by Rosalyn Eves
The moment was perfect: the sunshine mellowing the landscape, the murmuring water and the faintest hint of real danger to give the story a thrill. I found myself storing up details to share with Freddy before remembering, with devastating suddenness, that Freddy no longer cared to hear such details from me.
I gripped my hands together, my nails pricking my palms.
A slight catching sensation, as if the air about me had thickened, and the illusion shifted. Like dense fog parting to reveal the brick and balustrades of a building hidden only moments before, I caught a glimpse of something underneath the lovely bright maiden: another woman, her eyes like embers and her hair tangled around her head like some drowned Ophelia. Her mouth opened, exposing pointed teeth, and I caught an echo of a song, like something familiar but forgotten.
I gasped.
Herr Steinberg shot a sharp look at me. “Are you well?”
“Did you see that?” I asked. “The other Lorelei maiden?”
“The other maiden?” he asked, removing his glasses to look at me more closely. “But there is just the one Lorelei.” He paused for a moment, inspecting my face. His usual pleasant expression was gone, replaced with fierce intensity. “What did you see, Miss Anna?”
I glanced back at the rock, now behind us. I saw only a smiling face and a fall of golden hair.
What had I seen?
“Nothing,” I said at last. “A shadow.”
Herr Steinberg did not allude again to that episode, but in the weeks following, I caught him watching me more than once, a worried line drawn across his forehead.
We arrived at last in Vienna, and Grandmama insisted upon buying me new dresses—lovely, grown-up gowns with full bell sleeves and skirts that swept the floor when I walked. The dresses necessitated the purchase of a new, stiffer corset: when the stays were cinched tight, I could scarcely draw breath.
We attended the opera one night, the opera house as splendid as I had imagined, a riot of gilt and red velvet and heavy curtains over the stage. I smoothed the shell-pink satin of my skirts, unease drawing cold fingers up my spine. What if someone were to recognize me for what I was: a young lady who had been sent from London in disgrace? An impostor? I forgot my fear during the performance, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, but it returned again during the interlude, as a steady stream of visitors came to our box. When none of them perceived anything untoward about me, I began to relax. And when one of Grandmama’s old school friends invited us to a ball the following night, it confirmed the evening as one of the most pleasant of my life.
Though I was not technically “out” in society, Mama had given Grandmama tacit permission—that is, she had not forbidden it—for me to attend social events in the hope I might acquire some polish.
The next night, Ginny buzzed around our rented rooms in growing excitement, helping me dress for my first ball. Standing before my mirror, an emerald silk taffeta gown pooling about my feet, with heavy lace falls at my throat and wrists, I scarcely recognized myself. The skirt was gathered and tucked into elaborate poufs, and it billowed around me when I walked. A mixture of excitement and terror prickled through me. I fingered my topaz necklace and wondered how much it mattered that I was not also adorned with a soul sign, the social symbol of magical worth.
“You look lovely,” Ginny said. “Those German lords will be fighting to dance with you.”
I grasped her hand. “I wish you were coming with me.”
She shook her head, her ginger curls dancing. “Nay, I’d not fit in with such company.”
“Perhaps I shan’t either.”
“Nonsense. Your blood is just as good as theirs.”
But not my magic.
Ginny whirled away to fetch my shoes and did not notice my failure to respond. I may have been born Luminate, but Mama had made it clear to me that though I might be tolerated by society, I would never be embraced.
Herr Steinberg appeared promptly to usher us to the ball, in a neoclassical mansion near the Hofburg Palace in the center of the walled city. Someone had gone to great effort to construct an illusion guiding guests into the building: either the family was extraordinarily powerful or they had powerful friends. Over my head, branches of gold, silver, and palest green trees stretched brittle fingers. Exotic birds flew from tree to tree: a phoenix with a tail of flame, a gigantic golden eagle, a bejeweled nightingale. Pale fire circled the entrance.
