Winter War Awakening (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 3)

by Rosalyn Eves

  The samodiva queen—Zhena—was dead.

  She had seemed so powerful, threatening us in our room. And fearless as she demanded restitution for Zhivka’s death. How could someone with that much fire and life die so casually, her neck snapped as though she were a defenseless child?

  The samodiva queen had driven Zhivka to betray us, but she had not been without compassion, to judge from her care for her sisters and her grief over Zhivka. Chernobog, who tormented soldiers for entertainment, had none. If he took his place among the Four, they would never relent.

  Chernobog descended from the cloud of smoke like an Old Testament god, reeking of brimstone. The samodiva queen still hung from his hands, but all her brightness had gone out. He flung her corpse at the feet of Hunger and Vasilisa, and a dismayed murmur from the crowd broke out at his blatant disrespect.

  “I told you,” he said. “Weak.”

  If Hunger was troubled by this turn of events, his calm face showed nothing of it. “Your challenge was successful. Welcome to the Four.” With a murmured word to Vasilisa, he lifted the broken body of the queen and walked from the room. Vasilisa, Pál, and the praetheria nearest Chernobog clustered around the horned god, presumably to congratulate him on his win.

  The tree-creature set us both on the floor. He accepted our thanks with a sad nod, and we fled the chamber.

  Back in our room, we were silent for a long time, lying on our beds and staring at the rock ceiling. Again, I thought of the sheer weight resting quiescent above us, the layered earth that could crush us in a moment.

  At last, Noémi spoke. “I told you I felt we ought to stay, that there was something I was called to do or observe in these caves. That feeling has vanished. Maybe I only imagined it—I don’t know. But I do not think we can safely stay here any longer.”

  “No,” I agreed. “We need to get out.”

  And then what?

  The praetheria would certainly attack, particularly with Chernobog goading the Four. My weeks in the cave had given me some idea of the scope of the battle facing the human armies—it would be far larger and far deadlier than any of us had suspected. I had already told Gábor some of this, and he would have passed word on to Kossuth. If we got free, we should have to warn the Austrian and Russian armies as best we could. The human armies could hope to face the praetheria only if they stopped fighting each other.

  And yet, for a hale human army to face a prepared praetherian army seemed like a recipe for disaster—a battle where no one won and everyone lost. Emilija told me that a good soldier fought not for the sake of fighting but to end the fighting. I did not want to win a war but to end one.

  But how?

  In the last months I had been hungry, hunted, cast out from everything I knew. My ego had been stripped bare, and I saw myself for what I was: a rash, foolish girl who had believed she was more important than she was. A girl like that had nothing to offer a world at war.

  One swallow could not make a summer.

  And yet…

  Perhaps it didn’t matter whether I could do something or not. Perhaps what mattered was the trying. Before he left for war, Gábor had told me, “I might die whether I choose to fight or not, and I would prefer an active death.”

  I might achieve nothing. But I had rather try and fail than not try at all. Vasilisa and Pál seemed to think I had some worth as a weapon—enough that Vasilisa had hunted me, that Pál had intrigued to catch me. Even if I could not (yet) see how breaking spells might help me end a war, I would try. One swallow could not make a summer; one soldier could not win a war. But a dozen soldiers acting together might turn the tide of a battle.

  Alone, I could do little enough. But I would not be alone.

  Together, with my friends, we might achieve something that mattered.

  We just had to escape first.

  After Chernobog’s defeat of the samodiva queen, the atmosphere in the caverns shifted. The praetheria who had been kind to Noémi and me began to avoid us, as if our presence made them uncomfortable. The giantess no longer spoke to us, though she might acknowledge us with a terse nod. Those who had been indifferent took to “accidentally” jostling us as we passed or laying snares for us, and more than once Noémi and I found ourselves in a tangle of bruised knees and wounded dignity, sprawled on the cavern floor. Hunger was the only praetherian who appeared to seek us out. Even Vasilisa stayed away for a few days.

  “Perhaps,” Hunger said, coming upon us after one such tumble, “you ought to stay closer to your room. Or wait for me or Pál to come with you.”

  “That’s kind of you.” Noémi’s blush belied the dignity in her tone. “But we do not need your escort.”

  “No,” Hunger agreed, reaching down to help her rise. “But you might find it more comfortable. You might even enjoy my company.”

  He did not release his grip on Noémi’s hands once she was standing, and her blush deepened. She mumbled something, and Hunger, his eyes brightening with delight, said, “I quite understand if you find me too much. You would not be the first woman overwhelmed by my manifest charms.”

  This outrageous statement seemed to restore Noémi. “Oh, do go away,” she said crossly.

  Hunger laughed and let her go.

  Our prowls through the caverns were not random: we were looking for possible escape routes. But beyond the unexplored depths of the caves where no one went, there appeared to be only one exit. It was always well guarded, and we were never alone. If Hunger or Pál did not trail us, a guard did.

  Vasilisa found us on one of these rambles. Chernobog lurked behind her, horns casting pointed shadows across us. The few nearby praetheria, after a swift glance at the pair, found urgent business elsewhere.

