by Rosalyn Eves
Dragon fire scorched the earth in front of us, and we both jumped.
“When Zhivka brought him back, she touched him and spoke his name. Maybe if we can get his attention…?” Bahadır said.
Mátyás landed with a thud, his fanged mouths lashing out at Hunger, who settled beside him, interposing his bulk between Mátyás and a handful of soldiers who watched us. We tried shouting his name, but Mátyás seemed fixed on Hunger and ignored us. I tried to creep closer, to touch him, but his tail came sweeping round and caught my ankle, throwing me to the ground.
“Do you still have the canteen and salt?” Bahadır asked.
“Yes.” I’d added water to the canteen before Pál brought me to the battlefield but hadn’t found occasion to use it.
“Good.” Bahadır dashed away, returning a moment later with a barrel of black powder that he’d rescued beside an overturned and abandoned cannon. I handed him the canteen, then the salt. He dumped the salt into the canteen, screwed the lid back on, and shook it rapidly. He set the canteen in the barrel, put the cover back on, and then flung the barrel at Mátyás.
His aim was impeccable. The barrel struck the joint between two of Mátyás’s waving heads, then exploded: powder and wooden debris and scraps of canteen metal screamed through the air.
The six remaining heads froze, then turned their focus on the two of us. Six heads, twelve eyes, innumerable sharp teeth.
Well. We had his attention now.
“Mátyás!” Bahadır yelled. “It’s Bahadır. Your friend.”
Bahadır poked me, and I echoed him. “Mátyás! It’s Anna. Your cousin.”
The six heads swayed a bit, but they did not attack, and I stepped toward the beast. Zhivka touched him. Behind me, Bahadır began talking about Ákos and the other bandits, about their time together on the plains. A great shudder rippled through Mátyás, but he did not strike. I took another step. Two more.
Hunger crouched beside Mátyás, watchful, his muscles coiled in case he needed to spring into action. Bahadır kept talking and I kept walking, and still Mátyás did not move. But when the Turkish boy stopped to draw breath, one of the six heads drew back. Hunger launched forward and intercepted the striking head, but a second and then a third head snaked around him, mouths open, fangs glistening.
I dodged between them, throwing my arms around Mátyás’s foreleg. The skin was smooth like a polished opal, and warm. This close, I could see that the scales were not all black, but luminescent, with touches of turquoise and emerald and amaranth swirling in their depths.
“Mátyás!” I shouted again. “I love you—even this part of you, that you hesitate to name. This dragon is you, but not all of you. You are cousin and brother and nephew. Bandit and soldier, táltos and spirit walker, dragon and crow. You are Mátyás, the King of Crows.”
A breath of heat against my face: dragon’s breath.
I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek against the smooth scales. I did not want to see the moment Mátyás decided to eat me.
“You are King of Crows,” I whispered again. “Mátyás, Rex Corvus.”
The heat withdrew, icy air encircling me once again.
I opened my eyes.
One of the great heads was still lowered, staring at me, but the black eyes were no longer flat. Something like recognition glinted in them.
“Anna?” The voice sounded as though it came from somewhere very far away, small and unused. Then the name was picked up by five more throats, and my name reverberated in the air.
I sagged against his foreleg. “Mátyás.”
The scales began to shrink beneath my cheek, and I released my grip. The seven heads melted into one, the great body collapsed into a smaller one, without scales. When Mátyás stood before me again, I hugged him. Bahadır clapped him on the back. He was still too thin (and too naked, but I was trying very hard not to notice that), but the color had returned to his face, and he looked infinitely better than when I’d seen him last.
Hunger shifted too and came to stand beside me. Naturally, he was impeccably dressed: fitted striped trousers and military-style dolman with silver frogging. He handed Mátyás a cloak. “Someone must really teach you how to shift without losing all your clothes.”
I took the cloak from Hunger and swung it around my shoulders. It was a damned sight more pleasant than the cold-pricked skin I’d worn earlier, though I’d need to supplement it with additional clothes soon.
