Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

  Zhivka, lit like a torch in the night.

  “Zhivka, no!” Her glamour might be potent against a handful of men, but without her sisters she couldn’t take down the mass of soldiers swarming through the camp. She’d be a target before she got far.

  Too late. The crack of a gun from a soldier I couldn’t see, and Zhivka crumpled like a burning rose.

  I sprang toward her, clubbing a hussar who stood in front of me on the head, shooting another as he took aim at Bahadır.

  I was reaching through the night for roosting crows and falcons when pain sliced through my leg and I stumbled, losing the thread of my magic. The curved saber withdrew, then flashed toward me again. I hurled my gun at him, which had the advantage of throwing my attacker off guard, but the distinct disadvantage of leaving me without a usable weapon.

  As the hussar lunged a third time, I finally shifted into crow form and flung myself up in the air. While the soldier gaped, I dove toward his face.

  He screamed, clasping his hands over his eyes, and I swooped low, plucking up his dropped saber. As I lifted into the air, straining against the weight, something caught my injured leg. I let go of the sword, to a satisfyingly pained grunt below, and the pressure eased off. I fluttered to a nearby branch, my heart sprinting and my leg aching.

  “Surrender!” one of the soldiers in the center of the camp called out. I focused on the voice and ruffled my wings in shock. I knew that face: he’d stepped out of my dreams. The leader of the soldiers I’d seen drinking in a csárda. Had it been more than a dream? I should have paid more attention when the Lady spoke of my reborn gifts. “We’ve come to take the praetheria to Vienna, the rest of you to face the justice of the land.”

  There were too many bodies on the ground, more betyár than hussar. Some were wounded, but some did not move. My giant lay slumped on his side against the earth, and I clacked my beak in dismay. The soldiers had approximately half again our number, and they’d taken us by surprise.

  But if they took us prisoner, we’d face trial. My life would certainly be forfeit, possibly my men. I wasn’t worried about myself—I hadn’t met a prison yet that could hold me—but the others made me hesitate. Bahadır might die simply because he was foreign. The others would likely be hanged for a demonstration. And the praetheria would be imprisoned for life, at best.

  We could not surrender.

  I screamed a challenge and shot skyward, the crows and falcons I’d summoned winging through the night, sleeping horses now awake and stampeding toward the camp.

  I was feeding the animals images of the hussars when a bullet shattered my wing, dropping me from the sky. I had a moment of despair, etched in sharp lines of fire and pain, before slamming into the ground. Agony burst through me like a firecracker and then, mercifully, nothing.

  Two Red Mantles seized my arms. I tugged and kicked, but their grip was implacable.

  No. There was no spell here for me to break, only human strength—and I was powerless against it. I cast a desperate glance around the ballroom. The throng leered at me, black masks hiding glittering eyes, costumed hoods casting monstrous shadows against the wall. The light spangling off the mirrors was bright and hard and cruel. It seemed impossible that the archduchess had just given the order for my death.

  Catherine wept quietly into Richard’s shoulder and would not look at me.

  “Anna?” Franz Joseph said again, his voice thinner this time, like an echo.

  The guards began hauling me forward, across the floor. William ran toward us, blocking our progress.

  “You can’t take her like this, not without a trial!” William said, his hand going automatically to his hip, where an ornamental scabbard hung, part of a pirate costume.

  His fingers hadn’t even closed around the hilt of the sword when the guard on my right shoved a wicked, curved Turkish knife into William’s gut.

  William doubled over, his hands clutching his stomach, blood blossoming around his fingers.

  “William!” I screamed, but already I was being dragged past him, my sight obscured by the black-and-gold magicians streaming across the room, driving the praetheria before them. A curl of anger tightened inside me, my shadow self stirring with it. I jabbed my elbow at the guard who had struck William. He merely grunted and tightened his grip.

  I started thrashing between them, fighting hard enough to stop our forward momentum. “If he dies, I hope you rot in hell!”

