by Rosalyn Eves
I had only a moment to wonder at his mercurial shift, from cold and distant to close and warm, before he pressed his lips against mine.
I closed my eyes, ignoring the chill that shot through me. This was what I wanted.
He slid his tongue between my lips. I waited for the kick of excitement in my gut, but felt only a breeze slithering around my bare shoulders.
Franz Joseph pulled back. “We may have to wait until I reach my majority. You do not mind, do you?”
I did not mind. But aside from a slight relief that I would not be sent back to England at once, I did not feel anything, not even fear at his mother’s reaction. It struck me that this deadness ought to concern me, but I pushed it aside and said, “Can we keep this between us, just for a little while?” Those who wanted to see me hanged would not be pleased with the news just yet.
“Of course. May I tell my mother, at least?”
“If you must.” I shivered.
“You’re cold. Let’s go back to the ballroom.”
*
I did not hear what it was Franz Joseph said to his mother—he left me with Count Grünne while he broke the news to her. The count thought it his duty to dance with me, so I caught only glimpses of Archduchess Sophie as they spoke, and her iron countenance did not change.
After the count there was a string of other partners, and I lost sight of Franz Joseph for a time. I felt oddly unsettled: it was excessively careless for a girl to misplace her potential bridegroom within half an hour of her betrothal. I was, in fact, looking for him when someone caught my hand and swung me into a waltz.
Hunger’s gold eyes gleamed down at me.
I tried to pull away, but his grip was steel-strong. “Why did you tell Noémi about Mátyás?”
“She asked if I had witnessed his death. Did you want me to lie to her?”
“Yes! Or at least steer the conversation away. Noémi may never forgive me.”
He peered at me with interest. “And this matters to you, her forgiveness?”
“Yes, of course it does. She is my best friend.”
“Humans are so odd—so caught up in vindication and vengeance, absolution and atonement. You are forever caught in the past, forever looking to the future. When do you live in the now?”
“Unlike you, I cannot separate my past from my future, or from my present.”
“I did not say my past had no bearing on my present.” Some dark undertone in his words seemed to rasp against my skull, sending my heart thumping.
I changed the topic. “Did you seduce a secretary’s daughter?”
The gleam grew brighter. “Should you care if I had?”
“It is not, of course, any of my business—only perhaps you don’t know that it is not the socially acceptable thing to seduce unmarried women of good families.”
“But the married women are fair game?”
“I did not say that!” My cheeks burned. “Never mind. I don’t wish to speak of your conquests at all.”
“Very well. Let us speak of yours. The archduke seems well and truly caught. Did I not promise to make you a queen?”
I stopped dancing, and the couple behind us nearly stumbled over me. You are intoxicating, the archduke had said.
“Did you arrange this? Is that why Vasilisa insisted I come here tonight?”
He shook his head. “I helped the archduke see you in a way he might not otherwise have done, is all. Anything more is your doing. Did Vasilisa dress you?”
I saw myself suddenly as a doll, bowing to Vasilisa’s whims, moving to the strings Hunger pulled. There was a sourness in my mouth, and I tried to pull away.
“Not yet,” Hunger said, holding me fast.
The waltz came to flourishing conclusion. Hunger laughed and released me to Franz Joseph, who stood waiting nearby.
“Has that man been bothering you?” the archduke asked.
I shook my head. “How did your mother take your news?”
“I did not tell her yet. She is preoccupied with other concerns at the moment. The timing did not seem right.” He hesitated. “Anna, you may not like this, but—”
He broke off as the archduchess marched into the middle of the ballroom. A powerful glow enveloped her, and a thin wind seemed to curl around her feet, rustling the hem of the sea-gown she wore. She looked regal, powerful—and utterly terrifying.
“My dear friends, you honor us with your presence this evening. Thank you. We have an announcement to make. You are all aware of the Congress that has been meeting in Vienna these past two months, deliberating over how to best integrate the praetheria into our society, following their release from the Binding spell. The deliberations have been long and arduous. But early this morning, accord was at last reached.”
A chill settled in my breast. My hand closed convulsively around Franz Joseph’s. “This morning? But I was not informed…” I fell silent, hearing the ridiculousness of my words as I said them. Of course I was no longer part of the Congress.
“Though we mean the creatures no harm, too many of them are dangerous or unpredictable. They cannot be allowed to roam free. A temporary holding camp is being established for them near Melk; they will be sent to a more permanent site once it is completed.”
No.
“No!” someone else shouted. I spun, looking for its source. The tsar stood a few paces away, my uncle Pál beside him.
Pál caught me looking at him and smiled that thin smile I so disliked. He was enjoying this.
“The sequestration is effective immediately. Dragović!” Behind the archduchess, a dozen or so Red Mantles fanned out across the room.
“No!” the tsar shouted again, in French, then German. “The creatures are mine! You shall not have them. You shall not weaken me like this. Praetheria! Men at arms! To me! To me!” A dozen or so men with the erect bearing of soldiers drove through the crowd toward the tsar. Beside the tsar, the golden-haired Count Svarog seemed to flicker—his face splitting apart for the briefest of moments to reveal four heads, each grimacing at the crowd around them. I blinked, and the man’s face was restored, handsome beyond anything I had seen.