A small crowd of commoners gathered, watching the illusions with wide eyes and open mouths. Two guards stood at the fringes, ensuring no one pressed too close to the Luminate entering the building. A thin girl, only a little younger than myself, darted past one of the guards and rushed toward me, her hands outstretched.
“A kreuzer, miss?”
My hand dipped automatically to my reticule. The girl’s dress was ragged and her cheeks bore the hollowed-out look of someone who did not eat frequently enough. But before I could press a few small coins into the girl’s hands, a wall of air shot past me, striking the girl and knocking her to the paving stones.
I sprang forward and crouched down beside the girl, trying to help her up. She shrank back from my hand, her dilated eyes fixed on something behind me. I whirled to see one of the guards trotting toward us, his mustache quivering. Herr Steinberg followed him.
“Leave her be. The emperor Ferdinand has issued orders that the lower classes are not to disturb Luminate events. This girl should know better,” Herr Steinberg said.
“But she’s starving,” I said. “A few coins won’t hurt me at all.”
“If you give money to one, we’ll have hordes descending upon us. She must learn her place.”
He held out his arm to escort me toward the gleaming illusions where Grandmama waited, dismayed. I ignored him, turning back toward the girl, but she had already melted into the crowd. I scanned the faces, looking for hers, and found row upon row of glittering eyes. These people hated the Luminate—and feared us too. I am worried about the gap between Luminate and others, Papa had said.
I let Herr Steinberg lead me back to Grandmama. We stepped through the fiery doorway, embraced by light but not heat, and left the streets behind us. Our short, rotund hostess smiled and kissed Grandmama’s cheeks in the European manner when we were introduced. Then she turned to me, patted my cheek, and told me I was ein schönes Mädchen.
The theme from the entry continued in the ballroom, with lights picking out the shapes of enormous trees on the ballroom walls. Another phoenix swam through the air overhead. I accompanied Grandmama to a chair near one wall and sat beside her. As the music swelled around me and dancers swirled past, I could not seem to shake my encounter on the streets. The divide the guards wanted to enforce between that girl and me was as artificial as the illusions gracing this ballroom: the product of money and magic. But for an accident of birth, I might have been her. She might have been me. I shivered, feeling alien in my own skin.
A spotty young gentleman approached us, before halting a few paces from me, his eyes fixing on the bare spot above my collarbone where my soul sign should have been. Abruptly, he swung around and marched off.
Grandmama put her hand over mine and squeezed. I shrugged. I did not care if a spotty gentleman preferred not to dance with me. The music eddied and fell around me, and my feet tapped to the rhythm. The hostess brought a tall young gentleman to us to be introduced. He bowed, and professed himself flattered, but I marked the way his eyes lingered on my absent soul sign, and he did not ask me to dance.
Only one man asked me to dance, an acquaintance of Herr Steinberg’s. He was large and overweight, and nearly as old as Papa. Gentleman or not, his eyes crawled over my body in a way that made my flesh creep. As he had trouble keeping his hands in the right places, I struggled free of his sweaty grip before the waltz had finished and returned to Grandmama. Better not to dance, I thought, than to endure that again.
I spied Herr Steinberg on the far side of the room, deep in conversation with a man of middling height. As if he felt
my eyes on him, the second man looked across at me. His eyes were unusually light for his dark complexion. Even when his gaze had moved on, a curious crawling sensation still lingered between my shoulder blades.
Halfway through the evening, a mild tremor shook the crowd. I sprang to my feet to see the source of the disturbance: a small party had entered the ballroom, and the entire company seemed to drop as one, sweeping deep curtsies and bows. I curtsied too, my mind spinning. This must be the Hapsburg royal family. The eldest gentleman, dripping with gold medallions on his coat, must be Emperor Ferdinand, who had given the order that the lower class was not to disturb Luminate events. Beside him was a handsome boy about my age. I asked Grandmama who he was.
“That’s the archduke Franz Josef. He’ll be emperor after his father and uncle.”