  Vasilisa flicked her gaze at Noémi. “Miss Eszterházy, you are not needed. I suggest you return to your room.”

  With a murmured apology to me, Noémi disappeared. Vasilisa led Chernobog and me to a smaller chamber nearby, empty of praetheria though rich with configurations of stone. I bristled at her assumption that I should simply follow her—but really, what choice did I have?

  Perfunctorily, she had me demonstrate my basic skill, tossing a spell at me that I broke—if not easily, then at least competently enough.

  “Is that all?” Chernobog asked. “For all the trouble you went through to acquire the girl, I expected something more.”

  “She can unmake things too, though she is unfortunately blocked at the moment. We are working on it.”

  “And time? Can she unmake the past as well?”

  Vasilisa’s eyebrows shot up, though she masked her surprise quickly. “I was not aware that was a chimera gift.”

  He grunted. “Was speculated as such. The only chimera I met did not live long enough to attempt it.”

  I was not sure which part of his statement was more alarming: that chimera could unmake the past or that the only chimera in his company had not lived long.

  Chernobog watched as Vasilisa ran me through a few more tests: a painful spell that set every nerve in my body screeching until I snapped its source; an ice-bear illusion I shattered only after the bear knocked me to the ground; a net that tightened around me before I unraveled it.

  Chernobog broke off a club of stone longer than his arm and held it out to me. “Unmake this.”

  “I can’t unmake stone,” I protested. The rock was not fabricated, as the card had been.

  He passed the stone from one hand to another, running one finger along a trail of water. As though he had plucked my thoughts from my mind, he said, “But this is not the original shape of the stone: millennia have gone into its formation, drop by drop. What can be made can also be unmade.” He pointed it at me as though it were a saber. “Try.”

  My shadow self rumbled uneasily. I had shifted the stones beneath the foundations of Schönbrunn and had set an avalanche to block
the entrance to the ice caves. I had not unmade the rock, precisely, but I had broken it down, had loosed the bonds that held the particles of stone together.

  I took the rock from Chernobog, equal parts repelled and drawn by the prospect of unmaking. Could I do it? Should I do it? The questions seemed two entirely different things.

  I set my fingertips on the end of the stone lance and closed my eyes. I could not sense anything to indicate a spell, no buzzing, no frisson along my bones. I tried, as I had with the avalanche, to picture the minerals in the stone loosening their bonds, but the slight shudder beneath my fingers might have been imagined.

  My head began to pound.

  “Try harder,” Chernobog instructed.

  A weight settled across me, like a fine misting of rain. My eyes flashed open. Chernobog had not moved, but his shadow flowed toward me, cloaking me, spreading tendrils around my throat. My shadow self uncoiled and spread, liquid and hot, through my body, burning at each point across my skin where it met Chernobog’s darkness.

  “Chernobog…,” Vasilisa said, a note of warning in her voice.

  “You coddle the girl too much,” he said.

  I tried to draw back, but his shadow followed me. Worse even than the burning where his shadow touched me was the sense that the shadow had somehow crossed the barrier of my skin and was spreading, like ink in water, through my doubled souls. My more ordinary soul shriveled, drawing back before the creeping darkness of Chernobog’s reach, and the shadow soul swelled into ascendancy.

  She had been ascendant before, in times of high emotional tension, including when I broke the Binding—but she had always been part of me, rooted in my core. But this boiling power was not me.

  If I reached out now, the stone lance would crumble. But what else might unravel with it? My soul?

  Months before, in Vienna, Vasilisa had told me I could cast spells only if I would join my souls. I could not allow Chernobog’s pollution to spread further: he was driving my souls apart, engorging one and starving the other.

  I closed my eyes again, concentrating not on that encroaching shadow but on my two souls: there was a quietness at the very center of my mind, away from the turmoil rocketing through my body. I clung to it, dragging my consciousness of my souls with me.

  My souls were not separate from me: they were me. When I breathed, I did not provide air to just one; when I slept at night, my souls slept too. It was only my mind that kept interfering, kept dragging up my double-souled chimera self as if I might forget I was monstrous if not reminded. What had Vasilisa told me? That I was too much in my head?

  I took a long breath and let my mind ride on the inhale and exhale. I pushed deeper, trying not to think, trying only to feel that calm. In that center, I held my two souls, and instead of smashing them together, instead of severing them, I embraced them both.

  A wave of warmth washed over me, a bone-deep sureness.

  “Lumen,” I whispered, casting one of the few spells I knew. But I directed the light not to the chamber around me but toward the darkness inside of me.

  Chernobog’s shadow pulled away so quickly that it left a burning line to mark its passing. Chernobog cursed, and I opened my eyes to find him snarling. Or perhaps grinning? His lips pulled back around his teeth, but I could not read the expression in his eyes.

  Stars spangled on the edge of my vision in time with my pulse. I inhaled.

  His arm shot forward, his fingers curling around my throat, as he’d done to the samodiva queen. Before I could exhale, he had propelled both of us across the room, slamming me against the wall and knocking the wind from me.

  His eyes were cold and flat. Did he mean to kill me? Surely Vasilisa would not let it go so far.

