Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2) Read online

  “I’ve no business. I’m his nephew, Mátyás.”

  If I’d expected a warm welcome at that, I was mistaken. Her nostrils flared, two white lines appearing beside them. She looked me up and down once sharply, then said, “Master Mátyás is dead these eight months, and I find your joke in very poor taste!”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  Fool. I should have foreseen that reaction to my announcement. I retraced my steps, returning to the overgrown gardens behind the palace.

  Two of the glass-paned doors opening into the garden were boarded over and nailed shut. But the third proved unlocked. I made a mental note to tell my great-uncle not to be so trusting of strangers and let myself in.

  I went slowly, alert for the maid or anyone else who might be moving through the rooms. A rattle of nails on the floor forewarned me of Noémi’s vizsla, and I ruffled Oroszlán’s ears when he bounded toward me. After leaping up to lick my face, he settled into pace beside me.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor, circling around a narrow courtyard. I paused briefly in my old room to find a plain linen shirt and trousers. After a moment’s hesitation, I fished my father’s signet ring from a drawer—the griffin rampant, bearing a sword and flowers, winked up at me. Then I passed down the corridor toward the salon where János liked to hole up. As it turns out, I’d correctly interpreted the maid’s “busy” as “sleeping”: János was slumped peacefully in his favorite chair near the ceramic stove, an unfinished tray of pastries on the low table before him.

  I shut the door silently behind me—and started.

  János wasn’t alone.

  The Lady sat beside him, watching him with that unfathomable gaze of hers.

  I must have made some involuntary sound, because she looked up at me, a smile softening her mouth.

  “How did you—?”

  “You forget I was once a goddess. I have eyes everywhere. As fleetly as you travel in falcon form, I can travel faster.”

  “But what are you doing here?”

  She didn’t answer me immediately. Instead, she turned back to János, reaching out to stroke his weathered cheek. “It is hard on him, to grow old. He hates the gout that plagues him, that keeps him tied to these drafty halls when he would rather be of service to his kingdom. Did you know?”

  I had guessed as much, though János did not like to speak of it. But I could not guess where her comments were tending.

  “He looks so peaceful now. It would almost be a shame to wake him. I find it curious, even after millennia of watching you humans, how sleep is such a vivid semblance of death. It would be so easy to slide from one to the other. Painless too. Your great-uncle might welcome it. Surely many spirits wait for him on the other side.” Her eyes filled with a kind of ferocious tenderness.

  Chills crawled down my back that had nothing to do with the room, which was unseasonably warm, just as János liked it. Affecting a nonchalance I did not feel, I said, “Likely he would welcome death, as you say. I only came for my horse—and anything portable I might sell.”

  I held my casual posture for a long, breathless moment as the Lady scrutinized me. The troubled set to her mouth suggested she did not quite believe me, but she did not stop me as I plucked a small gold ormolu clock from the mantel and left the room.

  I let out a sigh of relief as I retraced my steps down the corridor. I hoped my deception had been enough to convince her to leave my uncle alone. I did not think the Lady was evil, but she had a kind of single-mindedness that could be ruthless. And I did not think former goddesses were prone to weigh human lives as I did.

  I stopped in a few more rooms, gathering small portable valuables to lend truth to my lie. I swung by the kitchen, empty at midafternoon, and filched a loaf of bread, some cheese, and some wrinkled apples from last fall’s harvest.

  My heart was stone-heavy as I made my way across the weed-congested lawns to the stables. János had been more father to me than my own father, who had not shown much care for me when he lived, and even less when he took his own life and left us penniless. I might not agree with János’s politics, but he had shown my sister and me a rough, casual affection we hadn’t known before, and made us the best home he could in his awkward, confirmed-bachelor way.

  One of the few regrets I carried with me from my death was that I had not been able to say good-bye to János or my sister. Now I could never do so. If I sought out Noémi, even Anna, I would only signal to the Lady that I might be moved by threats against them.