Grandmama added that the rather square-faced gentleman behind the emperor was Prince Metternich, the head of the Austrian Circle and the driving power behind the Hapsburg throne for nearly forty years. I shivered a little, resolving to do nothing to draw the prince’s attention to me. I had thus far escaped the notice of the Circle in Europe. I intended to keep it that way.
I turned my attention back to the young archduke. What must it be like, I wondered, to be so young and have your future written so clearly? The Austrian empire was perhaps the most powerful nation in Europe, stretching from the Illyrian coast to northern Italy, across Austria and Bohemia, and into Hungary and Poland, almost to Russia. This boy would someday rule all of it.
I knew a sharp, savage prick of envy. I wished my own future were so certain.
A pair of society matrons walked past us. A tall, thin woman in a silver gown said, “I cannot comprehend why Lady Isen allows such a thing in her home.”
“Shocking, indeed. Barrens should be kept away from decent society. We know they exist, of course, but no one wants to have their existence paraded before our eyes.” The second woman, in a pink taffeta gown much too young for her, fluttered a fan at the sausage curls by her ears.
My blood seemed to freeze, then flooded my face with a rush.
Grandmama squeezed my hand again. “The Austria-Hungary I remember was not like this.”
She was not alone in overhearing the insult. A young red-haired man approached us, his blue eyes blazing with indignation. Unlike the others, he spared no glance at my missing soul sign. He walked directly to me, caught my hand, and pulled me into the waltz just forming without waiting for a proper introduction.
“You!” I said.
“Me,” said William Skala, the Scottish radical from London. His tone was lightly mocking.
“What are you doing here?” I thought of the crowds kept back from the gala by Luminate guards. “How did you get in?”
“I’ve been trying to find you for weeks. I asked about you after our encounter in Hyde Park. I heard you broke your sister’s spells. And that day in Hyde Park, you broke mine.” He laughed at the surprise in my face. “Yes, for my sins, my father was a minor Polish count. I was Confirmed like the best of the Luminate, and I admit I find small magics useful purely for showmanship. As I am technically Luminate, I’m grudgingly allowed through the doors. But the Luminate world and I have no great love for one another.”
He had asked after me—and found me in the heart of Europe. If he could find me so easily, could the Circle? The ballroom, which had been mildly warm, closed around me. I tried to pull my hand free, but his fingers tightened on mine.
“Don’t go. I need to talk to you. We could use someone like you. Every revolution in the last two hundred years has failed, except Napoleon’s conquest of France. Do you know why?”
Of course I knew. “The Circle keep us safe,” I said. It was a prayer I’d learned in childhood. “The Binding preserve us.”
“The Circle doesn’t merit your prayers. There’s nothing divine about it.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You break spells. I want to see if you can break the Binding.”
I nearly stumbled. Only Mr. Skala’s grip kept me from crashing to the floor. “Even if I could do that, what could you possibly hope to achieve?” I said before remembering that Papa thought society would be better without the Binding too.
Mr. Skala curled his lip. “You’ve been brainwashed by the Circle like every other Luminate child. I’d hoped for better from you—I’ve heard your father is a man of sense.”
He swirled me past Herr Steinberg, who watched us with a slight frown. “Understand this: the Circle uses the Binding to restrict who has access to magic, and its members use that control to rule as despots everywhere. Even in England, though the Queen tempers them some. The Circle wants you to believe that magic belongs solely to noble bloodlines. But this is not true. If magic were strictly hereditary, it would have made its way beyond Luminate families by now, through marriage outside the class or infidelity. But we see magic just within Luminate ranks. Why? Magic doesn’t care who—or what—wields it.
“But the Circle does. Somehow, the Binding spell pulls magic from everyone who might have inherited a gift for it, Luminate and commoner alike. The Circle uses its power over the Binding to control even the Luminate, shunting them into Circle-approved orders, so no individual Luminate is powerful enough to challenge it.
“Think. Only the American colonists have won independence from a Circle-governed nation, and then only because the Circle never did figure out how to anchor the Binding spell across the ocean. In the colonies, magic is a matter of aptitude, not wealth.”
