by Rosalyn Eves
“But how will you pay for it?” Noémi caught his sleeve as he stepped away from us. “Not gaming. Mátyás, you promised.”
Mátyás shook her off, a frown starting between his brows. He stalked toward the field without looking back.
Dinner that night was quiet and uneasy, all of us sitting at a long, formal table in a room too large for so few. The white walls had been painted in the Chinese style, an elaborate ornamental garden sketched in blue, with warriors and sages in exotic costumes strolling through it. I studied the peaceful, frozen scene and wished I might step into it.
János said, “There are likely to be Gypsy musicians tonight, Miss Anna. You’ll want to keep your distance.”
No one spoke about the beating in the field.
After dinner, Ginny helped me into my favorite new dress, purchased in Vienna: an amber-colored gown with double rows of ruching above the hem and blond Brussels lace falling at the neck and about my wrists. I was dismayed to arrive in the entry hall and discover we were not to drive to some nearby estate but to walk back to the green outside the church. Once there, my heart sank even lower as I studied the assembled dancers.
I had hoped this dance might redeem my failure in Vienna. I knew how to sweep into a ballroom, my skirts held just so. I knew how to curtsy to the appropriate degree—when I chose to. But I did not know how to sweep into a dance conducted outdoors, on a patch of earth. I did not know how to keep my long skirts or fine shoes from getting soiled by the grass and the dirt. The women’s skirts, cut high to show an expanse of ankle, seemed much more practical—if a touch scandalous.
And the dances! I’d expected dances that one might find at any society ball: schottische, polka, quadrille, waltz, Roger de Coverley. Each of these I knew. Mama, for all she doubted my future in polite society, had seen I was properly drilled. And truth was, I loved dancing—the music, the twirl and swish of dresses, the color and energy.
But I did not know these strange round csárdás dances, these whirling dances to energetic but discordant music. So as Noémi and Mátyás were drawn, laughing, into the swirl, I stood alone, watching. Herr Steinberg, who lingered still in the village, asked me to dance, and the two of us tried to fit the steps of a polka to the music playing. It was an ill fit, and I was less than cordial when we parted.
János took center stage during a cessation in the dancing. At his signal, the Gypsy musicians took up a mournful tune, and János flung his hands upward. Water droplets materialized in the air around his head, each lit with a tiny flicker of colored light. They danced through the air, swirling above the entranced crowd. The music crescendoed, and the water droplets coalesced to a horse-shaped wave, galloping across the night sky. A final flourish, and the horse shattered. A fine mist settled over the assembled crowd, a cooling kiss after the exertions of the dance. Three cracks of lightning split the sky, the finale to his Elementalist spell, and János bowed to much applause.
Then it was Mátyás, whistling two high notes in the air. A murder of crows descended from the sky, their wings inky against the gold horizon. They circled above his head before diving toward the crowd, who shrieked and ducked low. Mátyás laughed, and the birds lifted, their raucous cries echoing his laughter. Other birds followed: white egrets with their yellow feet, red-backed shrikes with their grey heads and masks, short-eared owls with banded tails. They swirled through the air in an intricate dance, weaving in and around one another in response to Mátyás’s silent persuasion. He clapped his hands, and the birds vanished as swiftly as they’d come. A tiny piece of my heart went with them, and I coveted my cousin’s gift.
The crowd turned expectantly to Grandmama, who laughed, waved her hand, and protested she was too old. So the crowd turned to me.
I shook my head, anxiety crawling up my throat. The villagers clearly expected some kind of Luminate performance. But what could I do? Ask János to cast another illusion so I could break it, perhaps sending fire through the fields? Unthinkable.
Noémi, Grandmama said, would not be asked to perform. Like Mátyás, she was Animanti, her magic working on living things, but she had focused on healing spells, which were not suitable for display.
With a kind of collective sigh, the musicians struck up again and the crowd returned to dancing. I sat beside Grandmama to watch, but a movement caught the periphery of my vision.
