Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2) Page 3

  “Yes,” Catherine agreed, and her voice was devastatingly gentle. “And they are all married.”

  *

  St. Stephen’s Cathedral hulked against the skyline like a dragon carcass: all blackened spires and knobs, the intricate carved details climbing like scales up its walls. Even the multicolored tiling on the roof seemed only an extension of the reptilian skin. In my weeks in Vienna, I had not yet gotten used to the sight, or the feeling, upon entering the vast nave, of being swallowed by some beast.

  But the Hapsburgs were a religious family, and it was the fashion to be seen in church on a Sunday, never mind that Catherine and I belonged to the Church of England and the royal family were Roman Catholics who most often worshipped in their private chapel in the Hofburg. Or that Sunday masses were said in Latin, so that it was a difficult thing to prick my eyelids open during the resonant hum of the priest’s recitation.

  We arrived a few minutes early and took our seats in a pew to one side, where Catherine and Richard had a better vantage point of the congregants. They spent the time exchanging gossip about each new arrival. I listened absently and tried to ignore my scalp itching beneath my hat.

  At once the entire congregation seemed to surge to their feet. This baffled me for a moment, as I couldn’t remember this in any of the previous masses, and then my scattered thoughts caught up to me: one of the royals must have entered the building. I craned my neck, but I could see little over the women’s hats springing up like mushrooms.

  Eventually, the crowd settled and the priest entered with his retinue, resplendent in embroidered vestments. I listened, drowsing, through the recitations and woke during the singing, lovely and medieval, echoing in the bones of the building.

  After the service, I followed behind Catherine as Richard greeted half the congregation. I was not attending much: the gleam of pale sunlight beyond the square door beckoned me. So I was caught off guard when someone grasped my arm.

  “Anna Arden!” William Skala, revolutionary extraordinaire, beamed at me, his red hair springing wildly from his forehead.

  “William!” I had not seen him since my father brought me home from Hungary. “I did not know you were in Vienna.”

  “Now that Hungary has won her independence, it’s time for Poland to do the same. I’ve come to the Congress with the Polish delegation. We failed to win independence during the 1814 Congress, but by God, we’ll win this time.”

  Typical William, always aflame with a cause. “I thought the Congress was to discuss the praetheria.”

  William waved his hand. “When did a group of politicians meet without arguing everything under the sun? In all the negotiations that are sure to happen, we’ll find a way to plead our cause.” He paused. “The Hungarian delegation is in town, with Louis Kossuth. Have you seen any of our friends?”

  Something in me went very still. If Louis Kossuth, the anglicized name for Hungarian patriot Kossuth Lajos, was in Vienna, perhaps Gábor was too. I had heard nothing from him in the months I had been gone: as an unmarried woman I could not receive letters in either my father’s or my sister’s home from a man I was not related to. But I had seen the letter Kossuth sent my father, thanking him for my help in winning Hungary’s independence. There had been a postscript too, written in a different hand, but my father had not noticed that.

  Tell your daughter that her friend Gábor is come to work for me in a secretarial capacity. I find him smart and capable and eager to get on. The postscript had been in Gábor’s writing, and I imagined him smiling as he wrote it.

  I shook my head, already searching the milling crowd behind William for a slim Romani man.

  William laughed. “I can guess for whom you search. He was here earlier—if I see him, I will tell him how ardently you sought him.”

  My face flamed. “You will do no such—”

  Catherine caught my hand, interrupting me.

  “What is it?” My voice was sharper than I intended as my sister whirled me around. I was hardly in the mood to be introduced to yet another Viennese doyenne, whose wrinkled face, pale hair, and permanently disgruntled expression would be indistinguishable from every other grand dame’s. I wanted to abandon my sister and my dignity and search the crowd for Gábor.

  But anything I might have said died on my tongue. The archduchess Sophie stood beside my sister. Just behind her, studying me with undisguised interest, was the heir to the Austrian imperial crown, Franz Joseph. When he caught my eye, he smiled, pink stealing into his cheeks.

