Mama moaned. “Oh, Charles.”
Papa said, “I’ll not deny I think society would be better without the Binding, but I’m not so foolish as to attempt to break it myself—or to urge my untrained daughter to do so! I know our laws as well as you.”
Gooseflesh prickled along my forearms. The radical, William Skala, opposed the Binding. That made sense, for one coveting Luminate magic and position. But why should Papa? He had nothing to gain from such a stand, and everything to lose.
“You heretics are mad,” Lord Orwell said. “You believe the Binding restricts the use of magic, but that is folly. In fact, the Binding spell strengthens our power by giving us access to magic we might not possess individually. It protects us from injudicious spell-casting and from…other threats. Breaking the Binding would only weaken our magic.”
“The Binding preserve us,” Grandmama whispered, echoing a prayer I’d learned in childhood.
Papa did not look convinced.
The radical’s words in the park floated back to me. I asked, “Is it true that magical ability has nothing to do with bloodlines? I heard someone say the Circle only grants magic to families who can afford Confirmation.”
“Nonsense,” Lord Orwell said. “Magic has everything to do with bloodlines—without Luminate blood, we would have no magic.”
Papa opened his mouth to speak, but Mama closed her hand around his forearm and he fell silent.
Lady Berri said, “We believe your daughter may be a danger—both to herself and to others.” She swung toward me with the majestic mass of a ship at sea. “Come here, child.”
“Anna,” Grandmama whispered, “you do not have to do this.”
“I’m afraid she does, Lady Zrínyi,” Lady Berri said.
I crossed the room to her, though I wanted to face the Circle even less than I had wanted to sit through my parents’ proposal to Freddy.
My father wore his scholar face: narrowed eyes, intent focus. Mama looked pale. At some unspoken signal, Lady Berri took my right hand and Lord Orwell my left. They began reciting long, sonorous phrases in Latin. Lady Berri’s hand was warm in mine, Lord Orwell’s callused and dry.
They stopped speaking, and I concentrated on the silence, trying to hear or feel something of the spell they cast. Nothing.
My eyes followed an insect (a bee, perhaps?) tapping gently against a window. Then warmth flooded me, like the first flush of embarrassment. The warmth intensified, tracing lines of heat through my body.
No. I knew this feeling. I knew what happened next.
The heat exploded into flame, as if my entire body had caught fire from the inside out. Heat flared behind my eyes, across my chest, down my limbs, and into my fingers and toes.
I tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by the blaze in my throat.
Lady Berri must have sensed my distress, because she released my hand. The flames flickered once, then died. I took a long, shuddering breath and shook my other hand free of Lord Orwell’s grip.
“Odd.” Lord Orwell’s bushy eyebrows pulled together over his nose.
“What happened?” Grandmama’s voice was tight.
My body, which had been overhot, was now cold.
Lady Berri frowned. “I…am not sure. Usually a soul-scry reveals the shape of one’s soul and one’s natural affinity for a magical order. In rare cases, a scry may uncover any hidden spells or geas that impede spell-casting. But Anna’s results are…indeterminate. At any rate, I have never seen anyone react so strongly to this ritual, which suggests that something else is at the root of your daughter’s condition.”
“We’ll need to study the girl further, at our offices on Downing Street.” Lord Orwell nodded at my father. “Perhaps with a blood sample we could—”
Papa cut him off. “I’ve said before, my daughter is not some specimen for examination and dissection.”
“I’m afraid you may not have a choice,” Lady Berri said. A look passed between her and Papa that I could not read. “But I promise you, I will see to it she is safe.”
And with that we had to be content.
After Barton ushered the Circle members from the room, Papa sank into his chair. “I suppose that settles it.”
“Settles what?” I asked. “You can’t mean to let them experiment upon me.”
“We’ll have to send you away,” Papa said.
A great weariness slipped over me. “I suppose you will send me back to Dorset.”
“No,” Mama said. “You will accompany your grandmother to Hungary. You will be gone some months, time enough for the scandal to die down. It is to be hoped when you return you will behave as a proper lady ought.”
“It is to be hoped,” Papa said, “that the Circle will lose interest in you during your absence. I care less for the scandal than for your safety.”
“You will love Hungary, Anna,” Grandmama said. “Such a beautiful country. And generous people. We can stay with my cousin János for the summer. Eszterháza is a remarkable estate—the Hungarian Versailles, people call it, where Haydn used to compose symphonies for the empress Maria Theresa. I spent the happiest summers of my childhood there. I believe János has a great-niece and great-nephew staying with him. They lost their parents, szegények, but I am sure they will be good company for you. And in the fall we can go to Buda-Pest, when the Luminate gather in the cities.”
I tried to smile at the joy in her voice, at the already thickening accent. But my heartbeat thundered in my ears. So this was my fate. Instead of marriage to Freddy, I was to be packed off to a country on the fringes of civilized Europe. Why not Paris, if I must leave England? Or even Vienna? Hungary might be Mama’s and Grandmama’s birthplace, but it was so far.
Leaving England would mean abandoning any hope of a debut, a legitimate place in Luminate society, for a society that spoke a language I did not understand and lived by rules I did not know. There were Grandmama’s stories, of course, of a paradoxical people who could “weep from one eye and laugh with the other,” a people who laughed when they mourned and wept when they were joyful. Stories of a fiercely independent folk who had swept into the Carpathian basin and terrorized Europe before being subjugated themselves, first by the Turks and then by the Austrians. Grandmama’s stories of Hungarian history were littered with tragic heroes: I grew up believing that to be a hero in Hungary meant you had to die.
I loved Grandmama’s stories.
But I did not know how to live in them.
Catherine barged into my room that evening while Ginny was brushing my hair.
“I’m not sorry you’re going,” she said, crossing to my dressing table and examining a tiny vase.
“I had not imagined you would be.” I swallowed. “I am sorry for what I did at your ball. You were rightly angry.”