foolhardy for any young woman. I sent up a small prayer for her safety.

  “Is there anything else in the letter?”

  Only betrayal. But as I could not see how that would help anyone now, I lied. “No.”

  He sighed. “I had hoped you might help us. Well, I have sent men after her. I hope they can find her before she comes to harm.”

  *

  My world had never been so circumscribed as it was just then. Even in England, when Mama had kept me from society, she had allowed me out: exploring the fields, visiting the village, shopping in the markets. Catherine and Richard allowed me nowhere.

  I prowled the limits of my room, taking books off the shelf at random and replacing them. Even my beloved poetry books could not hold me: they were mere words, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth had said.

  Words were not enough. Once I thought they would be—if I found my voice, if I found the right words, I could compel people to hear me. But it wasn’t enough. One needed more than the right words; one needed a platform from which to be heard. A king might lack eloquence, but he would be heard. A guttersnipe, no matter how facile with language, would struggle to find an audience beyond those who shared her gutter.

  But I could not simply give up. I could not go back to England. I had seen a world shatter inside the Binding; I had seen a revolution begin to change the world. I wanted to be part of that change. I wanted to matter.

  To do that, I needed more than my bare self. Joan of Arc had persisted in telling the truth of her visions until someone had given her an army. Like Joan, I simply needed an audience—and a powerful ally.

  I sat at my desk and pulled out a sheet of the finest parchment I owned, the Arden phoenix crest emblazoned at the top, and began to write.

  Listening to Catherine and Richard’s carriage rattle away from the house, I felt like Cinderella, left behind as the world gathered for a ball. The masquerade that night at Schönbrunn promised to be a crowning event of the Congress season. Instead of a costume, I wore a nightdress; instead of a glittering ballroom and throngs of people, I was alone in my bedroom.

  Catherine had been adamant I stay behind. “Richard and I must make an appearance, but we will not stay above a few hours.” She eyed me. “And do not think you can sneak out. I’ve given the staff orders that you are to be confined to your room. Someone will be watching your door at all times.”

  When the tumult in the house died down, I peeked out my door. A footman was slouching against the wall of the hallway. He stood to attention as my door opened.

  “Beg pardon, miss, but you’re not to leave.”

  I sighed. “I know. Could you send one of the maids to the kitchen to see if Cook has any of the plum cake left?” When he nodded, I let my door fall shut. I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall.

  I had heard nothing in response to the letter I had sent to Franz Joseph, asking for an audience. Likely, he regretted his proposal. But he had made the offer, and a man of honor did not go back on his word. Much as it would gall me to betroth myself to a man who no longer wanted my hand, I could not see I had many options. Gábor was gone—and I would not think of him. (Not above a dozen times a day.) I would not receive my inheritance from Grandmama until I reached twenty-one—or until I married. And if I could not find a powerful ally, Catherine would ship me back to England, to face the Queen’s justice.

  I had no reason to say no (saving, perhaps, some moral squeamishness), a dozen reasons to say yes.

  And if I could not, after all, bring myself to say yes, I could use the threat of that proposal to enlist Franz Joseph’s aid. If anyone could successfully intercede with the Austrian emperor or the English Queen, it was a future emperor.

  But none of my plans would matter if Franz Joseph did not respond.

  A sound in my room sent my eyes flying open. My wardrobe door was wide, dresses soaring past it onto the floor and my bed.

  My first thought was that it must be Ginny—but no. I had given Ginny the night off, at her request. There was no need for her to be confined to the house simply because I was. And she could not have slipped past me unobserved. “Who’s there?”

  A head emerged from the wardrobe: Vasilisa.

  “What are you doing here?” I supposed she had climbed through the window again.

  She waved her hand. “I am here because you are not at the ball, and I wish you to be there.”

  I could not help it: I laughed. “So you are to be my fairy godmother?” She looked the part, I’d grant, all pale loveliness. Though she had a hard, feral edge I’d never pictured when reading Cinderella.

  Her answering smile showed all her pointed teeth. “If you like.”

  “And shall I win the prince?” I asked, only half jesting. If Vasilisa was in earnest, this would afford me an excellent opportunity to talk to Franz Joseph.

  “I hope you break his heart.” Vasilisa surveyed the discarded gowns with distaste. “You have nothing that is suitable. We shall have to use magic.” She plucked up a pale blue gown and shoved it at me. “Put this on.”

  Though it was hardly a costume, I thought the dress was rather lovely, lace dripping over a pale blue satin underskirt. Still bemused by this new turn of events, I watched as Vasilisa tapped her lips, then flicked her hands toward me.

  My amusement vanished as silver threads began growing up my hands like a living thing, a delicately sharp pattern like hoarfrost on the window in January. The dress too began to shift around me, spikes springing from the collar like an Elizabethan ruff to encircle my head and throat. The skirt slimmed and lengthened, a long pool of palest whites and blues, shimmering in the last fade of evening light.