  I’d be confounded if I let the Lady force my hand. If caring for people meant endangering them—very well then, I would care for no one but myself. Selfishness was an art form I was rather good at.

  I let myself into the stable, squinting in the dim light. Only two of the once proud fleet of Eszterházy horses remained. Holdas whinnied a welcome from his stall. Cukor, that fat, stupid gelding, took up another mouthful of hay without the least interest. I took down a saddlebag from the wall and stuffed the food and other pilfered items inside it.

  I saddled Holdas, murmuring softly to the horse when he rolled his eyes at me. Clearly, no one had dared ride him since I’d left. I hoped, at least, János had let him out to run in the fields, or this was going to be uncomfortable for both of us.

  I couldn’t resume my old life—someone was bound to recognize me and tell Noémi, and she’d only be hurt that I had not sought her out. Worse, she’d find me and force a confrontation, and I didn’t think I could pretend to hate her to her face. There was always the possibility that no one would believe it was me—I was supposed to be dead. But I could not risk it.

  I would have to disappear. Become nothing and nobody.

  Not Eszterházy Mátyás.

  Not táltos.

  No one.

  I left Eszterháza slowly, lingering over the familiar haunts of the Hanság marsh, skimming the southern edge of Lake Fertő, and then heading east.

  I spent the first night in a small csárda not far from Kapuvár, where I’d sold the ormolu clock. After tossing all night on the rough mattress, I was happy to settle my bill and leave with first light.

  The empty, solitary hours of that second day weighed on me. I hadn’t realized quite how much I had depended on the Lady and the grey women for company as I’d recovered from dying. I tried talking to Holdas, but he flattened his ears and attempted to knock me from his back. Only the fact that I felt his irritation before he showed it saved me from falling.

  I stopped for lunch in a farmer’s field, breaking off a chunk of rapidly drying bread. A crow settled on a branch near me, cocking his head to one side and fixing me with an intelligent black eye. I could feel his curiosity like a shiny coin in my head.

  I like crows. They’re smart, and while a raven is perhaps more magnificent, crows are more approachable. Less conceited, maybe. I blamed this preference on my mother, who had named me after Hunyadi Mátyás, the great Renaissance king, also known as Matthias Corvinus or the Raven King. Legend had it that when young Mátyás was to be crowned king to end a protracted civil war, his mother signaled for him to return to Hungary from Prague by sending a raven with a ring in its beak.

  My mother no doubt intended that my namesake should inspire me to great things: she died disappointed. And as it felt presumptuous to adopt Mátyás’s ravens, I’d chosen their lesser cousins instead.

  I tossed a piece of bread to the crow, who caught it in his beak and swallowed it in one gulp. “Not quite as tasty as carrion, but it will do in a pinch, eh, varjú?”

  The answering caw sounded like laughter as the crow shook himself, then lifted into the air. I watched him go. Perhaps I should follow him. I could stop being Mátyás entirely, embracing nothing but the hunt and the flight.

  A little recollection convinced me otherwise. Besides the obvious energy it would take to shift all the time, the entire lack of human contact and conversation might kill me.

  The next night I spent longer than was wise in the tap
room of another csárda. A passing Frenchman was running an informal faro bank, and the sight of the tiger-backed cards sent electricity racing through me.

  How long had it been since I’d held cards in my hand? A lifetime. I joined the group of punters at his table, alternately winning and losing. A barmaid perhaps ten years my senior began to join me in between her rounds, cheering me on when I won, regaling me with gossip when I lost. I let most of her chatter wash over me, enjoying the way her plump hands moved when she talked, the way her cheeks flushed when she hit something particularly salacious.

  At the end of the evening she kissed me. And while it was clear she would have welcomed more—I found, abruptly, that I had no taste for it. I put her off politely, and she shrugged philosophically. I counted up my remaining chips and discovered my losses had outpaced my earnings, carving a sizable dent into the funds I’d earned from selling the clock.

  I also shrugged philosophically.

