by Rosalyn Eves
Apparently the names were sufficiently prominent, for he lost his doubtful look. “I’m sorry, but I’ve orders to open the gate to no one.”
“Will you at least tell Lady Karolina I wish to speak with her?”
He nodded shortly and disappeared into one of the twin entrances flanking the gate. I slid my hand into my pocket, my fingers questing for the golden falcon. But it was gone—lost somewhere in that night’s madness.
A few minutes later, Karolina rushed out to the gate, wearing a traveling gown and hat and pulling on her gloves as she crossed the cobblestones to me. “Anna! Why are you still here?”
“You’re leaving?”
“Something has gone wrong. The revolution has turned; it is no longer for us. My children are already away. I stayed only for word of my husband’s safety. You should leave as well.”
“My grandmother has been hurt. She needs help.”
Karolina shook her head, biting her lower lip as though she were genuinely troubled. “I’m so sorry, Anna. I can’t help you. I wish I could. The carriage is already waiting. I must think of my family first.”
Rage and grief boiled in my stomach, a bitter kind of alchemy. “Please.”
Karolina fished in her reticule, then pressed a handful of notes through the bars of the gate into my hand. “I wish your grandmother well. Truly. Isten áldjon!” God bless you! She picked up her skirts and swept back the way she’d come, leaving me staring after her.
I didn’t want her money. I dropped the notes on the ground and spun on my heel.
I wept tears of rage all the way back to Grandmama’s. I was furious with Karolina—and with my own helplessness. I had no means to send for a doctor, and no assurance one would come could I summon him. I wished I had not been so quick to spurn Karolina’s money, satisfying as the gesture had been.
Across the street from Grandmama’s, I spotted a solitary figure lighting a pipe, the flare burning in the darkness. Though I reasoned a Circle spy would not betray his presence so carelessly, the sight sent barbs of fear up my spine.
I climbed the stairs in silence and darkness. I could not stay here: it would be the first place the Circle hunted for me. But I could not leave Noémi alone to tend to Grandmama and Ginny while they were still so weak.
In the library, I curled up beside Grandmama and listened to her labored breathing. I watched her form, initially invisible save for the drape of the quilt, gradually take on color. She looked pasty and waxen, not like a real person at all. And eventually, against every expectation, I started drifting. The corners of the room swam around me—one, two, three, four—and I closed my eyes.
I found myself in a strange forest, surrounded by tall pines. They filled the air around me with their clean scent. My heart lightened, as if all the horror of the night were only a dream and this were real. I followed a path between snowdrops, their white petals blazing in the gloom cast by the towering trees. The path led eventually to a clearing, where a lady sat plaiting her dark hair. At my arrival, she looked up and smiled a welcome.
The Lady was a stranger to me. I had never seen anyone who shone so brightly, her entire body emanating light as if she were made of sunbeams. Yet there was something familiar about her. Maybe it was her smile, which held all the maternal warmth I had longed to see in my own mother. Maybe it was the clarity in her look. She stood and came toward me, her long gown scarcely bending the grass beneath her. A great gold falcon perched on her shoulder, much like the one I’d seen in the Binding. The turul bird.
I stood still, trembling. Hope can sometimes feel very much like terror.
“Well met, daughter.” She cupped my face in her hands, and the warmth of her touch pushed away the fear and exhaustion I carried with me. “Be at peace. You have traveled far, and the hardest road is still before you. But remember there are those who love you. You shall not be alone, nor forgotten. Who you are, what you shall do, all these matter.”
Her words fell like balm against cracked skin. They stung a little, with their reminder of hardship to come, but they healed too. A hard kernel of fear, buried so deep I had almost forgotten I carried it, softened and dissipated. I was loved: by Grandmama, by James, by my cousins. By Gábor too, though he fought it. I mattered. With a gentle finger, the Lady wiped a tear from my cheek before bending forward to kiss my forehead. A flicker of warmth built against my skull, radiating down to fill my entire body.
