by Rosalyn Eves
“Why did you never tell me?” I asked.
“I did not want you to look at me differently,” Mátyás said. “Those who know always do.”
I stared at him, my heart filling with a terrible hope and a terrible despair, before flinging my arms around him. He smelled of sweat and something bitter, and I did not want to let him go.
“You can’t do this,” I said. “You will…” I could not bring myself to say the word die. Mátyás’s heart thumped beneath my cheek. He knew.
“And what if I do not? Then the Binding does not break, the Circle goes unchallenged, and William, Gábor, and all my friends will die.”
“They might die even if you do.”
Mátyás nodded at Hunger. “He promised you an army. I don’t believe even Luminates could stand against the creatures here.”
I shivered. I did not say, How am I supposed to set a knife against your heart, to thrust it in? I hugged Mátyás once more, then let him go.
I was not eager to begin the spell that might end with Mátyás’s death, however willing he was, but I did not know how much time had passed in the real world. I explained to Mátyás everything I knew. It did not take long.
I did not know nearly enough.
Mátyás rubbed one hand over his jaw, thinking. “You cannot perform spells because the double souls in you repel spells—but you cannot reach spells unless you are angry or strongly moved.” He looked at me. “Are you angry now?”
I was angry, a simmering fury at the unfairness of the situation. But it was not the raw, overwhelming anger I’d used to break Catherine’s spell. “No.”
“Even if she were to draw the magic in, her soul would begin to break it down immediately, before she could hold the entire spell,” Hunger said. “It would be like unraveling a weaving. It might take weeks.”
“We don’t have weeks,” I said.
“If we could separate your souls somehow, maybe you could draw all the magic into one soul and then bring the souls back together….” Mátyás rubbed his face again.
The beginnings of an idea glimmered. “How does your shapeshifting work? Do you change matter, or something else?”
“I change matter. Usually my own, but I can sometimes shift things I touch.”
I thrust my wrist out to Mátyás. “Could you shift one of my souls into something else? Into power that might be drawn into this?” The Romani bracelet jangled.
He studied me for a long moment, his blue-eyed gaze clear and unflinching. “Hold still,” he said finally, and took my left hand.
A faint warmth crept from his fingers into mine. But then, as it had done with so many other spells, the heat intensified. It blazed up my arm, following the tracery of blood vessels, and spreading through my lungs like fire. I tried to scream and wrench my hand free, but Mátyás held me fast, and I had no air left in my lungs for sound. I could feel my souls reaching for his spell, to tear it open, and I pushed them down. I must stay calm. I must let this work.
Then something closed around my other wrist—long fingers that were somehow both human in the soft touch of skin and inhuman in the not-quite-right shape. His touch scalded, as it had in Sárvár, but the burning was only a drop to the pain pouring through me. The bone blade fell from my fingers. At my side, Hunger murmured strange words in a lyrical, molten tongue. After a moment, the heat began to leave me, sliding through my fingers into Hunger. His grip tightened. The fire did not go out, but it dampened enough I could bear it.
“Anna, I can’t reach you. I can feel your second soul, but it’s like a shadow. I can’t hold it,” Mátyás said.
Grandmama’s last words floated back to me. Let yourself free. She was right about me. All my life I had been dimly aware of my dual souls, wearing one soul as my public face and pushing everything dark into the other, keeping her, like Macbeth, “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.”
I reached beneath the haze of pain and pried the bars of my heart open.
I let my shadow self wing upward, strong and fine and falcon-free. She was not, as I had feared, malformed and dangerous. Only imperfect.
Only me.
“Got her,” Mátyás said. Then, “Confound it, Anna, this will hurt—”
The fire flared up, searing through me, tearing through soft tissue, shearing through muscle and bone. And then the final great clap of pain: agony so intense it moved beyond pain into a kind of pleasure, anguish so deep that white sparkled at the edge of my vision, and only the twin grips on my hands held me steady.
As abruptly as it had built, the fire burned away. I was cold, as cold as I could ever remember being. Even the sun on my face carried only a memory of warmth. Mátyás saw me shivering and wrapped his arms around me.
I wept into his shirt.
“It’s done, Anna,” he said. “Look.” With one arm still draped around me, he lifted my wrist with his other hand. The agate blazed—so bright it hurt to look at.
My soul.
And now I could feel the spell around us—not as a faint tremor, but as a living, pulsing thing. It streamed around me in the wind. It shifted in the shadows between the trees. And it danced inside me, warmth blossoming through my body like sensation returning to chilled limbs after a winter storm. This—this was the Luminate birthright, the awareness the Confirmation made possible. No wonder the Circle members were desperate to keep it for themselves.
I laughed with relief and threw my arms around Mátyás, then released him and danced a jig around Hunger. And because I could, I crafted a Lumen light and then sent it spinning off into the sky.
“Careful.” Hunger frowned. “This power is not to be wasted.”
“I will not,” I promised, sobered by the reminder.
My gaze caught on the shifting darkness beyond Hunger, and I discovered that what I had first taken to be simply shadows cast by the trees were not shadows at all, but creatures of every shape and size watching us from the fringes of the wood. Some were of beast aspect, ragged tusks and fur and gleaming red eyes. Others were so beautiful I could not look on them. The Lady blazed like white fire against the green, the golden wings of the turul bird flashing above her.
