He whispered back, “Pet?fi Sándor. They say he may be the greatest poet of our generation. I read you some of his poetry while you convalesced.”
William, deprived of his sparring partner, looked around the café. His eyes lit on me. “Miss Anna Arden!” he cried, leaning across the table toward me. “Mátyás told me of your excellent work at Sárvár! Have you come to join our cause?”
Gábor stiffened beside me, but when I risked a glance at him, he did not look surprised. Mátyás must have told him what happened.
I shook my head gently. “I’ve made no decisions.”
William accepted my rebuff affably enough, and he and the poet fell back into a friendly argument as to the most compelling reasons to break from Austria. The poet said, “The Hapsburgs dictate our laws, our schools, who our spell-binders might be, even our wars. They’ve deprived us of all our natural rights.”
William shook his head. “The Circle is more your enemy than the Hapsburgs. They are the ones who limit your magic, who encourage the Hapsburgs to limit your rights for fear you will grow strong enough to challenge them.”
As Mátyás translated their words, my sympathy grew. I knew what it was to have your life determined for you. In their complaints, I felt all my old chafing against my mother’s strictures.
I asked Mátyás, “Are they not afraid of the Circle, or government censors?” Any of the Luminate in the café might be a spy.
Mátyás laughed. “The Circle members are fools. They think all plots require secrecy and midnight meetings. They see no danger in our open discussions.” He sobered. “Perhaps they should. There is suffering enough in Hungary to rouse even the faintest heart.”
“It’s not only the Hungarians who suffer,” Gábor said to me. “It is still legal to take a Romani child from her family and raise her to an apprenticeship far from her home.”
A young woman sitting near me said, “Kossuth Lajos hopes to see such laws changed. He would abolish the serfdom, and make proper concessions for the Romani. And Jews. And anyone else who suffers under current laws. But first Hungary must break away from Austria and the Circle’s power. At present, we are entirely subordinate: we lack our own government, our own laws, our own Circle. Not even all our aristocracy are Luminate, because the Austrian Circle will only allow Confirmation to the wealthiest of Hungarian nobles.”
I warmed to her immediately. I liked the calm intelligence of her voice, the openness of her face, and—it must be confessed—the elegance of her gown, brightly embroidered with the stylized flowers of Hungarian kézimunka.
“Kossuth!” William scoffed. “He is a tame sort of radical. All fuel and no fire. He won’t challenge the Circle.”
“He is still our best hope.” The woman’s cheeks flushed.
Gábor added, “I think Kossuth’s policy is best: we should exhaust diplomacy before we fight.”
Pet?fi shook his head and tapped his chest. “We are Magyarország’s best hope. And so far, talk has achieved nothing. We must act: drive the Circle from Hungary, demand our independence from Austria.”
“But in the months I have spent in Buda-Pest, all you have done is talk.” William’s lip curled.
Pet?fi frowned. “We wait for the right moment.”
“You don’t wait for a moment; you create it.” William looked at me. “Miss Arden could help us, if she would only break the Binding.”
Could I? If William were right, breaking the Binding would weaken the Circle, perhaps destroy it outright. The Circle’s control and maintenance of the Binding was their primary source of power. Without it, though they might attempt to continue regulating magic, they would lose that leverage. An influx of magic outside the Luminate class could well shift the balance of power away from the Circle. Without the Circle to support it, the Hapsburg government in Vienna must release its stranglehold on Hungary, on the people and places I was coming to love.
The poet followed William’s gaze, his mustache twitching as his lips turned down. “A girl?”
I crossed my arms. “You should not dismiss me because I am only a female. Even a small dog can bite. And,” I added, remembering a scientific conversation I had overheard between Mátyás and Gábor, “a microorganism smaller than the head of a pin can kill a grown man.”
“Brava!” The young lady beside me clapped her hands.
Gábor murmured, “But having power does not always mean using it. The Binding is a large spell and a dangerous one. My grandmother believes that it contains monsters. She may be wrong, but breaking a spell without understanding what you unleash is madness.”
Monsters. A woman with a third eye, a golden man with shifting faces, shadows scuttering across a field, clawed hands dragging me through darkness. For a moment, Gábor’s doubt set my mental scales trembling. Herr Steinberg had also warned me. Then I thought: none of the creatures harmed me. Likely, Gábor’s warnings stemmed only from Romani superstition. And Herr Steinberg was less than trustworthy: his position in the Circle was only as secure as the Binding spell.
Mátyás laughed. “I should rather like to see Anna take on a massive spell.”
“We don’t have to break the Binding to petition for more independence,” Gábor said. “Kossuth—”
William cut across him. “Nonsense. Consider the evidence of the past centuries. Petitions alone have never spurred change. The Circle simply ignores them. We haven’t the leverage we need to make them listen. But we would be strong enough if the Binding was broken. Only look at the colonists.”
“If there are monsters,” Pet?fi added, “and I have never heard of their existence, they cannot be worse than what we already face.”
Gábor looked as though he wished to argue further, but Mátyás stood up. “This has been an invigorating discussion. But it’s time we returned for tea.”
I swallowed a slightly hysterical urge to laugh. Because tea was, of course, the appropriate response to an afternoon’s talk of treason and monsters.
As we rose, the young woman rose with us. “Wait,” she said, accompanying us toward the doorway. “I am Károlyi Karolina. You may call me Karolina. I very much admired your speech earlier, and I should like to know you better. May I call on you?”
I nodded, strangely shy. I could count my female friends on one hand, and they were all either related to me or in my employ. “I should like that.”
“And you must all come to the ball my sister and I are holding next Monday night at the Redoute,” she added.
“That’s kind of you,” Gábor said, “but I am not certain your friends would welcome me.”
“Nonsense,” Karolina said. “If you care for Hungary, you are welcome.”
“But,” Gábor said, frowning, “perhaps you do not realize I am Romani.”
“What should I care for that?” Karolina said, stepping through the doorway and swinging up her parasol. “We are building a new world, are we not?”