“I set my blessing on you,” she said, releasing me.
“Thank you.” I met her star-bright gaze without flinching.
“Have courage. We are both of us bound in different ways. You are bound by your fears—but do not let them shackle you. You are stronger than you know.”
I studied her serene face, like a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. “You are bound? Where? How?”
“In the same Binding spell you troubled so recently. I can only reach you thus in dreams.” She touched my cheek again. “That spell contains a host of creatures, just as your world does. We are not all of us dark, or all light. I am the Boldogasszony.” The Joyful Woman. “Once, before I was bound, I was mother-goddess to Hungary.”
“But the creatures—” I began. A sound like a gunshot fractured through the dream. The Lady’s face began to waver, cracks of light splintering across her. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t go.”
“Anna.” Noémi was shaking my shoulder. “Someone’s here.”
And then I was wide awake, blinking in the first grey light of dawn, my heart pounding an erratic rhythm in my chest. I sat upright. Noises drifted up from the entryway below. Voices. Footsteps.
Noémi scrambled to her feet. “Perhaps it’s Mátyás.”
I listened for a moment. I heard crashing, then the lilting refrain of a spell. “No. The Circle.”
“What have you done?” Her face turned the color of bone. “Surely I would have felt the Binding shatter.”
“Lady Berri killed someone.” And where was she now? I stooped to gather Grandmama as best I could. “Help Ginny.” My maid was awake but weak still.
The three of us staggered down the hallway to the back of the house, then descended the narrow servants’ stairs to a door at the back of the courtyard. We struggled through the rear gate and into the mew. Light though she was, Grandmama was not easy to carry. My muscles pulled and burned.
Please, I prayed as we stumbled toward the street. Please let there be a carriage. Behind us, I heard a door slam, then shouts.
As if my prayer had conjured it, there was, indeed, a vehicle in the street. But it was a farmer’s cart, worn and slow moving. The farmer in question was unloading jugs of milk.
“We need a ride,” Noémi said without preamble. She released Ginny, who wavered a bit but did not fall, and unclasped the fine gold chain she wore. She marched to the farmer. “Here. Take this for payment.”
The farmer set down the jug he carried and promptly helped us into the back of his wagon. “Where to, miss?”
I sat beside Grandmama, her head pillowed in my lap. Noémi and Ginny crowded next to us, the bare planks of wood hard beneath us.
“Anywhere,” Noémi said. “Please, just drive!”
He clucked at his horses and they shuffled forward. I groaned. At this rate, the men behind us could outrun our wagon on foot.
Noémi closed her eyes and began whispering. I recognized a spell from her hand motions, and edged sideways, my arms pulling beneath Grandmama’s weight. Calm, I whispered to my fluttering heart, to my shadow self stirring beneath it. Please be calm. I could not afford to break another spell.
Noémi’s eyes flew open. “That should buy us some time.”
“What did you do?”
“The only thing I could think to do. I set a plague of boils on them—in, um, a location that should ensure they do not walk, run, or ride horseback easily for the next short while.” Her cheeks were pink, but a suggestion of a smile played about her lips.
I sagged back against the side of the wagon. “That is the bes
t news I have heard all week.”
At my direction, the farmer drove us toward Café Pilvax, where we hoped to find word of Mátyás—and of Gábor, though I did not voice that wish. Ginny waited in the wagon with Grandmama while Noémi and I went in.
The interior was unusually empty—a single patron in the back, a stout man rubbing a cloth over the glass display cases near the front. He looked up at our entrance.
“Ladies. You should not be here.”
“We’re looking for someone,” I said. “Eszterházy Mátyás? A student, middling height, curling brown hair.”
“The students who were here are all gone. Rounded up by the Austrian police for treason.” He plucked a paper from a nearby table and held it out.
“What?” I gasped, snatching at the circular. Beside me, Noémi dug her fingers into my arm.
