“Do you?”
He turned troubled eyes on me. “I am proud of who I am. There is much to admire about my people: their tenacity, their intelligence, their humor and passion. But sometimes I catch myself seeing them as a gadzho might, seeing their superstitions, the difficulties of a nomadic life.” His voice dropped. “And sometimes I see myself as they do: a man aspiring to foolishness, currying favor of people who will never value him.”
I thought of James, trying to find a place among those who should have welcomed him, and my heart squeezed tight. “At least you know something. I’ve been taught to stitch and curtsy.”
Gábor stopped pacing and dropped beside me. My entire left side came alive at his nearness.
“Is knowledge always such a good thing? I mean to go to Buda-Pest in the fall to take courses at the university, if I can. Mátyás says he will help me. I believe in what I’m doing—but sometimes it costs more than I can bear. I do not always fit comfortably with my own people—or with the gadzhe. Where does such a half creature belong?”
I had never heard this note in Gábor’s voice before, and it took me a moment to identify it. Uncertainty. Vulnerability. Odd how openness can make something familiar strange, and something strange familiar. Gábor was only a boy after all, not much older than I was.
“You’re not a half creature,” I said. “Two ways of seeing should make you better, stronger, wiser. Like the owl, who sees in all directions.”
“Perhaps humans weren’t meant for such double vision. A woman with a double soul once nearly destroyed the world.”
Gooseflesh prickled up my arm. I knew this story: Pandora, the all-gifted by the Olympian gods, given one soul for herself, and one to punish the men who helped Prometheus. “But Pandora was chimera. Your dual vision doesn’t make you monstrous.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
One slim brown hand clenched and unclenched against his leg. Before I let myself think, I stripped off my glove and reached out, my fingers closing over his. His hand stilled.
His bare skin was rough and warm against my touch. I had never touched a man’s ungloved hand before, save Papa’s. And this was quite different. “Everyone feels that way who does not fit neatly into the role society gives them. But it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, only that you are bigger than they can imagine.” Recognition pulled at me—my words were as true for me as for Gábor. I put them away to study them later. Just then, my attention was all for Gábor. “You know so much. You’re kind to your sister and brother. You’re patient beyond anything I deserve. You are…quite remarkable.” My nerves stood alert like soldiers, alive to the perils—and promises—of some uncharted territory.
His eyes lifted to mine, his dark pupils swallowing the brown iris. Perhaps I should not have spoken so freely, but I could not call the words back. Would not.
His hand shifted, capturing my fingers in his, his thumb tracing a slow movement across the back of my hand. The heat sweeping up my arm, suffusing my body, had nothing to do with the warmth of the summer day.
I knew I should pull away, but I did not.
Gábor smiled down at me, and for a moment ringing filled my ears. He was going to kiss me. He wanted to. I could see it in his slightly widened eyes, the way he leaned intently toward me as he spoke, his gaze dropping to my lips, to the skin exposed by the neck of my dress.
But he held back, waiting for me to make some sign.
What would it matter, here, away from prying eyes, if I let him kiss me? Here he was not Romani, I was not a lady. He was Gábor; I was Anna. All it would take was a look, a slight upward tilt of my chin.
But I kept my chin lowered. I dropped my eyes.
I thought of Catherine’s ball, how I had traded a kiss with Freddy for months of exile. And I remembered the strange, wild hunger that swept me the first time Gábor kissed me. I did not trust myself. Gábor might be a good man, a remarkable one, but he was still Romani, his life and heritage worlds away from everything I had ever known, everything I had ever wanted.
A current of air beneath the trees shifted. At once I felt watched, exposed.
I pulled my hand away, angry with myself for wanting something I couldn’t have, angry at society for dictating those barriers. “I must go.” I scrambled to my feet and lurched away. With the aid of a nearby stump, I mounted Starfire and turned her head toward home.
I did not look back.
Nearly a week passed before I heard anything from Gábor. I walked in the gardens with Grandmama, practiced Hungarian with Noémi as I accompanied her on her rounds, rode with Mátyás, and tried to read Gábor’s silence. Was he angry? Offended? Perhaps he thought himself well rid of me.
When the summons came, I pressed the scrap of paper to my breast in relief. My lessons would continue, and perhaps I could salvage something of our friendship.
Still, I insisted Mátyás accompany me, both for propriety and as a buffer against any potential awkwardness.
Gábor waited alone at our usual spot, studying the brook a few feet away with an intensity it did not warrant.
I selected a fallen log for my seat and fussed with my skirts, trying to ignore the heat rising in my cheeks at the sight of him. Mátyás plopped down beside me.
“Today,” Gábor began with no preliminary greetings, “I’d like to see if Miss Arden can use the magic already stored in a talisman to summon light.” Still, he would not look at me.
There was a long silence. Miss Arden, he said, but he spoke about me, not to me. My heart clenched tight.
“Miss Arden—are you tired of our spells? We do not need to continue.” Gábor’s voice was clipped, precise.
I made an effort to speak normally. “I’m sorry. I was woolgathering. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
Mátyás waggled his eyebrows at me, and I elbowed him in the side. He tumbled off the log, laughing. Gábor glowered at both of us.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. Sorry for Mátyás’s folly, for my own. Whatever intimacy Gábor and I had shared, I had ruined.
Gábor held out his hand. Sunlight played across his palm. “Watch.” The light in his hands seemed to coalesce, intensifying until he held a miniature star in his hand. I reached out to touch the light, and it splintered apart. “Now you. Reach through the magic in the talisman to the essence of the sunlight.”
I closed my eyes, envisioning the magic as a tenuous string linking my heart to the air brushing across my skin, and curled my fingers around the Romani talisman I wore. I needed this to work. That need was a tangible thing, a weight against my breast, a prickling of tears at the back of my throat.
The sunlight warmed my palm. Essence, I thought. Connection.
I was so focused on my spell that Izidóra’s voice near my ear made me jump. I had not seen her coming.