by Rosalyn Eves
Tiny bullets pinged against my hide.
Gábor’s voice echoed in my head: “Mátyás, don’t! Come back to us.” But then his name fuzzed in my mind, drifted away like smoke. The sense that some of the humans below were familiar—even beloved—receded, and I was left only with a yawning need burning through me, wiping out any sense of who I was or had been.
The ache of that need drove away my lingering pain. I seized three or four of the scattering, screaming beings below with my heads, and their blood ran down my tongues and spilled across my chins. Some of the blood was warm and salt and copper: human blood. Some of it was cooler, sour with a faint floral note.
All of it fed my appetite.
Fire burned up my leg, a bright note piercing me even through the blood haze. I looked down, determined to devour the author of my pain, and saw a girl, incandescent with flame, holding fast to my ankle.
Her name darted into my heart.
Zhivka.
I came back to myself in a rush, halting the heads, letting them melt back into one, letting myself shrink back into my own body.
I blinked, and my hands were human again, with blood beneath my nails. I wiped my arm against my wet mouth, and it came away scarlet. All around me were bodies. Most were soldiers, but one of the tree-creatures lay halved before me, and I dropped to my knees and vomited across the grass.
I gagged until there was nothing left, until my empty stomach wrung itself out, but the sour taste of what I’d done lingered.
“Thank you,” I gasped to Zhivka, who’d let the fire flicker out and now sat on the grass beside me, one hand to the back of her head. “Where are the rest of the soldiers?”
“Dead.” Gábor rubbed his hand against his forehead, leaving a streak of black gunpowder. He held a knife in his free hand. “Or fled. What you did—it was terrifying.”
I looked around. The tents of our campsite were flattened, the cauldron over the fire upturned, the fire itself out and smoking. Only a few of us remained: Bahadır, nursing his shoulder; the lidérc, meeting my gaze with an almost defiant one of her own; the domovoi weeping, rocking back and forth beside a fallen tree.
“And ours?”
“Also fled.”
“Maybe you should go too.” Pain rattled through my skull; horror made my blood run sluggish.
Zhivka shook her head. “You are táltos, as the Lady said. And where should we go?”
I waved my hand. “I don’t know. Find the Lady. Find shelter elsewhere, with someone who won’t—” I gagged again, remembering the bitter taste of the leshy blood.
“You will learn control,” she said.
But to learn control meant summoning the Lady again, meant swallowing my pride. Though that bitterness could be nothing compared to the guilt that threatened to swamp me.
*
We spent the next few hours seeing to the wounded—though not before I had scavenged some clothes from a dead soldier.
Gábor knew enough of medical science to dig the bullet from Bahadır’s shoulder, and Zhivka helped cauterize the wound.
Gábor and I together wrapped Zhivka’s injured knee, and Gábor used a bit of magic to set the shattered bone.
When the most dire wounds had been tended, I devoured a full loaf of bread and a dozen eggs. Zhivka offered me a slab of meat, but the sight of it had set my gorge rising. The demon hunger had left me, but I was weak from the aftereffects of shifting.
The dead we laid out in state, for burial in the evening when it had cooled. The tree-creature I had slain had already been claimed by his partner, who had taken the body away to bury the roots and set the rest adrift on water. I did not know if the leshy would return, but I doubted it. I could not blame him: I did not want to stay with myself either.
I would have moved camp, if I could—no one wanted to spend the night where so many had died. But I couldn’t risk moving those who were injured. When we’d dealt with the most pressing needs of the living and the dead, I went to find the guards who had not returned. Already, my heart was weighted down with what I feared I’d find.
Bahadır struggled after me. “Take me with you.”
“But your arm—”
“Will not interfere with my ability to walk. Please.”
I walked onto the grasslands prepared to search for some time, ready to shift if we could not find them quickly. But in the end we needed neither time nor shifting. A clutch of vultures circled over our camp—a few of their brothers drifted lazily to the south. When I focused my animal sense on them, I could feel the shivered excitement of a find.