The paper smelled of ink, fresh from the printer. I unfolded it and stared at the German headline, my entire body tensing.
The Circle Restores Order to Troubled City.
I scanned onward. Last evening, devastating plans were set in motion to raze the city and bring down the Hapsburg government. Thanks to an informer, Luminate spell-binders and armed Austrian soldiers were prepared for just such action and were able to thwart the rebellion shortly after its onset, with only minimal damage to property in Pest.
I thought of Grandmama’s house, and the blistered and peeling front of the Pázmandy mansion, which we’d passed in our circuitous route through Pest. What had happened when I failed to give the signal for the Binding that evening? Such destruction had never been part of our plan. Of my plan, I realized: I did not truly know what Petőfi and William had planned.
I had been as willfully ignorant of their plot as I had been to the Binding, choosing to acknowledge only what I wanted to see.
No citizens were killed, though some Luminate were unfortunately driven from their homes. It is now believed safe for their return.
The fracas was not without bloodshed, however. Some rebels were slain. And it has been confirmed that Lady Berri, erstwhile head of the Lucifera order in England, was shockingly found supporting revolutionary measures and was killed while fighting against the very Circle she purported to sustain.
Lady Berri. Images flashed across my mind: her eyes alight with secret amusement, the strangely imposing fashion with which she moved her stout body through rooms, the grim set to her mouth when she told me to flee.
She had died saving my life.
Noémi took the paper from my nerveless fingers and skimmed through it. One hand flew to her mouth.
I snatched the paper away, my heart thudding. The following have been apprehended as traitors. Executions are set to begin in two days’ time, a fittingly swift and just end for all such rabble.
With trembling fingers, I turned the circular over. A list of names was appended. My eyes flew down them, dread thick and bitter in my mouth. The letters swam before me, making it difficult to sort out the names. There were dozens of them. I recognized two as young men I’d met at Café Pilvax, one I had conversed with at Karolina’s, several I had danced with.
And there—William Skala. I pictured William as I had seen him last, his face radiant with the possibilities of revolution. In all his plans for the future, had he seen this?
Let there be no more, I prayed, guilty with the relief I’d feel if it were only William’s name. Or Petőfi’s.
But no. There it was, the name I’d been fearing to see from the moment I spied the list. Gábor Kovács.
And a few lines later: Mátyás Eszterházy.
The sensation was like the moment when ice across a winter pond no longer holds your weight: only a second’s warning and then you are falling, gripped by a cold so deep and enveloping you cannot breathe.
I choked. How could a list—a string of letters on paper—be so deadly?
Noémi turned a tear-streaked face to me. “This! This is why I pleaded with you not to fight.”
My stomach flipped over. “Did you tell the Circle? You said you would stop us if you could.”
“You think I would betray my own brother?”
A voice cut across us, “But someone told them. Was it you?” Petőfi staggered toward me, waggling his finger in my face. I had not recognized him in the gloom of the café. His rollicking gait made one thing quite clear: he was drunk. He began reciting in a singsong voice:
Why should I love my homeland?
Or care for her travails?
Her troubles will pass…eventually—
I’m a Magyar noblewoman!
His voice dropped to a normal register. “Your cousin had let me hope Luminate could be selfless—could be patriots. He was wrong. You’re self-serving wretches, and you women are worst of all. So concerned for your gowns and your society you can’t even follow through on a promise. Where was your broken spell? Where was your signal?”
Spittle flicked my cheek, and I flinched away. “I couldn’t break the Binding. I won’t loose the monsters it holds.”
A flash of remembered touch, ghostly against my cheek. The Lady was bound too. I grieved for her—but I could not let the others free.
“Selfish,” the poet sneered. “Weak. Frightened.”
“You cannot simply blame me,” I said. “If the signal didn’t come, why did you fight?”
“Because we were surrounded. Because someone betrayed us.” His eyes were flint. “And now my friends will die.”
“No,” Noémi said. “We can’t let them.”
