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

  “What you ask is impossible, ridiculous,” he shouted in French. “You do not seek to protect Poland, you seek only to ruin me and my country. It would be far better to give the praetheria to us. We will take them on as vassal subjects.”

  Richard’s jaw went slack. “The man is mad if he thinks he can control the praetheria himself.”

  My glance fell from the tsar to the men at his sides: the golden-haired man I had seen at the Liszt musicale (what had the ambassador named him? Sarok? Svarog?)—and Pál. My uncle wore a tight, secret smile. He was plotting something, and he was pleased with himself. The combination did not bode well for anyone in the room, least of all the tsar. What was Pál planning?

  When the tsar finished ranting, a stodgy gentleman with a droopy mustache rose from the Prussian delegation. “With all due respect, I think you are missing the obvious here. We know now that the creatures were held in the Binding spell. The Binding broke, and our magic has not been the same since. Most of our families are weaker than we have ever been. Meanwhile, we face rising threats from these creatures, many of whom draw on their own unholy magic. The solution seems simple: reinstate the Binding.”

  A smattering of applause broke out.

  A cold horror gripped me, and I shot up. Richard grasped at my arm, but I ignored him. “Do you know how the Binding spell was cast? It took a blood sacrifice, all the best Luminate of a generation, to enforce that spell. How do you propose to do that in a civilized age? Will you offer yourselves, perhaps? Or your children? Which of you wants to die so that you can resurrect an archaic, cruel, horrible spell?”

  A curl slid from Ginny’s careful coiffure. I pushed it away from my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.

  The answering silence slapped me. Archduchess Sophie looked amused, Franz Joseph faintly awed. A few of the Hungarian contingent dared to clap, but most of the audience glowered at me.

  Then the murmurs started, growing louder and more insistent until the rumbling words roared up around me like a tidal wave. “Who is that?” “She must be a lunatic; the Binding was nothing like that.”

  Richard, his face nearly florid, stood beside me. None too gently, he pushed me back into my seat. “Didn’t I tell you not to speak?”

  “But these men are wrong,” I said. “They know nothing of the Binding. They know nothing of how dangerous it is. How unjust.”

  “And you do?”

  I subsided in burning silence. I could not tell Richard how I knew about the Binding without revealing my role in breaking it. And though Pál might sit here calmly, defying rumors that he had broken the Binding, I felt certain that the court would not be so complacent if those rumors were confirmed as truth.

  If these men knew I had broken the Binding, I would be driven from the city: back to England in disgrace if I was lucky; hurt or even killed if I was not.

  A new voice cut across the buzzing. I did not immediately recognize it, but I recognized the feeling it carried with it—a yearning so intense it bent me nearly double. Hunger, skimming power from our desires, marched between the aisles to the front of the room, his gold-touched skin blazing under the light of the chandeliers.

  “You speak of the praetheria as if they were animals, creatures of no sentience and no will to live life on their own terms. You did not even invite them to their own sentencing.” He smiled, light glinting from his pointed canines. “So I’ve come myself, like the wicked fairy to the princess’s christening, to spoil your pleasure. My young friend is right.” He nodded at me, and I did not know if the thrill that ran through me was pleasure or horror at being linked with him. “You do not understand the magnitude of that spell. Nor can you honestly think that, having betrayed us once, we will let you do it a second time. We are willing to remain peaceable as long as you do—but if you bring war to us, we will return it to you.”

  He paused, looking across the frozen room. “We want what you want: a secure place to live, enough food to eat, a home for our children. A chance to grow old.”

  Hunger was no illusionist, but I saw his words play out in my head—a green estate, fresh fruit from the gardens, dark-haired children playing on the lawns. The Congress was silent, not from shock or derision, but from a kind of mutual daydream.

  Dragović stepped forward from his post near the archduchess, his high forehead shining. “Stop that at once! Your demon magic isn’t welcome here. And where are the bells the law requires you to wear?”

