Winter War Awakening (Blood Rose Rebellion Book 3) Read online

  ALSO BY ROSALYN EVES

  Blood Rose Rebellion

  Lost Crow Conspiracy

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Rosalyn Eves

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Velvet Spectrum

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101936115 (trade) — ISBN 9781101936122 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781101936139

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rosalyn Eves

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Anna

  Chapter 2: Anna

  Chapter 3: Mátyás

  Chapter 4: Anna

  Chapter 5: Anna

  Chapter 6: Mátyás

  Chapter 7: Anna

  Chapter 8: Anna

  Chapter 9: Mátyás

  Chapter 10: Anna

  Chapter 11: Anna

  Chapter 12: Mátyás

  Chapter 13: Mátyás

  Chapter 14: Anna

  Chapter 15: Anna

  Chapter 16: Anna

  Chapter 17: Mátyás

  Chapter 18: Mátyás

  Chapter 19: Anna

  Chapter 20: Anna

  Chapter 21: Mátyás

  Chapter 22: Anna

  Chapter 23: Anna

  Chapter 24: Mátyás

  Chapter 25: Anna

  Chapter 26: Anna

  Chapter 27: Mátyás

  Chapter 28: Anna

  Chapter 29: Mátyás

  Chapter 30: Anna

  Chapter 31: Mátyás

  Chapter 32: Anna

  Epilogue: Anna

  Author’s Note

  Additional Resources

  Character Guide

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Andrew & Oliver, who think there’s too much kissing in my books, but let me write them anyway.

  I can read the stars: blood and blood everywhere. Brother kills brother, nationalities massacre each other implacably and insanely. They mark the houses they seek to burn down or destroy with the sign of the cross in blood. My life has gone up in smoke! Pest is gone. Roaming troops devastate everything we had built.

  —SZÉCHENYI ISTVÁN’S DIARY, 1848, FROM STEPHEN SISA’S THE SPIRIT OF HUNGARY

  Liberty and love

  These two I must have.

  For my love I’ll sacrifice

  My life.

  For liberty I’ll sacrifice

  My love.

  —PETŐFI SÁNDOR

  Austria, late September 1848

  These mountains gave nothing back. You might offer your secrets to them, and they would be kept safe in the folded rock and jagged crevices.

  You might tally your fears against them, and they would be swallowed by the immensity of stone.

  You might throw yourself at them and never return.

  We were too few, the five of us against these mountains, against the praetheria who might be holding my cousin Noémi in a cave buried somewhere in that imposing stretch of rock—a handful of dust against the weight of the mountains.

  Night fell swiftly as we set up camp, a sweep of ink blotting out the Austrian Alps rising all around us. The walls of a military fortress, clamped on high rocks behind me, disappeared as though someone had dropped a curtain over them. But I could feel the mountains even so: craggy stone sentinels piercing the sky overhead, monoliths that would crush me as soon as shelter me. Though the September evening was mild, I shivered in the too-large secondhand dolman I wore over a boy’s shirt and trousers. I wished that Gábor were here, to share his warmth—or that Mátyás would let us start a fire. But my cousin was being uncharacteristically cautious.

  I squinted into the night. The mountains facing us were no longer visible, except as a wash of black at the base of a star-strewn sky. Somewhere in that darkness, Noémi waited.

  Assuming, of course, that the information we had pieced together in Vienna was correct.

  Two months earlier, Noémi had disappeared from Vienna while I was crusading unsuccessfully on behalf of the praetheria, the creatures I’d released from the Binding spell. Before I could do anything to recover her trail, my own life had imploded, and I’d been hunted from Vienna, running until I’d stumbled across Mátyás and Gábor on the puszta.

  Together, along with some outlaws Mátyás had befriended, we searched for Noémi in Buda-Pest and at Eszterháza before returning under cover to Vienna to comb the city for clues. The few crumbs of information we found there had led us to an unlikely road into these mountains, pressed like teeth against the sky.

  Had we made a web of nothing—built a trail out of strands that, when pinched together, would vanish?

  A flare tugged my attention back to our small camp. Zhivka held a tiny flame in her hand, and it danced, a sensuous weave of light and heat. Mátyás batted irritably at her. “Put that out. Someone might see it.”

  She swung her hand out of reach. “Oh, don’t be such a wet wood. And who should see us here?”