  That tiny betrayal by his circulatory system saved my opinion of him: if he could blush, he could not yet be too toplofty.

  Richard presented us, and I dropped the deepest curtsy I could muster without falling.

  Franz Joseph bowed slightly in return, and I felt something that might have been fluttering in my breast—were it not that I categorically refused to be the kind of girl whose heart fluttered upon meeting a handsome prince. For Franz Joseph was handsome: dark gold hair with auburn tints, blue eyes, and a kind of fresh-faced openness I found appealing.

  “The honor is mine,” he said, smiling. “I’ve wanted to meet the darling of Hungary for some time. To hear tell, you stormed Buda Castle single-handedly and freed a regiment’s worth of political prisoners.”

  “Rebels,” his mother said.

  “Patriots,” came William’s murmured voice behind me. The archduchess’s face tightened almost imperceptibly.

  I held up my gloved hands. “Not single-handedly, Your Majesty.”

  The archduke laughed, and pride flushed through me. I could already imagine Catherine composing a letter to Mama: Anna spoke with Archduke Franz Joseph, and he laughed at her wit. Though she might draw a line through wit and add foolishness.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of a familiar face. And though I knew it was wrong to let my attention waver, even for a second, particularly with the archduchess watching so closely, I glanced away.

  Gábor.

  Light from one of the stained-glass windows fell on his bare head and shoulders, transforming him into a medieval icon, all bronze and gold and stark lines. I watched his gaze flick from me to the archduke, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to hold his glance. With a tiny shake of his head, he stepped back, out of the light. The crowd closed around him. I gripped my hands together, unexpectedly bereft.

  When I pulled my gaze back to the archduke, he waited with a mildly inquiring air. He had asked me something and I had no answer. I glanced to Catherine for help, but her pursed lips told me only that she would be speaking with me on our return home. The archduchess’s smooth face gave me even less.

  “I must apologize,” I said. “I fear I was not attending as I should. The sermon was so overpowering—I’m still feeling its effects.”

  “I only asked if you enjoy riding.”

  “Oh!” I could almost feel Starfire beneath me, the pure joy of flying across the fields near Eszterháza. Before everything. “Yes. Very much.”

  The archduke beamed at me. “Capital! So do I. Perhaps you’d come riding with me—say Tuesday next?”

  My brain had some trouble parsing his request. Had an archduke just asked me to go riding with him? How did one even do that? Where was I supposed to meet him? What would I wear? Or ride?

  Catherine pinched my elbow. “My sister would be delighted.”

  Franz Joseph looked at me, his eyes uncertain. That flash of insecurity, in a boy who might with justice rate himself quite high, charmed me.

  “I would enjoy that very much,” I said.

  “Wonderful. I shall make arrangements.” Franz Joseph smiled and bowed, and he and his mother and their entourage drifted away from us.

  Catherine slipped her arm through mine and steered me in their wake, toward the door of the cathedral. Leaning in, her lips so close I could feel her breath, she said, “Anna, how could you be so daft! I was quite humiliated by your inattention. Do you not understand what an honor this is?”

 
The honor I fully grasped. It was the why that eluded me. “I don’t understand why they should seek me out.”

  “Do you not? I keep trying to tell you that you are an attractive young woman.”

  I laughed. “Are you suggesting he’s courting me? Now it’s you who’s being daft: heirs to empires don’t marry attractive young women, they make mistresses of them.”

  Catherine’s shocked look nearly made up for the fact that I could not see Gábor anywhere in the remaining crowd.

  He was gone.

  When one is the heir to an empire, a ride in the park is not nearly so simple as it might seem. On the heels of the archduke’s invitation to go riding, a more formal invitation appeared a few days later, on paper so fine and thick that I held it for a long moment, admiring its heft and trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach.

  On the appointed morning, I spent hours in my room with my maid Ginny, under Catherine’s close supervision, trying to achieve a fresh, natural look that would suggest I had spent no time at all. Then I waited in one of the salons for a quarter of an hour, afraid to move, my smart new forest-green riding dress brushed and fitted within an inch of its life, my riding cap pinned precisely to my curled hair.

