by Rosalyn Eves
Why? I wondered, but the peaceful moment made me disinclined to ask. I remained a little longer, talking of minor camp gossip, before reluctantly rising again. The sun had already disappeared, only a wash of light against the sky marking its passing. I wished I could linger, but there were too many tasks already calling for my attention.
*
The brief interlude of peace in camp was destined not to last.
A few days later I returned from a scouting venture to find a visitor. By the time I loosed Holdas on the grasses, Ákos had already welcomed her and settled her on a rock that passed for a chair. Her back was turned to me, but the dark hair flowing like velvet down her shoulders was familiar. Far above, dark shapes circled over the camp. Turul birds.
The Lady had returned.
I stopped when I recognized her, rooted to the ground just outside the circle of our tents. As I watched, others began drifting toward her: some of my most hardened betyárok, the lidérc, the domovoi. Even Varjú, curse him, kept sidling along a branch overhead to get closer. Ákos sat by her feet, his face rapt. She stroked a hand across his cheek, and he blushed—Ákos, whom I had never seen so befuddled, not even by Zhivka at her most enthralling.
I stalked toward the Lady. If the others fell back at my glowering approach, the Lady merely smiled. “What are you doing here?”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “My birds bring me reports of your movement, but I thought it time I spoke with you again. You have wrought well.” She gestured to the clearing around us, the crowd equal parts praetherian and human, all pressed close together.
“This wasn’t done for you,” I said.
“No? But it was done all the same. These men and creatures would follow you into death.”
No. My heart burned cold. “I won’t ask them to. All I want is for us to live our lives unmolested.”
“That is all most of us want. But few will have that chance. Do you think the Four will curtail their plan because you want to be left alone? Do you think the Austrian emperor, who even now sends money to Croatian troops to invade our borders, cares what a band of outlaws thinks about living in peace? If peace were so easily won, I would welcome it, but it will not be. Will you not reconsider?”
I shook my head. “This is not our fight.”
“It will be.”
A low murmuring gathered around me. Did they judge me for saying no? Let them. I’d already taken on more responsibility than I had ever wanted.
“If you will not assume your role as táltos, at least let me teach you to master your powers.”
“I don’t need help with my powers. I’ve enough.”
She shook her head, her hair sliding down her shoulders like water. Someone sighed: it might have been Ákos. “You’ve not touched the powers of your rebirth—only those powers you had in life, your shifting and your animal persuasion. But you’ve so much more, powers of which you’ve barely tapped the surface. A táltos who dies and is reborn becomes a shaman, capable of taking on any shape, able to send his soul from his body in dreams.”
When I shifted, there was always a moment in a new form where I felt alien: where the skin or fur or feathers I’d assumed seemed disconnected. I felt that way now, without shifting, as though I had suddenly become someone unrecognizable to myself. I scratched at my forearm.
“And what should I do with this power?”
I had not forgotten the monster I’d become when I’d shifted at Hadúr’s provocation, that all-consuming hunger. “If you’ve watched me at all, you must have seen that I’m lazy, venal, selfish, rather cowardly. If you make me a god—who will stand against me? How will you ensure that I do not destroy the very people and country you mean to save?” I broke off, breathing hard, as if I’d run a race.
The Lady closed the distance between us, setting her hands against my cheek. Her touch was cooling in the heavy summer air. She smelled of lavender and vanilla, the same scent my mother had worn when I was young, and for a moment my craving for the past thrust me so forcibly into the mind of my six-year-old self that I wanted to cry.
“I know you,” the Lady said. “I have known you all your life.”
The way she looked at me with those clear eyes, I wanted to believe her. I wanted to be known like that, with a clarity that saw me for my faults and strengths all together and did not judge. More than that, in the moment she looked at me, I wanted to be the person she saw.
But I was not that person. I did not think I could be, no matter what she thought she saw or hoped to convince me of.
“I have served under weak leaders and they are dangerous. But you are not weak,” Ákos said.