We found the other guard first. He’d been shot by the soldiers in his stomach and leg, wounds that would not have been immediately fatal. I hoped it had not taken him long to die.
I watched Bahadır closely. His face had frozen, as though he were preemptively steeling himself against what we might discover.
Ákos we found slumped near a small trickle of water, with a single bullet to his forehead. He was still smiling, as though he’d been taunting the soldiers when he’d been caught.
I knelt on the ground beside him and gently closed his eyes. Then I sobbed, as I had not done since my mother died.
The night after the massacre, I slept poorly. I kept jerking awake to stare at the stars, wishing I could be as distant and impartial as those shining bodies. Instead, I ached with grief, my eyes raw with rubbing and tears. Not exactly the dignified look for someone with the lofty title of “King of Crows.”
Most times I woke to weeping, usually Bahadır, curled in a tight, miserable ball on the far side of the fire. Even after seeing my mother and Noémi through mourning after my father’s death, I still didn’t know what to do with grief (mine, or others’). But as I lay there, practicing my usual trick of ignorance, I heard Gábor’s murmuring voice and Bahadır’s soft reply.
Gábor and Zhivka and I traded watches that night, on guard against the soldiers’ return and ensuring that none of the wounded worsened during the night. I had the last watch, and though sleep was fitful, I kept returning to it, knowing the next day would be hard enough without being sleepless.
Less than an hour before my turn as sentry, I fell back into a troubled sleep. I dreamed of flying across the grasslands to a stand of trees beside a river snaking through the puszta. In the distance, the vast spread of the world tree unfurled against the sky. A small pack of wolves hunted, urged on by a young woman with pale hair and wood-rot eyes.
Lords and ladies might use dogs to hunt boars and deer—what would one hunt with wolves? My curiosity piqued, I flew onward, trying to spot their prey. The plains were mostly empty, but far ahead someone walked alone, a pair of falcons winging overhead.
I swooped lower, and the whole earth slid sideways.
“Mátyás!”
I opened my eyes to Zhivka’s white face. She was shaking my shoulder.
“Fires burn bright,” she said, releasing me. “I thought you might be dead.”
“I was only sleeping.”
She shook her head. “You weren’t. Your breath was so shallow I was not sure you lived. And you were so still, your face so empty, as though you had gone very far away inside yourself.”
“I was dreaming,” I said, less sure than before.
“Before the Binding,” Zhivka said, “being a táltos was not so rare. Some were dream walkers, able to travel with their spirit from one dreamer to the next, or simply send their soul out as they dreamed. Are you sure it was only a dream?”
In that moment I wasn’t sure of anything. I’d dreamed of hussars hunting us, and they had come. I’d seen Noémi in chains. And who was it the pale-haired woman hunted? If my dreams were truth, then it had not mattered that I’d stayed away from Vienna to protect Noémi—she was imperiled all the same.
*
We packed up camp the next morning before the soldiers could return. Gábor worked alongside me, folding blankets and stuffing them into canvas bags for transport. The wounded we dispatched
to sympathetic farmers nearby, with funds to cover their care.
“Where will you go?” I asked Gábor.
“With you,” he said. “Kossuth sent me to find you and bring you back to Buda-Pest.”
The landscape of the kingdom was changing. Gábor had said war was already at our door in the south. From what I knew of Austria, I suspected it would not be long before she joined in, desperate to reclaim Hungary. I was, and always would be, a patriot. But—
“I can’t go back. Not yet.” I could not continue being the King of Crows, a highwayman who occasionally performed along the roadside. That life was gone. These soldiers might have left, but there would be others.
And the praetheria. I had told the Lady I did not mean to be a hero, but I could not stand by and see them dragged off to a camp without trying to help—a camp that I suspected would be little better than a prison. I’d seen how the majority of humans treated the creatures: as though they were something monstrous, something better destroyed than left alone.