  Hunger held out his hands, wrists upward in a gesture of submission. “No one has yet bound me, sir.” The contempt in his last word was so faint I wondered if I imagined it. “Perhaps your soldiers do not feel comfortable marking someone who looks and speaks like a human. Do you?”

  Dragović started toward Hunger, as though he’d bind him there before all of us. The emperor waved his hand. “Let him be.”

  The Croatian soldier froze, one hand on the sword he wore at his hip, fealty to his emperor warring with outrage. Dragović turned back to the crowd. “Mark this. These creatures warp our minds and our hearts and make us forget that some of the most beautiful things are the most deadly. If even one of them is a threat to our safety, the whole lot are tainted. They must be driven from us, by force if necessary.”

  Murmurs of agreement washed across the room. Kossuth rose, a commanding presence with his thick chestnut hair and neatly trimmed beard. “Are we to condemn them all without due trial? Without full understanding? The church tells us all creatures are creations of the same God.”

  Hunger inclined his head toward Kossuth.

  “How very like you,” Dragović said, crossing his arms, “to consider the rights of creatures, but ignore the pleas of your brothers. When you asked Vienna to give you an independent government after your little revolt, your pleas were heard despite your treachery. Yet when Croatia asked Hungary for the same independence, you spurned us. I suspect your humanity now is inspired less by nobility than by self-interest. What did you promise the creatures in exchange for defending your armies?”

  “I only ask that we consider the case rationally,” Kossuth said evenly, though I could see temper working in his face. “And Hungary has no agreement with these creatures—what aid they gave us, they gave us freely.”

  Freely. I bit back a laugh at the irony. Mátyás’s blood had been a steep price for their cooperation.

  “You, of all men, preach reason? You are a traitor to your king and country,” Dragović said.

  The archduchess whispered something to Franz Joseph, who stood. “Enough. Nothing has been decided yet, and such squabbling ill becomes men of good repute. Please be seated.”

  Emperor Ferdinand merely looked on, his fingers playing a tune in the air that no one heard but him.

  The discussion resumed as though my interruption had never happened. I hunched down in my seat, still smarting from my dismissal earlier. No one in this room took me seriously save Hunger and perhaps the Hungarians. And even I could see that their word carried little weight in this assembly.

  I wanted to believe that well-spoken words mattered. I wanted to believe that a word could turn away a sword. But all I could see in this room was shifting alliances, men who sought their own self-interest by promoting the self-interest of someone else, at still another’s expense. Money and position bought power, and though I had some money, I had no recognized position.

  Catherine was right.

  Alone, I had no voice. At least no voice that could be heard by those who mattered.

  But I would not be silenced so easily. I would find a way to speak—with words loud and sharp enough that even the dull men in this room would hear me.

  I would speak for myself, for every woman who had held her tongue for fear of mockery.

  I would speak with the praetheria, who were denied a voice in their own fate.

  And for Mátyás, who no longer had a voice at all.

  This is not the story of my death.

  That already happened, t
hough it was disappointingly lacking in pearly gates or angels of any form. It’s not as though I asked for much: I didn’t need cherubim or seraphim. I would have been happy with a good German Valkyrie, devilishly curved and properly appreciative of my sacrifice.

  This is not the story of my life either. As I understand it, “life” refers to that interval between birth and death. For me, that interval has passed. (On the whole, pleasurably.)

  This, whatever it is, is something else entirely.

  *

  Here is what I remember: dying was not at all pleasant. I’d imagined a thunderclap, a conflagration, some flamboyant glory to spur me on to higher realms. Some pure moment of exaltation to purge me of my sins.

  After all, I was giving up my life to break an unjust spell and rescue my friends. A moment’s noble sacrifice seemed a fair exchange for an afterlife of peace.

  My sister would tell you I strike poor bargains. This, apparently, was one of them.

  I got all of the pain—and none of the glory.

  Anna drove a knife through my chest, and I let her. We were trying to save the world. Pain burned through my body. Had it been real fire, I would have been a true inferno, a beacon seen miles around. Instead I just ached, damnably.

