My legs, scrambling after my captor, seemed oddly detached from my body. Perhaps the creatures were not real, only illusions cast by the mutated spell, like the illusions in the wake of Catherine’s debutante spells.
But I suspected that illusions could not pull me as my captor did, would not feel as tangible as the fur and scales I’d brushed against. Fear battered at the back of my throat, squeezing stiff fingers around my heart. What could this creature want with me? A blood sacrifice, to continue fueling Countess Báthory’s spell? Worse—a meal? I tried not to imagine the sudden sting and burn of claws against the soft skin of my stomach, my throat. I tried not to picture monsters converging on my broken body, tearing and slurping in that pit of darkness.
I stopped, throwing my entire weight opposite my captor’s forward motion. Whatever the creature meant to do with me, I would not let it happen without a fight.
A star streaked across the space, then coalesced into the form of a man standing before me, smelling of brimstone and brine. My captor released me with a suddenness that sent me reeling back, my arms windmilling. It scuttered away into the darkness, claws clattering along the ground. I caught myself just in time and had a confused impression of multiple faces, sleek and vaguely draconic, and then the light solidified into a single face so beautiful it pained me to look at. Before I could draw back, the man put fingers like brands on my shoulders and set a kiss like a live coal against my forehead.
When I gasped—more out of anger than fear, though the anger might only have been a cover for fear—the creature laughed. The sound of his laugh had a falseness to it—an actor imitating an emotion he doesn’t truly feel. He released me, but I could still feel phantom hands burning against my body. Shackles jangled at his wrists.
“Well met, maiden,” he said.
I wiped my forehead with my hand and hoped he did not notice my trembling.
“Peace, child. We shan’t eat you.”
I wished I believed him. I’d caught a glimpse of fangs among the faces that flashed across his.
“We haven’t much time. Already this spell unravels, and the Binding pulls us back. We need your help.”
I was startled into speech. “Mine?”
“Your magic snagged the edges of Báthory’s spell, tearing it enough so we could catch you through it. And this is not the first time you’ve troubled the barrier of the Binding spell.”
I gripped my shaking hands together. My fingers were like ice. Pictures flickered through my mind: the winged creature at Catherine’s debut, the hollow-eyed Lorelei, the shadows racing across a dark field. “No.”
“We need you to break us free. It’s not enough to tear the boundary—the Binding always pulls us back. You must destroy the spell entirely.”
I shrank away from him. The trembling in my hands spread to my arms. My legs shook beneath me. “Who are you? How are you here?”
He shrugged, the human gesture hanging oddly on his body. “Báthory’s spell created a kind of bubble, a space connecting the Binding spell that holds us and your world. The Binding is thinner here—sometimes we break through, though never for long, and never past this space.” His eyes were gold, gleaming like polished coins.
He did not answer my other question.
A tremor tore through the cavern, and something in me surged upward, carried by a wild, unexpectedly sweet longing. I fought my shadow self back. I could not lose control. Not here. Not now. I gripped my hands tighter.
“Release her,” the creature said, and the hunger in my shadow self became an ache. I trembled under the strain of holding her. “I must go—but we shall meet again. Hold your heart for me. I shall have need of it.” He launched himself into the air, disappearing into the darkness above me. Air gusted into my face, stirred by something sweeping overhead.
Another surge rocketed through the space of the spell. I gasped and opened my hands. At once there was a sense of release, of heat and light and longing and even darkness flooding out of me.
Then nothing.
I heard the voices first, murmuring softly in Hungarian. Sometimes I heard a lullaby, sung in Grandmama’s aging cadences. And once I heard Mátyás declaiming poetry, an incongruous mix of Hungarian, German, and even English poets. I drifted then, colors and lights and sounds flashing at the periphery of my consciousness.
When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the dim light of early morning and the raucous call of birds outside the window. I was in a strange room, in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar csárda. Noémi drowsed in a chair by the empty fireplace, a book tumbled open in her lap.
I tried to speak. My voice croaked like a foghorn, and Noémi jerked upright, the book falling to the floor with a loud slap.
“You’re awake! How do you feel?”
I coughed. “Like a silk gown left out in a rainstorm.”
She made a sympathetic face. “So well?” She crossed the floor to my bedside and laid her hand against my forehead. “Your fever has broken.”
“What happened?”
“You collapsed inside the bathhouse at Sárvár.” She primmed up her lips, as if she were deliberately holding back words. “Mátyás and the Circle guards dragged you out and summoned us.”
“Is Mátyás all right?”
“He’s fine. The spell seems to have broken before he entered, fortunately. You, however, were not so fortunate. It’s been three days, and this is the first time you’ve been lucid.”
I thought of the strange creatures in the bathhouse. Were they only fever dreams, the side effect of being caught in a tainted spell?
Noémi left to tell Grandmama I was awake, and I looked around my room. My eyes caught on a small, dirty mirror mounted against the wall. A glimmer of a twinned reflection, then the two smudged echoes of my face merged into one. I was pale, my dark hair wild around my face. The neckline of my nightdress had slipped down on one side.
Against the skin of my right shoulder, as if branded there, was the faint print of a hand. An indistinct sphere imprinted my forehead, token of that burning kiss.
It had not been a dream. Or an illusion.
The spell had been real. And I had broken it.
Papa would be jubilant. As would William.
I should feel jubilant as well—and vindicated. I had set out to prove what I could do, and I had done it. But I felt neither. My stomach curled tight, and I pressed my arms against my sides, my hands folded protectively before me. It was one thing to be a spell-binder, to shape air and light into illusions, to heal. It was something else entirely to destroy those spells, to turn gifts into curses, to release shadows into daylight.
Grandmama eased into the room. After fussing over me for a moment, she sat down on the bed beside me and brushed a thin hand through my hair. At length, she said, “Will you tell me why you came here?”
When I shook my head, the corners of her eyes drooped. “Mátyás will not say either. But Anna, szívem, I am very much afraid you have started something you will not be able to stop.”
Someone tapped at the door.