I squinted into the shadows between two houses. Like the other Hungarian villages we’d passed, the village near Eszterháza consisted mostly of houses strung along a rutted main road, like shells on a bit of twine. Behind the houses spread fields, silent and fathomless under the star-bright sky.
There. Something was moving. My first thought was some kind of animal—a cow or horse, perhaps. But no animal would carry that faint nimbus of light.
My heart leapt into my throat. I remembered Noémi’s words: a night of Unruhe, of restless shades and shadows. Who was in the field? Whoever it was moved erratically, the light blinking in and out of sight.
I set my lips together. Probably some villager.
No. Something about the light wasn’t right: it was neither the flickering gold gleam of a lantern nor the steady, otherworldly blue radiance of a Lumen light. It looked, in fact, as though the stranger were wearing gloves of moonlight, a steady silver glow limning his hands and spreading up his arms. I’d never seen a Luminate illusion like that—and it seemed odd that a spell-caster would waste magic on that kind of illusion rather than the simpler Lumen light.
I inspected the dancers and the crowd beyond. Mátyás and Noémi still danced with the others. Herr Steinberg stood at the far edge of the crowd, a drinking mug in hand, while János sat at Grandmama’s far side. The squire was there too, though I noticed the villagers made a wide berth around him.
Whoever the light-bearer was, he was not one of the local Luminate. Likely, it was a Luminate stranger passing through, wandering the fields on foot. I edged toward the field, my curiosity piqued.
He might be a ghost, Noémi’s voice whispered in my ear. I brushed the idea away as one might a bothersome gnat. Ridiculous.
I glanced around once more. No one paid the least attention to me: even Grandmama was enthralled by the dancers. I slipped into the shadows, hiking my skirts up to an unseemly height as soon as I reached the field beyond the houses. The light bobbed in the distance, silver against the tree line.
I frowned. Something about the situation nagged at me, a piece that would not fit. Why should a Luminate nobleman skulk about a relatively insignificant field at night? Why not call on the local landowners? Surely, he was up to nothing good.
An improbable idea struck me, momentarily robbing me of breath. What if the man in the field were not Luminate at all? Mr. Skala said people from all classes had once practiced magic. What if someone had found a way around the Circle’s restrictions? It seemed impossible—and yet I could not shake a growing hope.
Whatever the source of this light, I had to know for certain.
I stepped into the field. In the spring night, the plants—whatever they were—had not yet achieved their full growth, for which I was grateful. Even so, in my dainty dancing shoes, I slipped and lurched on the loose earth.
For a moment, I lost the moving light. I stood motionless in the quiet field. Overhead the stars shone and the moon cast a faint tracing across the ground like hoarfrost. In the distance, the echo of the fiddles sounded plaintive, almost lost. I considered going back.
But no, there was the light again, in the copse of trees ahead. I plunged forward, weaving my way through the trees, my eyes fixed on the soft glow. My skirts caught on some kind of thornbush, and I wasted several moments trying to free myself without ripping the delicate fabric. At last, my patience at an end and fearful of losing my way, I simply tore free.
To my right, I could hear the gurgle of water. Between the dark bars of trees, silver moonlight glinted off the surface of the stream. My mind filled with images of drowned maidens, their hair spread like a veil across th
eir faces. I touched the rough bark of a nearby tree and looked up, but the canopy of new leaves was so thick it blotted out the stars from the night sky. My shoulders tensed as I moved forward; if a rusalka or lidérc crouched in the tree above me, I would not know it till she sprang upon me, her nimble fingers tearing at my face and throat.
I cursed Noémi under my breath. If she had not succeeded in scaring me earlier, she had succeeded now.
I lost the light-bearer again. In the fitful darkness, I felt the first real stab of terror—not the almost-pleasant frisson of alarm that came from scaring myself with fancies, but gut-wrenching fear. I could feel my shadow self stirring in panic and let her rise. What did it matter now if I were less than perfectly behaved?
Something seemed to snag in the air around me, as though I had walked into a spider’s web. But when I batted at my cheeks, I could feel no silk filaments. I shuddered, imagining the creature somewhere on my body, skittering beneath my clothing.