  Another crow found me the next morning, winging behind me as I rode down a narrow dirt road. Following an impulse, I pulled Holdas off the road to let him graze, shifting quickly and pumping my wings to follow the crow. We tore through the sky, tumbling and wheeling, joined by the other members of the crow’s family. At length I returned to my own form, feeling more like myself than I had since dying. Gambling and shapeshifting—if I could only patent the combination, I’d make a fortune.

  When night fell, creeping slowly across the still-warm air, I was nowhere near a village large enough to boast an inn. I found a farmhouse that looked tidy, the woven rushes in the roof neatly patched, the walls whitewashed.

  The round farmwife who answered my knock was not willing to let me into the house—and spying the half dozen or so children tumbling across the floor behind her, I doubted she had room for me in the house even if she wished it—but she offered me a spot in the adjacent barn.

  As it had already begun to drizzle, I accepted gladly. She sent one of the older boys to show me to a stall where I could house Holdas, and then to the corner of the barn where they kept fresh hay.

  I’d slept in worse places, certainly—most memorably the night William and I had gotten spectacularly drunk in Pest and spent the night sleeping on the cobblestones just outside the kocsma. At least the barn was clean. The boy who’d led me to the outbuilding reappeared a few minutes later with a pile of blankets, and I settled in for the night.

  The steady drum of rain covered most of the animal noises, the lowing of the single cow, the whickering of Holdas and a pair of draft horses in neighboring stalls, even the handful of chickens roosting along the far wall.

  I was nearly asleep when a crack of lightning shot white light through slits in the walls, and thunder boomed moments later.

  In the brief illumination, I saw that the door of the barn was open, and someone stood in the doorway. The cow bellowed like a crazed thing, banging against her stall and trying to get away.

  I couldn’t see why the cow was so wound up. It was only a girl in a white shift, which was clinging damply to a shapely figure. Her dark hair hung in wet clumps around a pretty, if narrow, face.

  A second bolt of lightning lit the sky behind her, and the rain against the roof grew sharp and hard. Hail. The girl moved, darting forward with a strange, unjointed grace. She slid into Holdas’s stall, and I groaned. Holdas tolerated fools even less willingly than I did. If I didn’t warn her, she risked being trampled.

  I slid out of my warm cocoon of blankets and floundered in the dark for my boots. I categorically refused to walk barefoot through a barn—I had no desire to clean manure from my feet.

  “Miss?” I called out, approaching the stall. “I shouldn’t stay there if I were you. My horse isn’t very kind to strangers.”

  As if to underscore my words, I heard a sharp hissing and Holdas reared up, his eyes flashing red in the dim light.

  I swore and ran forward, setting a hand on Holdas’s neck and nudging his mind with a stream of calming thoughts. His hooves flashed down, narrowly missing the girl huddled in the corner, thin arms wrapped around sharp shins. She stared at me unblinkingly. Another flash of lightning illuminated her face: her eyes were wild and burning, with irises so dark they seemed to swallow her entire eye, leaving no whites at all.

  “Are you hurt? How did you come here?” I didn’t particularly relish the thought of a roommate, but I couldn’t send her back into the storm, growing more violent by the minute. What would drive a girl out in a night like this?

  She whispered something, a sibilant string that meant nothing to me. The hiss of her voice seemed to crawl beneath my clothes, burrowing into my bones. What was she? She couldn’t be entirely human.

  Voices caught my attention above the rising clamor of the storm: many of them, and they were angry. I moved to the door of the barn, blinking as a mix of rain and hail stung my cheeks.

  Light flickered in the field beyond: a half dozen lanterns, by my guess. The next stroke of lightning showed that the assembly was much larger. A dozen men and a few women, all armed with farm tools: scythes and hoes, pitchforks and axes. A pair of dogs howled and raced back and forth beside the leaders. My gaze flickered back to the girl.

  Damn it.

  I’d no wish to be part of a mob hunt. I’d even less wish to stand against them, risking my neck for someone who might, for all I knew, actually have been guilty of something. But if the mob caught up with her here, they’d spook all the animals, and there would be no rest for any of us.

