I smiled at her, more from politeness than agreement. Ginny left, and I settled into my bed and picked up the letters, reading them by the fitful light of a small kerosene lamp. How could I shatter Catherine’s spells and yet be incapable of carrying even a Lumen light?
There were two letters from James, both very short. Another letter, a bit longer, from Papa, adjuring me to enjoy my first glimpse of the world. He described meeting with Lady Berri and Lord Orwell, who asked where I had gone. I returned a vague answer that you had gone into the country, Papa wrote. But be watchful. They might yet come looking for you.
Gooseflesh prickled up my arms. I was nothing in their world—if I could break spells, I knew neither how nor why.
So why this continued interest?
There was rain that night, hammering like a fusillade against the glass panes of my window. I lay on a stiff feather mattress, staring into the darkness. I had passed the point of exhaustion and could not sleep. This room, my room now, smelled strange to me—of sage and lavender and dust.
Scenes played over and over again before my eyes, like a finely crafted illusion. Freddy, in the garden, leaning in to kiss me. The unraveling spell in my parents’ ballroom. Catherine’s smile when she announced Freddy had kissed her. The red-haired William Skala predicting a Luminate fall in Hyde Park and then confronting me in Vienna. And the last: the hollow-eyed, sharp-toothed woman I’d seen beneath the Lorelei illusion.
Around and around my head they danced. The familiar faces stretched, becoming monstrous through overexamination until I no longer recognized any of them.
A wild, unearthly music splintered the air, riding on the echoes of pealing bells.
I jolted upright in bed, my heart thumping. I was still trying to catch my breath when Ginny nudged open the door with a breakfast tray.
“What is it?” I asked.
Ginny smiled. “It’s Whitsunday. There are Gypsy musicians in the courtyard, and most of the village has come for breakfast. Your grandmama tells me it is customary.”
I settled back against my pillows. Whitsunday, the seventh Sunday following Easter. At home there would be fetes and a special sermon. I swallowed down a sting of homesickness and let Ginny help me dress.
Later, after I drowsed through a Hungarian sermon, the villagers spilled onto the bit of green lawn before the Romanesque church, wearing their holiday finery: the men in brilliant white shirts with dark, embroidered vests and wide trousers, the women in blouses with puffed sleeves, wide skirts, and aprons covered in floral handwork. Some wore kerchiefs over their hair. In my dark green gown, with its pointed waist and moderate sleeves, I stood out among these colorfully dressed folk like a crow among peacocks.
Wooden trestle tables groaned with food in the sunshine. I scanned the offerings, but they were mostly unfamiliar: rich meat dishes with savory sauces, potatoes with cream and herbs, sausages, miniature dumplings, and so many pastries. I settled on pastries as the least likely to disagree with me. I stripped off a glove and reached for a golden brown morsel. My mouth watered at the sweet smell—until I bit into something with the taste and texture of grit.
Mátyás watched my face as I tried to chew and swallow. He laughed. “Poppy seeds.”
When Mátyás was not looking, I rolled the remainder under the trestle table for a bird to find.
“I wonder why you are here if you are determined to dislike everything,” Noémi said in German beside me. I started a little—I had not seen her approach.
“I—” I stopped. I doubted my prickly cousin was interested in either Catherine’s broken spells or Papa’s fears for my safety. “Grandmama wished to come.”
“And did she warn you? About Whitsun night?” The brim of her hat cast her eyes into shadow.
“There’s nothing to warn of.” Mátyás frowned.
Noémi ignored him. “Tonight is a night of unrest.” A chill pricked me, as if that word, Unruhe, were enough to rouse the ghosts of the nearby cemetery. “In Germany, evil spirits walk this night. In Bohemia, not so very far away, rusalka are stronger now than at any time, able to leave their watery graves and crouch in trees, or hide in the fields, luring innocent victims to their death. And here the lidérc watch for unwary sleepers.”
I knew the lidérc from Grandmama’s stories: a midnight lover, hatched from the first egg of a black hen. A demon lover in some tales, a hoarder of gold in others. The rusalka was, perhaps, Slavic—I did not know it.
Noémi smiled, a stretching of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. “Did you know our Hungarian word for nightmare is lidércnyomás? That feeling when you wake suddenly from sleep and cannot breathe for the pressure on your chest.” She raised one white hand to her own chest to demonstrate. “That is the lidérc sucking the life from you.”
“Stop trying to frighten her,” Mátyás said. “Lidérc and rusalka—they’re just stories to scare children.”
“I’m not frightened,” I said.
“Very well,” Noémi said. “But I’d not walk alone tonight.”
I could not seem to shake the uneasy prickling from Noémi’s words, even through an afternoon of games in the fields beyond the churchyard, including a horse race for the Whitsun King crown—a role that brought no kingdom, but a year’s supply of beer and wine at the local kocsma. Mátyás won easily, breezing through the finish line to rowdy cheers. Noémi tossed a poppy chain across his horse’s withers.
Mátyás dismounted and turned a face full of boyish delight to me. I extended my fingers, meaning simply to shake hands, but Mátyás caught my hand and pulled me into a tight embrace. He smelled of sweat and sun and made me feel hot and cold together.
Perhaps he felt my rigid surprise, for he released me almost at once. He turned to view the crowd gathering around him and pumped his arm in the air. “Hajrá!”
The crowd echoed back, “Hajrá!” A few scattered voices added, “éljen Mátyás úr!” Long live Lord Mátyás!
A second cry ripped through the crowd, and the cheers died. In the middle of the field, a stocky man snapped his whip down on a young man in the white linen trousers of a servant. A dark horse limped a pace forward and collapsed behind the boy.
I knew the sound of a whip, of course, the sizzle and sharp crack. But somehow, the sizzle and crack and slap against human flesh was like nothing I’d heard before. My stomach twisted.
The boy flung both hands over his head. Even at this distance, I could see his white sleeves crisscrossed with blood.
“Stop!” Mátyás shouted, in German and then in Hungarian, struggling through the crowd. The others whispered and some of the women cried, but no one else moved. Mátyás pushed forward until he was next to the two figures.
He did not, as I expected, shove the stocky man back. Instead, he stood beside him, talking quietly, his hand outstretched. The man with the whip nodded and folded the whip under his arm. He offered the bridle of the lamed horse to Mátyás.