  My head pounded, joined now by throbbing aches all through my back. Chernobog’s shadow wrapped around me again, joining his fingers at my throat.

  I couldn’t breathe. My vision, already sparkly, began to fuzz at the edges and darken.

  The rock behind me began to soften and melt as he pushed, my shoulders pressing into stone.

  I remembered how he had tried to bury the samodiva queen in rock, how he had smothered a soldier in stone, and my body flushed with ice.

  His fingers loosened as the rock swallowed my ears, then my cheeks. My legs, kicking wildly, were still outthrust before me.

  “Unmake this,” he whispered, pulling his hand free. The words rumbled through the stone around my ears. I caught a wild, desperate breath as the rock closed over me.

  There was a small pocket of air before my face, but it was not enough. Already the blood felt heavy and sluggish in my veins.

  The darkness inside the stone was absolute.

  I could not move.

  How long would it take for me to die?

  Don’t panic, I thought. Too late, I thought.

  I didn’t know how to unmake rock.

  But maybe I could break it.

  With my inner sense, I sought out the fissures in the rock, the nearly invisible seams crisscrossing the layers of stone. The rock had not always existed in this form: some of it had been grains of sand, compressed to stone over the years. Crystals had formed in pockets.

  “Be yourself,” I whispered. Not an unmaking but a making of sorts—a return to its original form. The rock around me began to crumble an infinitesimal bit, and I could move my fingers.

  This tiny success spurred me onward. I nudged my souls together, driving them toward the fissures I’d widened. I didn’t know a spell for cracking rock, and I was no Lucifera in any case. But Vasilisa had told me once that spells were not necessary if the will was strong enough, and I had nothing now but will.

  “Break,” I whispered, and a crack like cannon fire boomed around me. The wall of rock erupted. I tumbled backward, landing on my rear in another chamber of the cavern, to the immense surprise of the praetheria gathered there. I scrambled to my feet and dusted off my skirt, trying to control the trembling in my hands.

  The pain thundering through my head was almost blinding.

  “Anna?” my uncle asked, rising from his seat at a table where a game of cards was in process. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Chernobog put me in the wall,” I said, as though that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

  Pál frowned. “You would be wiser to humor the Four, child.”

  I started to shake my head, stopping when the pain only intensified. “I could not do what he wanted.” But I had done what I needed.

  His frown deepened. “Then you had best pray, child. Because if they do not find you useful, they will not keep you here. And they cannot afford to let you go.”

  The agony in my head reached an exquisite pitch. I stopped caring what the Four might do to me. If they killed me, at least my head would stop aching.

  “The Four can go to hell,” I said, taking a sliver of pleasure from the shock on Pál’s face. “I am going to my bed.”

  * * *

  I slept for hours, a blessedly dreamless sleep, and woke to an empty room. My bag lay open in the center of the floor.

  For a moment, I blinked at it, uncomprehending. Then I scrambled from my bed, jarring my knees against the rock floor as I dug through the bag.

  Gábor’s letters—both spelled sheets of paper—were gone. What had he written last? Something about heading to the northern passes to head off the Austrian army and protect the mines. And I had not erased the letter because I wanted to remember the part that made me laugh.

  Nausea rolled through me. I wanted to weep. The praetheria knew where Gábor and the Hungarian soldiers were heading. They knew I had means of writing the soldiers. What else might they know?

  Noémi ducked back into the room. “You’re awake!” She registered the look in my eyes and dropped to the ground beside me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Gábor’s l
etters are gone. Along with the last message he sent me.”

  Noémi knew as well as I what that meant.

  “Oh, Anna.” She reached a hand toward me, then let it fall. “Hunger told me what happened with Chernobog. I have never seen him so angry.”

  “Were you with him just now? When someone snuck into our room and stole my letters?”

  Her blue eyes narrowed. “Don’t blame me—your keeping the letters made them dangerous, not my absence. Are you in pain? I can lighten some of the bruises.”

  My entire body ached, including my head, though the worst of that had subsided with my rest. But I was not about to let Noémi heal me. I deserved to feel some pain for my own stupidity.

  “I’m fine.” I stood up, wincing at the movement.

  Noémi put her arm around me, her own irritation forgotten as her healer’s instincts kicked in. “You’re not fine. Someone put you in solid rock.”

  “I’m a fool.”

  I was worse than a fool. I’d put Gábor in danger—and I’d proved Chernobog right. Unmake this. Chernobog’s voice echoed in my head. He’d pushed me into the wall to goad me into action, and I’d acted. I had not unmade the rock, not precisely, but what I had done was destructive magic all the same. What kind of chaos could such unmaking unleash on the battlefield? Breaking spells alone had made me monstrous, had given me a gift and a responsibility beyond what I trusted myself to bear. If there was more to being chimera than spell-breaking, what might I become in following those gifts?

  Terror curdled in my heart. It did not bear thinking of.

  “Anna, look at me,” Noémi said. “Whatever they hope to make of you, that does not have to define you.”

  She put her arm around me, and I curled into her, laying my head on her shoulder, comforted by her warmth and her pragmatism. Only a few people could look at me as she had just then, as though they could see all of me and did not flinch from it but loved me still. Gábor had that same gift.