by Rosalyn Eves
“Pull your skirts down,” my rescuer said.
My skirts bunched around my legs, exposing an indecent amount of skin. Cheeks burning, I tried to tug them down. I straightened and wound my fingers in the horse’s mane, praying we’d be home swiftly. “I’m Anna Arden.” Grandmama would be horrified that I introduced myself to a Gypsy, but I had to say something to fill the silence straining between us, and my name seemed a small thing to give him for his aid.
“You should not have come here,” he said, ignoring my introduction.
To your camp? Or to Hungary? I swallowed a ridiculous urge to laugh. Of course I should not have come.
“Did no one tell you what night this is? It is not safe to be abroad alone.”
Noémi had. I had not believed her.
“Might I know your name?”
A long pause. Then, “Kovács Gábor.” He gave his name in the Hungarian way, surname first.
The faint fall of the horse’s hooves and the slow breaths of my reluctant rescuer boomed in the silence between us. His arm was secure around my waist, his chest warm against my back. He smelled nice, of green things and sunlight. From the rigid way he held himself, I gathered he was no more comfortable with our proximity than I was.
Our route took us within hailing distance of a copse of trees. I turned my head toward the fields, so I would not see the shadows that were not shadows. A faint breeze stirred the moonlit plants around us. Everything looked peaceful.
Then I heard it again, the faintest suggestion of words. Almost, I could pretend it was only the sighing of the wind, but the words were too distinct. Free us. I released the coarse hair of the mane and clapped my hands over my ears.
Gábor stilled. The horse beneath us kept moving, but I could tell the rider’s attention was elsewhere. Could he hear it too?
His breath was warm on my neck as he bent forward. “Hold on.” The muscles in his thighs flexed alongside mine as he spurred the horse forward. His arm tightened around my waist.
I turned my head so my cheek lay against his chest and tried not to see the blackness streaming across the field, shadows against the moon-pale earth where nothing existed to cast a shadow. Our heartbeats hammered counterpoints to one another.
Free us.
A shadow snaked across the horse’s coat, sending the poor beast sidestepping wildly for a moment. A second shadow curled up my arm and slid across my cheek before withdrawing. Fear tasted sharp and bitter in my mouth.
And then we were past the field, riding onto the rutted road to the village, and the shadows, whatever they were, dissipated into the midnight air. The streets were quiet, but Eszterháza, when we approached, was ablaze with light. My heart contracted. I had not considered how my absence would distress Grandmama.
Gábor stopped just beyond the ring of light cast by the Lumen lanterns at the front door. He swung himself down and helped me dismount.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
I tested my ankle. It hurt, but held. “Yes.”
He swung back into the saddle.
“Won’t you come in?” I asked.
“No.” The monosyllable was like a slap. His hauteur, forgotten during our shared run of terror, was back.
I fought an unladylike glare. “I’m sure my grandmother would wish to thank you.”
“No. I’ll take no thanks for a duty that brings no pleasure. Next time you choose to go slumming, my lady, pick a time and place less likely to get you killed.”
While I struggled to form a coherent response, he whistled sharply and was off, the horse’s hooves clattering against the cobblestones.
Grandmama pressed her hands against her heart when I entered the parlor, where she waited with the others. “Thank all the Saints that Bind! What happened? Are you all right?” She frowned at my dirty and torn dress.
“I’m fine. I got lost and I fell.”
Noémi’s eyes bored into me, but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing her stories had any effect on me.
A maid came into the room with tea, and under the cover of the clatter, I buried my face in Grandmama’s shoulder. The shock and pain and exhaustion of the evening came crashing down on me. Grandmama stroked my hair with gentle fingers. “Are you sure you are all right, szívem?”
I was quiet for a very long time, trying to swallow the childish plea bubbling up inside me. I failed. “Please, can we go home?”
The gentle fingers stilled. Grandmama sighed. “Not yet. Your mama does not wish us to return until Catherine is safely betrothed.”
That might be ages yet. I stood, wobbling a little on my ankle. “If you’ll excuse me, I should like to retire.”