Mr. Skala spun me in an energetic whirl, and I struggled to keep up both mentally and physically. “But why does no one speak of this?”
“They do—in my crowd.” He grinned. “In Luminate society, the only ones who care are too cowed by the Circle to speak.”
He continued. “You must see the Binding is key. Without the Binding trapping magic, power could belong to anyone, irrespective of wealth or bloodline. If we break the Binding, we strike at the heart of the Circle’s power. That would be the very advantage we need to overthrow them: here, in Hungary, in Poland, in France, in England.”
I glanced sharply around. If anyone had overheard us, he risked imprisonment for treason. Or worse. “How do you know all of this?”
“You don’t believe me, do you? I’ve studied for a very long time.” A lurking smile lit his eyes. “Also, I’ve spoken with your father, and others like him.”
“My father?” The kernel of doubt he’d planted in Hyde Park was growing now, swelling in discomfiting ways. If I had been lied to about Luminate magic, what other lies did I unwittingly believe? And why had Papa spoken so frankly with Mr. Skala but hid the truth from his own children? Was he, as Mr. Skala charged, afraid of the Circle’s repercussions? Or perhaps his silence was Mama’s doing. “Even if you were right, the Binding can’t be broken—least of all by someone without magic. If you’ve asked about me, surely you know that too.”
“I heard the rumors. But I don’t believe them. Whatever you are, you’re not without magic. Not as they would have you believe.”
“You know nothing about me.” I met his gaze with a challenge in my own. “I heard your speech, you know. But no matter how thrilling the idea of an egalitarian society, I don’t believe you can do it, not without more destruction than your cause is worth. Even if I could help you, I wouldn’t. I don’t wish to overset Luminate society—I want to be part of it.”
He glanced around the ballroom, at the men and women who had shunned me because I bore no soul sign. He lifted one eyebrow, and I flushed.
“Not society like this, perhaps, but there might be others….” I trailed off, feeling suddenly ridiculous.
“They won’t make you one of them, you know. No matter what you sacrifice.”
The fact that he was likely right infuriated me. “I don’t want to discuss this.”
Mr. Skala twirled me out with a flourish. “As you wish,” he said, turning the conversation to unexceptionable things until the waltz finishe
d.
Mr. Skala returned me to Grandmama with gentlemanly correctness, but any pleasure I had in the ball was ruined. When I asked to leave early, Grandmama did not demur.
As our carriage rattled away through the darkened streets, Herr Steinberg said, “You ought to be more careful, Miss Arden, whom you associate with before a roomful of Luminate. Radicals like William Skala could ruin you more surely than any lack of magic.”
Our route from Vienna into Hungary wandered through wooded hills before skirting Lake Fertő and emerging onto a marsh known as the Hanság. As the road threaded through spindly thickets, I watched a goshawk circle over the rushes before plunging toward its prey. A mile or two farther, and a purple heron moseyed long-legged among the reeds. My heart sank. Besides the birds, there was nothing here.
No society.
I was to be immured at the edge of nowhere. Somehow, such isolation seemed all the more painful coming on the heels of my failure at the ball in Vienna. I had not given up my hope of finding a way into society, but such an event seemed increasingly unlikely.
I fell asleep to Grandmama pointing out sights to Herr Steinberg and woke to the sound of our carriage wheels bumping down a poplar-lined road. My eyelids felt made of fine grit.
Eszterháza is not an estate one approaches by slow degrees, winding down a long driveway before bursting through the trees and beholding the house in all its glory. Instead, our carriage rattled directly to huge iron gates covered with a flourish of leaves.
Beyond the gates, two great semicircular wings curved around either side of the courtyard, leading to an immense, four-storied façade. Two flights of marble stairs swept up to a balcony. A large clock was set into a triangular wall above the third floor, beneath a profusion of figures and flags and weapons. I tried to count the windows blinking at us in the setting sun, but gave up well before one hundred.
I turned an astonished face on Grandmama. She had called it the Hungarian Versailles, but I had discounted that as the kind of benign exaggeration Grandmama often applied to things she loved.