“We have to do something,” I said. “Fight back.”
“We did fight. We failed.”
“But there are others who escaped, surely?” I asked. “And others who will want to help. I know where William kept his mechanical armor. We can use that.” I did not know precisely how we could use it; I only knew a rising desperation that somehow we had to free Mátyás and Gábor and the others. As long as they lived, there was still hope.
“If there’s anything left of it,” Petőfi said, but he followed us out to the wagon.
I stood in the middle of the cavernous room housing William’s workshop, my mind reeling. The room looked as if someone had pummeled it with a giant fist. Nothing remained of William’s mechanical creations but fragments of metal, glinting in the dim light. The metal woman with the medusa hair was smashed into a corner, her face a flattened sheet of metal, her wild hair slivers of silver on the floor.
Beside me, Petőfi swore.
A cold wind whipped through the shattered windows, pulling at my loose hair. I shivered, glad the others had chosen to wait in the wagon.
This was not random looters or revolutionaries, not the violence that wrecked Grandmama’s house. Nothing of value had been taken. The metal pieces were still here, simply bent beyond recognition and use. The thoroughness of the attack—nothing in the workshop had been left unscathed—suggested deliberate planning.
How had the Circle known that the machines were here? Only a few days earlier, William said he had not shown them to anyone else. William. Mátyás. Gábor. Me. Had one of us betrayed everyone? I could not believe it. William would die first. Gábor too. And though Mátyás had his share of weaknesses, I did not see him betraying his friends.
That left me.
I had not said anything—but the Circle had been following me. Had they followed me here?
The Circle ends.
My ring. Even if the Circle had not sent someone after me, they knew where I had gone. Herr Steinberg himself had told me the ring tracked me. I already knew it did not work precisely as Herr Steinberg had said: it had not kept me from the Binding. But what if it had other functions? If it could read the spells cast in my presence, could it also record what was spoken? I would not put such a spell beyond Herr Steinberg, who had never trusted Lady Berri.
I thought of all the conversations I had heard in the café, of William boasting he had designed these mechanical creatures to withstand the Austrian armies, of Lady Berri’s plans. If the
Circle had heard, they would have known everything: when Lady Berri meant to fetch me, where to attack Lady Berri while she waited for me to break the spell, where to find the students as they gathered for revolution.
It was only luck—or perhaps surprise—that the Circle had not caught us before we breached the Binding. But I suspected that was not the case with William and the others. No doubt the Circle and their soldiers had already been in place, watching as William and a roomful of students began to don the mechanical creatures, planning to catch them in the very act of treason. I’d bet Herr Steinberg enjoyed watching the students’ faces turn from exhilaration to horror, when they realized they were betrayed.
I fell to my knees, my stomach twisting like laundry wrung dry. I was the worst kind of fool. I had thought of the ring only in relationship to the Binding—and to me. I had resented it for curtailing my choices. How could I not have seen that my very presence endangered everything, everyone I cared for? I believed I was clever, invincible, important.
I had been important. Only to the wrong people. And for the wrong reasons.
Petőfi looked at me with some concern. “Are you well?”
No. “I think it was me,” I said. “I think the Circle heard everything through a ring they forced me to wear.” I stared at my now-bare finger, heartsick.
“You!” Petőfi glowered down at me, the tips of his mustache trembling with his passion. “You betrayed us?”
“Not intentionally.” But I had betrayed them all the same.
He was still for a long moment. Then, “I am sorry about your cousin, and your friends. They are my friends too. I will do what I can for them. But you—you are treacherous. I want nothing to do with you.”
He stalked from the room.
I pushed myself up and stood for a moment on trembling legs. Without the mechanical creatures, we had almost nothing. Even if Grandmama and Noémi were willing to lend their magic to our cause, it would not be enough to free Mátyás and Gábor. What were invisibility and healing against a legion of Circle-trained soldiers? Even if I could break a few spells, it would not be enough.