“Noémi, can’t you do something for her?” Mátyás asked.
“I am afraid I have exhausted myself dancing.” Noémi looked up from the cup of tea she nursed near the fire. “But I will bid you good night, cousin. Sweet dreams. Be sure you do not count the corners of your room.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Grandmama hushed Noémi, a fine line of irritation drawn on her forehead. “Only a silly folk custom: if you count the corners of your room, you will remember your dreams.”
Grandmama followed me to my room and sat on my bed, watching my face in the mirror while Ginny brushed out my hair.
“You mustn’t let Noémi get to you, szívem.”
“I make it a point not to mind unpleasant people,” I said, wincing as the brush caught in another snarl.
Grandmama shook her head at me. “She deserves your pity more than your scorn. It has not been easy for her. Her father gambled away their estate, her mother’s dowry, her own portion—everything. Then he could not live with the shame, and he shot himself. Her mother died shortly after. She lived with her Eszterházy cousins for a time in Vienna, while Mátyás was at school, but—it is not easy to be the poor cousin. When János invited them here, to help with the estate, they came gladly. But this is not the life either of them sought.”
I looked down at my hands, still dirty and scraped from my tumble down the hill. I knew how it felt to be thrust into a life you did not want. I promised myself to be kinder to Noémi.
Ginny helped me undress and settled me in bed. “I’m glad you’re home safe.” Her smile wrinkled her nose. She bobbed a curtsy at Grandmama and left.
Grandmama sat beside my bed with a collection of Hungarian fairy tales. She had read to me nearly every night as a child. Somehow, the familiar cadence of her voice in this unfamiliar place raised stinging tears in my eyes. I blinked them back.
“It was long ago,” Grandmama read, “and far away, over forty-nine kingdoms, beyond the Operentsia Sea, beyond the glass mountains, and beyond that to a kingdom beneath a pearl sky.” She described a beautiful reed maiden, the king who loved her, and the wicked girl who trapped the king in marriage. Her voice soothed my fraught nerves.
After she left, I stared at the ceiling of my room, the carved rose vines dimly visible in the moonlight sliding between my half-drawn curtains. I should close them. But my ankle throbbed and I was disinclined to move. Noémi’s words rang in my ears: do not count the corners.
One.
This was ridiculous. There was no reason for my breath to hitch as I began counting. No reason to feel that something beyond mere curiosity drove me. I did not need to remember my dreams, not after that night.
Two. Three.
I would not do it. It was clear Noémi was only toying with me, trying to frighten me. I could not decide if she was malicious or ignorant or both.
Four.
Nothing happened. The moonlight streamed serenely through the curtains, pooling on the floor. The shadows stayed put, as well-regulated shadows do. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.
Hours later, I woke with a start. There was a pressure on my breast, as if something heavy weighted me down. I threw the blankets from me, but the pressure did not abate. I sat upright, both hands flying upward to settle on the warm, bare flesh at the base of my neck. Nothing.
There was nothing there.
And then I remembered.
In my dream, a creature had crouched on my breast, long, tangled hair framing its face, two burning pits where eyes should be. The feet that pressed so heavily into my chest were goose feet, a mundane detail made all the more terrifying by its incongruity.
Lidércnyomás. Nightmare. The pressure of a lidérc before feeding.
The blood-red lips opened, revealing a mouth of needle-sharp teeth. I cringed, anticipating the creature’s foul breath and the sting of pain. But the breath was sweet, like honey.
And the only thing that came from the creature’s mouth was a word: “eloldozva.”
When I asked Grandmama in the morning, she said the word meant “free.” Or perhaps “unbound.” She wanted to know, where I had heard it.
“I dreamed it.” I stirred some honey into my tea. “I counted the corners of my room.”
Grandmama looked up from a bit of bread and jam, her forehead pinched with concern. “Some say you will dream truth if you do. What did you see?”
A creature out of folklore. A story. “Nothing,” I said.
While my ankle healed, I was confined to the palace and its grounds. I slept most of the first two days, exhausted by the journey across Europe and the terrors of Whitsun night. By the fourth day, my gait had improved noticeably but my temper had not. I was bored.