  “You shall go as the Queen of Winter, the ice at the end of the world. I want all the court to see you as you are.”

  “The court has seen me. Surely you heard that I confessed to breaking the Binding.”

  She snorted. “I want them to see you as something more than a foolish girl.”

  Another flick of her narrow wrists, and something heavy settled on my head. Lifting my hands, I found a glass crown, the points sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Look,” Vasilisa said, turning me to the mirror.

>   Instead of the mask that was de rigueur at masquerades, the frost from my gloves continued up my throat, spreading in swirls across my cheeks, biting across my lips. By some glamour, Vasilisa had enhanced my purely average prettiness, until the face that peered back at me was like snow in moonlight: beautiful, terrible, deadly. A face to break the hearts of men and women alike.

  I was not certain I liked the girl in the mirror.

  “This is how you see me?” I asked.

  “As you could be—were you not afraid.”

  I stared at my reflection for another long moment, wondering if it was fear that set my pulse pounding or anticipation. The door to my room was still securely shut; the guards did not suspect anything.

  “Stop mooning at yourself,” Vasilisa said, pinching my arm above the frost gloves. “We have work to do.”

  And then she pulled a cloak of darkness across the two of us, opened the window on the sweet-smelling summer evening, and flung us into the sky.

  *

  It was nearly midnight when we reached the sprawling Schönbrunn estate some miles from the walls of Vienna. The massive sweep of the baroque façade blazed with lights. Vasilisa set us down behind the main palace, on the gravel walkway near the labyrinth hedges. I rubbed my hands together. Though the summer evening was warm, the flight above the city had left me chilled and vaguely unsettled. I was not supposed to be here. Catherine was unlikely to recognize me in my costume, but should she return early and discover me gone…I would find Franz Joseph, then leave as soon as I could.

  Behind the main building, the formal and informal gardens were decorated with blue and green lanterns. Elementalist magic sent sprays of water tumbling through the night air, above guests strolling the gardens. Silver and turquoise lights played across the walls of Schönbrunn in rippling waves, while footmen decked in shells and coral, white lace foaming down their trousers, passed with trays of food and drink.

  We’d come down in an underwater kingdom.

  Vasilisa and I climbed the stairs behind the palace to the ballroom, the massive French doors thrown open to the night breezes. Inside, the ballroom stopped my breath. In daylight, the rococo exuberance and the painted friezes were lovely, if a bit opulent for my taste. But at night, with Lumen lanterns casting blue lights on the polished floor and sparkling off jewelry and ornamented masks, the gold leaf on the ceiling seeming somehow to burn, the room transformed into something from legend. The undersea theme continued in the ballroom, a circulating breeze carrying the faintest hint of salt and sand; illusions of waves crested along the walls.

  All those years that Mama had kept me home, I had had a lurking sympathy for Cinderella’s desperate yearning for the ball—if not the prince. But as I stepped through the doors, a hush seemed to fall over the assembled dancers. As the dancers turned to stare at me, eyes widening with fear-tinged awe, I wondered if the story was not about something more than the desire to escape. If it was not, perhaps, about that moment when a girl, previously scorned, overlooked, and made to feel small, sweeps triumphantly into a room where she is the sole focus.

  I confess: I liked it.

  Then Vasilisa stepped beside me, as striking in bronze and green as I was in my ice and silver, and their attention fractured. The musicians struck up again, the dancers resumed their swirl, and the party moved on.

  I was thronged, nearly at once, with a dozen young (and not so young) men wanting to dance with me, and a few of their sisters, wanting the name of my modiste.

  “Such a stunning gown,” one said. “And such gloves! Wherever did you find them?”

  “My fairy godmother made them,” I said, laughing.

  I put off my prospective partners with a pretty word or two and a loose promise to be available later, then plunged into the crowd.

  It was oddly liberating. No one knew who I was—I might be anyone, which meant also that I might be utterly me. But that same anonymity meant others were also difficult to recognize behind their masks—though I saw Catherine, dressed for her royal Russian namesake, and gave her wide berth.

  I caught snatches of gossip as I went: that Kossuth had returned to Buda-Pest to raise an army against the emperor (unlikely), that Dragović had dispatched his lieutenant to Croatia to mobilize their own army (probably true—and terrifying), that the secretary of the treasury’s niece had been seduced by a golden-eyed praetherian (I refused to have an opinion on the likelihood of Hunger’s actions). But the last bit of gossip brought me short:

  “They say it was a girl who broke the Binding, not that Hungarian lord with the tsar. Practically a child!”

  “I don’t care if she was a babe in arms. She ought to be shot for what she’s done. My Lukas has not been the same since he lost his magic.”

