At the base of the hill, I spied a pathway winding away into a wood of thin-branched trees lifting leaves like silver pennies to the sky. Beyond the wood, the spires of a city soared into the blue vault of heaven. The Binding was nothing like the dark, closed world of the way station in the bathhouse at Sárvár. Rather, it was something out of a fairy tale.
Long ago, and far away, over forty-nine kingdoms, beyond the Operentsia Sea, beyond the glass mountains, and beyond that to a kingdom beneath a pearl sky…so Grandmama’s tales had always begun. My heart spiraled upward, and I hummed under my breath as I headed toward the city. After all, a city implied people, perhaps creatures.
The road was smooth beneath my feet. I reached the shadows at the fringe of the wood when a voice interrupted me.
“Has no one told you, child, not to wander in unfamiliar woods? Have you not read your fairy tales?”
I whirled around to find myself face to face with the man who’d kissed me inside the spell at Sárvár, his curiously inhuman eyes glowing gold.
I fingered the knife Lady Berri had given me and wondered, If I were killed in this dimension, would I be dead in the other as well? But the creatures would not harm me: they needed me too much.
Behind me, the wind sang through the trees. A glance over my shoulder revealed only the sun-dappled shadows of a quiet wood.
“Who are you?” I glanced at the silver manacles he still bore at his wrists.
A smile slithered across his face, transforming it into something unnaturally, painfully beautiful. “I have many names. Some call me Hunger. I bear other names too: Need, Want, Desire.” The smile slipped, as if he was unused to holding it for long. “And you are Anna Arden. I know you. I know your need.”
My heart thumped, a beat too hard and too fast. “I am not afraid of you.”
His eyes fixed on mine, and he laughed. “Of course you are not. But was it wise, my dear, to come into the Binding with drugs burning in your blood?”
“Is this the Binding? It looks like no spell I’ve seen.”
“Its like has never been cast, before or since. It is prison and sanctuary, world and shadow,” he said.
Riddles. “You asked me to break this spell. Do you know how?”
Those golden eyes kindled brighter. “The spell was bound with blood and will break with blood.”
More riddles. I ground my heel. “Speak plainly if you mean me to help.”
“You will have to sacrifice at the heart of the spell. You must pull the power of the spell into your own heart and let your heart break with it.” He tapped the turul necklace I wore, and I fancied I could feel the wings fluttering against my skin. “You will need blood.”
A breeze whispered across my neck, raising gooseflesh on my arms. “A blood sacrifice? Will I die then?”
“You shall not die. The spell-caster must live to hold the spell.”
I nodded, relieved. “Can you show me the heart of the spell?”
He bowed. One pale hand sliced through the air, inscribing a circle, and a giant sphere rose around us like a bubble raised in the kitchen sink when the maids did the washing.
I watched the ground fall away from me, my spirits lifting as the bubble rose higher. Once, as a child, after watching a goose launch itself from the surface of the pond, I’d tried to do the same. Instead of flying, I had nearly drowned. Catherine, who fished me out, intoned I would never fly—our family (Elementalists and Coremancers) hadn’t the right magic for it. Then I’d seen the great air balloons in London, and Mama forbade me to try them. But this soaring required no magic (at least, no magic of mine), and no one was here to forbid me.
I looked up from my inspection of the miniaturized world below me to find Hunger watching me with a curious expression, his cheeks hollowed and his eyes incandescent. The shadowy wood passed underneath us, cut by a silver strip of water. Past the trees, we flew over an open plain, an ocean of grasses waving in an unseen wind. A creature that seemed made of pure light gamboled across the grass, and delight sparkled through me.
We drew closer to the outer wall of the city, bastions of glass and fine-carved stone spiking into the sky. The sphere drifted lower. In a private garden, young women, each more beautiful than the last, danced to a faintly heard melody. Near the heart of the city, where a fountain spilled over gold-veined marble, a maiden sang to a reclining knight, her pale fingers tracing love runes through his hair.
Our sphere floated by the castle. Inside I glimpsed paintings of dreamscapes, stained-glass windows, and long, vaulted hallways filled with creatures in gorgeous gowns. In an airy room in the highest tower of the castle, imps twirled around a small laughing child. Every gurgle of laughter lifted the child into the air. In response, the imps kicked up their heels to impossible new heights, and the child’s giggles lifted it even higher. Everything was touched with wonder.
Relief swept through me: Gábor’s fears were groundless. Releasing these creatures into the world would harm no one.
And yet.
I glanced again at the silver at Hunger’s wrists. “Does the spell hold you here?”
“Yes.”
“If I break this spell, what will happen? Will you go free?”
“Who is ever truly free? We trap ourselves with bonds of our own making: duty, love, desire.” The last word hissed from his lips, and he ran a black, glistening tongue across them. “But if you mean, will we leave this place? Yes.”
My thoughts were tangled with unpleasant memories: the suffocating weight of my mother’s expectations, my painful rejection at Lady Isen’s ball in Vienna. Luminate society, much as I had longed for it, brought its own rules and limitations. James, trapped at Eton by those same rigid rules. Noémi held virtual prisoner at Eszterháza by her poverty. There were so many ways of being trapped in my world. This spell should not be one of them.
I began to ask another question, but the words were torn away and the bubble shattered into a million shards of brightness around me. Then I was falling, falling, and finally gasping on the winter-hard earth of Attila’s Hill.
Lady Berri’s round face bent over mine, her brow creased with concern. “Are you well, child? You weren’t supposed to be sucked in so quickly. Something else—something from the other side—was shaping the spell, twisting it away from me. I couldn’t let you stay in that other realm. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“I was in no danger,” I said, pushing myself upright. There was nothing in that world to harm me.
Except your own need. A pair of golden eyes rose in my mind, and I trembled.
Lady Berri looked away from me, her expression lost to the darkness. She said only, “I’m glad you were not hurt,” before loading me into her carriage and whisking me home again in silence.
All that long, dark drive I found myself reliving the spell-bound world in my mind. Something sharp lodged in my heart, and I could not shake the pain of it. So Eve must have felt after being thrust from her garden: exposed by her desires, tethered by her need.