Remembering what Vasilisa had told me, I peered at Hunger. “You were táltos?”
Hunger sighed. “A long time ago. I’ve kept the dragon shape because it suited me. If there were other shapes, I’ve since forgotten them. I was never as good at shifting as you appear to be.”
We stood in an odd bubble of quiet, the battle having spun away from the fighting dragons; it had not yet returned to envelop us. Hunger told me a short version of his story, how he had been driven from the World Tree and lost the intense hunger. “That is not a tactic I would recommend,” he said.
“With practice, you’ll get better at managing the hunger,” he continued. “Stay close to the World Tree; it will help you remain grounded. Nothing will fill the hunger completely, though. A being that is completely satiated loses its edge, and you will need that edge, as táltos and protector, now that Hadúr is dead and no one is left to tend the World Tree. You have to learn to live inside the hunger and longing. Let it goad you without destroying you. Better still, learn to cultivate it in others, as I have done. I find it infinitely preferable to rouse desire in others than be ravaged by it.”
I lost the last part of his speech. “Hadúr is dead?”
“Chernobog killed him, just after Noémi died,” Anna said, handing me a pair of trousers. There was only a slight speckling of blood below one knee, so I pretended not to notice and slid them on.
Noémi, Hadúr. And the list would no doubt grow before this battle was over. As a child, I had gone swimming with my family one summer at Lake Balaton. We got caught by a surprise storm, and as the wind churned up waves, one crashed over me. I saw it just before it hit, but I could not move away fast enough. The ground went out beneath me, and I floundered in darkness, unsure which way was up. I could feel my grief now, poised like that wave. But I could not let it crash. Giving in to grief in that moment felt too much like running—a way to avoid the responsibility before me.
If I died in this war, I wanted to die with my eyes open. I wanted to die trying. For so long, I had thought my father’s failure came from disappointing us, from not being the man we believed him to be. And so I had been careful to set expectations low, so I would not disappoint, so I would not be my father.
But my father had not disappointed us when he lost the family fortune at cards—we might have lived through that. He had disappointed us when he left us to bear the shame alone.
There was no dishonor in failure, so long as I tried. My mother used to say that everyone is the blacksmith of his or her own fate; I would be the smith of mine.
“Vasilisa said we needed to convince the assembled armies that peace was more costly than war,” I said.
“Vasilisa holds words cheaply,” Hunger said. “She told you whatever she thought would best twist you to her will. The praetheria, under the three who drive them now, are not looking for peace.”
“I think she’s right, though,” I said, “about convincing the others. But we need an army.”
There were four of us: me, Bahadır, Hunger, Anna. Wait—a figure was crossing through the smoke-covered field toward us. Gábor made five. Anna ran to him, throwing her arms around him with such energy that he staggered.
Bahadır pulled a crumpled bit of fabric from his shirt. He shook it out: a gold ash tree on a green field. “We have Hadúr’s standard.” He tied it to the end of his rifle and raised it above his head. The wind caught it, whipping it out smartly.
“General Görgey and the Hungarians know to come to our aid when we raise it. The lidérc has been recruiting praetheria, and Emilija is trying to persuade her father.”
“Will that be enough?” I asked. The battlefields I’d seen in my hunger-maddened state were chaos: Austrians and Russians and Hungarians all fighting one another and fighting the praetheria. Even I had seen that much.
“There might be enough soldiers on these fields—human and praetherian alike—who do not want this war,” Hunger said. “If we can rally them.”
Anna was looking intently at Gábor. “You could help,” she said.
Gábor pressed his lips together. “You know how I feel about Coremancer gifts.”
Anna said slowly, “I don’t think persuasion always has to mean coercion, or even manipulation. Your words can be an invitation—they can open a place for understanding, for negotiation.”
She hesitated, but Gábor picked up on her unspoken words. “And we are desperate.” He sighed. “I will try.”