“Why don’t you show Anna about the place?” János suggested at luncheon, tipping his pipe toward Mátyás.
I should like that. I glanced up at Mátyás with a slight smile.
“It’s tiring,” Mátyás complained, tugging at a small ornamented cross he wore around his neck. “Wouldn’t you rather go into the village for a pint? I’ve a year’s worth of winnings to drink through.”
I wouldn’t—and so we set off to explore the palace. Noémi’s vizsla romped behind us, sniffling at our heels and then bounding off into darkened rooms before darting back. In English, Mátyás told me a little of the history, how the house was expanded in the late eighteenth century and then largely abandoned.
“Do you know why?” I asked.
Mátyás shrugged. “Who can say? Perhaps it was too expensive to keep up—perhaps the family merely decided it was too far from Vienna, too unfashionable. Miklós’s grandson—one of János’s cousins—moved most of the furniture and paintings to Eisenstadt.”
“But you live here.”
Mátyás quirked one eyebrow, the corners of his lips curling. “Yes. For my sins, I live here. János came here perhaps ten years ago, when his pension proved insufficient to Viennese life. I believe he asked to come—he had fond memories of the place as a child.”
I smiled. “Grandmama shares those memories. Do you like it?”
For a moment I worried I had asked too much. A muscle flexed in his cheek, and my hitherto good-humored cousin looked grim. Then his face lightened. “It’s not so bad. János was lonely before, and he enjoys having us. And of course, now you’re here, it’s infinitely better.” He winked at me, and, to my disgust, I found myself blushing.
We followed a curving staircase down and wandered through a small room unaccountably full of the most exquisite china—all of which, he said, was used when Empress Maria Theresa had visited. The shelves were lined with Sèvres vases, Chinese urns, and delicate Dresden figures. The most valuable had been taken to the family’s primary holdings at Eisenstadt, and yet a lord’s ransom remained. On one shelf I discovered something odd: a wooden sculpture of a web-footed boy stuffing a frog into his mouth. He looked wholly feral.
“What is this?”
Mátyás grinned. “Our local legend. He was found in the Hanság and brought to Eszterháza, but he escaped and was never heard from again. Some say he lives in the marsh still.”
More monsters.
We passed out of the china room into the vaulted entryway, and crossed through a pink marble doorway into a large, multiwindowed room. The floors here, like the one above in the Banquet Hall, were of white marble. Painted silver and green flower garlands, only slightly faded, adorned the walls, and cherubs gamboled overhead with roses. Three other doorways, each framed by pink marble, led out into the ruined gardens. The middle set were open, letting a spring breeze into the room.
“Behold the celebrated Sala Terrena,” Mátyás said, gesturing into the room.
Something moved in the far corner. Several somethings. The strong scent of livestock was not, as I had supposed, wafting in through the open windows.
“Those are sheep,” I said faintly. “In the house.” Oroszlán gave a sharp, delighted bark and sprang into the room, chasing the sheep toward the far wall and scattering hay beneath him. Some escaped through the open doorway.
Mátyás grinned at me. “Well, the barns are disreputable, and János never uses this room.”
I wondered if Grandmama knew.
“Keeping sheep in the house is also marvelous tonic for overinflated self-esteem,” Mátyás added, and I choked on a laugh. “Come.” Mátyás took my arm and tugged me toward the set of large doors opening onto the gardens. We dodged the sheep—and sheep droppings!—and found ourselves looking out at the garden that had once been the pride of Hungary. A series of paths branched out from a central fountain, most of them lost into shaggy foliage.
“There, at the end of the garden. Do you see those buildings?”
I nodded. The buildings were a smudge of darkness beyond the green.
“One was an opera house, another a puppet theater. Now they’re mostly decayed, unused. Sometimes vagrants sleep there, though don’t tell my sister that. And yet sixty years ago, Haydn lived here. Operas were performed monthly in the opera house. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ ” He laughed softly. “Behold how the mighty are fallen.”