  Any number of people, I thought. Austrian soldiers, come to haul me back to Vienna to suffer a death sentence for the magic that had killed Mátyás and broken the Binding. Or those same soldiers, to collect the bounty on Mátyás’s head, as he and Bahadır had spent the summer as bandits on the Hungarian plains, because apparently dying once had not put sufficient fear of death into him. Or to arrest the praetherian women, Zhivka and the lidérc, for flouting the imperial Hapsburg ruling that all praetheria be sequestered. We had been cautious while gathering information in Vienna, but the lidérc stood guard some hundred or so feet from camp even now, in case our caution had not been enough.

  “You said yourself that praetheria sheltered in the caves,” Bahadır said, his dark eyes fixed on the flame in her hand. His voice was soft, but a tightness about his eyes revealed some of his tension. “If they find us here, they will kill us before we can betray their location.”

  It was not the nameless praetheria in the caves I feared: it w
as the praetherian Vasilisa and her wolves. My shoulder still ached where one of her great beasts had gnawed it—she had chased me down and damn near caught me, just before Mátyás found me. Well, it was not only the nameless praetheria I feared.

  “And if they should see me, they will see only a samodiva on her way to join her sisters.” The flame maiden in Zhivka’s hands somersaulted, her body forming a neat ring. “You think everything is a trap. I cannot tell if this is caution”—her voice turned sly—“or fear.”

  Bahadır shot to his feet. “I believe it’s my turn to keep watch.”

  Mátyás looked at Zhivka after the Turkish boy had vanished into the shadows. “That was not kind. Had your father and, later, your best friend been killed before you, you might see traps everywhere too. He is not a coward.”

  “I did not say he was. If he thinks I did, it is his own conscience that pricks him, not me.” Zhivka drew the fire around her, a flaming shawl against the brightness of her hair. I wished I could borrow it from her without burning and press its heat against my throbbing shoulder. Then she sighed and let the fire flicker out. “If you are so worried, I will explore the caves tomorrow and report if I find your sister.”

  “Thank you,” Mátyás said, his voice a trifle stiff.

  “I’ll go with you,” the lidérc said, stepping toward us on her bare goose feet. She’d discarded the boots she wore in more civilized regions. With boots on, she appeared very nearly human, until she met your gaze with her opaque black eyes or grinned to reveal her sharpened teeth. Without boots—well, she had rather the look of a housecat, a predator that only pretends to be domesticated.

  Zhivka lifted an eyebrow. “I did not think climbing a mountain was something you enjoyed.”

  The lidérc returned a long, steely stare. “It’s not. Neither is spying on my kin. But I offered to help Mátyás find his sister, and I mean to keep my word.”

  Zhivka dropped her eyes and did not answer, and I wondered what message had passed unspoken between them.

  Shadows curled in around us. I inched toward Mátyás, drawing a blanket over me. Despite the trees surrounding our camp, we were too exposed here.

  Mátyás turned to smile at me, and his teeth gleamed faintly in the starlight. “Tired?”

  My body was heavy with exhaustion, but I was not tired. There would be no rest here on the hard-packed earth, no rest while finding Noémi was a possibility, halfway up a mountain I could no longer see. “No.”

  “You should try to sleep,” Mátyás said. “We’ve a long climb tomorrow.”

  I lay back on the ground, my head pillowed against my arms. Tracing the bright lines of stars with my eyes, I tried to scry them, searching out a future that led us to Noémi and not to capture or death.

  But if the stars had an answer, I could not read it.

  * * *

  Bahadır came in from his watch and Zhivka took his place, and still I could not sleep. I inhaled, long and slow, and blew the breath out, my hands steady on my stomach as it rose and fell. And yet this breathing trick, which usually calmed me, did nothing to still the voices chattering in my head.

  So I thought of Gábor instead, deliberately turning my thoughts and spooling out my memories of him, slow and luxurious, until they replaced the stars overhead, until I no longer minded the anxious thrum of my heartbeat in my neck. If those memories hurt, I preferred that pain to the dull ache of fear.

  Nearly three months earlier, Gábor had left me in Vienna, telling me that no relationship between us could prosper, that the distance between us was too great. I had filled the silences after his departure with rage: angry that he presumed to decide our future without asking me, angry that we lived in a world where social status should matter so much.

  But then the archduchess had learned of my role in the broken Binding and sentenced me to death, and in escaping her I had become a fugitive, and the distances that had once seemed so great began to shrink. What was social standing to a girl who had nothing left to lose?

  Awake in the darkened valley, I skimmed over the memory of those days spent hiding and hungry, skipping past the soldier Emilija Dragović tracking me down and Vasilisa cornering us both with her wolves. I remembered instead how Mátyás had found us just in time, how Gábor’s fingers had been so gentle on the wound in my shoulder.