I could not see the way forward; behind me, the trees were closing ranks and I could not see the way back either. I could still hear music, distantly, but it seemed to come from all sides.
A soft hissing like wind in the trees sounded behind me—but there was no wind. I froze, hardly daring to breathe. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. I glanced around, squinting into the gloom.
There.
Something stirred, a subtle difference of shade on shadow. Something with a sinuous, nonhuman movement. I stepped forward, setting my foot down with the precision of a dancer, trying to stay silent. One step, then two, then three.
The shadow-that-was-not-a-shadow crept forward too.
I took a few more steps, and the thing kept pace with me.
It was following me.
I had lost the glowing stranger entirely now. The darkness gathered around me like a living thing, waiting to spring. I pressed forward, keeping the gliding shadow in the edge of my vision. I knew, somehow, with the certainty one gets in moments of high emotion, that I had far, far more cause to be frightened of the thing behind me than whoever was before me.
By the time I’d made it out of the trees, into the comparative brightness of a moonlit meadow, I was ready to weep. The thing following me was still there, though it had made no attempt to draw closer. As I moved out into the meadow, I watched the rim of trees. A shadow detached itself from the grove and crossed into the moonlight. The vaguely human shape had no features I could make out, only a mouth like a gaping wound.
“Free us.”
A breeze caught the words and tossed them against my ears, tangled them in my hair. Then the shadow multiplied into one, two, three, four shadows, all of them melting toward me in the meadow, with tendril-like arms outstretched. But there were no hands on these arms, and no fingers.
“Free us.”
I screamed then and began to run. I slipped and stumbled across the field, dragging at my skirts, and staggered up a slight hillock. I continued to run even as the earth dropped away beneath me.
As I fell, I glimpsed a young woman emerging from a thread of silver water with a face straight out of my nightmares: immense dark eyes studding moon-pale flesh, dark hair clinging in drowned clumps to the sides of her face.
Rusalka.
I tumbled down the far side of the hillock. Small and not-so-small rocks banged against my body as I slid, coming to a gasping halt at the water’s edge. My throat hurt from screaming.
The creature by the water cried out too, her voice eerily human, the way a cat’s cry at midnight sounds like a baby.
More lights blossomed along the bank. Dark shapes massed and ran toward us.
I tried to stand, to flee, but my ankle pulsed with pain and would not hold me. I collapsed back to the ground.
The shapes drew nearer, and I saw they were nothing monstrous, just people, their lights only flickering torches. Some were men, hatless in the night. Others were women in long, striped skirts and clinking necklaces: Gypsies.
This should have alleviated my fears—after all, Gypsy musicians had played at the procession this morning and again for the dancing. But lost as I was, my mind was full of warnings: Grandmama, telling me not to speak with the musicians; János, more bluntly, adding Gypsies were not to be trusted; and a half-remembered scene from Miss Austen’s novel Emma, where Emma and her friend Harriet are attacked by Gypsies.
An argument was unfolding on the banks of the river, an older woman shaking her fists at the girl—it was only a Gypsy girl bathing in moonlight after all, not a rusalka. The fists spoke a language I knew: You should be ashamed of yourself.
The girl hung her head, her arms sliding protectively around her wet torso. But then she straightened and flung her hand in my direction, and dozens of eyes fixed on me.
None made a move to help me. The girl slipped away, no doubt stealing back to camp and drier clothes. Chanting rose on the air, and music. I could see now the distant yellow glow of campfires across the stream, the pale outline of tents.
I shut away the memory of the things that had followed me. Surely I had made shadows into monsters, as I had turned a Gypsy girl into a rusalka. But my ears still held the echo of those haunting cries.
Free us.
I tried again to stand, and failed. I held my hand out toward the crowd. “Bitte helfen Sie mir.” Help me, please. They shifted and muttered, but no one approached me. I could not tell if they did not understand me or chose to ignore my plea.
I swallowed, trying to ignore the burning in my ankle. The night air pricked at my face, cold where the sweat dried against my cheeks, the nape of my neck.