“You know Shelley?” I asked, too startled by his familiarity with the English poet to make a witty comment on the fall of modern empires.
Mátyás flashed his grin, a dimple flickering into being in one cheek. “Of course. My education has included all the essentials. How to identify a fine vintage. How much to wager at the racetrack. And of course, how to seduce pretty girls through poetry.”
Seduce? Only as he said this did I realize how close he stood to me, trapping me against the wall beside the door. Mátyás put one hand on the wall and cupped my chin with the other. Even Freddy had never stood quite so close as Mátyás did now, so close I could feel the heat of his body and see the fine gold stubble on his chin. So close he loomed over me, taller, broader, denser, more physically present than Freddy ever had been.
I froze. I did not want Mátyás to kiss me.
A tiny bloom of excitement unfurled in my stomach. Did I?
Before I could make up my mind, his lips were on mine, butterfly soft. The fine hair of his mustache tickled my skin, not unpleasantly. Feeling surged in me, a yearning I had almost forgotten since Freddy’s kiss in Grandmama’s garden. It was thrilling and terrifying at once. Mátyás pressed his lips more firmly against mine, and pleasure sent fireworks pinwheeling through my body.
No, I thought, my rational self reasserting control over the boiling stew of emotion. I put my hands on Mátyás’s chest, fighting the urge to curl them into his shirt and pull him closer. Instead, I shoved. Mátyás staggered back, nearly tumbling over a sheep.
“Don’t,” I said, wishing my breathing did not sound so ragged. “Ever. Do that. Again.” My entire head burned, even my ears. Mátyás, to my chagrin, appeared utterly untouched by our encounter. His color was smooth, his smile steady.
“I won’t,” he promised. A beat, then his dimple flashed. “Not until you ask me.”
I passed a bakery, the smell of yeast and fresh bread heavy in the air, my heart thumping. Any moment now, I expected someone to question why I was in the village alone, for Grandmama to notice my absence and send Ginny after me. But no one approached. I walked by the kocsma with its usual collection of afternoon drinkers loungi
ng on the wooden benches. Surprisingly, Mátyás was not among them. A thin man in a fine suit turned swiftly away, though not before I’d caught the glint of spectacles. Herr Steinberg? Surely he’d returned to Vienna already.
Beyond the chapel and the row of whitewashed houses with their thatched roofs, I left the road to cross the open field, heading west and south—toward the Gypsy camp. As I walked, I kept one eye on the dark fringe of trees at the edge of the field. The trees, I had learned, marked the edge of the Eszterháza estate. Rationally, I knew I had nothing to fear from the shadows of Whitsun night in bright daylight.
But I watched the trees all the same.
Insects hummed lazily. An unfamiliar bird fluttered past me, exotic in its black-and-white-banded wings, its orange crest. I paused at a glinting stream to splash water on my face and neck before following the stream bank past a gentle rise. I could smell campfire now. A short distance beyond the hillock and I spotted the first of the tents, simple sheets of fabric draped across a pole held upright by two more poles.
The camp bustled with activity. Women stirring cook pots, children running between the tents, dogs rolling around underfoot. I could not see many men—only one or two, in the distance, grooming a horse.
My feet halted. This was madness. My welcome last time had been less than cordial. What would happen if I were discovered now, without the excuse of injury? Being yelled at was unpleasant enough.
But I could not turn back. If the Gypsies had a way to use magic without being Confirmed, I had to know it. The Circle officiant had told Papa I was Barren, empty of magic. But when I had told Mr. Skala as much at the ball, he had not believed it. And indeed, if Luminate drew all their magic from the Binding, then my inability to perform spells might only mean that my Confirmation spell had not worked. If there were other ways to use magic, perhaps they would work for me. At the least, they might work for James.
A couple of children spotted me and came running. They tugged at my sleeves and laughed and held out small brown hands. My first instinct was to pull back, as if they might pollute me. I shook myself. The children, though poor, were clearly well cared for: their cheeks glowed with health, and their lack of self-consciousness around strangers bespoke someone’s loving solicitude.