  I set my own fingers against my shoulder, re-creating that soft weight.

  After the rescue, I had begun to hope (cautiously, carefully) that Gábor and I might find our way back to each other. Our first task was to take the unconscious Emilija to the Buda-Pest hospital where Noémi used to work; our second was to find Noémi. For these joint tasks, we shared a horse on the road to Buda-Pest; every day, Gábor wrapped his arms around me, and we talked, and sometimes he pressed featherlight kisses on my hair, brushes delicate enough to be accidental, kisses I pretended I did not feel, though I wanted to turn and catch them with my lips. At night, he watched me, an unguarded expression on his face that brought a blush to my cheeks. While the others shared stories, I told him English fairy tales, and he sang Romani songs from his childhood. We talked of everything and nothing, our quiet voices embroidered around the others’ laughter.

  For all he said before he left Vienna, he had never said he did not care for me. I had begun to believe that meant something.

  But then sixteen days ago, I left him behind in Buda-Pest. For sixteen nights, only the memory of his voice had followed me into my dreams.

  We had all been crammed into a dingy hotel room in Pest, disheartened by a week’s worth of searching for clues to Noémi’s whereabouts with no success. Mátyás suggested that we go back to Vienna, where she had disappeared, and we had agreed.

  Then Gábor had spoken. “I’m staying.” He was standing near a dirty window, looking out on the street below. A chill had washed over me, and I looked at him, studying his severe profile with a growing lump in my throat.

  “You’re staying?” I echoed, hearing how foolish the words were as soon as they left my mouth. I thought of the nights we’d spent beside the fire: had I misconstrued everything?

  “I mean to enlist with Kossuth’s army.” He hesitated, his glance flickering around the room. “It is not that I don’t care what happens to Noémi. I do, and I understand why you wish to go. But Hungary is my home, my family’s home. My first duty is to them.”

  Bahadır murmured something in response. I said nothing. The room swirled around me, the air strangely dense. Gábor was going to war. I might never see him again.

  I had no claim on him. No right to protest his leaving, no say in his decisions, no sense to feel as betrayed as I did.

  My head understood the barriers between us—that we belonged to different worlds, that his family did not want us together any more than mine did, that perhaps he did not care for me as I did for him. But my heart could not accept them. These last weeks had taught me I could live without luxury, could even live outside society. But I did not want to live without Gábor in my life.

  “Excuse me,” I said, standing up suddenly and then stumbling from the room, my gaze unsteady and unfocused. I needed air. I crept along the dark hallway, down the stairs, and through the smoky common area to a door opening onto the cobblestone street.

  Dusk was falling, a gentle drift of grey against the sun-warmed rock. I walked past the front of the hotel to the alley flanking it, where I could bury myself in the shadows and indulge in self-pity and tears.

  I could not grudge Gábor’s choice of home and family over me. For all the things I loved in him—his courage, his kindness, his bright curiosity—what did I have to offer in exchange? Everything I owned had been stripped from me, and any intrinsic gifts I might have were tainted by my chimera self, the dual souls that broke spells and trailed havoc in my wake. What man of sense would knowingly link himself to all that?

  I should simply have t
o steel myself against my heart’s fruitless yearning.

  “Anna?” Gábor’s voice echoed in the deserted street.

  I froze. There was nothing dignified in my tear-stained cheeks, in the sniffles I was trying hard to suppress. Gábor couldn’t see me like this. My mother’s tart voice echoed in my ears: Serves you right. Self-pity is never pretty. I swiped the sleeve of my shirt across my face.

  “Anna?” His voice came again, closer, and then he was standing before me, his hands reaching for mine. His bare fingers were warm, his palms slightly callused.

  I should have pulled away, but I wanted this last touch. I wanted to remember the weight of his hands around mine. I looked down at our entwined fingers, both to hide my reddened eyes and to avoid seeing the pity in his. My tears betrayed too much. His breath huffed against my cheek as he sighed.

  “I did not make this choice lightly,” he said. “And I do not make it to hurt you.”

  “I know,” I said. And I did, though my lips found it hard to shape the words. I wanted to get through this conversation as quickly as possible, with at least some of my dignity still intact.

  “Would you please look at me?”

  I raised my eyes, though my heart hurt at his nearness, at the familiar, beloved planes of his face: brown skin stretched across sharp cheekbones, the wide, generous lips that creased at the corners when he smiled. In the dimming light, his dark eyes were pinched, in the way they always were when he was nervous, or guarded. The tightness around my chest began to ease. Perhaps I was not the only one hurting.