He made his way to a wagon near an overturned cannon, abandoned in the swiftly moving current of the war. He clambered aboard, so he would have some vantage point over the flat battlefield. He held himself still for a moment, his face pensive. Then he called out, “People of Hungary, Austria, Russia, Croatia, and the provinces! Praetheria! If you can hear me, I beg you to listen.”
His voice carried across the field, a voice that I felt as much as heard. When had he developed Coremancer abilities? I had missed too much.
“This war needs to end. We are destroying one another—and for what? Because we hope to prove our own superiority? To indulge our arrogance?”
As Gábor spoke, the weight of the war felt like a tangible thing, pinning me to the ground until I could scarcely move.
“We look to end this fight, to restore peace not just for humans but for praetheria as well. We look to forge a new world. If your heart responds to this plea, then join us. Whoever you are, whatever you are, we will find a place for you.”
The piercing weight of the war was followed by a sharp longing to throw that weight away. Did Gábor know how powerful his magic was? I did not feel forced or coerced—but a singing had taken up in my veins, a warming sureness that fighting alongside him was the right and inevitable path.
The reaction to his words was not immediate, though the fighting stilled around us as he spoke. When he finished, there was a sluggish stirring of men and women taking up their weapons again, resuming their fight.
But not all of them.
At first singly, then in pairs and clumps of soldiers, people began pulling away from the battle. Hungarians mostly, at first, because Gábor had spoken in Hungarian. But the pull of his words transcended language, and after the Hungarians came a few Romanians, a handful of Croatians.
And praetheria.
A giantess, who seemed to know Anna, because she nodded at her and then searched the ground around her, frowning—I realized she was looking for Noémi too. A pair of Valkyries, who did not look at any of us but came to rest beside Gábor anyway. A tree-man, looking so like the tree-man I had accidentally killed in our bandit camp that my heart twisted. A Fair One, similar to the one I’d reluctantly saved from a mob months earlier. A cluster of samodiva, their glamours burning bright around them. I told them I was sorry about Zhivka, and they brushed their hands against mine in silent acknowledgment.
There were others whom I did not recognize, and still we were not many—several dozen, perhaps a hundred—but more than I had hoped for.
“But who shall lead all these soldiers?” Bahadır asked.
“You,” I said. “You always did think circles around me when Hadúr taught us strategy. You were born to lead.” It was true: Bahadır had an instinct for groups that I had never had, even when I led my betyárok as the King of Crows. Thank St. Cajetan, we did not all have to lead to contribute something of value.
Bahadır’s cheeks darkened with the praise, but he seemed pleased.
“I’ll help,” Gábor said. “I make an excellent adjutant.”
While the soldiers continued to gather around us, waiting for instruction, Hunger said, “We need to cut the praetherian army off at its head—we need to eliminate or neutralize the three praetheria who lead them. Chernobog will not refuse a challenge. His pride is his weakness; he believes he cannot lose.”
“Can he lose?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Hunger said, shrugging. “You ought to pray it’s true, because you are our best hope of challenging him. Otherwise, he will hide behind his minions, and we don’t have enough numbers to overwhelm them.”
One of the Valkyries said, “I will come with the táltos. If he fails, I will challenge Chernobog myself.” Her sister murmured agreement.
“And Vasilisa and Svarog?” Anna asked.
A young man joined us, struggling to the front of our makeshift army. His hair blazed gold, even in the muted light from the overcast sky, and a string of lights hung around his neck like stars. “I can take Svarog.”
“And you are?” I asked.
“His son.”
Others of the praetheria, including the tree-man, offered to join the young man, should he fail. It seemed Svarog was not quite so feared among the praetheria as Chernobog, which should have terrified me. Instead, that familiar thrum of a calculated risk buzzed through my blood.
Hunger insisted on facing Vasilisa himself. He turned to Anna. “Will you come with me?”
I saw the fear in her face: the widened eyes, the pale cheek. Anna swallowed once and said, “Very well.”
Alarm penetrated through my cloud of energy. “You can’t mean for Anna to fight her?”
