by Rosalyn Eves
Before the spinning vision of the past began to slow, I had already begun: using the same inner sense that I’d used to undo the curse surrounding Franz Joseph, I reached out to Pál. I was not sure what quality of the blood made it clot, so I concentrated instead on the flow of liquid through his lungs. When I had asked the stones above the ice caves to shatter to form an avalanche, I did not need to know each seam that made them up; I asked only that the stone accelerate its natural progress toward decay. Nudging the blood toward clots was a similar kind of unmaking—not asking blood to be anything other than it was, only asking a particular function of it.
I did not think this was the unmaking Chernobog envisioned me capable of.
The main danger was that Pál might read my mind before I finished. While part of me attended to the unmaking, the rest of me concentrated on his Vision spell, trying to recapture that initial feeling of hope and possibility I’d felt when he presented his plan.
The whirling lights of Pál’s Vision spell stilled at last. “Here,” he said. Using light to guide my inner eye, he teased a few threads from the pattern so I could see them, then explained how I was to swap two threads, snapping them just as I might a spell, after which he would rework them into the whole, beginning our rewrite of history.
I could not tell if my attempt at clot-forming had worked; Pál seemed unmoved. I needed to stall for time, so I reached for the threads he showed me, intending to let my own ineptitude prevent me from actually breaking the weave.
Beneath that focus, my second soul whispered to his blood: clot, clot, clot.
Before I could touch the vision threads, Pál backhanded me with his free hand. I reeled, the lights of the pattern disappearing as our connection broke.
“You are one of the few members of my family, of my own blood, and yet you attack my blood?”
I froze, my hand against my cheek. Despite all my efforts to hide them, he’d heard my thoughts.
He whispered a spell, and as its edges brushed me, my blood felt as if it were dissolving. Whatever I’d succeeded in doing, Pál had just undone. “I promised to elevate you to glory—and this is how you repay me? By trying to kill me? I should leave you for the ravens, to peck your eyes out, you ungrateful wretch.”
He reached for me, and I scrambled back. His eyes had always been eerie, unnaturally pale, but now they reflected a deadness that frightened me more than all his inscrutable moods had. “Perhaps I don’t need you, only your second soul.”
I stared at him. He must be mad. “You can’t have either of my souls.”
“Why not? You only need one. In the general way, a soul divorced from its body is no use to me, as the separation kills the body and thus the soul loses its vitality. Except, of course, for a táltos. Perhaps if I fail with you, I’ll try again with your cousin.”
He advanced again, and I turned on my heel to run, but some invisible spell snaked around my ankle and yanked me to the ground. Frozen dirt and blood filled my mouth.
Pál tangled his fingers in my hair, splaying them across my head and digging the fingernails into my scalp. I bit back a yelp. He murmured something, and agony exploded across my body, burrowing under my skin and burning through my veins.
And at my core, in the place where I kept my souls, a fissure erupted. Fire cleaved between them, and my second soul, my wild shadow self that I adored and feared in equal measure, peeled away.
I screamed, a raw cry that rose to the clouded sky and fell away, muted. This pain echoed my agony when we broke the Binding spell, when Mátyás had shifted my second soul away from my body so I could draw the spell into me. I had thought that pain would kill me: only Hunger’s grip, siphoning away the worst of it, had kept me upright until Mátyás could release my second soul back to me, until I could shatter the spell.
But this pain—Pál had not been gentle in stripping my soul away, as Mátyás had been. And Hunger did not stand beside me to blunt its edges.
I writhed on the ground, every nerve ending in my body sparking. The gaping hole at my core seemed to spread, as though someone had run a sword through me and carved away half my body. I could not breathe.
Pál stood over me, considering, his body blocking the weak light that filtered through the clouds overhead. “It’s a pity I cannot kill you now without rendering your soul worthless.”