If being táltos was my destiny, it was not something I was eager to embrace. But maybe it was time to stop running from it. Maybe if I had not refused to learn what I could do, I would not have lost myself to my dragon shape. I would not have killed indiscriminately. If I had understood my dreaming, perhaps I would have known the soldiers were coming, and Ákos and the others would still be alive.
I refused to live in the past. That had destroyed my mother.
I would mourn Ákos and the others, and then I would move on. The stories said the world tree was hidden from the eyes of most men, but I was not most men, and I would find it again. I would find a way to swallow my pride, if I choked on it, and beg the Lady to teach me what I needed to know.
I might fail.
Probably I would, since my luck seemed to have run out of late.
But I could no longer live with doing nothing.
“I mean to find the Lady. I need to know more about what I am than I currently do.”
“I’ll come—” Gábor broke off at a high keening that soared through the camp.
I did not look up at first: the betyárok and the praetheria between them had dozens of ways of mourning, and the sounds of someone sobbing had marked time ever since the soldiers had come.
This time, though, the keening did not rise and drop off. This time, it continued to escalate, joined by more and more voices, a wave that crested toward us.
I looked up.
The second of the tree-creatures had come back. He carried something pale and drooping in his arms, and his voice sounded in a long, hollow cry like wind tearing through a mountain valley.
I did not recognize her at first. Her face was colorless and still, without the beatific glow she usually wore. But when the tree-creature drew closer, her features resolved into something familiar.
He carried the Lady in his arms. When he reached me, he laid her gently on the ground—some high, holy sacrifice laid before a priest.
But the Lady was not a sacrifice I had wanted, and I was no saint.
Gábor knelt beside the still form, his fingers brushing her pulse. He looked a question at me. “I can’t feel anything. Who is she?”
“She is dead,” the tree-creature said, breaking off his mournful howl. “Her light is gone. I cannot feel it.”
Horror made my tongue stiff and clumsy. “She was the Boldogasszony,” I said. “Mother-goddess of Hungary.” She had chivvied me and set me on an impossible task, and I had hated her for it. But I had also welcomed her belief in me, just as one welcomes the secure belief of a priest in his faith, even as one finds their own faith faltering.
Now she was dead, and I felt unmoored, unanchored, lost. Who—or what?—could kill an immortal?
The heavy summer air clung to the hair and skin of everyone in the camp. All of us turned toward the Lady, who had once walked among us, drawing worship from those assembled as easily as one might draw water from a full well.
“Who could have done this?” Gábor asked, echoing my own question.
“Only another immortal,” the lidérc said. Her tongue flickered between her lips.
The shock of the Lady’s death kept radiating through me, a drop of water followed by increasing ripples. I had spurned her help—but I had always felt her offer there, waiting if I chose to take it up. Now it was too late. Even if Hadúr could teach me some of what the Lady knew, her loss was like a familiar trail covered with snow in an avalanche, a comfortable landscape made strange and treacherous.
We buried the Lady on the puszta, beneath a mossy old oak, standing solitary sentinel. Far overhead, I could sense her turul birds circling, their distress clear even at this distance. Go home, I thought at them. Tell Hadúr.
The leshy who had carried the Lady into camp sang, a long, wordless melody that curled through my bones. Though the summer afternoon was warm, my hands were cold, the tips of my fingers white. My rebirth had been defined, in part, by running away from the Lady. With her death, what was I?
As we walked back to the camp, somber and silent, I saw again my dream from the night before, a pale-haired girl hunting near the world tree. What immortal had killed the Lady—and why?
“Gábor, Zhivka, do you know of any praetheria who look like a young girl with hair the color of old bones?”
“Anna has a friend, Vasilisa, who looks like that,” Gábor said.
“Have you seen her?” Zhivka asked, her eyes dilating. Beside her, the lidérc shifted her weight from one goose foot to the other.
“In a dream only,” I said. The cold ripples from the Lady’s death grew deeper, wider. “She is friends with Anna?”