“Not alone,” Hunger said. “But she’s chimera, and she has faced Vasilisa before.”
“It’s all right,” Anna said. “I need to do this. Besides, you cannot offer to challenge Chernobog and then lecture me for a similar choice.”
Abashed, I said, “You’re right. I’ll wish you good luck instead.”
We were all going to need as much luck as we could get.
Our little group began to disperse—the young man, with a handful of praetheria heading out to find Svarog; Hunger, shifting to carry Anna away; Bahadır and Gábor, already discussing how to use their small numbers to their advantage.
I looked at the Valkyries. They were both taller than I, even unmounted, and they still would not make eye contact, instead fixing their gaze at a point above my head. It was disconcerting.
“So,” I said. “Do you know where Chernobog is?”
The taller one inclined her head, then both of them mounted their flying horses and took off. I borrowed a nonflying horse and did my damnedest to follow them.
Chernobog was not hard to spot, once we drew close. He let lesser praetheria lead the charge, but he was not far behind, towering above the soldiers as he spitted them casually on a longsword or shoved them down into the ground, the dirt swallowing their screams as it closed over their heads. I had seen him fight once before, when I followed Anna and Noémi in spirit form: he was brutal, vicious, nasty.
I tamped down a brief flare of panic.
The Valkyries landed beside Chernobog as I galloped forward, and he swung toward them. “You would betray your own kind?”
“You betrayed us first. We might have won peace if you had not brought this war.”
I wasn’t sure if that was accurate, but it sounded good.
I took a deep breath. Now or never. “Chernobog!” I called, hoping my voice did not sound as thin to the praetherian as it did to my own ears. “I formally challenge you as one of the Four.” Three? I swallowed my correction, lest it make me look more ridiculous.
Chernobog’s lips curled back over his teeth, and he slammed his sword at me. I yelped and dove out of the way, toppling off my borrowed horse. The tip of the sword
scored my hip, leaving a burning line in its wake.
“Does this mean you accept?” I called up, already shifting to something better equipped to withstand his attacks: a bear, with a decidedly non-ursine scaly hide beneath the fur. I swiped, throwing all the strength of my powerful new body into the movement, and caught Chernobog’s arm with my claws.
His sword clattered to the ground, and I kicked it away. He did not even glance down. Instead, he twisted his arm so that he caught my wrist, his own curved claws stabbing through the fur and scale to draw blood. Then he shoved my arm up behind me, and something cracked.
A sharp pain shot through my arm, and I growled, pushing forward to close my jaws across his shoulder. Instead of releasing me, he thrust downward. The ground beneath my feet opened up and I fell, my jaws snapping shut around air. Earth closed over my head.
All the nervous energy that had buoyed me evaporated. I shifted, trying not to remember the weeks I’d spent similarly immobilized in rock, the suffocating weight of dirt all around me. As a mole, arrowing toward the surface, I could breathe easier. I thought of creating some ancient wyrm, a blind creature with thousands of teeth that could erupt from the ground below Chernobog. But I couldn’t be certain I’d emerge in the right spot, or that I’d be able to hold a shape that could both dig and surprise the horned god.
As soon as I hit the surface, I shifted—this time into a long, ropy serpent that coiled lightning-fast around Chernobog’s legs, swooping up his hips to pin his arms to his sides. I fought the urge to send a call to an avian army to help me. Hunger had been quite clear: a challenge must be fought alone, or my life was forfeit.
The horned god was powerful, but my serpent was nearly his equal, and for a moment I thought I might hold him long enough to wrap a final coil around his throat and mouth and squeeze the breath from him. I did not think it would kill a near-immortal, but it would slow him long enough for me to come up with another idea.
Chernobog wrenched an arm free and sliced a claw down the soft underbelly of my serpent form. Hissing in pain, I dropped at his feet. The dark god plucked me up and flung me into the air. I shifted in mid-arc to an ancient creature I’d seen in a book: a cat with long saber teeth and powerful claws. As I fell back to the earth, I aimed those teeth at the horned god’s face.