  I died in the shadow of a rock, surrounded by roses. But when my heart failed and my vision went dark, Anna was already gone, fled through the crumbling walls of the spell-world. When I died, I died alone.

  Was it too much to ask that she witness my death? Or at least see my body decently buried? I don’t remember abandonment being part of our bargain—though in fairness, when I agreed to die on the tip of a bone knife, it never occurred to me to negotiate how my body should be disposed of.

  I wish I had thought to dictate an epitaph for the monument I imagined Noémi would raise in a cemetery somewhere: Here lies Eszterházy Mátyás: the right hero at the wrong time. Or perhaps the wrong hero at the right time.

  I’m not certain what happened after the Binding shattered.

  I was dead for that part.

  *

  The next thing I remember was the wind.

  It was gentle at first, only a whisper in my ears, an almost Valkyrie-like caress stirring the hair on my forehead. Then it grew louder, an endless bluster scraping across my skin, howling and pushing air into my nose so that my failed lungs creaked and expanded and remembered how to breathe.

  I gulped in air like a man dying of thirst might guzzle water. But my lungs cramped and I gagged, rolling onto my side across some rough surface. As my stomach wrung itself out, memory returned, burning across my mind like feeling returned to frost-numbed fingers. I rather wished I were still dead. Oblivion is its own kind of bliss.

  “You’re awake.” The voice floating on the air above me was gentle, pleasant. The kind of voice my mother had before my father died, before she let herself waste away.

  I pushed myself to my knees, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand and ignoring the dizziness that rolled across me. The woman facing me, her hands resting quietly in her lap, was no one I had ever seen before. Everything about her was bright: her eyes, the curve of her smile, the sun blazing on her dark hair. She was stunning—but for once, in the presence of a beautiful woman, it wasn’t her looks that I noticed first. It was the bone-deep comfort she radiated, like a warm bowl of gulyásleves on a winter evening.

  Limbs of some giant tree spread around us. The branches splintering away from us were as wide as buildings and so long I could not see the end of them. I’d never seen anything like it. Leaves rustled, sun glinting off them like new kreuzer coins.

  “Am I dead?”

  “No. That is…you were. But no longer.”

  “You revived me?” My sister was a healer. She had, once or twice before, revived someone whose heart had stopped, though she generally did not like to speak about it.

  “Not precisely. After your body failed, I brought you here, to the Upper World, the uppermost of the three realms. You are táltos. Your soul can travel between worlds. It traveled between death and life and returned to you here, as I hoped it would. While your soul was traveling, I healed your body.”

  Traveling? Where the hell had I gone? And why didn’t I remember any of it? Reflexively I reached for the small filigree cross I wore for luck. My fingers closed around air. With a stab, I remembered I’d given the cross to Anna.

  “Are you telling me you’re an angel?” Her gentle demeanor and the light that seemed to cling to her certainly fit, but I could see no signs of wings, a halo, or, thanks be to all the saints, a harp.

  She smiled. “No.”

  I grinned back at her, encouraged. “A Valkyrie?”

  Her smile thinned. “You are no dead German soldier, and I am not one of Odin’s minions.”

  No dalliance, then. “Then who are you? Where are we?” She’d spoken of three realms and an upper world. I turned my attention back to the tree, vague memories surfacing of my nursemaid telling stories, until my devout Catholic mother had put a stop to them. Some of the stories spoke of a sky-high tree, sprung between heaven and earth, where heroes had climbed to rescue princesses from the seven-headed dragon-king who ruled there. In others, the tree was home to Hadúr, the god of war, and his brothers, the kings of the sun and the wind. The Upper World, at the top of the tree, was home to a pantheon of ancient Hungarian gods.

  But those were only stories, born of a time before King István converted to Christianity.

  This seemed very real, unless death was just some mass hallucination.

  Now there was a cheerful thought.

  A wind picked up, swirling through the leaves. As the branches waved back and forth, I caught glimpses of the world beyond us: whirling clusters of stars, as if the entire tree had grown up into the cosmos.