  When Archduke Franz Joseph arrived at last, he was not alone.

  Nearly half the court had come with him, it seemed: a brace of grooms and several ladies and gentlemen I did not know. My tongue was heavy in my mouth. I was not certain I remembered how to speak.

  Catherine did all the necessary talking at the house, ushering me to the door after the butler answered it, thanking the archduke for the honor, and then walking me down the stairs to where a mount waited for me. Franz Joseph was an excellent judge of horseflesh: he’d chosen a pretty roan horse with just enough spirit to be interesting.

  “A fine morning for riding,” he said, cupping his hands so he could lift me into the saddle.

  “Very fine,” I echoed. It felt faintly blasphemous to set my boot, no matter how clean, in royal hands. Perhaps I should have insisted one of the grooms help me.

  The morning was warm, but not unpleasantly so, and I lifted my face to the sunlight, hoping the radiance would give me courage to get through the ride without embarrassing myself—and to ask the archduke about attending the Congress.

  We rode east through gates of the city proper, past the emerald sweep of the glacis, the band of grass surrounding the walls, kept bare for defense. We crossed an arm of the Donau on a stone bridge before reaching the leafy green expanse of Prater Park. The other riders rotated around us, and Franz Joseph introduced them all, though I’m afraid their names slid through my brain like water. The only name I did remember belonged to the archduke’s personal valet, Count Karl Grünne, a bewhiskered gentleman twice the archduke’s age, whose dour countenance suggested he had looked me over and found me utterly wanting. Gloom and Grünne, indeed.

  I was not certain how to speak to an archduke in any circumstance, let alone when we were surrounded by the sharp eyes and pricked ears of a dozen courtiers. Anything I said would doubtless be repeated—with amplifications—to Franz Joseph’s mother.

  “Are you enjoying your stay in Vienna?”

  I took a deep breath. An easy question; I could do this. “Yes, indeed. Such lovely buildings, and so much history.”

  Franz Joseph beamed, as if I had complimented him personally.

  “And you—are you fond of the city?” I asked.

  “I’m fond of Vienna; I’ve spent a great deal of time here, and the government is here. But I must confess I prefer the country: Schönbrunn and its gardens are much more my taste than the Hofburg. I have cousins in Bavaria, and it’s beautiful there. My family has hunting lodges scattered here and in Hungary.”

  “So you hunt?”

  “Yes. I enjoy it very much.”

  The remembered echo of the gunshot in the ballroom buzzed through my head. I changed the subject. “Have you traveled much? I confess, I envy that. I’ve really only been in England and Hungary, and now Vienna.”

  “Some. I was in northern Italy not long ago, with Radetzky’s army. I saw the tail end of the fighting against the insurgents in Lombardy.” Franz Joseph’s face lit, and some of his exquisite politeness dropped away. “If I weren’t—that is, had my life been otherwise, I would have chosen to make a career of it. My good friend the count”—he nodded at his valet, riding quietly alongside us—“is a military man through and through. In good moods, he consents to tell me stories of the fights he’s seen.” He grinned at me, betraying his youth. Mátyás and his student friends had been just as enthusiastic about wars and revolutions.

  I swallowed and flicked my reins, blinking sharply.

  “It would be lovely,” I said, “to live in a world where the only expectations set for us by our families were that we be happy.”

  He laughed. “Lovely—but not very practical. Who should govern then? Or choose to work at all?”

  His laughter stung a little.

  We entered the long, leafy boulevard of the park, overhung with white flowers as big as my fist. Other riders joined us, and the talk became more general, a peculiar mix of society and politics: the Congress, an upcoming lecture on the praetheria by an esteemed professor, a ball at the Belvedere, whether or not the fair weather would hold for a garden picnic.