  My left-hand guard released me, and I thought for a moment that I might pull free, but he yanked his pistol from his belt and slammed it into my skull.

  The room went black, then flared white. Pain rang through me, echoing down my spine and pinching my fingers. Before I could catch my breath, the guard had grabbed my arm again and we were moving.

  My blurred eyes caught on a familiar face, frozen in the sea of motion: a girl a half dozen years older than me, her face pale beneath her freckles, her arm raised before her as though to ward off a blow—or cast a spell.

  Ginny.

  The colors of the room swirled around me, melting together like water-paints on paper.

  “Miss Anna,” Ginny cried, dropping her hands and running toward me. I remembered: she had asked for the night off.

  “Did you know about the praetheria?” I was still being hauled toward the doors of the ballroom. My shoulders throbbed from the uncomfortable angle; my wrists burned where the Red Mantles gripped me.

  “They said it was an exercise,” Ginny said. “Lord Ponsonby sent a message from the embassy that any British students were to lend aid. I didn’t know it would be like this. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “Then stop. Don’t do this.” How could Ginny help the magicians, knowing how I felt about the praetheria? After seeing the archduchess denounce me? Given a choice between betraying the ambassador’s order (and the British crown) and betraying me, she’d chosen me. My head throbbed with the aftereffects of the soldier’s blow, and I fought not to vomit right there in the ballroom.

  I thought I heard her say “I’m sorry,” but the sound was lost in the chaos of the room. The air around me was dense with noise: the distressed cries of ladies of quality, being discreetly herded from the room; the shrieks of praetheria, less discreetly herded by magicians and soldiers alike; the murmur of spells.

  Then, at once, I felt it: the magic woven through the air like fog, the faint buzz along my bones. My captors used no spells, but the room was rife with power.

  I only needed to break a single spell. A small magic would suffice to distract my guards and break free, though where I would go, God alone knew.

  I dug my heels against the floor. My captors grunted at the extra resistance, though they did not slow noticeably. Closing my eyes, I reached for the magic as I had when Vasilisa struck me, letting the pain in my arms focus me. I nudged my shadow self, and she bloomed upward, her rage burning through me. I would not die for trying to do the right thing, regardless of the law.

  I snagged a spell in the making from a student as we passed, grimacing through the pounding in my head. By the time the caster reacted with a muffled curse, it was already too late. I snapped the strands of the spell and pulled the released magic to me. The power pummeled me, seeking release, so I acted almost instinctively, shoving the magic into the floor at my feet, through the parquet-patterned wood and down to the stone foundations.

  Months before, when I had broken the Binding spell, I had used a trick Gábor had taught me to let the magic take its own shape, rather than shape it with my will. Now I had only a little magic, but perhaps the same tactic would suffice. The rocks beneath my feet were unnatural—hewn into a form that was not their own, made to hold a shape and a structure not found in nature. I tried to feel something of that grounding, a stillness beneath the wildly churning ballroom.

  “Be as you were,” I whispered to both the magic and the stones, ignoring the wrenching ache in my arms, the rapidly approaching door.

  A breath, and then the f
loor shifted, the rocks churning in their foundation. My guards and I tumbled to the floor. I recovered soonest, having expected something, and scrambled to my feet. I darted across the room, toward the doors leading into the garden.

  The wood beneath me lifted and fell like an ocean wave, and all across the room people shook. Some managed to keep their feet; most toppled. When the wave reached the far wall, everything seemed to pause for a moment. Then the marble pillars quivered, the windows rattled in their frames, and glass rained down.

  Screams echoed across the room. Some part of me winced, but the greater part felt a savage kick of satisfaction. Let the archduchess try to misjudge me again. A few praetheria limped through the open windows, and I cheered them silently.

  I dodged fallen masqueraders, trying to keep my feet as a second wave rolled across the floor. A curious low grinding sounded, and then a massive section of the outer wall collapsed, dust and rock falling into the ballroom amid more screams.