  “Shooting is too merciful. She should be hanged.”

  Dizziness gripped me, bringing a wave of heat into my face. I did not think I should ever grow accustomed to people wishing for my death. I stood still until the faintness passed, then moved on, grateful that Vasilisa’s illusion hid my real self.

  Stopping had been a mistake: before I had quite caught my breath, I was surrounded again by men, young and old, all wanting something. A dance, a turn around the garden, a word. Though none of them touched me, I felt their needs as an almost tangible, smothering weight.

  “No,” I managed. “No, I’m sorry.” Beyond them, I spotted a slim, young man dressed as Alexander the Great, his brown hair shining above a black mask and laurel-leaf crown. By his profile, I guessed he was the archduke. “Excuse me.” I cut through the crowd around me, cringing as I pressed between two guests, feeling their breath on my hair, the heat of their bodies in their clothes. The room was too close.

  Alexander broke off his conversation as I approached and turned toward me.

  “Madam, do you seek me?” I had guessed right: he was the archduke.

  I curtsied. “I should like a word with you, if you please.”

  He hesitated the barest fraction before nodding and offering me his arm.

  “The room is very warm,” I said. “Would you show me the gardens?”

  The archduke’s blue eyes glittered behind his mask, but I could not read his expression to tell if he recognized me or not.

  An elegant woman in sea-blue satin, dripping pearls and wearing a diamond-encrusted crown, started after us, but the swirl of dancers pressed too close, and we reached the gardens safely.

  Franz Joseph led me across the lawn toward a copse of trees. A few other couples strolled in the lanes, illuminated by fairy lights and the full moon overhead.

  He turned to face me and pulled off his mask, his blue eyes scanning my face. His fingers settled, light as down, against the patterned whorls on my cheeks. “Illusion?”

  I nodded.

  “You are heartbreaking tonight, did you know that?”

  I hope you break his heart. Why had Vasilisa brought me to the ball?

  “You know who I am?”

  He nodded shortly. There was a constraint in his posture, in his silence, that sent my heart plunging.

  “I have given a great deal of thought to your flattering offer.” I paused for a moment, waiting for some sign: a lifting of his lips, a warmth in his eyes. Nothing. I took a deep breath, squashing my scruples, and plunged on. “I should like to accept.”

  I caught the merest flicker of surprise in his face before his expression smoothed out and he gripped my hands. “Miss Arden. You do me great honor.”

  A breeze stirred around us, pricking gooseflesh on my arms.

  “I…A gentleman should never go back on his word, I know,” Franz Joseph said. “But your confession to the Congress—is it true that you broke the Binding? Mother says it is, but I cannot believe it.”

  I dipped my head, wondering as I did so why Franz Joseph would rather believe I had lied.

  “Why?” His voice emerged unexpectedly high, cracking at the end. I began to feel as though my hands, still clasped in his, were no longer my own
.

  “Because my friends were going to die if I did not and Hungary would continue bound to laws that were not her own. Because the Binding was inherently unfair. Why should some have magic and others not, only because the Circle deemed it so? Why should the praetheria be condemned to spend their life supplying us with magic?”

  “Why indeed?” He dropped my hands at last and stepped back. He pressed a fist to his lips. “You could not have known.”

  “What did I not know?”

  Franz Joseph’s shoulders sagged. For a moment he looked lost, bereft. A boy who had mistaken his way in a crowded market. I stepped toward him, my hand outstretched, but he retreated a pace, and I let my hand fall.

  “The Hapsburgs have never been powerful Luminate—less so after the Binding. When you broke the Binding, you took away any magic I had.” Franz Joseph opened his fist and inscribed a circle in the air. “Lumen.”

  A spark so faint I might have imagined it nestled in his palm before snuffing out.

  No. A cloud scuttled across the moon, throwing the gardens into sudden darkness.

  “But your mother—” I began.

  “Is not a Hapsburg by blood. Have you not wondered why Count Grünne is always with me? He casts spells for me, so no one suspects. What future emperor could rule a magical people without magic himself?”

  “I am sorry,” I whispered.

  “Are you? Would you have left the Binding unbroken if you had known?”

  I looked away, unable to meet the pain in his eyes. Of course I would not. Not for him, not for a hundred like him. I had not left the Binding unbroken, even to save Mátyás.

  I ran my tongue along my teeth, trying to wash away the bitter taste in my mouth. “I won’t hold you to your offer.”

  “I did not say I did not wish to marry you.” Franz Joseph stepped closer to me at last, cupping my cheek with his hand. “I don’t know what I wish. You are—you are impossibly lovely tonight. You have so much passion for life. For justice.”

  That dizzy heat swept up me again, and I wavered. Franz Joseph caught me in his arms, his lips inches from mine.

  “You are intoxicating,” he whispered, a strange light filling his eyes.