  I listened mostly in silence, speaking only when my opinion was solicited. I still could make nothing of the archduke’s attention: why shower so much time on me? I had noble blood and money, but nothing remarkable in this company. My only claim to Luminate power was my dual-souled chimera nature, but that merely allowed me to break spells, not cast them. And just a handful of people knew I was chimera—a number that did not include Franz Joseph or his mother.

  A pretty young woman was describing the pains her dressmaker had taken to procure the fabric for her most recent gown when Count Grünne stopped short with an oath. Franz Joseph dropped all pretense of listening to ride to the count’s side. A mutinous pout clouded the young lady’s features.

  I nudged my horse behind the archduke.

  “What is it?” Franz Joseph’s voice was low.

  The count scanned the bushes, his thick brows drawn together. “I thought I saw something. Praetherian.”

  “Dragović’s Red Mantles have been patrolling the park religiously. If anything were here, they’d have found it. Probably a spooked deer.”

  “Best to be safe, Your Highness,” Count Grünne said, rubbing his hands together and then weaving them through the air.

  I backed up as the first buzz of the spell brushed against me, holding my breath. But the spell released safely, a set of tiny lights that arrowed between the trees and into the undergrowth. A rabbit bounded away.

  The count nodded, satisfied. “It’s secure, Your Highness.”

  Clouds scuttled across the sky, blotting out the sun. I wanted to ask about the praetheria, what it was the count feared and why, but I could not find the words to frame such a question. I said merely, “That was a pretty casting, my lord.”

  The count grunted.

  “Count Grünne teaches at my mother’s school,” the archduke said.

  “I saw a boy once,” I said, “when the Binding was first broken, who killed himself with a Fire spell because he had no training. I am very glad your mother is doing something about it. Please give her my compliments.” I wished briefly, impossibly, that the school taught courses in chimera.

  “Gladly.” The archduke smiled as he spoke, but there was something grim about the set of his smile. “Though I could wish there was no need for such a school. We’re well rid of the Circle—my mother says a country ought not to have two governments—but the Binding…Well. I’d like to horsewhip the man responsible for the suffering he’s caused.”

  My gloved hands tightened on the reins, and I stared fixedly at them. Would the archduke still want to horsewhip the accused if he knew it was me? If he understood the full extent of injustice the B
inding maintained? But I could not argue without betraying myself. “Do you know,” I asked, my throat dry, “who broke the Binding?”

  “My mother thinks it may have been a Hungarian gentleman who worked for the Circle and disappeared after the spell broke.”

  Uncle Pál. I nearly sagged with relief. They did not suspect me. Yet. I fell silent and the conversation turned to more innocuous topics.

  Eventually the line of riders attenuated, some far outpacing us, some falling behind. The sunlight returned, and I was drowsing in a warm breeze when Franz Joseph spoke to me in Hungarian. “I am trying to understand what happened in Hungary.”

  Astonishment nearly jolted me from my horse. The archduke’s Hungarian was impeccable, if stiff. The count’s lips pursed, as if he had bit something sour.

  I answered in the same language. “I did not know you spoke Hungarian.”

  “One of my tutors spoke it fluently. I find it important to speak to people. I cannot govern a people I do not know. Will you tell me about the revolution?”

  I shifted in my saddle. “What do you want to know?” There were too many secrets still bound up in that war: I did not mean to betray any that I did not need to.

  Franz Joseph frowned and flicked his riding crop at a fly buzzing near his horse’s ears. “I understand that some students tried to revolt and were caught and threatened with hanging. An army marched on Buda-Pest to release them, and the praetheria joined them.” A shadow passed over his face, though it might have only been the dappled shade thrown by the trees lining the path. He cast a sidelong look at me and smiled. “I heard the prisoners were freed by a British girl. What was it like?”

  The memory of smoke and blood and screaming descended like a curtain across my eyes. It was a moment before my throat loosened enough to speak. “It was not very triumphant. I had never been in fighting before, and the blood in the streets made me sick. I would not have gone at all, but I had friends in the prison, and I had to save them.” I remembered the black, falling feeling when I had thought Gábor might already be dead.

  “You are very loyal,” Franz Joseph said, his tone warm with approval.