I would not think about them. I could not afford the distraction.
Closing my eyes, I extended my arms and fingers, trying to put as much of myself as I could in contact with the spell. I cast my thoughts inward, seeking for the calm center where my soul should be.
I found my center, though it was anything but calm. My soul was wild and agitated, the edges raw and wounded, a great, gaping hole bearing mute witness to my missing soul. I closed my eyes tighter and concentrated not on the wounded soul, but on that gap. I reached through it and outward toward the knotted center of the spell. With my invisible sense, I grasped the spell and pulled. One strand of the great spell followed my tug, and I reached for another, then another, and finally too many to count.
When I was full of the spell, so full I could scarcely breathe, so full even blinking hurt, Mátyás released his grip on my other soul.
It slipped back into place, pulled by an irresistible force. The spell inside me creaked and shuddered, an old house caught in the grasp of a strong wind.
A fissure opened across the dome of the sky revealing a band of blackness, night stars incongruous against the blue. The ground trembled, and a handful of boulders shook loose from the rocks above us. One cracked against the stone slab behind me.
A winged creature launched itself from the fringes of the woods, disappearing through the fissure with a cry that reverberated along my bones.
My entire body began to shake, my teeth rattling against each other. The spell fought to free itself, to stay whole, and I could no longer contain it.
The magic flowed back into the Binding spell, and I collapsed on the ground.
“Well,” Mátyás said, “I believe that might work.”
I could not do this.
I retrieved Lady Berri’s bone knife from the grou
nd and looked from the blade to Mátyás’s pale face. I did not want to endure that soul-searing pain again. And I could not—I shied away from the end of that thought. The blade hung heavy in my hands.
Hunger caught my eyes with his golden ones. Something flickered deep within them that might have been compassion. “This is the only way.”
I took a deep breath and tried to center myself. I thought again of Gábor, of William. I called to mind all the people and places in Hungary I had come to love. If I did not do this thing, I was abandoning all of them to the casual cruelty of the Circle and the Hapsburgs. I would be abandoning all the creatures standing just out of sight, those creatures terrible and beautiful and strange.
Creatures like me.
“Not all of us are monsters,” Hunger said, as if he knew my heart.
“It is the right thing,” Mátyás said, and took my left hand again. His fingers shook beneath mine.
I took another breath, trying to keep my rebellious stomach in place. I did not want to do this, even if it was the right thing.
“Anna,” Mátyás said, dropping my hand and cradling my face with both hands. His eyes were like a spring of water: clear, calm, fathomless. I drank them in. “It will be all right.”
I remembered a phrase I’d heard at the café, between students discussing the injustice of Hapsburg rule: Mátyás is dead, justice is gone. They were referring to the great Renaissance king, but they could have been speaking of this moment.
If Mátyás dies, how can anything be right?
His eyes held mine. “I chose this, Anna. An honorable death is more than most men hope for. I won’t die my father’s death.” A smile haunted his face. He slipped his good-luck cross from his neck and handed it to me. “Give this to Noémi. She might even forgive me.”
My heart twisted as I slipped the cross over my head. “All right.” It is not all right.
As before, Mátyás peeled one of my souls away and forced it into my talisman. The pain crawling through my body was worse the second time, because I knew to anticipate it. Hunger took my right wrist, careful to avoid the bone blade in my hand, and siphoned some of the fire away from me. I called the spell into the emptiness left by my missing soul, and the spell followed, though not willingly.
Magic hummed through my body. Electricity sparked down my veins, lifting my hair away from my arms, from the back of my head. The slightest touch would shatter me into a million shining pieces.
I looked through that power and pain to Mátyás. He leaned against the great stone slab, his face white, his lips set.
“I am ready,” he said.
My heart compressed into a tight mass.
“Mátyás,” I said.
There weren’t enough words. I wanted to thank him and apologize in the same breath. I wanted to tell him I was horrified and sad and angry and honored all at once to be here with him. I wanted to tell him I loved him like a brother, but those were not the words he wanted to hear, and I could not lie to him. Not here, not now. And Hunger was listening.
So I left the words unsaid and leaned forward, closing the space between us. I kissed him. Into that kiss I put all my gratitude and love and the beginnings of the grief pushing at the back of my throat. His lips moved against mine, our breath mingling for one splendid, wrenching moment.
I blinked against the burning in my eyes and pulled back to look at Mátyás. “I wish…”
He shook his head minutely. “No wishes. Just truth. Tell Noémi I love her. And—remember me.”
“Always.” My voice caught. His face swam before me through a glaze of tears. I wanted to memorize this moment, to engrave it on my mind and heart.
Hunger released my arm, and the full weight of the spell rushed back into me. I nearly dropped the knife. I squeezed my fingers around the hilt and raised it. Hesitated.
“The spell must have heart’s blood,” Hunger reminded me, but his voice was gentle, as though he knew what this would cost.
I placed the tip of my knife against Mátyás’s breast, above his heart. His eyes met mine, and his fingers, still holding mine, tightened.