What kind of illusion was that? Who was that?
A tall, willowy man with bark-textured skin and branching antlers, wearing the gold-and-black livery of the Hapsburg family, dropped his serving tray and bolted toward an open door onto the balcony. A Red Mantle seized the tree-man just as he reached the door, then released him with a screech.
“He shocked me!”
The archduchess lifted both hands. Doors on either side of the room opened, and dozens of men and women entered, wearing the black and gold of the emperor’s household. But they did not carry themselves like servants, and as I watched, a short, grizzle-haired man began weaving his hands in the air and murmuring. I felt the slightest buzz of the spell as it passed, and then the tree-man halted, halfway out the French door, before tumbling frozen to the ground.
I dropped Franz Joseph’s hand and began to move—to challenge the archduchess or help the tree-creature, I was not entirely certain which. But he caught my arm.
“Anna, don’t! Your compassionate heart does you credit, but you’ll only injure yourself if you try anything now. The Congress has decided: nothing you do can change the fate of the praetheria. Wait.”
But would waiting change anything? For that matter, would acting change anything? If I helped a creature escape now, would that prevent its capture later?
It was hard to think clearly, and I had so little time.
Another praetherian shed its human aspect, and a serpent slid from empty livery as it fell to the ground. It streaked across the floor, accompanied by shouting. One of the black-and-gold figures pointed at it, and it writhed and knotted before the archduchess, then fell still.
All around me, the room was in chaos: ordinary men and women scrambling for the doors, the Red Mantles surrounding the praetheria, the black-and-gold figures flooding across the ballroom, the buzz of their spells
all around me.
I shook free of Franz Joseph and crossed the floor to Archduchess Sophie. My gloves began unraveling as I walked, the illusion melting away like real frost before warmth. My dress too was reverting: titters followed me. I did not know what this meant, if Vasilisa had been captured or had burned up her magic trying to escape.
I hoped she was flying free across the night.
Pál caught my arm as I passed him. “It’s not too late to join us,” he said. “Come with me, and the tsar will protect you.”
“I don’t want your protection,” I said, and continued my march to the archduchess.
She looked at me coldly. “Anna Arden.”
I curtsied. “Your Majesty, please, don’t let this happen. Some of the praetheria have served you well—and they cannot help their birth. They deserve better than this.”
“You presume too much, Miss Arden. Life is not fair,” the archduchess said. “Not for you, not for me, not for anyone. You will be happier if you accept that.”
“You are the most powerful person in this court: if you were to set your will against this, you could stop it. Please. I have done everything you asked. I have let your son court me. I have tried to smooth relations between Austria and Hungary.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Have you? From where I stand, I have seen only a foolish girl who sets herself against everything and everyone.”
“Anna.” Franz Joseph tugged gently on my arm. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Not now,” I said. “But someday I will have the power to stop this.”
At that, Archduchess Sophie’s face did change, the tiniest curl of a smile lifting her lips. “Did my besotted son propose to you? Dear, what impulsive children you are.”
“I will be my own man soon enough,” Franz Joseph said. “I can make my own choices.”
“But you will not marry to disoblige me, or your country, my Franzi. Listen carefully, Miss Arden. Your beloved Hungary is facing a civil war. Already Croatian soldiers march toward Buda-Pest, and Romanian soldiers will follow them.”
“And you allow this?” I asked the archduchess.
“We do not officially sanction insurrection.”
But the smile playing about her lips told me another story. The conversation I had overheard ages ago came back to me—the archduchess complaining about the ignominy of submitting to a mess of students, Dragović promising to set it right.
“Within a year, likely less, Hungary will be brought firmly back within the Hapsburg Empire, where it belongs. Any value you might have brought to marriage as an alliance builder is lost completely. Not to mention your disastrously unpopular decision to break the Binding—and publicly announce as much.”
Her words hammered against me.
“Perhaps there is some value in your ability to break spells—but it seems a mercurial ability, and unreliable. Besides which, I have had a most revealing conversation with one of my foremost Luminate historians. He verifies what you charged at the Congress the other day, that the original Binding was forged with blood magic—what we now would call death magic. He tells me, also, that it is highly unlikely such a spell could have broken without similar magic.”
Though the fringes of the room were still in turmoil—praetheria fighting to evade capture, Russian men flanking their tsar—a small bubble of quiet formed around us. Catherine stood nearby, gripping Richard’s hand. William waited just beyond them, his gold mask pushed up onto his red hair, leaving his pale, freckled face exposed. My entire body was stiff with tension, my bare hands rubbing anxiously at the lace overlay of my skirt.
“Is this true, Miss Arden? Was someone killed to break the Binding? Did you kill him?” Archduchess Sophie asked.
I could not seem to swallow. I did not want to lie, to diminish Mátyás’s sacrifice. But I could not tell the truth either. Death magic was forbidden, a capital offense.
“You needn’t answer me. Your face betrays you.”
Franz Joseph lifted a hand toward me, then let it fall. “Anna?”
I could not answer him. He wanted me to swear my innocence, and I was not innocent.