His footsteps moved away, and I pushed myself upright, gritting my teeth at the black stars swimming in my vision. A small cluster of soldiers fought near us—Russians and Hungarians, from the look of it—and Pál swept his hand at them. They froze instantly, ice creeping from their boots to their belts, from their hands to their cheeks. They toppled slowly, like a child’s dominoes left ignored on a table.
A crawling despair washed over me. I had tried to stop Pál and had failed—worse still, he had stripped from me the last strength I possessed.
Who was I, if I was not even chimera?
The intensity of the pain had settled into a massive ache throbbing in my muscles and bones. I slid my chilled fingers into my pocket and brushed against Gábor’s stone. “Hope,” I whispered. There was no rush of warmth this time: Gábor had warned me the stone would not work above once. But I found his words, curled like a treasure box in my mind that needed only to be opened: Your gifts do not define you; you define your gifts.
I was Anna Arden before I knew I was chimera; I was Anna Arden still. The Four had talked so much of unmaking, but I did not believe it was truly possible. You could not take a thing out of existence, only change its form. For all the times I thought my old self gone, she was still here, only transformed. Even with my chimera self stripped away, I was still here.
I had gifts and flaws together, and there were people in the world who loved me. I might be in pain, I might be half-souled, but I was not nothing.
I struggled to my feet, swaying as I rose. I scanned the battlefield and found Pál not far distant. He was not moving swiftly—rather, he seemed to be taking his time, tossing casual spells like flowers at the surrounding soldiers, and smiling when they fell. I lifted a sword from one of the frost-covered soldiers with a murmured apology.
Pál was not looking for me to follow him, and he did not see me as I drew closer. His pride might be his sole weakness, but it was a weakness I could use. He had clearly forgotten that, single-souled, I could cast the spells I struggled with as chimera. Vasilisa had taught me I did not even need to know the spell ritual if my will was strong enough.
My will was adamantine.
“Fall,” I whispered, drawing together every scrap of power I had and pushing it toward Pál.
I caught my uncle midspell. The ground buckled beneath him, and his spell deteriorated in a burst of fire before him. He fell backward, his head thunking against the frozen ground. Ignoring the pain that spiked through my feet with each step, I ran forward, the sword heavy in my hand.
I did not know any killing spells—and did not think I had the will for one, in any case—but I knew the bite of metal. I’d felt it when I stabbed Mátyás; I’d seen it in the blow that had felled William, the thrust that killed Hadúr. While Pál lay still on the ground, groaning at the red, bubbled skin on his face, I rammed the sword into his gut, angling up toward his heart. A killing blow, I hoped. One that he could not undo or counter with any number of powerful spells.
Pál’s eyes flew open. “How—?”
I stood over him, blocking the light from his face, as he had blocked it from mine. “Not all power lies in spells or doubled souls,” I said. “I am Anna Arden, and I will have my soul back.”
The dragon seemed to swim across the field, long muscles coiling and uncoiling, the seven heads sinuous and sleek. Ice crusted the field beneath its clawed feet, but it neither felt the cold nor cared. Its singular focus was filling the ravening emptiness inside it.
Screaming heralded its march across the battlefie
ld, and the dragon followed the sound, drawn less by the noise than by the sense that each thin cry unfurled from a warm body, a mouthful (or two) that would take a minuscule edge off the aching that drove it.
Threads of magic spun around the beast, trying to halt its forward motion. It shook them loose, their power spinning harmlessly into the air around it.
The dragon was unleashed, and it was hungry.
I watched Pál as he lay dying. It did not take long—a matter of minutes, though it felt like hours, his bloody fingers scrabbling uselessly at the hilt of the sword, his breath dissolving in curses. The flat grey sky, shedding bits of snow, revealed nothing of the passage of time.
I could not break the spell holding my soul to him, but before he stopped breathing, the spell snapped and my second soul winged back to me, slamming into me with the force Noémi’s hound had used to knock me to the ground the first time we met. (My second soul had the same exuberance too.) I kept my feet, but only just.