  “Here.” I crossed back to the stall to keep Holdas from mauling the girl and held out my hand. She lifted her face to me just as another flash of lightning threw brilliance across it. Something dark stained her lips, and I did not think it was late berries she’d ransacked from some larder. I hesitated, wondering what kind of crime I was abetting. But those big, nearly black eyes did not seem dangerous or evil, only frightened, and the hand that clutched convulsively over my arm was so thin as to be almost translucent.

  I led her across the barn to where I’d been sleeping, directed her to lie down on my blanket, and threw the second blanket over her, hoping she’d have the sense to stay put.

  Then I went back to the entrance of the barn.

  The mob was at the farmhouse, banging loudly on the door. I saw a light flicker inside, then a tall, stringy man appeared. He shook his head, then gestured to the barn, and the mob surged toward me.

  I leaned, deceptively casual, against the door frame. As soon as they were within hailing distance, I said, “Here’s a hűhó. What’s amiss, my friends?”

  A big burly man with a white-flecked beard lifted his torch and scowled at me. “We’re hunting one of those thrice-damned praetheria. Made off with my prize ewe.”

  A sheep. I nearly laughed in relief. It was only a sheep that she’d stolen—and, probably, eaten.

  “Have you seen her? Looks are deceptive—looks like a slip of a girl, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she’s dangerous. Killed the sheep with her bare hands like it was nothing.”

  A narrow woman beside him added, “You’d best be on the watch. Handsome thing like you, she’d have you for breakfast. One of them Fair Ones, you know. Seduces then eats her lovers.”

  I brushed away a twinge of irritation. I needed to tread carefully. These people may have read too many fairy stories—and had too much to drink—but they were no less dangerous for being irrational. Maybe more. The only thing I believed of the girl was that she had stolen a sheep.

  “I’ve seen no one,” I said. “And I’d like to go back to sleep, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’ve been sleeping? Then you’ll pardon us if we search the barn behind you. We know she came this direction.”

  “I tell you, there’s no one else here. And you’re disturbing the animals.”

  The dogs were sniffing at the doorway of the barn, whining eagerly.

  The burly man’s gaze swept my plain clothes. “You talk like a Luminate but wear the clothes of a
peasant. I don’t trust you. The dogs say she’s been here.”

  I couldn’t hope to outmatch the entire crowd, and I had no real wish to. I sighed, moving aside as the mob crammed through the open doorway. I went back to my bag and blankets, putting one hand on top of the girl’s head. “Stay still,” I whispered.

  I concentrated on the dogs, feeling the emotions tumbling through them: eagerness at the hunt, the distinctive sharp scent that insisted here, somewhere here was the thing they chased, a tiny curl of displeasure at their wet fur. I sent a thread of magic toward them, taking the edge off their eagerness and suggesting that no, this was not the scent they sought.

  The dogs immediately lost their intensity, snuffling with interest at the different smells the barn offered, but no longer following a single scent. No one in the mob seemed to notice.

  The crowd rushed into empty stalls, swept items off shelves even when it was obvious nothing so large could hide there, tossed through a barrel of feed. There was no real method to their search. I called out a warning when they reached Holdas. I’m not sure they believed me, but Holdas snorted and reared up, so they held back, only shining the torchlight into the stall.

  The burly man who led the mob elbowed his way to the corner of the barn where I’d been sleeping. His eyes fell on my mounded blanket.

  “You hiding something here?”

  “Please don’t touch my things,” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”

  With a dismissive sneer, he lunged for the blanket and whipped it off.

  The doleful eyes of a russet vizsla, much like my sister Noémi’s, looked up at him. The decision to shift the girl had been spur-of-the-moment, when I touched her head earlier. I was still surprised the spell had taken. I could sometimes shift things if I touched them, but usually only small things with a superficial resemblance—a stone into a blade, a hair into a thread. I had only once before succeeded in transforming something major, outside myself, and that was when I had shifted Anna’s soul, just before I died. Cold prickled down my spine. Was this another instance of my táltos gifts expanding?