  A gust of air filled the room. A gold-flecked, black dragon flexed its impossibly long wings in the new opening, his enormous shadow falling across the crowd. He shook, and the walls nearest him trembled, then crumbled down, broadening the opening I’d triggered. A pair of praetheria scrambled through it. When a soldier attempted to follow, the dragon blocked him with wide, sharp wings.

  I knew that dragon: Hunger, in his sárkány form. Hope flickered briefly inside me, just as a long draconic arm shot in my direction and claws curled around my torso, plucking me from the ground.

  All around me marble and mortar lay strewn across the floor; people and praetheria were tangled together in knots, a few struggling to rise, many motionless. Soldiers—some in the red-lined capes of Dragović’s men, some wearing the red and gold of the Hapsburg guards—raised rifles to fire.

  In the center of the room, unscathed and furious, the archduchess stood watching. She shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out. A faint buzz tickled my skin—a spell, seeking after us. Ignoring the pain pulsing through my shoulders and tightening my scalp, I reached for the spell. Dark spots dancing in my vision, I concentrated for a moment on the fine lines I could sense stemming from somewhere in the center of the room, then I snapped them. I grasped for the released energy, but in my pain-fogged state, I missed. The newly released energy stirred up a vortex around us.

  Glass shards stung my cheeks, and I threw my arms up to protect my eyes. Hunger roared again and surged upward, lifting me from the floor in a sickening lurch and swirl. I swallowed hard, and then we were through the wind and the glass and soaring through the gap in the wall toward the distant pinprick of stars.

  I am not certain how long we flew: the air was cold, this high above the ground, and the seconds stretched out infinitely. At some point I passed out from pain. When I came to, we were far away from the city lights, flying over patchwork fields illuminated by the full moon.

  At last Hunger set down in a wooded area. When he released me, I staggered before sitting abruptly on the ground. My dress was torn and dirty, but it no longer seemed to matter. My life was forfeit. Mátyás and Grandmama were dead, maybe William too. Noémi and Gábor were gone, my father and James so far away they might as well be on the moon. Catherine despaired of me, and Ginny had betrayed me. I could not go back to Vienna, or to England. I might go to Hungary, but the archduchess might claim that harboring a fugitive justified an Austrian invasion.

  I was briefly sick in a bush. When I straightened and wiped my mouth, Hunger was back in human shape, his gold eyes resting on me with something akin to compassion. Unlike my cousin, he emerged from his shifting fully dressed—a small mercy for which I was grateful, even if it was only an illusion. My frayed nerves could not handle another shock.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for rescuing me.”

  “I seem to have made a habit of it.”

  Despite my injuries, I stiffened. “I am not a damsel in distress.”

  Hunger laughed, then winced. “It is not weakness to need help. Even the most powerful among us need allies.” I saw now that he was wounded too: small gashes across his cheeks and hands; a larger cut, bleeding sluggishly, across his thigh.

  “You’re hurt!”

  “It’s no matter. We’ve healers among our number. Come.” He held out a hand to me.

  I crossed my arms across my chest. “I’ve not forgiven you yet.”

  “I neither need nor want your forgiveness. But don’t be foolish. You’re half sick with pain.”

  At that, I let Hunger help me rise, though I swallowed another scream at the lance of fire that shot through me when he tugged on my arm. My head throbbed in time with my halting steps, the cost of spell-breaking compounding my physical injuries.

  Hunger led me into the gloom. As my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light under the trees, I began to realize this was not a randomly chosen destination: among the trees were clear signs of habitation. Small huts woven of grass and moss nestled in the roots of great trees. I thought, at first, they might be children’s playthings, but eyes glimmered at me from shadowed doorways. Farther in, the huts grew larger and more intricate. I passed a carefully planned structure of mud and twigs, with smooth river stones forming whorls and waves along the walls and thick straw plaits for a roof. A few paces more and I spotted a sod room carved out of a hillock, daisies springing up around the wooden doorway.

  “What is this place?” I asked, but Hunger didn’t answer. I guessed it to be some kind of praetherian camp—but these homes had not been thrown together in a hurry. Whoever lived here had been here for some time.