A long, shuddering breath, and then Pál was still. I knelt to brush his eyelids closed, then sat down beside his body. He had tried to kill me the first time we met. He had led the Circle to us at Eszterháza, and the Circle had killed Grandmama. He had killed Hunger, and only Mátyás and Noémi’s quick work had saved the sárkány.
But he was still my mother’s brother, still the man who had been a frightened child when the Circle made him into a weapon. Still the child my grandmother had mourned most of her adult life.
As I knelt beside his body, a litany of my dead ran through my mind: Grandmama. Lady Berri. William. Zhivka. Petőfi Sándor. Hadúr. Pál. Noémi. I curled my arms around my knees and began to cry. For the dead, whom I could not bring back, and for the living, who could not escape the bloody reach of this war.
When I’d spent myself, I stood and wiped the tears from my cheeks. A few drops had caught on the ends of my short hair and hung—frozen salt diamonds.
In the aftermath of Pál’s death I felt oddly untethered. My uncle’s death seemed so cataclysmic, and yet little had changed. The battle still raged. I might still lose everything.
But I had won myself back. That was something.
I looked around once more, assessing. In the distance, the black mass that was Mátyás wreaked havoc on the human soldiers.
How had he come to fight for the praetheria? What had Vasilisa told him? Partial truths, I guessed. Enough to make him trust her. But he was fighting for the wrong side, burning energy in battles that might yet destroy us.
One soldier, I thought. One task. I could not end the war alone, but I could do this one thing.
I had a glimmer of an idea, but no assurance it would work. Closing my eyes, I pictured Gábor as I had seen him last, as I walked away from him toward the praetheria. I thought of the trees and fields around Eszterháza, the heartbreaking hominess of a stork settling in to roost, a heron picking through the reeds. I pictured England—my family’s home in Dorset. My father, hunched over some bit of obscure scholarship. James, racing between the house and the stables.
Noémi.
I knit all the longing together and pushed it outward: an invocation and plea.
Would it be enough, in a battlefield rife with desperation, with a hundred thousand hearts beating with hope and terror and need? I shuffled through my mental pictures again, holding them until the pain of absence was unbearable.
Long minutes passed. A cold wind picked up, biting my cheeks and stirring the hair of Pál’s corpse behind me.
A flicker of movement: a birdlike shape where no birds flew (save the vultures circling high above). The flicker swelled, and Hunger stood beside me.
“What?” he asked, rather ungraciously.
I faltered. The only time I had seen him look worse was when he was dead. Dried blood (Noémi’s?) crusted his cheeks, and his eyes were hooded and haunted. I guessed that Noémi’s death was replaying through his head as it was through mine.
His gaze fixed on a spot behind me, his dark brows drawn together in a frown. “Is that Pál?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I did not turn to look at Pál. “I need you to help me stop Mátyás.”
When Hunger didn’t say anything, I plunged on. “I know you’re grieving Noémi—we all are. But she would want us to channel that grief into action; she’d want us to stop Mátyás before he tears himself apart. We still have a chance to salvage this.”
Hunger looked back at me and bowed his head. “As you wish.”
If he did not sound enthusiastic, he had not said no, either. I’d accept that.
He shifted with the ease of someone long accustomed to it, then lowered his torso so that I could scramble astride his back. I’d sat thus before, though the last time he’d been fitted with a saddle to anchor me. I leaned forward, my belly against the knobbled spine of his back, and knotted my arms around his neck.
He lifted with a rush, the cold wind roaring up to meet us. We soared over the battlefield, following the smoking, groaning ruins of the armies. The devastation rocked me: had it only been this morning that the praetherian army marched out? A miasma of fear rose from the dead and dying, from the living trying to scuttle back beyond the reach of a powerful, deadly army.
We landed a short distance from Mátyás. The appearance of a second dragon—even if he only had one head instead of seven—set up a renewed chorus of screaming and soldiers scrambling to get away. Even the praetheria gave the two dragons wide berth.