“I think so,” Gábor said. “I saw them frequently together. Why?”
“We need to go back to Vienna.” Later, I would find Hadúr, ask him to teach me what he could. But for now, I needed to know that Anna and Noémi were safe.
Sunlight streamed bright and thick across my face, like a small child demanding my attention. I blinked at it irritably and shifted onto my side. Pain screamed through me, just as memory returned. Breaking Vasilisa from the prison, attempting to escape.
Falling.
I should have died.
I could not waste time on wonder—how I had lived, how I had come to be in a bed, wherever this was. I had to ensure Catherine was well. I had to leave warning about the praetheria.
I had to run.
I wrested myself upright and flung the bedcovers away from my legs, coughing at the smoke fumes still heavy in the air. Someone had removed my dress from the night before—it lay in shredded ribbons on the floor—and replaced it with a large nightshirt. I swung my shockingly bare legs down, stood, and nearly fell back on the bed. The whole room swam, a swirl of black stars and colors.
The door opened, and a young man with dark hair, a robust mustache, and military trousers peeked in. “Ah, capital! You’re awake.”
He looked exhausted, the dark circles under his eyes a pointed contrast to the cheer in his tone. I wondered if it was his room I was occupying—and if he had been the one to disrobe me. I pushed the thought aside. I did not have time to indulge in embarrassment.
“The fires?” I asked.
He rubbed a soot-stained hand across his forehead, his eyes flicking briefly to my legs. “Contained, for the moment.”
Thank God. I pulled the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around my lower body.
“There is still fighting by the university barracks. Bloody students never know when they’re beat.” He coughed. “Are you well? Those creatures damned near carried you off. Lucky our spell-casters were able to drive them away.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “Very lucky. Look, I’m afraid I must be going. Can you find me some clothes?”
He frowned. “Er, this is a soldier’s barracks, ma’am. The hospitals were full last night with burn victims. I’m afraid we don’t have the kinds of clothes you require. Only tell me who to summon to fetch you home.”
I thou
ght of Richard’s face at the ball, white with shock, of Catherine weeping. Catherine might worry for me, but it was not the worry this soldier expected.
“Then bring me men’s clothes. Those will do just as well, and really it’s quite urgent.”
His frown deepened. “That would hardly be suitable, Miss…”
“An—” I began, “Anikó Kovács.” I couldn’t give him my real name—doubtless the soldiers all knew about my sentencing at the Schönbrunn ball. Though I could have come up with a different surname than Gábor’s. My cheeks burned. “Is there any food to be had?” I switched tactics, wondering how much I might play upon the boy’s sympathies. “I’ve not eaten much in several days. I was captive, you see.”
His face darkened. “Those blighted praetheria. My commanding officer will wish to speak to you later, about what you know of those creatures and their current camp.”
Realization slammed into me so hard it left me breathless. You will not like it if we have to hunt you down when this is over, Hunger had said. The praetheria would return for me—the question was not if, but when. Perhaps they were already winging their way back to the city.
I paced the room, restless. “Tell your officer that Austria must not be drawn into war with Hungary and Russia. The praetheria are waiting for that—they mean to attack when the armies are weak.”
He snorted. “I should like to see them try. Don’t worry—you’ll be safe here. We drove them away last night, didn’t we? And our magicians broke your fall just in time.”
Only because the praetheria didn’t wish a pitched battle, and Hunger had been injured.
I had to get away and find someone who would believe me.
I clasped my hands together. “Some food, if you please?”
“Oh yes, of course!” The young man disappeared at last.
I allowed myself one sigh of relief, and then I sprang into action. I pulled open the drawers from the narrow chest near the bed. Underthings were tossed untidily together, and I slammed the drawer shut. The second drawer proved more promising, with a couple of folded shirts. I snagged one and then opened the wardrobe. Regimentals lined neatly along the single bar. I didn’t want a uniform: I’d be far too conspicuous. At the back of the closet I found what I was searching for: a pair of everyday trousers.