  The Upper World.

  Startled, I turned back to the lady. She smiled, serene as a Madonna. “I am the Boldogasszony.”

  The joyful woman? “That must be very nice for you,” I said politely.

  She sighed. “I had hoped you, of all my children, might remember me. I was, once, mother-goddess of Hungary. After I was bound, that worship shifted to the Catholic Mary. You may call me the Lady. Your cousin does.”

  “Anna? You’ve seen her?”

  “Not since the Binding spell was broken. But my birds tell me she is well.”

  A tightness in my shoulders eased. Anna was well. She had made it out of the Binding, survived the Circle ambush at Eszterháza. The relief was followed almost at once by a prick of anger. If she was safe, why had she abandoned me? “And the others? Do you know what happened to the prisoners in Buda-Pest?”

  “Freed by your cousin”—she smiled—“and an army of Hungarian patriots and praetheria.”

  Hála Istennek. “Prae—what?”

  “Praetheria. What the humans call my kind, and the other uncanny creatures.”

  I scratched my head, trying to comprehend the stories made flesh before me. “So you are a…goddess? How does that work? Are you immortal? And how were you bound with the creatures in the Binding?”

  She sighed. “I am not immortal. I am capable of dying, though it might take something extraordinary to kill me. I have lived for a very long time. I suppose I placed too much faith in the people I had nurtured for so long. I did not believe they could see me for anything other than what I was: someone who had loved them and sought to protect them. But your ancestors who agreed to the Binding were jealous of their power, and the Church disapproved of anything uncanny, anything outside their strict understanding. They bound everything with any power that did not appear to be human. We—Hadúr and I and the others, I suppose you would call us gods—were not prepared, and so we were caught up in the spell.

  “The centuries in the spell did not kill us, though they have weakened us. The world tree”—she gestured at the branches stirring around us—“has always been our link to the human realm, and a source of some of our strength. It survived our long imprisonment, in
visible to most human eyes, and I have spent these last months nursing it back to its old strength.”

  “Are there others like you?” For the first time, I wondered what we had released with the Binding. When I had agreed to die, I had only thought of Anna’s need, of my friends locked away in a Buda jail. The creatures I had seen inside the spell—shy, almost wild creatures—might ease themselves into the existing world. But gods? How would they fit in a modern world?

  “A few. There are powerful beings in all cultures. Some of us were gods, some witches, some monsters, some nameless. Most were never as powerful as the stories told of them, and they either died or faded away in the centuries in the Binding. Some of them do not care for their old glory. But the others…” Her voice trailed off and her eyes fixed on me. “The others may threaten everything Hadúr and I hope to rebuild.”

  Did those others have something to do with why the Lady had revived me? I rather suspected, from the earnest look she focused on me, that I did not want to find out. Anna had looked just as importuning—and I had agreed to die. What would I do for a goddess with ten times Anna’s magnetism?

  “Are you hungry?” The Lady stood, her gown rippling down like water. “You were dead for some time, and you have been sleeping much longer. Nearly eight months, as they tell time below.”

  Eight months.

  For six months Noémi would have worn heavy mourning—by now she might have graduated to the subdued greys and lavender of lesser mourning. Did she blame me for leaving her? Where was she now? Still with our uncle János in Hungary, or had our Eszterházy cousins dragged her back to Vienna? My fingers reached again for my missing cross. I prayed she was happy.

  I tried to stand, but the muscles in my legs seemed to have forgotten how to hold me. The Lady’s arm was around me almost at once, lifting me effortlessly. She led me down the immensely wide branch until we came to an intersection with a vast trunk shooting upward. How long would it take a tree to grow this size? Millennia? And what did it feed on—sunlight and water like normal trees? Or something more macabre, like blood and bone? I glanced down between the branches, but all I could see was the green of more branches. A door opened into a hollow carved from the trunk: a high, airy space lit by tiny bits of light that spun back and forth in the air like fireflies.