“Et tu, Brute?” I asked. When Ákos only stared at me, I sighed. “Not you too? Besides, I’m not even the leader here.”
“Are you not?” the Lady asked.
Ákos grinned at me. “My leadership consists mainly of handing any real work to you. You’ve done a marvelous job.”
A pokolba. He was right: every major decision recently had been mine. Ákos only confirmed my orders. I’d stepped into a role I didn’t want without realizing I’d done it.
“My answer is still no,” I told the Lady.
“Your powers may hurt more than you if you leave them untouched.”
“They’ve done nothing so far,” I said. “Let them stay buried.”
She nodded once. “I will go, then.”
“That would be best.”
At once a chorus of outcry arose, and I moved back to allow the others to press around the Lady, petitioning her to stay. She floated from one to the next, setting her hand on their cheek or head or shoulder, leaving her blessing.
“I am sorry, my friends, but I have other things I must do, others I must be watching. Do your best to persuade Mátyás to help me, and I may come back.”
If it had not been for the fact that I’d never seen a glimmer of mischievousness in the Lady, I’d have sworn that the smile she sent me was dulcet, hiding an edge. She had effectively trapped me. She might do as I asked and not petition me further, but it did not matter: the others would pester me for her.
Already, the lidérc was inching toward me, her fey eyes flickering. “Why won’t you help the Lady?”
I only shook my head and did not answer. I stalked toward the horses. If Holdas was surprised to be ridden out again so soon after coming in, he didn’t show it. We raced beneath the low-slung thunderclouds until the rain came on, and then raced some more. Varjú sped after us, wheeling in the sky.
The puszta spun all around me, an ocean of grass. I reached a spot where there was nothing, no landmarks to break the endless flatness where the land kissed the sky. I could lose myself here. Holdas and I could keep riding and never go back.
But I knew too well how it felt to wait for someone who did not return. I had sat vigil with my mother the long day after my father did not return, until nightfall, when someone brought us word that he was dead, shot by his own hand in one of the private rooms at his club.
The betyárok were not my family; they were not a fifteen-year-old boy waiting for their father. A tug of responsibility pulled me back anyway. I had not asked to lead them, but they had given me the role. I could refuse it still. But I couldn’t bring myself to. The responsibility sat heavy on me, but it was not entirely uncomfortable. It felt…right.
It felt damned terrifying.
I spat all the curse words I could think of at the lowering sky, rain stinging my face like tears.
Then I rode back to camp. To my betyárok. My own clan of bandits.
The soldiers were gathered in a dim csárda, flickering yellow light from a smoking fire washing across their distinctive hussar uniforms, glinting on the hilts of their sabers, catching in the feathers of the shako hats now discarded on the table and floor before them.
I watched them from the shadows, with only a vague recollection of how I’d come to be there: flying across moon-dark fields.
“The betyárok must be stopped,” one
said, touching his hand lightly to his pomaded hair. Even at this distance, I could smell the hog lard used to grease it. “They’ve grown too powerful.”
“And they’ve too many of those damned monsters. It’s a perversion.” Another spat on the floor.
The first pulled out a map of the region, unrolled it on the table. “Our report sets them about here,” he said. “We’ll scour the area and pin them down. When we’ve found them, we’ll wait till nightfall.”
“Are we to kill or capture?” a third asked.
The leader shrugged. “It’s all one to me. But their King of Crows you will leave to me. I will gut him and use his own entrails to hang him.” He lifted his head from the scrutiny of the maps and looked directly at me, his eyes dark and small like a rat’s.
Everything in me seemed to fly apart, and I woke, choking and thrashing in the dark.
A dream. I tossed my blanket from me and stood. It was only a dream, a nightmare born of secret fears.
But my leg muscles cramped, and my heart still pounded as though I’d run in from the plains.
In the morning the domovoi sidled up to me as I tried to wash my face.
“We would fight with you, táltos. With the Lady.” His rough Hungarian had improved in the weeks since he’d joined us.