One of Mátyás’s seven heads reached out to snag a fleeing soldier, snapping him in half.
Hunger swelled to meet Mátyás, increasing his size by half, and my grip on his neck loosened. I slid backward, my heart catapulting into my throat, before finally lodging against his shoulder blades, where his wings sprouted outward. He folded his wings back around, anchoring me.
“Mátyás!” Hunger called, and the dragon before us stilled, the seven heads pulling back in unison to eye us. Dragon faces are not particularly expressive, but I imagined this one was surprised. I doubted Mátyás had met anything yet to stand against him in dragon form.
“Mátyás,” I echoed, craning around Hunger’s shoulder to look at my cousin. “Please stop—come back to us!”
Dragon muscles tightened beneath me. “I’m not sure he can hear you: he’s consumed by the hunger of that form. He’s drawing power from the World Tree, but that power was intended to protect the tree, not destroy life, and the longer he uses this shape to destroy things, the more he erodes the deeper connection.”
Hunger’s answer was curiously specific and set a warning jangling along my veins. “How do you know all of this?”
Mátyás hissed, and two of the heads struck forward. One narrowly missed Hunger’s neck—and me behind it—the other latched onto Hunger’s upper arm. Hunger clawed the head away and released a gout of fire, and all seven of Mátyás’s heads screamed. “Because the hunger that goads him—I know it. What he is now, I was once—a táltos defined by the shape I wore.”
Hunger.
I nearly lost my grip in surprise—only the leathery wings folded around me held me in place. I’d thought he took his name from his role in the Four, a black-humored nod to the human legend of the Four Horsemen. I’d never thought to wonder at his past: he seemed so much a creature out of story, a legend born onto the pages fully formed.
“How did you learn to control the hunger?”
He snapped his teeth at Mátyás. “I didn’t. The World Tree calls this shape forth from táltos when it needs a protector. But I was young and brash and arrogant, and instead of becoming a dragon to protect the tree, I sought only to feed my hunger. And so eventually a hero—I’ve forgotten his name—arrived and drove me out of the tree, because that’s what heroes do. Exile broke my connection to the World Tree and the hunger.”
In Grandmama’
s stories, it was always the simple farm boy who defeated the dragon. Was Hunger still bitter, all these centuries later?
Two great wings unfurled behind Mátyás, lifting him from the ground. His wingspan blotted out cloud-filtered light, plunging us into shadow. Then he dove toward us, claws outstretched.
He was fast, but Hunger was faster, and he flung us to the side so that Mátyás’s clawed feet pounded the frozen dust instead of us. Mátyás lumbered around, his airborne grace lost on the ground. Hunger snaked his long neck forward and his jaws closed around the throat of one of Mátyás’s seven heads, snapping it. While that head dangled uselessly, the other heads roared. Hunger danced back, out of reach, his sleek black limbs far more graceful than my cousin’s.
“I don’t think exiling him to break the connection will work.”
“No,” agreed Hunger. “We need to remind him who he is inside that devouring hunger. See if you can talk to him. I’ll try to keep you safe.”
I wriggled downward, through the protective enfolding of Hunger’s wings, and let myself drop to the ground. The impact knocked my breath away, and it took a moment for me to collect myself and sprint out of the way of the lumbering dragons.
I slipped around Hunger, to the no-man’s land between the two clashing dragons. My heart climbed into my throat, beating frantically.
But I wasn’t alone.
Bahadır stood beside me, his breathing heavy, as though he’d just run a great distance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Mátyás sprang into the air, and Hunger followed, driving him back. I danced out of the way of a swinging tail.
“I saw Mátyás across the field and came to join him. He gets lost in this form: I thought I might help him.”
“You’re a good friend.”
Bahadır turned a smile on me that was more a grimace than an expression of mirth. “I’m a terrified friend.” He sucked in a breath. “I ran when my father was killed by the sultan’s men. I was a child; I could not have done anything then. But I will not run now.”