“When they grow up,” I said. “If she dies. You must think more positively.” It was a peculiar habit of the Hungarians to say if instead of when: if I grow up, if I go home. Their fatalism was built into their language, just as British optimism was built into ours: when I am rich, when I am married. When I have magic.
Noémi turned eyes full of despair on me. “Mine is only a small gift. It’s not enough. And there is no doctor here. János cannot afford to sponsor one, and the Viennese branch of the Eszterházy family doesn’t care. There is a medical examiner in the county. But like most of our Hapsburg-elected officials, he is poorly trained and mainly concerned with maximizing his profit and minimizing his labor.”
“So you heal them?”
“I do what I can. I wish I could do more.”
Shame filled me. I had misread Noémi on so many counts. “Is all of Hungary like this?”
“There are hard times everywhere,” Noémi said. “But it is harder for the peasants in the country. Hungarian Luminate are exempt from paying taxes, so the burden falls heavily on poor farmers. It would be better if Hungary could govern herself, but with the Austrian Circle all but running the country, there is small chance of that.”
I smiled a little. “You sound like a revolutionary.”
Noémi rounded on me. “Don’t say that! I am nothing like William. He is like a stupid old man who believes you can heal a patient by killing him. William and my brother don’t see that people have to live in a real world, where compromises must be made.”
What compromises, I wondered, had Noémi been forced to make? I took a deep breath. I was not good with friendships. I had never really had a friend, outside of James and sometimes Catherine. Maybe Ginny, though it was scarcely acceptable to be friends with one’s maid. I liked Noémi, despite her prickliness, and something about her face, a wistfulness in her eyes belying her words, made me sense an opening. But I had wounded her pride, which meant I would have to offer her my vulnerability.
“Do you know why I am here?”
Noémi blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “No. János is not a gossip.”
“Except with Grandmama,” I said, and she smiled. “I ruined my sister’s debut. I spoiled her illusions. And I kissed the man she’d hoped to marry.”
Noémi’s mouth fell open. Then, incredibly, she laughed. “You?”
A small, birdlike hope flexed its wings in my heart. “I didn’t mean to do it. I thought I was in love. I was wrong.”
Her eyes softened. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because…because I think I could like you, if you would only talk to me.”
“I do talk to you.”
“Yes. About the weather. And today’s luncheon.”
Noémi laughed again. I had been right—she liked frankness. “Thank you, for coming with me today. It’s not easy to bear hard things alone.”
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
William Skala was gone when we returned to Eszterháza, on to Buda-Pest to stir up bigger and grander revolutions than our quiet estate afforded. I felt only relief, until Mátyás slipped me the note William had left for me.
Think on my offer.
I tore the note into tiny pieces. I had no patience for his games. I had my own plans to execute.
I told Mátyás of Gábor’s offer, and his stipulation.
Mátyás laughed. “Gábor to teach you magic? That’s a rich jest, cousin.”
When I continued to stare at him, he sobered. “You can’t be serious. Do you know what he risks to teach you? Gypsy magic is illegal. Verboten. Gábor could be imprisoned, or worse if the arresting officer wishes to make a point.”
Fear prickled through me. “If he doesn’t mind, why should I?”
Mátyás’s lips curled. “I knew I liked you. I’ll come.”
Two days later, a village boy brought me a scrap of paper with a message in an incongruous copperplate hand: Meet me at Hangman’s Hedge in the morning.
Gábor’s hands were in constant motion: clenching, straightening, fingers sliding in and out of one another. I wondered if he was as nervous as I was.
“What do you know about magic?” he asked.
A wind shook through the clearing near Hangman’s Hedge, scattering the shadows and sun dapples across our laps. The Hedge was a quiet, sunny spot—Mátyás said a highwayman had been hanged here in the last century, and the locals avoided the spot in the belief it was haunted.
Gábor stilled his hands and waited for my answer, his dark eyes resting on my face. I told him what I knew: the Binding spell served as a reservoir of magic, and Luminate spell-casters called magic from the Binding through rituals. They pushed their magic into spells shaped by word and gesture and will.
Mátyás translated my words into Hungarian for Gábor’s sister, Izidóra, who sat in the shadows beside Gábor and turned smiling lips and eyes on my cousin.
A slight frown settled between Gábor’s eyes. “I have never understood how you gadzhe, with all your supposed education, know so little about your own power. Magic is a by-product of dji, the life-force in every creature. Your Binding may gather that force and hold it, but it is not its source. A reservoir is made up of many small rivulets coming together in streams and then rivers; the Binding simply collects the magic that flows from every living thing. Birth and death feed powerful magic into the Binding as well.”
I began to feel bewildered. In Queen Victoria’s England, children were celebrated and extended mourning indicated one’s virtue—but the actual acts of birthing and dying were sterilized and strange. One did not speak of them. “I don’t understand how you use magic without having Luminate blood.”
“We are Romani,” Gábor said, as if it explained everything.
When I only wrinkled my forehead at him, he continued. “Romani butji. Our work. We glean from things others discard. You Luminate are too quick to assume you know everything about magic, but even your own spells leak sometimes. We gather that surplus. Your Binding spell is not perfect: like a dam made of stones and mortar, there are places where the Binding is weak, where magic seeps through. We find those places. And there are days and nights, old holy days, when the Binding does not seem to pull magic from our world as well. We collect what we can before it’s drawn into the Binding. Sometimes, we can glean magic at birth and at death, when the flow and ebb of life generates excess power. We store the magic in talismans that are enchanted to hold it.”
Gábor held out his hands, his fingers splayed wide. On two of his fingers, he wore silver rings with large, polished stones. He touched one of the stones and murmured a word, and the stone came to life.
Izidóra leaned forward to show me her own charms: a necklace resting in the hollow of her neck and a pair of bracelets jangling on one wrist. Mátyás plucked at the necklace she wore, lifting it away from her collarbone. “Are you able to command much power with these?”
“Mátyás,” Gábor said, a sharp warning in his voice.