“Please.” My voice broke. “Close your eyes or I cannot do this.”
Mátyás closed his eyes. I studied the tracing of blue veins on his eyelids, the mole beneath his left eye, the way his brown lashes turned gold at their tips.
I looked up at the great cracked vault of the sky, the arching upward thrust of the stone mountains.
I cannot do this.
“God have mercy,” I whispered. My hand on the knife wavered.
“The Binding breaks,” Hunger said in my ear. He set his hand on mine and shoved the blade home.
I released the hilt as if it scorched me and shook off Hunger’s hand.
Mátyás’s eyes flew open. He gasped and dropped my hand, his fingers fluttering up to the hilt protruding from his chest. His legs buckling, he slid to the ground, his back against the stone slab.
I had a brief moment to wonder whom I hated more—myself or Hunger—before Mátyás lost his grip on my soul.
That second soul winged back into its place like a dove to its dovecote.
And—nothing.
I brimmed with power, my veins blazing fire through my body. But the spell had not broken. Mátyás watched me with agony-bright eyes, patient, trusting. Then his head listed, his eyes tipped shut.
No.
“You need more power,” Hunger whispered.
But where was I to find more power? My body already contained the whole of the spell. It fought against my souls.
My souls.
My essence.
I brushed my fingers against the Romani bracelet I wore. Make yourself vulnerable, Gábor had said, all those weeks ago. Open your essence to the thing you would persuade. I had struggled to find magic because I did not know who—what—I was. I knew that now.
I was not powerless.
I was chimera.
I had the power to break worlds.
Lumen, I thought, opening my souls to the rushing current of the magic. Be what you will. Be free.
And the world fell apart.
The sky erupted—the crack blossoming outward like a firework, a great bloom of destruction. The fissures radiated down to the ground. A thunderclap shook the valley, then another, and chasms snaked toward me through the bent grass and boulders. The mountains trembled and shivered apart, great hunks of rock raining down.
The stone slab broke, the crack down its heart exactly above Mátyás’s head.
The Binding breaks.
The Circle ends.
All the maledictions of my childhood coming to fruition on the plain before me.
The creatures at the edge of the woods disappeared, vanishing through the cracks and fissures, screaming their elation.
“We must go, or we’ll be trapped here.” Hunger wrapped iron fingers around my arm, pulling me toward the nearest fissure. The beginnings of a headache wrapped similarly tight fingers around my skull.
A thin smear of blood trickled down my hand. Mátyás’s blood. My eyes flew to Mátyás, huddled in the shadow of the great rock. I struggled against Hunger’s grip.
“I can’t leave my cousin!”
“He’s dead.”
“At least let me bring his body!”
“There’s no time!”
And Hunger jumped down into a chasm, pulling me with him.
I screamed at him, every curse I could think of. As darkness swallowed me, all I could see was Mátyás dying alone in the shadow of the rock, cradled by a scrim of roses.
I landed, hard, against the cracked marble floor in the Sala Terrena. Pain sizzled up my arms and through my hips. It jabbed pointed fingers in my eyes and glittered at the edge of my sight. I blinked, trying to clear my stunned vision, and stood. Fire radiated from my head, shooting down my spine and flaming through my joints. This, the cost of breaking.
Slowly, as though my bones would fragment if I moved too swiftly, I looked around.
>
I stood awash in a sea of movement: goose-footed lidérc, drowned rusalka, hollow-eyed boszorkány, the shadow-on-shadow sleekness of the fene. And others, creatures I’d never seen: a tawny beast with the face of a boar and a long, wicked horn sloping from his forehead. A manticore with the body of a lion and the face of a man. Serpents of all kinds—great-winged dragons, snakes with human faces, man-sized roosters with serpent wings and scales. Some—all?—of the creatures had come through the chasm with us.
They raged through the Sala Terrena and burst like a tidal wave into the rest of the palace. From a distance came the faint tinkle of breaking crockery. Nearer at hand was the distressing rip and slurp of something feeding.
I pressed my fist against my stomach, fighting my rising gorge.
What had I done?
Every window in the room was broken, as though some great force had exploded in the center of the room and pushed outward. Outside, it rained, a steady grey drizzle.
Inside, madness reigned. I could not see Hunger, or the calming light of the Lady. The spider-woman with the third eye glanced my way briefly and saluted before disappearing from the room.
“Hunger!” I shouted.
A great boar-headed creature with crow’s wings turned at my call, saliva dripping from his thrusting tusks. He sniffed at the air, and his huge lips curved upward in a distortion of a smile.
He sprang toward me, and I ran, dodging a cluster of fae women with flowing hair and ivy-twined dresses. I could not hear, over the cacophony of the room—voices hooting, singing, crying, laughing, cackling, crowing, rooting, roaring—if the monster still followed me.
I tripped and caught myself on my hands on the cracked tile. A sheep curled on the floor before me, asleep. No. Not sleeping. Dead: its throat torn out, its entrails spilled across the floor in bizarre runic patterns, bits of bone and matted flesh strewn around it.
This: the destruction newly released creatures left in their wake.