The music ceased abruptly. I heard angry shouting. Those nearest me turned toward the sound, their faces tight. The crowd began to melt away, slinking toward the camp. I thought of the long, impossible walk back to Eszterháza—I no longer knew in which direction—through shadow-infested woods, and sniffed. I would not let myself cry.
A girl slipped through the crowd and crouched beside me, laying her hand on my arm. “Shh.” A dark-patterned kerchief covered her hair.
A young man followed her, carrying a small lantern. He spoke to the girl in a language I didn’t recognize, touching her temple lightly and then lifting a strand of wet hair from beneath her head covering. The girl from the water. In the light of his lamp, his face was all angles and shadows and almost unbearably beautiful—the words of a Byron poem come to life in a wild midnight spell.
Then his burning eyes fell on me, and the whole aspect of his face changed, hard and cold. He spoke to me first in Hungarian, and then, when I didn’t respond, in German. “What are you doing here?”
“I lost my way.” I lifted my chin so this Gypsy wouldn’t think me pitiable.
“You should not be here. You are gadzhi—a foreigner. You’re unclean.” His dark eyes swept down my dress and then he turned away as if he were ashamed of what he saw, as if I were a loose woman in Covent Garden with her bodice cut low and her skirt hitched high, rather than a young lady decently covered by a rather lovely Viennese gown (if now the worse for wear).
A spark of indignation lit me, warming me in the evening air. How dare this Gypsy accuse me of being unclean!
“I hurt myself.” To prove it, I pushed myself upward. Pain shot through my ankle, radiating up my leg, and I crumpled. The girl rushed to my side, slipping a thin arm around me and supporting my weight on her shoulders.
As I caught my balance, I glimpsed an old woman watching us from the stream bank. She flicked her hands toward me, palms down and then up, as one does when shooing off crows in a field or a feral dog. Her words were unfamiliar, but her meaning was clear: Go away. The young man turned and called something to her. His words were calm, placating.
The girl beside me sighed. She said something in Hungarian, and when I did not respond, pointed to my leg, then looked a question at me.
Does it hurt?
“A little,” I answered in German. “I should go.” The pain ratcheting through my body was now augmented
by increasing social discomfort. I was not wanted here.
The girl ignored me and whispered something under her breath, catching my right hand with hers.
A stone bracelet at her wrist began shining with a silver light. The glow spread across her palm and lined her fingers before sliding across our joined hands like gloves of moonlight. A slow warmth suffused me, the pain in my ankle beginning to recede. A healing charm? In London, only trained Animanti could cast such spells, as a healing charm took considerable power and mastery. A poorly spoken spell could intensify rather than erase the pain.
My heartbeat quickened, and not from my pain. I was right. There was magic here—and non-Luminate magic at that. Perhaps my adventure had not been so ill guided. If Gypsies had found a way to use magic outside of the Binding spell, surely I could do the same. “Please—how are you using magic?”
The young man turned back at my words and sprang forward, grasping the girl’s arm and tugging her away from me, breaking the charm. His voice was sharp with disapproval.
My weight crashed onto my ankle, and I nearly toppled before the girl caught me.
I ignored the stab of pain. “Can you teach me your spell?”
Her eyes were wide, uncomprehending. I wished desperately that my Hungarian was better.
The older woman was shrieking now, her voice tinged not just with anger but with fear. A shudder swept through me. At once, I wanted nothing more than my plain bed back at the palace. “Please,” I said, “can you help me home?”
“I will take you.” The young man’s German was clipped and hard. He called to a pair of men still standing nearby, watching. One disappeared into the shadows and emerged a moment later with a horse, a long, leggy creature with a dark coat. The young man swung himself up in a single fluid movement, and the girl helped me toward the horse. The young man reached down, grasped my arms, and yanked me up in front of him. I cried out in surprise and some not-inconsiderable pain, and then we were cantering forward.
“Thank you,” I said stiffly. I was not used to being manhandled. Or to riding bareback.