“I don’t want to fight,” I said.
The domovoi stroked his long beard. “If war comes to you, you do not choose.”
I pictured soldiers pouring into camp, slaughtering betyár and praetherian alike. What had the Lady said about my dreams? “Have new guards been set about the perimeter yet?”
He shrugged.
“Make yourself useful and tell Ákos to see to it.” Lingering unease from the night’s dream still prickled along my spine.
*
Midmorning, the guards brought me a prisoner, blindfolded as I had been when László caught me. The man’s hair was dark, his face mostly obscured by the handkerchief. Still, something about the way he stood seemed familiar.
“Why have you brought this man here?” I asked, pitching my voice so it sounded gruff and determined. A voice to take seriously.
“He was asking at the inn about the King of Crows,” Ákos said.
I turned to the prisoner. “What is your business with him?”
“That business is with the bandit king himself.”
That voice…I closed the distance between myself and the prisoner and pulled off the blindfold. “Gábor?”
My old friend blinked at me. “Mátyás?” A frown pulled his eyebrows together. “But Anna said you were dead.”
“I was dead.” I sighed. “It’s a long story. Are you in a hurry? We haven’t much, but we can offer you some gulyás stew.” I untied the ropes fastening Gábor’s hands together, watching as he rubbed his wrists.
“Are you the King of Crows?” Gábor asked.
I ducked my head, conscious of Ákos suppressing laughter nearby.
Gábor groaned. “I might have guessed as much.”
I sat with Gábor as he polished off a bowl of stew. While he ate, I explained what I knew, how the Boldogasszony had brought me back to life after the Binding spell broke, and I had fallen in with a group of bandits.
“But if you’re alive—why do Anna and Noémi think you are dead?” I could feel Gábor’s eyes on me, steady and measuring. He saw too much, damn him.
“Because the Boldogasszony—the Lady—wants me to save Hungary. And she will threaten anything she thinks I care for to make me play her role. She nearly killed János to force my hand. I cannot let her think I care.” I scanned the sky and nearby trees, listening for birds that might be the Lady’s eyes and ears. For the moment, we were safe.
Gábor rubbed his chin. “I’m afraid I’ve come to ask a similar favor. Kossuth sent me to find you, to ask your aid for the Hungarian troops. And not just Hungary—the Hapsburgs have passed a law that the praetheria are to be sequestered, and Russia has opened their borders to them, in defiance of the Congress.”
My throat dried. “Are Noémi and Anna safe?”
“They have powerful friends and family. They are as safe as anyone.” He looked at me curiously. “Why won’t you help the Lady? You were a hero once.”
“All I had to do was die! There’s no way to fail at dying. But this—there are so many ways to fail that it makes my head ache just thinking of it.”
Gábor must have sensed my reluctance to say more, because he changed the topic, glancing around the camp at the praetheria: at Zhivka trailing bits of light, and the domovoi riding on the shoulders of a tree-man. “I heard the puszta was a safe place for the praetheria.”
“Safer than other places,” I agreed. “They deserve better from us.”
*
That night, over a dinner of stew and pogácsa biscuits that Ákos managed to make light and flaky despite the limitations of a camp stove, Gábor told the others about the Congress in Vienna and its decision to put the praetheria in camps.
“Humans have always feared us,” the lidérc said, baring her pointed teeth and stretching her goose feet toward the fire. “And we are already outlaws. We will stay here.”
“To be fair, you are terrifying,” Ákos pointed out. “I’d not want to wake and find your face above mine!” He grinned at her, to show he meant no malice.
“You should dream of being so lucky.”
“And what news of Hungary?” Bahadır asked. “Is there to be war?”
Gábor ducked his head. “I am afraid so. A Croatian army marches on the Banat. There are already border skirmishes in Serbia, and the Romanians in Wallachia observe us closely for signs of weakness. When I left Vienna, Kossuth Lajos was preparing to return to Buda-Pest to ask the government for money to raise troops.”