“If it were only a matter of the broken Binding, we might have sent you to England for trial, as you broke no formal law. But this is another matter entirely.” The archduchess caught her breath, but there was no triumph in her eyes. “Miss Anna Arden, for crimes against the crown and against human dignity, for willingly taking a human life in support of your dark magic, your life is hereby forfeit.” She nodded at Dragović. “Seize her.”
The scream curdled in the air of the camp, leaving a sourness in the dense July warmth.
I sprang up from my maps with a muffled curse. Screaming seldom presaged anything good—besides which, the day was damnably hot, my sweat-soaked shirt had dried prickly and itchy against my back, and I wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and a long nap in cool shade. Not breaking up another of the interminable squabbles in camp. And especially not poring over maps of the puszta, planning yet another raid—something that should have been Ákos’s responsibility, but which he had breezily delegated to me.
You made me leader—I nominate you to do my work, he’d said.
Where was the bastard now? Sound asleep, under a tree. I ought to upend the remains of the dishwater over him.
A second scream chased the first. Ákos would have to wait.
I found the culprits some few hundred meters from camp, a couple of the younger bandits cornering the lidérc, teasing her about her webbed feet until she spat at them and screamed. I sent the lidérc back to camp—if she had a name, she had not yet disclosed it—and sentenced the others to scrub the accumulated laundry and to clean up after the horses.
Then I made Ákos gather everyone together. A heat haze shimmered over the puszta, turning the grasses to water where the ground met the sky. Gnats hummed around my face, and I swatted them absently.
Ákos looked at me, and I sighed. I’d no wish to play leader. But something must be said.
“I do not ask that you like each other,” I said. “But I do ask that you respect each other. You’ve all come here seeking a kind of sanctuary—an escape from the hatred of a mob, from poverty, hell, maybe even from boredom. I don’t care why you’ve come. But you WILL respect one another, or you will leave.”
The men and creatures grumbled, but they quieted. Boredom was at the root of some of their quarrels, I knew that, but there were only so many tasks we could set them to do.
As the betyárok dispersed, Ákos sent our best hunters—the lidérc, Zhivka, a few of the men—out to the plains to find meat for our supper, with strict instructions that they were not to bring home livestock belonging to the puszta farmers who eked out a living even poorer than our own. Or, heaven forbid, a dog or two, as the lidérc had done when first sent to hunt. Meat is meat, she had said, mystified by my efforts to explain that for us, dogs were companions, not food.
When everyone was safely occupied, I exhaled and walked to the makeshift corral where Holdas grazed with the rest of our horses. I saddled him and rode a wide circle around the perimeter of our camp, looking for our scouts. Varjú followed, floating on invisible air currents.
A light breeze skimmed across the grasses, but even that could not make the heat tolerable. It closed around me like bars, a trap of stale air and stagnating warmth. I met with the scouts, who assured me all was clear—no sign of hussars hunting us, or of potential marks either—and I returned to the camp.
As I drew closer, I pulled up short at the sight of Bahadır, the leshy tree-men, and our giant just outside the camp. As I watched, Bahadır bowed low to the praetheria, who followed suit, though the giant nearly lost his balance and pitched forward. Bahadır steadied him at the last minute.
The tree-creatures put their hands together, raised them above their heads, and then spread their arms and fingers wide. Bahadır mimicked their actions.
“What are you doing?” I asked, bemused.
�
�I am teaching them how to behave politely to humans,” Bahadır said, “and they are doing the same for me. This”—he demonstrated the move I’d just observed—“is a standard leshy greeting that means, I think, to bless with sun and rain so your roots and branches may flourish.”
The tree-creatures nodded gravely. I was still learning to read the different praetherian expressions, but they seemed pleased. I dismounted and repeated Bahadır’s movement, and the two of them hummed low in their throats.
“Well, carry on,” I said, leading Holdas past them toward the corral, carrying with me a buoyant hopefulness at such dissimilar creatures trading knowledge with each other, as though there might someday be a world where such things were normal, and not a curious exception.
*
I found Zhivka bathing in the long gold sunset, lying on the prairie grass and rubbing her hands across her arms in the fading light, her face beatific.
A twig cracked under my foot, and she shot upright, her frantic eyes easing as they came to rest on me. “Did you need something, my lord?”
“Mátyás,” I said.
“I was told not to use your given name, my lord.”
I groaned. “How long do you plan to hold my incivility against me?”
“As long as it amuses me,” she said, patting the ground beside her. “Come, join me. This is a good place for thinking.”
I settled on the grass. “What do you think of, when you come here?”
“Fire,” she said, gesturing at the distant sun. “My sisters. I miss them.”
“I miss my sister too.” When we had lived together, Noémi had seemed more nuisance than anything else and we fought frequently, but now I’d be overjoyed to be the subject of her scolding again. I wondered how she filled her days in Vienna, if she ever thought of me. If she was well. “I hope you know that the agreement I made with the samodiva does not have to hold you here. You’re not a prisoner. You’re free to go, if you wish.”
Her eyes lit, incandescent. I was not sure if it was a banked fire inside, or just the reflection of the fading sun. Then her chin drooped. “I must stay. But I thank you for the offer.”