  Hunger set me down on a moss-covered hollow at the base of a tree. The moss seemed to shift to better fit my form, though I might have imagined that: my body ached so fiercely that the moss felt like the best of down pillows. I closed my eyes, trying to will sleep to wash away the burning in my head and arms.

  When Hunger returned a few moments later, I blinked up at him to find things crawling across his hands. They looked like a curious cross between a moth and a grub: wingless, but with the soft covering of a moth and wide, feathered antennae. He plucked them one at a time from his hands and placed them on my shoulders. I tried not to cringe or cry out—Hunger’s amused eyes told me he clearly expected some reaction from me. Only my gloved fingers tightened into fists. Two of the grubs began creeping down my arms, snuffling at the skin below my sleeves. A third began climbing the nape of my neck. As the fourth slipped down the collar of my dress, an entirely involuntary gasp escaped me.

  “Get it off!”

  “Give them time to work.”

  At that, I stopped attending to the crawling sensation across my skin and tried to observe the deeper impact. Where the grubs’ snuffling anterior touched my skin, it warmed briefly and then the pain lost its sharpness. It was a slow, agonizing process—made worse because the longer the creatures climbed across me, the more I yearned to tear my skin off. But at last the pain had eased enough that I no longer felt like retching every time I moved. Hunger, reading something in my face, pulled three of the creatures off me and set them in the brush beside the tree, where they vanished.

  I insisted that Hunger let me remove the fourth creature myself—the one beneath the bodice of my dress. The grublike body was soft, and not unpleasant, but I was glad to be free of it all the same. Exhaustion washed over me.

  A short, squat praetherian, as much mushroom as living being, waddled up bearing a wooden bowl filled with steaming broth and vegetables. I reached for the bowl before remembering I was in a praetherian camp—and I knew what happened to folk who ate faerie food.

  Hunger watched me impatiently. “There’s nothing in it to hurt you.”

  My definition of “hurt” and Hunger’s might be vastly different. A spell that would hold me in thrall for the rest of my life might not technically hurt me, but I wished to avoid it all the same.

  “I’m not hungry.” My stomach growled. I was hungry, but at that moment I craved sleep even more than f
ood.

  “You’re a terrible liar.” He sighed. “You must eat something. Vasilisa would insist I force-feed you, but I haven’t quite her vindictiveness. I’ll send someone for apples—from human orchards, so you needn’t look at me like that.”

  “Thank you,” I said meekly.

  Hunger disappeared again, and I lay back in the moss-covered hollow and curled my arm beneath my head. I had meant to wait for the return of the apples, but a soft, honey-scented breeze wafted over me, and I closed my eyes and slept.

  I woke periodically in the grey half-light before dawn, blinking at the creatures marching past: shining vila, hirsute giants, more of the tree-men with their craggy faces and moss beards, a dire wolf with frosted shoulders. They walked in and out of my dreams, blurring the line between sleeping and waking.

  It was not until the sun washed fully across my face that my mind woke. Someone had covered me with a cloak woven of leaves and flowers during the night. As praetheria continued to pass me, I realized I had not dreamed them. Many of them were armed. Some with clubs and rocks, others with bright swords and steel-tipped lances, one or two with guns.

  The archduchess had only made her announcement regarding the praetheria the night before. Had the creatures armed themselves so quickly? Or had they anticipated such a move?

  Alert now, I rose, letting the flowered cloak drop at my feet. I followed a centaur to a clearing in the woods where perhaps two dozen praetheria had gathered. I watched for a moment as the centaur rode among them, directing first one and then another how to hold the weapon they carried.

  They were preparing for war. I could not blame them—I had seen the corpses in the laboratory; I had heard the archduchess’s orders in the ballroom. But my heart quailed at the thought of more fighting. Of Catherine, pregnant and vulnerable in the city.

  Hunger materialized beside me. “I warned your Congress that we would not go peaceably into another cage.”