“I would fight,” Ákos said, his words echoed by most of my betyárok.
I looked at him in surprise. “Why? You’re not trained soldiers. And—there’s a price on your head.”
“We love our country,” one said.
“And we can hold guns and ride horses. That is as much as most new recruits know,” said another.
“Besides,” Ákos added, “they’d have to pardon us, don’t you think, if we were to fight?”
This patchwork family that I’d begun to build was disintegrating before my eyes. I’d no wish to see them die, but I would not stop them if they wanted to fight.
“I too would fight,” the lidérc said.
When everyone stared at her, she shrugged one shoulder beneath her tangled hair. “Hungary is my home too. And I do not dislike you enough to want to see you die.”
Touched, I said, “This isn’t your war. You don’t have to fight.”
“The Lady said we shall all have to fight,” the domovoi said.
Bahadır asked, “Why would you fight alongside the same people who want to lock your kind away?”
“It is not so simple,” Zhivka said, staring at the fire, her hands weaving shapes that were echoed in the flames. “This fight is not just Hungarians against Croatians and Serbians, or humans against praetheria. There is a bigger war brewing, about the kind of world we wish to live in. The Lady will fight for Hungary and for many of the praetheria, for a world where humans and praetheria can live together.”
She fell silent for a moment, her eyes troubled.
“And their enemy?” Bahadır prompted.
“The Four will drive a human army against Hungary and the Lady, and when that army fails, they will send praetheria to destroy the rest.” Her words were slow, reluctant.
“And that world?”
“The praetheria will rule. What humans survive will live as the praetheria lived for centuries in the Binding: as chattel.”
“How do you know this?” I asked. “How do you know the Four are not a story the Lady tells to shape the world to her own design?” If the stories were true, then of course I should fight. But I would fight as a soldier, not as a leader of soldiers.
The others looked at me as tho
ugh I had spoken blasphemy in the nave of a church.
“You were only a story,” Gábor said, “until I found you.”
“If they were only a story,” Zhivka said, “then I would not be here.”
*
The attack came without warning.
I had been dreaming, flying across the puszta in crow form, following the ribbon of the road toward Buda-Pest. Then, between one wingbeat and the next, I was skimming the tips of a forest. I dropped low, pulled by some powerful instinct into the mouth of a clearing. A girl sat cradled between the roots of an old, mossy tree, her blond head resting on her forearms, which were propped upon her knees. Her dress had the look of something once fine—some shiny, crimson stuff—that had been dragged through mud and a briar patch.
My dream self had shifted to human form—clothed, unlike my waking self—and the girl lifted her head.
Noémi’s entire face lit, a sun emerging after a long gloom. “Mátyás!” She sprang to her feet and would have come to me, but her wrists were bound with daisy chains and creeping vines.
I ran toward her, arms outstretched—and a scream shattered through the clearing, cleaving through my dream self and pulling me back into my own body.
Even awake, the scream still echoed in my ears. No, not an echo, I realized—someone was in fact screaming. More than one someone. I sat up. A bullet cracked past my face, plowing into the ground where my head had rested only a moment before.
I scrambled up, adrenaline burning away the last heaviness of sleep.
We were under attack.
A wood witch darted past me, a soldier close behind her, blood already dripping from his drawn saber. Whose blood? And where were the guards—Ákos and one other—who were supposed to have sounded a warning?
No time to think about that now. I scooped up the gun lying near my pillow and whirled, senses already reaching for Varjú nesting in the trees nearby. He was awake and waiting.
The crow swooped low just as another gunshot exploded.
I dove away from the exposed clearing toward the scanty shelter of a copse of trees. The camp was in chaos, uniformed hussars trampling through bedding, stabbing viciously at anything that looked like a body. Other huddled shapes, motionless on the ground. A few of my betyárok grappling against their attackers. One of the tree-men swinging a hussar up and over his head before releasing him to the sky.